Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

Fragments of his dream were bobbing about on the water, he sank to his knees and relived everything that had happened in his dream. Meanwhile the red float — splashed with the blood of the giant fish — gradually rose up from the sea with meticulous care, as if the invisible fisherman were trying to do all he could not to scare his prey. Thirst, thought Lucas Egmont, all is thirst. Guilt, fear, all aspects of guilty conscience, cruelty and lies, it’s all thirst; flight and degradation, desires and social aspirations, everything is merely thirst.

Forced slowly on to his back by all his certainties, he watched as the sea was suddenly stretched like a fire blanket and formed a vast blue stillness under the balancing act of the sun, which was still standing on the ground, red and bulky, gazing at the ladder and the rope. Thirst, he thought, around which everything revolves, the only firm point in a slack universe: where would we be without thirst — like a helpless guest invited to a dinner for the first time, not knowing what to do with his hands in an overwhelmingly big hall?

Because, he thought, because thirst is the only certainty, I can live a little longer: but not in order to slake it, no, to keep it going since if I lose my thirst — then what?

And between dawn and morning, the dreamer within us, the greatest cynic of them all, helped him to mount fast horses and run away from everything which had been chasing him up to now: his guilt from the castle and the bank, his fear of everything which might force him to act, guilt feelings about his flight into the world of diagrams and bewitched trout. What else can you do, he thought, but maintain your thirst? If you want irrele-vancies to tear you to pieces, go ahead and drink!

White clouds of the only birds on the island, like seagulls but with bare necks and red bills made for hacking, dumb, and silent in flight, rose up from the interior of the island; transfixed by angst, he recalled those hectic minutes round the buried water keg, the shoving, the sharpness of the foot which always kicked him, the supreme moment of satisfaction as his palate was flooded, and the long agony afterwards when everything had to be investigated: why had he deceived the bank, shamelessly tricked his employers and fled with the money he’d kept hidden so long? It was like masturbation: an hour of blissful self-abuse, a moment when everything dissolved into blissful agony, a day of regret and furtive reproach.

But he was the one who could see most clearly what was going to happen, knew the ship coming to rescue them was still in Melbourne or Casablanca: he’d better be spared the shameful period of brooding that followed once he’d slaked his thirst. Trembling in every limb, not just from the cold, but also from angst, he scrambled to his feet and tried to suppress the crackling noise coming from the pieces of canvas round his feet as he walked. Was everyone asleep now? Gazing down greedily — yes, looks like that must be from greed, what else? — the birds circled around some fifteen feet up, their rubber necks stretched out before them. Yes, all six seemed to be asleep: the three men under a sheet of canvas between the fire and the white rock, with the mad captain furthest away, his shoulders hunched contemptuously even in his sleep, turned impatiently away from the nervous airman, whose heavy frame seemed to be lying at attention even as he slept; next to him the giant Tim Solider, calm and impassive under canvas as if relaxing on the chaise-longue at home with his wife beside him; closely intertwined by the fire under a bale of cotton they had managed to salvage lay the young English girl, her buttocks constantly quivering, and the sturdy red-haired woman, enclosed in a secret no one yet knew about; on his own near the water keg the crippled boxer, on his back, motionless, like a champion counted out for ever.

Unaware of committing any sort of crime, driven only by the force which always drove him: the urge to avoid normal guilt feelings, the only thing which for him could ever justify an action, Lucas Egmont took a plank from one of the wooden boxes and started digging in the sand until he heard the dull clang. His terror and triumph combined to fling him to the ground and his fingers sped like sand torpedoes over the cool metal of the keg, digging out a hollow for the water under the tap, and he was shaking as he unscrewed the tap, forcing every muscle in his body to keep his head still under the axe of angst and prevent himself from rolling over and simply drinking. But sand drinks quickly, one enormous gulp and it had imbibed all the water from the last keg they’d all helped to roll from the boat that first day when it was still an adventure, over the whole length of the half-moon-shaped reef, crooking its finger along the distant beach. When he lifted up the keg in his dirty hands, it was light and silent, and he buried it along with all their hopes of rescue just as the sun placed its foot on the first rung of the ladder and the sea seemed to fill its chest with its first breath of morning, the birds were swooping down into the forest in eerie silence, and he could hear the thud of an early-bird iguana.

He went down to the lagoon with his wooden plank and hurled it out over the water, which welcomed it with a tender embrace; and then suddenly something remarkable happened: the bottom of the lagoon was smooth and yellow and seemed almost to be floating just beneath the painfully clear water, but now a clutch of white bubbles floated up towards the plank like balloons, the sand became agitated, a fish slowly wriggled free from its grip, and with one lightning-fast twitch of its tail it launched itself from its hiding place, three feet at least it was from its tail to its shark-like mouth, its back covered in horrifyingly sharp, six-inch spikes, and with a sickening shudder it crashed into the plank, then circled round the lagoon in silence, slicing up the surface with its spikes, before sinking down slowly, burrowing into the loose sand, and disappearing once more. For a few seconds, the bottom was murky, a few clouds of froth floated on the water, then suddenly, everything was exactly as before.

Pale with emotion, as if he had seen a ghost, Lucas Egmont staggered backwards — was he afraid of being stabbed from behind otherwise? — then raced back to the smouldering fire and threw another branch on to it, adjusted the cotton over the English girl’s back as she muttered away non-stop in her sleep, then, feeling a little calmer, returned to the keg in order to go back to sleep under the boxer’s canvas. As he lifted the edge, the crippled boxer said without opening his eyes and barely parting his lips: ‘I saw what you did all right.’

Lucas Egmont bent over him till he raised his eyelids and allowed his hatred to seep out through the gaps. Then Lucas smiled down at the boxer as he untied the laces of his makeshift canvas shoes, since it was morning now, and warm. Still bent over him, he dangled the red laces like a pendulum in front of his eyes. Then the boxer closed his eyes like a man slamming a door, a shudder crept through him like a snake, and he seemed to be sinking although he was still lying there.

‘Enjoy your thirst,’ said Lucas Egmont, still smiling.

For a moment Jimmie Baaz thought his paralysis had loosened its grip, his hips became supple and the dull pain abated, his legs bent once more after years of stiffness, he wanted to run away, and he could do so once again. He flung back the canvas and then thought he could hear the stimulating reveille of a drum as his feet thudded quickly and regularly on the hard morning-sand. My God but he felt jubilant! The air was mild and cool at the same time, still hard after the chill of night, and closed in like leaves around his heat. The sun was like a newly painted red croquet ball, resting for a moment almost motionless on the black line, and the silent clouds of birds, splashed from below by the red glitter of morning on the sea, hovered over the world like white palm leaves. The path over the cliffs came racing towards him and made merry little leaps into the midst of the newly awakened greenery, discarded iguana skins on some of the green stones glittered like stiff lame, and in the high grass where he had never been before he would find a depression between some hidden stones into which he could force down his body and then abandon himself to eternal tranquillity. He would have reached the terminus of his long flight, and then it could be closed down as there weren’t going to be any more travellers. None of the other survivors would find him, they’d run around in the thickets shouting eagerly that he must come out, they just couldn’t live without him.