Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

‘What kind of an illness is that, then?’ asks the captain in a hollow voice, his face averted.

‘It’s the illness called guilt,’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘It’s also a disease you can play around with like you do, you can also turn it into a pleasure if you want to, it can also uplift you into the most extreme states of bliss. In any case, I can assure you it’s a terrible experience to wake up with a throbbing head, without having been to a party the night before, suddenly to wake up and feel you haven’t the strength to get up any more that day, that week, that year or that life; simply not have the strength, you see, because you’re bearing all the guilt in the world like a pillar of copper on your forehead, and every attempt to get up will just mean you fall over and suffer terrible injuries and you want to avoid that. Ah well, you lie there for a few days until someone comes along and establishes that you’re not ill at all, just too lazy to get up. Start dancing the Charleston, they tell you, and you’ll be fine, all your joints will be perfect. And of course you want to be perfect, in your joints and everywhere else, but it’s not long before you discover perfect doesn’t mean what you thought it meant, not by any means. Oh no, being perfect means mainly turning a blind eye on the guilt of the world, it means dancing on the left-hand side of the dance floor when there’s shooting and bloodshed going on over to the right. Well, obviously, you can get used to it after a while; I’ve got used to walking upright, for instance, as you can see, though it was a bit hard at first, that’s true, with all your advisers crowding round and considering and thinking and passing opinions to the effect that it wasn’t worth overdoing things. That it was best to have a rucksack with you when you went walking through forests and over moors. Of course, you were grateful for so much helpfulness, but it couldn’t do much about that fault which you considered to be the biggest one in the world: that there were so few people helping each other to bear the guilt of the world, so few with a conscience that the burden they had to bear was almost intolerable. You see, the guilt of the world is something quite different from the world’s solitude: there are so many of you sharing the world’s solitude that there isn’t all that much of it for each one of you to bear, just a reasonable burden for a man to put up with, if that; but when it comes to guilt, you’re overloaded.’

‘What was it you felt guilty about? What have you done, what crime have you been guilty of?’

‘Ah, that’s what’s so paradoxical about it all, you see. I haven’t done anything, or at least, I hadn’t done anything — not then. I was completely innocent — and yet I felt guilty. I thought I was responsible for everything that happened, it was my fault that the slum where my parents still lived even after I’d rented a little room closer to the bank, that the slum was teeming with children suffering from consumption, it was my fault that so many old people died in poverty in hostels dotted all over the city, and I even felt stabs of guilt every time I saw a beggar or some poor soul with pock-marks all over his face. Of course, I tried to help, using all the means at my disposal in order to reduce my guilt, and I tried all the channels open to a citizen who wants to do something to assist the underprivileged, but I have to say I found all of them inadequate, and in some cases criminally inadequate. The charities disgusted me with their onanistic self-satisfaction, it was as if they had to look at themselves in a mirror after every good deed to check whether they’d acquired a new little wrinkle round their mouths advertising their kindness. The political parties spent far too much energy on peripheral questions, claimed they were transforming the whole of society, a transformation which would liberate the world from the injustices currently bearing down on my forehead, in the long run: but that was just a cynical way of referring to a permanent postponement, that’s what they really meant. Occasionally they took up some of the problems of the very poorest in their propaganda, and what really disgusted me most about the whole thing was the way the poverty of the world was used as advertising material for a political party, that a self-evident thing like reducing the number of children with tuberculosis became a publicity stunt for a party whose behaviour in other respects has to be regarded with suspicion and even contempt. No, for guilty people like us there was no organization, the distress of the world was being taken in hand by people who’d ceased to feel guilty, if they ever had felt guilty at all, because they lived under the illusion that they were doing such an awful lot to ease it. The biggest problem, it seemed to me, was that people were talking so much about ideas, that’s what took up so much of their energy; but I think ideas are something for the nursery. You need ideas, of course, but you should play with them; ideas are the pretty little toys grown-ups play with. It seemed to me, contests concerning ideas were taking place at the wrong level altogether: instead of sitting round tables where the fate of the world is supposed to be decided with the ideas they cherished so unscrupulously and with such sadistic logic, they should have been gathering at tennis courts and playing tennis for their ideas, or in a big theatre where they could act out scenes with them, or in big, green meadows where they could chase after them in the sunshine with butterfly nets. There’s nothing more dangerous than taking ideas seriously, and nothing more praiseworthy, in fact I’d go as far as to say it’s the only praiseworthy thing in this life, than taking ideas for the playthings they are in fact. Here we are, you and me, sitting here playing, and there’s nothing in the whole world more important than this lion, yours and mine. Symbol as symbol — there are no gradations in the world of symbols, everything is equally big or equally small, that’s what’s so splendid about it. What happened next? Well — I grew tired of not being able to do anything but feeling as if I could do everything; I was falling between two stools, and in that situation I made up my mind on one thing. I decided to acquire real guilt, guilt I could really accept on my own behalf, guilt I could describe as being my very own so that I was the one who should bear it and nobody else. And so I pulled off a pretty bold feat of embezzlement, and with substantial funds in my pockets I’d left the country on the very first day of my holiday and was well on my way to a life to be lived in relative freedom from guilt; but it all turned out rather differently from what I’d expected.’

He’s been talking into the space beyond the cliff, oblivious of everything round about him, and now the captain takes advantage of his carelessness and hurls himself on top of him, and as he presses his back ruthlessly against the rock, he shrieks, ‘Now you help me to carve my lion into the rock, we’ll have no more of this nonsense, I’ve had enough of your stupid prattle. Why do you think I saved your life — so that you could get in my way? Don’t you think I had a reason for stopping you drinking that devil’s potion? The point was that you need at least two people to do a job like this, the work involved calls for two people, you might say. I can force you to help me because I’m stronger than you, oh yes, I can buy you because I’ve got pockets full of glass beads and that’s the only currency we’ve got here on the island.’

The edge of the rock is cutting into his shoulder-blade like a knife, and although Lucas Egmont twists and turns, he can’t break loose.

‘Captain,’ he whispers, ‘you can’t force me the way you say you can. You can beat me to death, but you can’t force me to carve that lion of yours. You can even tie me up, but when I’m tied up you’ve got even less chance of making me do what I don’t want to do. And in any case, I’ve no reason to be grateful to you for saving my life in the way you think.’