Colony
Hugo Wilcken
From the author of the existential thriller ‘The Execution’ comes ‘Colony’, a novel set in French Guiana as the age of Empire draws to a close and anarchy beckons.The year is 1928. Sabir – petty criminal, drifter, war veteran – is on a prison ship bound for a notorious penal colony in the French tropics. Soon after his arrival in the bagne, as it's known, Sabir is shipped out to a work camp deep in the South American jungle but quickly comes to the realisation that his old life is dead, and return to France an impossibility. Yet, if he's to survive at all, he must escape the brutality of the bagne. Posing as a professional gardener, Sabir wins the confidence and protection of the camp's naïve, idealistic Commandant. With a group of like-minded convicts – including the secretive, enigmatic Edouard, a comrade from the trenches of WW1 – he soon launches his escape bid, across the seas in a stolen boat. Bad weather forces the men ashore, condemning them to a dismal, hallucinatory tramp through the jungle. As hunger and rivalry tear the group apart, Sabir understands he has scant chance of escaping into another life.In Part Two, Manne – deserter, itinerant exile – comes to the Colony in search of his deported friend, the same Edouard from Part One. With a false identity and cover story, Manne installs himself as a guest at the Commandant's house. There, he falls into an affair with his host's wife. Meanwhile, the Commandant is slowly unravelling, growing ever more suspicious of who Manne is and what he's doing in the Colony. Manne ends up trapped like everyone else in the bagne, and realises that he too must escape. The novel's two plot threads begin to merge – boundaries between dream and reality blur, bringing a surreal tinge to the dramatic climax.Both a page-turning adventure story, and a bold novel of ideas, Colony takes an historical background familiar to readers of Henri Charrière's ‘Papillon’, and twists it into a metaphysical journey. Brilliantly evoking an atmosphere of colonial decline in the tropics, the novel explores the shifting natures of identity, memory and reality.
Colony
A Novel
Hugo Wilcken
London, New York, Toronto and Sydney
For Julie and Léon
I did not die – yet nothing of life remained
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#udf068abd-725a-5e03-8af2-d5a06c050ba1)
Title Page (#u76c24b86-1031-5c1d-b698-3a603eacdb53)
Epigraph (#u67dcf211-4fe2-58e7-b100-3d866b375d9b)
COLONY ONE (#ua8743a93-fb41-5dbb-81d6-ea23cea2e3b7)
I (#u4e64a001-9da8-5bde-ac52-86ee05869aa8)
II (#uc429a555-1251-5e0f-9793-291cf7c9346f)
III (#u9857781d-0f6d-5431-a677-1e593e4eaf6b)
IV (#u8ac1f0d6-e355-5db4-9f6b-506b3a591734)
V (#ucbe3db78-eaf5-540a-b4b1-09917530f453)
VI (#u9b744d19-d082-5535-99d1-70d84208f68f)
VII (#u6e5eae98-ecd2-5163-978b-9199aea2c1ac)
VIII (#u9b71efb3-45ac-5d6b-9498-e26d578c8cbc)
IX (#ueb72f054-2671-51d1-9e72-614923cc1d02)
X (#ud9f549c3-734e-5505-9154-5dc8a997c8fc)
XI (#u94e146ac-7b5b-59d5-94f6-e73a1a3fc19e)
XII (#u57920a58-ceca-54c9-bd06-742203fa5ba2)
XIII (#uf8c3b32b-0687-5ad8-8f86-48410e8142a0)
XIV (#u50d1722f-c106-5b4b-9ab3-cf84f6d3d765)
COLONY TWO (#u5c84694c-a48c-5075-8b27-b7d382ca3258)
I (#u5bb1da36-a10f-5bc5-9170-0af4804ecd63)
II (#u629ace27-9923-587c-8d11-73ea1779975b)
III (#ua9d7d2e0-0c4f-532b-95b7-840b3759ac67)
IV (#u99f4e327-3c92-5e1d-9a95-3c4c46e5407f)
V (#u05a09fc9-45d1-500f-ad99-94b800398a04)
VI (#uc89a41d9-6aaa-5e7f-b827-6555aea8ebde)
VII (#u2253a27e-17cb-58f8-b9a5-a17285b300ff)
VIII (#udaec8f65-2748-5e55-950d-576df0c4a68b)
IX (#u1e3deac3-d4e3-5d7f-b4fc-09be0fc3f713)
X (#u198be7dc-de33-5f33-bcce-a33e15cbf5be)
XI (#u330d0293-8a91-549c-bb7a-64697fa97669)
XII (#ua30b52a9-e501-5533-8ece-fa46f4eba35d)
XIII (#ub7a60426-d4da-50f4-9547-b4aadc51ff66)
COLONY THREE (#u9b0f69f9-8b04-548c-8686-4afd5621b298)
I (#uada6458e-d1da-50d2-aa30-c39d3dc1f686)
Acknowledgements (#ue8181437-d914-5de2-b0b4-31a7d6800366)
About the Author (#u93661893-8340-5147-8295-d2cc177fde01)
Also by Hugo Wilcken (#u550f496e-1bfd-5542-adc7-fb7f5767f687)
