Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

He’s paralysed by the sight at first, he wants to laugh and to cry, and his face is actually contorted by a couple of sobs, but then he stiffens and looks round cautiously as he tiptoes towards the dead bird, as if he were afraid it would fly off and leave him all alone with his hunger, his desperate hunger which is spreading its flames and burning through all the ceilings and all the floors of his intentions and expectations. And then he races forward and jabs his fingers into the stinking bird and, holding it pressed tightly to his trumpeting chest, he gallops away over the beach, afraid all the time that someone will prevent him, shout at him to stop and share it. He slithers over the slippery ridge that marks the end of their strip of beach, and as he jumps on the shiny stones where little green animals with suckers as mouths are clinging and burst with a sploshy crack when he treads on them, as he stumbles over the uneven surface of this beach, he bursts out crying, violent, shuddering sobs which force out the blood from the wounds in his chest, and he’s not crying with joy, not with joy at having at last found something to satisfy his hunger, no, he’s crying with sorrow and hatred of himself because he hadn’t been any stronger than that, and it’s mainly from desperation he takes a bite out of the bird, from desperation rather than hunger, and suddenly he has a mouth full of feathers and he spits them out and then his mouth is full of loose, rotten meat and he vomits, lying face down on the slippery stones. And he vomits and vomits but that’s not enough, he feels like a sewer and he must have water, lots and lots of pure water to rinse all this horrible stuff out of his system, and so he lifts up his miserable, shaking body as best as he can and crawls out into the water. But just here the bottom suddenly drops vertically and he can’t move at all to save himself as he sinks and he’s probably too disgusted by himself to want to even try and defend himself from the ocean which pours in through his mouth and chokes him. And he sinks and sinks as far as he can go and right to the very end he has rotten bird in his mouth.

12

The lion, king of the jungle. When Lucas Egmont is alone, he wanders around aimlessly through the grass and thinks thoughts about the lion. For someone like him from a northern country, it was always so exciting when, as a child, he heard the lion described as the king of the jungle, for there weren’t any lions in his country and, in the poor area where he lived, a boy went to the circus just once and when he got back home a few lads from the street took him out into the courtyard and beat him up with skipping ropes in among the dustbins because he had a father rich enough to take him to a circus. It was offensive somehow that the lion, the lion from so far away, should be the king of the jungle; it was as if a Negro king in Africa had suddenly declared himself to be the king of some northern country and all anybody could do was to accept it because that’s what it said in the school books.

Why is the lion king of the jungle, wonders Lucas Egmont as he wanders about in the grass, slashing at the long stalks. Why not the elephant, why not the python, why not man? Is it because the lion is stronger than all other animals, cleverer or bigger? No, it’s probably not because the lion is all that remarkable an animal in fact, but it’s got its status, been given its status because it’s the best symbol for regality anybody can think of. The actual concept of a lion is so unusually attractive to the essential part of our ego which deals with symbols, which lives in the world of symbols, which we despise precisely because it isn’t real, just as if there were anything especially honourable in being real, in being faithful to your reality, when there are so many unrealities it’s much more important to be faithful to.

He kneels down in the grass and catches a little yellow butterfly with little red blotches on its wings, and as he holds it in his hand one of its wings suddenly drops off and turns into a clear drop of liquid which runs slowly down his clenched lifeline. He’s never seen a butterfly like this before, and he pokes at it carefully with his nail, but even the slightest touch is obviously too much because it suddenly melts away and turns into a grey lump and when he blows at it, it wafts away like ash.

Is a struggle of this nature defensible at all, he wonders, and he can still feel the tickling sensation in his hand from the drop of butterfly, and see the cloud of ash drifting down into the grass. Does it really make sense to give up any vestige of a struggle to survive, and instead to devote ourselves to squabbling about the shape of a lion? But if we were to keep on living, if we tried catching fish or digging a well that could supply us with water, if we devoted all our efforts to living for a few more hours, wouldn’t that also be a symbolic act, a symbol for survival, not our own personal survival which doesn’t matter a fig to us potential suicides, but a symbol for the survival of the human race, which doesn’t worry us all that much either, but which our imagination, our talent for finding symbols, is so tempted to occupy itself with? Aren’t all actions symbolic in fact, is there such a thing as a meaningless action? And you could also ask: is there such a thing as a meaningful action, or are there just symbolic actions? Aren’t our actions, no matter how mad or how meaningless they might seem to a neutral observer, full of meaning when we have a specific symbolic intention when we perform them? When we tie a piece of string round the nearest oak tree and try to pull it down, it’s just as meaningful an action as demolishing a house or hanging oneself in an attic, because all of them symbolize the meaninglessness of all human effort. Those summers when I was able to accompany a well-to-do family to an archipelago, there were always a few islands enveloped in a shimmering blue haze, and we never visited them because those islands symbolized for us the meaning of life, the shimmering, secret meaning of life, and it was so nice to have it constantly before our eyes whenever we gazed out to sea, the meaningless sea; and the butterfly you have in your hand and poke at until it falls to pieces wouldn’t mean anything in itself — for what’s the significance of a drop of some sort of fluid and a little cloud of ash? — it wouldn’t mean anything at all if it didn’t symbolize the depravity of poking around, of poking too closely at the truth of the world.

He crouches in the grass, listening. There are plenty of voices and footsteps all round him, and he suddenly thinks of all the lions that have suddenly been born on the island and are trampling down the grass with their heavy paws. He’s so curious about, and at the same time afraid of the others’ decisions: it will be difficult for him to give way if the captain’s lion turns out the winner, not for his own sake, as he likes to think the whole business doesn’t mean anything to him, but for the others whose reality he’s tried to identify himself with, having realized how terribly difficult they found it to formulate their opposition to the captain. He thinks it’s their thoughts he’s going round thinking, just as if you could think a single thought or express a single opinion without having to accept responsibility for it yourself, and he gets quite a shock when he suddenly finds he’s come to the edge of the grass where there’s a terrible smell of something dead which he nevertheless can’t see, but he does see Boy Larus and the English girl with their bodies closely intertwined beside a cliff reflecting the red sunset. They sit up with a start when they hear him coming, and move apart, but he stands absolutely still, to fool them, and before long Boy Larus pulls her towards him again and he wants to run up to them and shout at them and ask what they think they’re doing, kissing and cuddling has to wait when there’s so much else at stake, there’s a lion which is so much more important than any particular mouth, he’s really upset, the identifier, that they have failed to justify his trust, but in the end he hasn’t the heart to spoil their happiness and he glides away like a pike in the reeds.