Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

No, he has no reason at all to be grateful. This is a life and death struggle, and the question of gratitude is hardly the most important one. It’s more important to know whether you are capable of killing someone who’s saved your life. Maybe you can.

‘This isn’t fair play, captain,’ he goes on, ‘and it’s not doing you any good. You’re just wasting time and it’s getting darker and darker. Before long we won’t be able to distinguish the drawing on your boot any longer — you’ve got to remember we haven’t got a fire any more. No, there’s another way, a way that’s fair play and is quickly settled, and what we do is to set each other tasks, difficult ones but not impossible, and whoever fails to perform what’s asked of him has lost, and his lion is defeated.’

The captain releases him and sits down on the other side of the rock and keeps tapping away incessantly at the leg of his boot.

‘We’ll draw lots to decide who goes first,’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘Whoever gets the stone I have in one of my hands has lost.’

He holds out both his clenched fists and, after a little worried hesitation, the captain chooses his left hand and there’s a stone in both of them and quickly and unobtrusively he drops the little stone in his right hand on to his knee and then holds it out to demonstrate that it’s empty.

The captain stands up and an anxious little smile flits round his mouth like a butterfly.

‘Well, what have you got lined up for me, Egmont?’ he asks, pretending to be unconcerned although he’s shaking like a leaf.

‘Swim across the lagoon,’ says Lucas quickly so that his voice doesn’t tremble.

‘There and back?’

‘Yes, there and back.’

‘Fully dressed?’

‘No, stripped to the waist.’

‘With my trousers and boot on?’

‘Yes.’

He pulls his shirt off and throws it to Lucas Egmont, and he’s shivering although it’s not in the least cold as he strides down the beach and then wades slowly out into the water. It’s that green moment of twilight when the world is filled with intense light, the night sticks its tongue out of its black mouth, and how light it is all around it! The surface of the lagoon is like a silken cloth, and it rustles almost like silk as the captain wades through the water. He wades as far as he can before starting to swim, the water is almost up to his shoulders when he launches himself into his first stroke, and then his head is bobbing up and down in the water like a floating drum, and he dips his forehead into the water and there’s just a thick tuft of black hair visible over the surface as he cuts a little black furrow into the green water. Then he starts accelerating, and his boot is splashing away almost over the surface, and when he’s about halfway across the lagoon it happens. The fish must have worked its way underneath him without warning, and all he can manage is a short, stifled shriek which doesn’t ruffle the smooth surface of the lagoon in the slightest, but just for a moment it rips apart the air round about Lucas Egmont and he finds it hard to breathe for a short while. But then the captain’s shredded body can’t manage to float any more, his head disappears as quickly as a float after a bite, and all is calm and peaceful. The silken surface of the lagoon has been slightly rippled, that’s the only glimpse one has of the world’s wounds, but soon it reverts to its smooth, green, shiny ruthless self.

15

Now Lucas Egmont is all alone, more alone than he’s ever been before, even more alone than he’s been when among sympathetic people. He throws the captain’s shirt out into the lagoon, but regrets that immediately and wades out to retrieve it and instead he spreads it out over the freezing cold dead body. Then he sits down for a while beside the white rock, fiddling with the stone, and suddenly it occurs to him that neither of them, neither the captain nor he himself, had brought that stone down the cliff. But somebody must have done so. It can’t have been the English girl, who was definitely down here on the beach after everybody else had dispersed: she was too blinded by her double desire, for the dead Jimmie Baaz and the living Boy Larus, to have been capable of anything of the sort. It can’t have been Boy Larus, either: he was too busy trying to make love to the English girl. There’s been so sign of Madame, and she looked so strangely vacant from the moment she spat out all her fear at Tim Solider’s face when he lay there, bitten by the iguanas. Tim Solider. It must have been Tim Solider. And he remembers that Tim Solider was the only one who seemed to be interested in the lion when they were sitting arguing round the rock earlier in the afternoon; and he picks up the stone and tries to find his footsteps in the sand, but of course, it’s a hopeless task when there’s such a confused mass of footprints running off in all directions over the beach. Then he suddenly notices something white shining through the dusk, it’s not far from where the fire was and it’s a bird’s feather and then he remembers the flock of birds that is still circling over the beach, but less purposefully now that it’s started to get dark. He throws the stone away in the direction of the cliffs, and with the feather in his hand he rushes over towards the dead bird which hasn’t been sucked out into the open sea yet, but is still bouncing backwards and forwards between its rocks. Then he sees him more or less straight away. He’s hanging at a strange angle, with his head pointing downwards and one foot just under the surface, trapped in a little crevice, and he’s fallen forwards and broken his foot so that his body is hanging down vertically. He takes a firm hold of the foot and tries to prise it loose, but it’s well and truly hooked and it’s incredibly difficult to do anything about it. Eventually, he gives an enormous tug and it comes loose, but he hasn’t reckoned with how fantastically heavy the body is, and he loses his grip and the corpse sinks so fast and so deep that he has no chance of grabbing it again.

It’s still grass-green dusk when he makes his way back, and he’s unhappy in quite a new way. There’s nothing he can do about it, but there’s a persistent little worry nagging away at first one corner and then another of his confidence, and in the end he lies down by the dead fire and tries to work out what’s what. He really can’t find anything to console him, and after lying there for a while he gets up and goes back to the rock which is now gleaming like a magic charm in the darker twilight; and he’s sure so much struggling can’t have been in vain, there must have been some point, the point must be that he should finish off things, including what Tim Solider wanted to help him with: he must carve that lion, his own and Tim’s lion, before it gets even darker. He searches for the stone and then he lies down beside the rock in a comfortable posture and he can hear from the sound of the sea and the flight of the birds and the walk of the iguanas how intimate night is preparing to make its entrance.

— and that’s when the terrible thing happens. He’s raring to go, he’s holding the stone tightly in his hand, he’s lying in the right position by the rock, and it’s not too dark for him not to be able to make out every detail in his carving for some time yet, everything’s as it should be and he’s been fighting to overcome all doubt and all doubt has been overcome, and even so, a terrible thing like this can happen: all of a sudden, he can’t remember what a lion looks like, and the captain’s lion, the only model, is lying dead on the bottom of the dreadful lagoon.

Oh, how he struggles to remember: he rolls around in the sand, he lies still in the sand and closes his eyes and tries to set the stone tracing lovingly round a shadow he remembers from his childhood, a lion on a circus poster, a lion in a zoology textbook; he tries to draw in the sand but the result is so awful that he bites at the sand in fury till he has a mouth full of sand and is choking and coughing and, blinded by the sand, he staggers around the beach and bumps into the cliff, falls on his knees in the water, stumbles over the burnt-out fire, falls over the white rock, and for one horrible moment grabs hold of the dead body and when he realizes what it is he shrieks like a lunatic and swallows the sand and rushes up towards the cliff face and stands there with his back to it and gapes around in all directions with his wild, still half-blind eyes, as if trying to protect himself from the most awful thing of all.