Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Lots of people have left trails behind them in the grass now, and he follows a winding path into the undergrowth and notices for the first time how oddly shaped the bushes are, it’s as if he’d never really seen them before, they’d only flitted past his eyes, looking green and prickly. As there is still a while to go before sunset, he has a good look at a big bush with bulging leaves and hairy branches. He tugs playfully at the bush’s hair in an attempt to pull some out, but it doesn’t budge at all. Then his fingers suddenly brush up against a little pouch hanging down from one of the branches above, and when he looks more closely he sees the whole bush is full of green pouches, miniature pumpkins, and when he plucks a few he notices a splashing sound from inside them. He thinks at first he’s misheard, but when he holds one to his ear, he discovers it’s full of some sort of liquid. He carefully breaks it in two and produces two halves, each of them filled with a clear liquid looking like water, and all at once he becomes so agonizingly aware of his thirst, and he has a sudden urge to throw the halves away and to run off so as not to be tempted any more, but instead he raises one half of the pouch towards his lips.

There’s a violent rustling noise in a nearby bush and somebody comes rushing out and Lucas Egmont realizes he’s been watched all the time.

‘Be careful, Mr Egmont,’ yells the captain, ‘don’t drink that whatever you do! That innocent-looking little green thing contains one of the most dangerous poisons there is. In some places in the islands, the natives dip their poisoned darts in it to make them really effective.’

Then Lucas Egmont’s hands start shaking and the grass and the bushes flow out and are elongated like shadows in disturbed water, but the captain grabs him reassuringly by the wrists and although Lucas is thinking desperately about the lion, it’s quite a while before he can keep his hands still. The captain pulls another fruit from the bush, however, and opens it, and they both go into a clump of undergrowth by the rock and the captain leans over the rock and places the two halves on the gleaming stone and then withdraws into hiding once more.

After a while, a big iguana comes crawling from near the edge of the cliff and they can see immediately it has caught sight of the two halves but, possibly because it’s conscious of how terribly dangerous they are, it doesn’t dare to go any nearer. It goes round and round them, but the circles get smaller and smaller and suddenly there it is, lapping up the contents of first one and then, after a moment’s hesitation, the other as well. Then the iguana plays around with the empty shells for a while before suddenly leaping up into the air with a horrific growling noise, and Lucas Egmont thinks it’s still playing but it’s dead and stiff by the time it hits the ground.

The captain kicks the iguana casually over the edge of the cliff and they hear it hit the sand with a dull thud and when they eventually get down there themselves there are just three dead bodies waiting for them in silence and emptiness, two iguanas and one human. The captain puts his hand protectively on Lucas’s wrist and smiles at him so intimately that Lucas can’t help but realize what the captain expects of him in return for having saved his life.

One can put up with false friends, Lucas thinks to himself as he draws back his hand, but God protect us from false enemies whose animosity you can’t count on.

13

Oh yes, there are three dead bodies waiting for them, but no living person and the dead boxer is waiting for them more than ever. They don’t notice at first, but when they kneel down by the white rock and start examining the stone Tim Solider had found for them, they hear an all too familiar sound: it’s a piece of canvas flapping in the breeze, and they’re both quite shocked when they see the boxer lying there, just as he was before they buried him, with only a piece of canvas over his body. Somebody has scraped away all the sand and the beach is churned up by feet that seemed to be in a very great hurry, and they think they can follow the trail, the light footsteps leading away over the sand.

But before they take up the chase, they go up to the boxer, cautiously, as though they’re afraid he might suddenly get up and reveal his terrible secrets. They kneel down beside him and are almost bowled over by the stench, but he’s hidden from their view: he’s not only covered by a sheet of canvas, he’s also wrapped in a piece of thick, grey cloth, the English girl’s cloth.

They follow her trail the length of the lagoon. She’s been uncertain about the precise route she should take, sometimes running out into the water as far as the point where the bottom suddenly falls away and it gets very deep, at other times she has splashed along in the shallows, or moved quite a way inland. Then the beach comes to an end, however, and a submerged rock runs out into the lagoon that peters out a bit further ahead and the girl has skirted round that before striking out at right-angles inland; it’s all stone now, and hard to keep track of her, but occasionally she’s strayed out into the mud and perhaps sunk down over her ankles before withrawing to the stones once more. The captain suddenly kneels down, and without a word points at a large rock a little way out in the water. There’s a little red stain on it, fresh blood, still not congealed. Then there are more or less similar red marks on lots of stones leading to a low cliff that drops steeply down to the deep water below, some fifty yards beyond the end of the lagoon.

Lucas Egmont gets down on his stomach and shuffles his way to the edge of the precipice and shields his eyes with his hand so that he can see down into the water. It’s all green for a long way down, but then he suspects the green gives way to something white shimmering through the water. But he can’t make out any clear outline, the white patch just spreads and contracts, it could be a white rock or it could be a girl’s corpse or it could be an optical illusion. It could be nothing more startling than an optical illusion. He throws a little stone at it, and watches it whirling round as it sinks before slowly coming to rest right in the middle of the white thing, like a frog on a cushion. But the next moment everything has disappeared, something has been edging its way along the bottom and stirring up the mud, and no matter how much he strains his eyes, he can’t see anything, nothing at all of the white, just some kind of ray floating up and down between the bottom and the surface like an underwater lift.

When they get back to the beach, an enormous flock of birds takes off from some stones only a few hundred yards from where they are. The birds rise in complete silence, and when their curiosity drives them forward to investigate, they see a little white bundle bobbing against the rocks where the water occasionally surges in and tries to snatch it away.

‘They’re eating their own kind,’ says the captain, kicking at a rock in scornful disgust, just like us.’

When they then sit down on either side of the white rock, they notice how the birds are hovering directly above them, more or less motionless, their gigantic wings outstretched.

But Lucas Egmont isn’t really thinking about the unpleasant birds, he’s thinking about all kinds of other things; he realizes straight away that none of the others will ever come back, because none of this was anything to do with them, because they weren’t talking the same language, because they weren’t talking any language at all, because they were just living for their unarticulated needs and had to be exploded when they suddenly discovered their needs could no longer be satisfied and they could no longer control their explosions. He has over-estimated their interest in opposing the immovable injustice of the world, their interest in the apparently meaningless action which is going to shake the world, their understanding of a man’s essential task: to say at least half the truth about the whole lie that is the world. He’s been identifying with them, not with them as they were but as what he thought they ought to be, and therefore, he acknowledges, therefore he must accept the awful responsibility of the identifier, the terrible burden; he must be like one of these people he’s been identifying with. Hence he doesn’t pay too much attention to the captain’s obvious aim of frightening him when he suddenly raises his hands heavenwards and exclaims, ‘Just look at those birds, Mr Egmont, those beautiful birds up there over our heads! How silent they are as they wait to have a go at our necks!’