Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

14

Dusk is settling over the beach and over the sea and the water has almost ceased glittering. The wind gusts from time to time and there is a creaking from the masts of the ship, but apart from that, everything is more or less silent. One or other of them occasionally picks up a stone, throws it up in the air and catches it again, or drops it on to the rock, or one of them scratches a line on the rock but then stops because the other is staring at him so mercilessly.

In the end, the captain says, ‘Well, it’ll soon be dark, and if we’re going to get started today we’d better get going as soon as possible, and we’ve got to know where we stand because it will be obvious even from the very first lines whether the lion is going to symbolize solitude or some kind of togetherness. I’m not at all clear about how you envisage the whole thing. You’re talking about a solitary lion, right, but how is a lion that’s so alone going to be able to symbolize anything other than solitude, a particular kind of solitude, not total solitude, as opposed to my lion with it’s foot on the dead body?’

Lucas Egmont responds to that as follows:

‘In the first place, it wasn’t my suggestion from the start that we should choose a lion, but when that was what was agreed, it seemed to me the image of the lion you were proposing was quite unacceptable. Unacceptable because it celebrates cruelty, the cruelty of anyone who, voluntarily and with eyes wide open, embraces solitude, kills off anything that is weak and fragile, anything that needs togetherness, so that eventually all that will survive will be cruel, solitary creatures, the kind who love solitude as the only thing they can comprehend. A solitary lion, on the other hand, sitting there without trampling anyone underfoot, is something completely different. I won’t go as far as to suggest it represents togetherness, but it does demonstrate calm strength, the whole personality, the harmony which might be rent asunder at any moment by the roar of a wild beast. Terror and harmony in the same character, you see, that’s my lion. Personally, I’d have preferred to take a snake as a symbol. It’s easier to carve into a rock, and it also says more about the horror that suddenly surges through your veins like a blood clot when it gets dark and your enemies find it so much easier to hide both themselves and their intentions.’

‘I’m sticking to my lion,’ says the captain. ‘Good God, what do you know about solitude? What do you know about the loneliness one feels in an attic after the roof has blown off and sailed away like a pair of swan’s wings? What do you know about the boundless solitude of the world, it’s greater than anyone dares to imagine, apart from a few ecstatic moments when there’s nothing you can do about them, but even so, you can feel it in every nerve-end.’

‘I don’t think anybody can take any account of your kind of solitude,’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘You enjoy it. As far as you’re concerned, it’s the greatest pleasure the world has to offer, instead of the greatest injustice. You’re never alone in fact, you always carry your solitude around with you, you have your head stuck in it as though it were a big bag, and when you want to experience yourself, because that’s what you’re doing when you say you’re experiencing solitude, like a masturbator, when you want to experience yourself, all you do is pull the bag further down over your head till you almost choke and there’s nothing you like more than choking. Just remember that.’

‘It’s not true that I enjoy it,’ says the captain, ‘but you must understand that the only way I can bear the enormous solitude that so often affects me is to accept it as a gift, as a welcome delight; and that’s also why I think the little loneliness, the thing that X or Y feels when the mood strikes him, is much more dangerous to the health of the world than mine. Only the strongest of men can bear a solitude like mine. You need the right kind of ear-drums for a start, strong ear-drums that can put up with the terrible weight pressing down on them when space suddenly starts singing of solitude.’

‘Have you really heard that song you talk about?’

‘Oh yes, of course, quite a lot of us have heard it. And you!’

‘Yes.’

‘I can teach you to hear it if you like. It’s quite easy, you see; of course, it’s hardest the first time, but after a while you learn how to do it and it only needs a certain kind of thing to happen, feelings of aversion radiating towards you, contempt, hatred, and suddenly there you are, in this, the clearest of all spaces.’

The captain has gone over to Lucas Egmont’s side, and now he sits down beside him and lifts up his hand and strokes it over his own as if it were a bow. Lucas glances at him and sees his face is covered in sweat, covered in crawling sweat.

‘Are you so afraid,’ he says contemptuously, taking his arm away, ‘are you so afraid of being alone? Can’t your ear-drums cope any longer?’

‘I’m not afraid,’ answers the captain vehemently, ‘I’m not afraid of being alone.’

Then he suddenly falls silent and stares down at the sand, and fear starts shaping his face skilfully, replacing his dimples with terror lines and the furrows get deeper and deeper. He picks up the stone and starts tapping it on the rock, making big black holes in the silence.

‘What would you do if I left you?’ asks Lucas Egmont. ‘It would be so easy for me to run away after all, I could run up into the grass and hide there as long as you like and not reply no matter how much you shouted to me, not reply even when you started crying and sobbing out my name.’

‘I wouldn’t go looking for you,’ says the captain curtly, ‘I’d just take this stone and carve a lion, the lion that’s on the back of my boot with a dead human underneath it, and then when I’d done that I’d lie down beside the rock and slowly glide into the ultimate solitude and my ear-drums would burst and my heart would stand still, but that wouldn’t matter because I’d never have been able to penetrate any further into solitude than that anyway.’

‘Would you take that frightened face of yours with you as well?’ asks Lucas Egmont. ‘Do you think that would burst as well, or that it would keep its fear even when your space started singing?

‘Do you think I don’t understand,’ he goes on passionately when the captain looks the other way, ‘do you think I don’t understand all this perfectly well, understand why you’ve come and sat down beside me now, hoping to infect me with your solitude? It’s because you’ve noticed we’re suddenly on our own, that all the others have disappeared into the sunset and will never come back. They simply weren’t interested in what we were planning to do, in all that lion business; not even your pretty little underling Boy Larus obeyed you on this occasion: just before I came down I saw him cuddling the English girl on a cliff up there. Now you’re so frightened I’ll go away as well that you’re trying to keep me here by making me just as sick as you are, by infecting me with the same terrible illness as you have. Of course it’s true you’ve been alone before, as you say, but as you’re realizing, that was something quite different: you’ve always had unlimited access to other people, you’ve always known you would wake up out of your drugged sleep into a normal environment containing just as much solitude as you needed in order to become fully conscious again. But here, you don’t dare to dive down into your great solitude because you never know what things are going to look like when you come back again. By then, here could be an even greater solitude than any of those others you’ve experienced during the whole of your life hitherto, and you want to guard against that by taking me with you: but you won’t succeed, and that’s why you’re miserable and bitter now, and don’t dare to look me in the eye because I’ve told you the truth as it is. But you’d better watch out: I’m also infectious. I’ve also got a disease, but I’m not going to try and pass it on to you, because you’d certainly never understand how to bear that illness, because you’d just think it was a pleasure, like all the other illnesses you’ve ever had.’