Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Now he expected a violent outburst, a powerful, spiteful blow across his cheek which would have released him from any form of obligation to suppress the truth — but the captain’s face and his nose with the fierce red spot merely sank down towards him, and the circle of the doomed closed in on him. Smiling confidently the captain slowly coaxed his hand out of his grip, slowly straightened his back and, half turning towards the circle of onlookers, raised his hand towards his heart, as if it had been a medal. All that happened was a regretful shrug of the shoulders; then the circle dissolved and he tried to flee and flee, but in vain, as they always came back and kept him paralysed with their watchful charity. The fear of death, now growing by the hour, seemed to envelop them all as they sat beside him wearing their cosmetic masks of clay; they hardened in the hot sun, and every quick, fearful smile left behind a battery of creases and furrows; these faces looked like a ghastly ruined landscape in what had once been beautiful countryside as they bent over his: curious, frowning uncomfortably, inquiring anxiously, half triumphant in advance or merely riddled with terror, whenever they thought he was asleep or had fallen into terminal unconsciousness. Worst of all was the young English girl who lay down beside him, slender and gazelle-like, her thin birch-leaf fingers frequently fluttering about his face; eyes increasingly as fixed as frozen lakes in the snowy landscapes surrounding her pupils examined him meticulously, and interpreted every change of expression with remarkable rapidity.

‘You want something to drink now,’ she would say immediately — or, ‘Now you’d like to get rid of this canvas sheet for a while.’

She spoke his language, slowly, darkly, with strange palatizations, almost like a tropical negress. It would have been touching and loveable in normal circumstances, but now he found it extremely distasteful, another stage in the process of stifling imprisonment. The girl’s peculiarities forced their way under his hard shell of resistance and scratched like a grain of sand, more irritating than the others’ easily exposed charity born of fear, since he detected a comical genuineness about the girl as she lay beside him; at first it seemed boundlessly ridiculous, but soon it became painfully intolerable as it immediately made everything so complicated, even more so than the hypocrisy of the others hindering his flight. Aha, a Florence Nightingale, he thought contemptuously, and made himself extra heavy when she came with her thin hands and tried to change the rags wrapped round his filthy lower body, He could see point in annoying her as she didn’t possess the honourable falsehood characteristic of all her shipwrecked companions. She was genuine, that is, she considered herself to be genuine, and so her lies were all the greater.

She would lie down beside him, and they often watched the velvet ships of the clouds gliding majestically over the sea. The new line running from the blood-red corner of her mouth grew severe and deep, and the fine, blue bow of her temples was ready to snap at any moment; her frozen gaze suddenly thawed, she seemed to reach out for him even though she was lying there without moving.

‘Can you see it?’ she said in his language, trembling away in the parcel of cloth her body was encased in, ‘There goes the good ship Tong, with its masts lost in the mists. Can you see the captain, the one standing smoking by the rail: the mists come from his pipe. A sailor is just emptying a bucket of mist overboard, you see, the Tong would go too fast otherwise. A lady from Shetland in her phantom fur-coat is evidently not feeling too well, can’t you see how sinister she looks as she stands on deck, waving her white letter of credit? The schoolboy who’s run away from my smoke-infested homeland has just whistled a shrill greeting to freedom, you can see that white column shooting up from the ship and you probably think it’s the steam whistle, but it’s the boy, I can assure you: his jubilation is so boundless that it has to look just like that.’

With meaningless prattle of that kind in the air, she’d go for a little walk on her own, but Jimmie refused to let himself get carried away; silent and compressed by his longing to run away from it all, his hunger, his thirst and his contempt, he wanted to cry out: ‘You’re lying, you’re making up that rescue ship in the clouds, you’re emptying your heavy box of fear on to a bank of clouds, but keep out of the way when it falls, the floor isn’t very steady. Just wait till my legs have got better and my paralysis has eased, there’ll be nothing to hold me back; I know your fear and your plans for me, but I’ll run away to where nothing can get at me.’

But then one day he came to with a start, it may even have been the same day everything else happened, for periods of consciousness in between the darkness of his oblivion were deplorably short. There was a new nuance in her way of talking; it’s possible it had been there all the time, knocking away at his window, but now it suddenly struck him: words that she palatized with the same noble energy as before took on a new tenor, and the blue quaking of her thin nostrils also had some message to impart. He lay there with his eyes almost closed and seemed to hear or see nothing, but in fact he was observing everything she did with intense concentration; at first he was put out, but increasingly he was filled with disgust and despair as he saw the love for himself that glinted like SOS signals behind her every movement and every word. She turned bravely away from him, but even so he could see her face muscles twitching with a desire to turn and face him, and tear down all the curtains of modesty.

‘Now I’m standing there on the upper deck with my white suitcase. I’ve been sailing on board the Tong for a long time, just wandering all over the boat like a lost soul, waiting eagerly and nervously for my friend. I was wandering about like that when we nudged the Antilles, and almost touched the Hebridean Isles; it’s been foggy all the time, you see, and we’ve only been able to follow the route on our maps. So there I am on the upper deck, with no idea of what I’m going to do. We keep coming across other boats, little round dinghies in the mist, wrapped in a froth of cigar smoke, but also whalers still engulfed in the remains of the smoke from the phantom whale that’s now dead. I wave sadly at them, but they don’t notice me because I’m so alone. Then you suddenly come along. Can you see yourself up there under the golden crown? You’ve been looking for me, no doubt, and like a Cassandra, I run towards you to tell you all the things that are going to happen to us. And then the accident happens, you can see up there what’s happened, can’t you? I’m so eager I simply drop my suitcase, the one I’ve been lugging around with me all the time since we left port, the whole voyage; it slides away over the deck, which is very slippery, and as it’s not locked, it comes open and everything falls into the sea before we know where we are. You can see the contents streaming down into the sea, can’t you? That haze of fiery smoke floating slowly down towards us, that was the contents of my suitcase. - You can be really awful.’

Oh, what wouldn’t he have given for healthy, mobile legs so that he could run away from this deceitful but, to make matters worse, quite honourably intended gush of words entangling his desire to flee in the blind threads of the drifting mist! But he was crippled, albeit only temporarily, and as the pain kept on growing in his chest, his ankles, his pulse and his temples, he was confronted by his paralysis every time he tried to turn over in the dry sand, which merely wailed plaintively by way of reply under the canvas sheet. He had to stay where he was, but flee even so — the cripple’s dilemma. He must get rid of her, the only one who, thanks to her lack of calculation, her unselfish desire to see him remain alive, was still able to make him want to stay instead of running away — and he didn’t want to be convinced that running away never does any good, or that there can ever be anything to justify staying behind. To call off a flight that’s already begun is a horrifying undertaking; the moment when the brakes are applied is always a millstone round one’s neck, and everything pitches into the person trying to run away like a pack of heavy, savage dogs, trampling over one’s belly and tearing at one’s body until one’s guts are exposed.