Danger comes: Tove Jansson and The Island

The second half of: “The Island,”  by Tove Jansson. Part one is here.

It’s a rickety structure, one pays for it with fear of darkness and sudden panic—a stirring in the dark, a boat on the horizon.

But during the weekdays, with their calmly repetitive and efficient chores, the protective barrier grows taller and firmer. Pull the boat out of the water before the storm, light the lamp for the night, gather and chop wood.

Problems are simple and can be solved.

Water runs out. The roof leaks. A tree is about to be blown over. A grouse has smashed the window, a net has disappeared.

Early spring is the safest time, a secure margin between the city’s anxiety and the consummated summer, which is green and contented and friendly. There are no boats going between islands, the sand is untouched, and the island has taken a small stealthy step toward wilderness.

Its colors are cold and serious, frail as the ice over the basins. The impassive sky is made of glass. Everything is expectant, attentive, and completely free from summer’s coquetry.

At night, the cries of the long-tailed ducks come from a faraway island. They can be heard when one gets up to light a fire before dawn. Freezing and violently happy, one stands by the door, looking at the meager land and the mountains in the half-light.

What withered and died a year ago lies like a brown tarp over everything that now has decided to begin to grow.

The forgotten possibility of life as a gift suddenly becomes thinkable. The fire burns in the stove. One curls up to sleep and recognizes the silence and makes friends with oneself.

There’s the joy of lifting heavy stones, of getting a tree trunk out of the water with a lever and balancing techniques, of steering the boat around the point in a strong southwesterly.

The water is ice cold and the ground is hard and the light gets brighter each day; one knows paradise is within reach. And each year one forgets that happiness lies in the expectation, not in the fulfillment.

But summer keeps its promise and goes away.

September drifts into October, and the island becomes impassive and indifferent once again. The last fishing boats sail by into the night and vanish in the ocean with their lights.

There is a new birdless silence. Colors get heavy, and the island is overtrodden and tired. It acquires a fascinatingly hostile face.

The fear of darkness drives one out of the cottage with its three black windows, into the small shed for the nets in the back. A safe, solid space that would never turn one over to danger.

Danger comes with the autumn storms. True storms that won’t abate at sundown, that can cut the island off for ten days, that transform the beaches and rattle the cottage.

And the peculiar sound sensations, stronger in the room but also perceptible in the shed during the storm’s fourth day; broken tonal fragments like music from the electrons, laughing voices and howls and faraway clocks, the sound of heavy running feet around the house.

It doesn’t matter as long as all the mirrors are turned towards the walls in time and the blankets are secured on the windows.

When the sun has set and everything that is violet and hateful has overflowed the island, it’s time to convince oneself that nothing could ever look into the shed. There can’t be any crevices there.

But the lamp has to be filled every evening, it mustn’t burn out. One can’t afford to be afraid in October. Fear of being afraid.

Not of people, but of what looks human but isn’t.

The morning is transparent and uninterested.

New mounds of seaweed pile up on the leeward beach. The island dries up and shrinks and tries to shake one off from itself.

Everything is depleted, moldy, spent. What the sea brings won’t remain in the swelling surf, it travels impatiently on, the ground is stripped naked by the winds, and the beach foam travels all the way to the windows, blinding them.

The water rises.

Everything one has built and gathered must be carried farther up. Each day farther up. It’s as if paradise were about to sink into the sea—and one feels a mysterious desire to follow it.

All around, things expose themselves to death and mere survival.

One day before dusk a rain curtain falls on the sea. For a few hours, the colors recover their luster and liveliness, the landscape pulls itself together and becomes voluptuous.

Then it sags, the ground is no longer alive, only bloated, billowing like the sea around the point, doors and windows can’t be opened, and all that was beautifully brown and withered turns into a wet mass; the island is dead but its glorious burial is still far off.

The last birds of the summer and the city folk flee. They flap away in horror.

I fled when the wind stopped, the night when the storm suddenly died down.

I had run out of food and firewood and the wind just blew.

On the last day, I lay on the floor and saw pictures in the knots in the wood ceiling. My packed bags had stood by the door for a week and the room was empty and without curtains.

Then a fast and black swirl shrouded my windows, birds with long pointy wings flew around the cottage, close to the walls. Again and again and again.

In the self-evident madness of solitude, I was convinced that unknown catastrophic animals were drawing their circle of doom around the house.

That night, the wind stopped. The silence woke me up.

Because the house was besieged by catastrophe, I forgot the fear of darkness, flung the door open, and ran out. Ran and tripped—the island at night was a foreign island—threw the suitcases into the boat, up in the cottage the lamp shone, alone in the mountain, so much fainter than the self-confident lighthouses along the horizon. And locked the cottage, turned and turned the key that hadn’t been needed for so long and refused to work, the lamp turned the juniper shrubs into terrifying creatures, out at sea a new wind slowly started to blow.

And ran to the beach, stumbled and ran, felt how the island hated me and wanted to get rid of me, tried to get the overloaded boat out, wept and cursed and pushed on—and then it was off, the oars down, the darkness at sea wasn’t dangerous and one felt ashamed.

You summer wretch, one thought. You think that you love your island but you have never endured a winter together with it. You summer bird, you beachgoer, you parasite of a merely convenient loneliness, you who toy with the primitive and picturesque, you vile city dweller.

Here everything was just black. The new wind grew stronger at sea. I heard it come, it came as if walking on water, before the water was even touched.

I rowed by instinct, someplace in there was dry land, safe, with sleeping houses, and farther away the lit-up city. The city where I lived, where I belonged, where winters were spent.

Suddenly I stopped rowing, in the middle of the journey.

And for the very first time that winter, during my escape, I started, uncontrollably, to miss my island.

From: “The Island,”  by Tove Jannson originally published in 1961 in a travel magazine, Turistliv i Finland. Translated by Hernan Diaz https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/13/tove-janssons-the-island/