Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

That’s when the lions appear. With swishing tails and manes scattering rain and sand, they come thundering down the beach and stand roaring in front of him. There’s an enormous mass of lions, the whole beach is full of them, indeed, no doubt the whole island, for now he can hear the swishing tails and fluttering manes high above his head and he curls up until he’s the most insignificant of nonentities and in fact they don’t seem all that interested in him, they swing round in the sand in front of him and the dust rises like a cloud and blinds him completely, they leap out roaring into the water, showing no respect in their bellies for the sharp fish, and they snort like horses in the water and when they come back again they shake themselves so carelessly that he’s soaked and then they suddenly come racing down from the cliff and jump over him and land with their horrific limbs so close to him that his whole mouth is filled with sand and he bends forward and vomits convulsively and his head is a roundabout of roaring, panting, snorting and bellowing from unfortunate animals on the island which have got into the most awful mess and as he lies there vomiting a dribbling lion stands astride him and growls with its upper lip curled threateningly and the stink from its dirty, predatory teeth envelopes him in a stifling cloud. If only they’d go away, if only they’d go away again, now he knows everything about lions and, with both eyes closed, he draws one lion after another in the air around him until his arm is bitten off, and actually he doesn’t have his eyes closed although he thinks he has, it’s just that he’s blinded by the sand and by fear.

Suddenly everything is ghostly silent, and all at once he can see again although that’s what he wants least just now, and what he’s forced to see while his blood and life are running out of him through the hole where his bitten-off arm was is the most terrible thing in the whole world. One of the lions has been down to the bottom of the lagoon and sniffed out the drowned captain and now he’s sitting quite still on the lion’s back, blue in the face and with motionless, staring eyes and his hair sticking down over his forehead like a horn, and, painfully slowly, they’re coming towards Lucas Egmont. Get down on your knees, whispers the dead mouth, and he kneels down and screams the second before the lion gives him that fatal blow on his head, ‘You won, you were the winner, I give in.’

But suddenly the world seems to have been transformed, and he’s reincarnated as a young male lion, bristling with life and eagerness; he races up the cliff and then leaps down again in death-defying abandon, whipping up the sand with his frenzied rutting dance; effortlessly and playfully he knocks down the young lioness which playfully bites him in return for his boldness, and as the stars explode and the roars of the lions rip him apart and he them, night falls and stifles everything in its narcotic embrace. Its mask settles over everyone and everything, and now comes deep, terrible, liberating sleep.

16

He wakes up and it’s still night and a handful of distant stars are trying in vain to come closer. He stretches, and realizes from the darkness and the silence that he’s at the bottom of the world. Indeed, Lucas Egmont is at the bottom of the world, because the fact is, you can’t just keep on falling for ever; the ego has an endless succession of glass roofs, but under the lowest of them is a bottom, a haven for the seeker, for a seeker about whom they said he’d go far when he was little, but all he’s done is sink, deeper and deeper — right to the bottom.

At the bottom of the world, it’s big and hot and silent, but not so big and hot and silent that anybody who’s fallen can’t make himself at home and feel comfortable for the brief moment he’s there. When you’re at the bottom of the world, you can ask every question and think every thought without needing to be afraid of the unknown, giddying depths beneath you. The bottom of the world is free from fear in that it’s the secure bottom for all fear, and free from fear in that anyone who’s landed up there is already familiar with all kinds of fear: the fear of death, the fear of cramp, the fear of hunger, the fear of a cycling accident and a sharp scythe, the fear of falling and the fear of landing in the ditch, the fear of the market square and fear of the hearse and all the other fears that adorn the whole of the way from the bottom of the world to its surface. But the bottom of the world is also free from many other things: it’s free from love and free from hatred and free from guilt and free from happiness, free from hope and free from disappointment, because on the way there the seeker has peeled off everything that adorned or disfigured him and now he’s completely naked, more naked than ever before, he has neither the swimming trunks of doubt nor the bath-robe of hope to hide behind, but it’s not too dark for him to contemplate himself and see what he looks like without any kind of disguise, without any mask, and on that basis he can fix his position in the world, even though he’s already dead and, with closed eyes, can observe the place where the drowning happened.

What I want is to do what’s right, he thinks, I want to do all I can to carry out the rightest of right actions. Everybody goes on about doing the right thing, they take it so seriously, they go on about the man who does the right thing, but how can anybody be so cruel as to overlook the man who tries to do the right thing but is interrupted at the wrong time? What about the character who gets cut off by a stammer or an epilectic fit with fatal consequences, or the bloke who just forgets something: he can’t remember what a lion looks like while it’s still light, and before it gets really dark the beach is suddenly filled with lions that demonstrate exactly what a lion looks like and while there’s still a chance of doing the right thing, of carving the image of the lion into the white rock, one of those lions bites off the only arm that can perform the only right thing, and then all of a sudden he’s in possession again of not only his arm but also the memory of what a lion looks like, but by that time it’s so dark there’s nothing to be done. Is there any salvation for him? Oh yes, there just has to be some form of salvation, if you can talk about salvation rather than foundering. Maybe neither of those are appropriate. Why should we succumb, come to that, and how should we go about succumbing if we don’t believe in some punitive supreme being above all other supreme beings? But otherwise, of course, it would fit in with our immoral world order if it weren’t sufficient to put up with your pleasures and your problems while you’re alive, but even later as well. It would fit in just perfectly with the Justice envisaged by our world order, with her miserable expression, and the brutal iron mask superimposed on the face twisted by desire.

What a splendid idea, that we should be judged according to whether we do right or wrong! There are so few of our actions we have control over. Pure chance, which can be distinguished from pure justice only because as yet it hasn’t got any bandages on, sets off and rounds off our actions; and what we can do and of course ought to do and indeed must do because of our conscience, whose very existence is so often queried, is to let ourselves be propelled in a particular direction, and how stubbornly we cling to that direction. But we know thanks to the most wide-open of all the world’s wide-open eyes that, as often as not, the goal is an illusion, and the important thing is the direction, because that and that alone is what we have control over. And awareness, oh yes, awareness: the open eyes which fearlessly scrutinize their dangerous position must be the stars of our ego, our only compass, the compass which decides which direction we take, because if there is no compass, there can be no direction. But if I put my trust in the direction, I have to question statements about human wickedness, because within a direction which might well be splendid in itself, there can be tendencies for both good and evil.