Copyright (#u86d8fd81-4e26-53c4-b82c-da71adf4d276)
About the Publisher (#u36238e0a-7081-5794-b05c-ed48c4a84f3f)
COLONY ONE (#ulink_8b270d74-05b4-597e-9ff9-b0257028c409)
I (#ulink_5c1879ec-b31b-541b-af00-3246f3554f1e)
Lurid rumours abound about life in the penal colony. There are the labour camps where they make you work naked under the sun; the jungle parasites that bore through your feet and crawl up to your brain; the island where they intern leper convicts; the silent punishment blocks where the guards wear felt-soled shoes; the botched escapes that end in cannibalism. As the stories move through the prison ship, they mutate at such a rate that it becomes impossible to gauge their truth.
In Sabir’s cage, there’s only one man who’s already been out there and actually knows what it’s like. He’s a grizzled assassin called Bonifacio. Although not tall, he’s bulkily built, with the bulging, tattooed biceps of a Paris hoodlum. His cool menace unnerves most prisoners but doesn’t stop a few from pestering him for information. The questions obviously irritate him and he only bothers to reply when bribed with cigarettes, which are in short supply on board. Sabir asks nothing himself, but listens as he lies on his hammock, gazing through the tiny porthole into the punishing intensity of the blue outside. It’s from these overheard fragments that he gradually builds up a picture of what awaits him across the ocean. He now knows that they’ll disembark at Saint-Laurent, a small frontier town on the banks of a river called the Maroni, somewhere north of the Amazon, somewhere south of Venezuela. A splinter of France lost in the jungle.
‘That’s where the main penitentiary is. Where they do the selection,’ he hears Bonifacio explain one day in his thick Corsican accent, shot through with Montmartre. ‘If they think you’re dangerous, you go straight to the islands. There are three of them. Diable is for political prisoners. The main barracks are on Royale and the punishment cells on Saint-Joseph. If you end up on the islands, there’s no chance of escape. But you won’t have to do hard labour.
‘If you don’t have a trade, they’ll send you to one of the forest camps. Some are near Saint-Laurent, some are on the coast. Do anything to avoid them. They’re the worst. You’re out in the sun all day chopping trees. If you don’t fill your quota, you don’t get your rations. You end up with fever, dysentery. If you’re down for the camps, bribe the bookkeeper to get you a job at Saint-Laurent. If that doesn’t work, pay one of the Blacks or Arabs to chop your wood for you. Then buy your way out as quick as you can.
‘If you’ve got a trade they can use, you get to stay at Saint-Laurent. Or they send you up to the capital, Cayenne. You work for the Administration. There are cooks, butchers, bakers, mechanics, bookkeepers, porters … If you get a job, make sure it’s outside the penitentiary. That way, you’re out during the day, you’re unguarded. Best thing is to work for an official, as houseboy or cook. You get to sleep at their house. But you won’t score a job like that first off.
‘To survive, you need dough. To escape, you need dough. To get it, you need a scam. Everyone’s got a scam. The guys who work at the hospital steal quinine and sell it on. The iron-mongers make knives and plans and sell them on. In the camps they catch butterflies and sell them to the guards, who sell them to collectors in America. Everyone’s got a scam.’
So much to take in. During the long sleepless nights, Sabir turns it all over in his mind. In the solitude of the darkness, problems seem insurmountable. How to avoid these forest camps, for instance? As far as he knows, Sabir hasn’t been classed dangerous, but he has no particular skill other than basic soldiery. He has no money. He knows that most of the other prisoners do, banknotes tightly fitted into the little screw-top cylinder they call a plan, hidden in the rectum. Money given to them by their families. Sabir’s father has disowned him; his mother is dead. No trade, no money; no brawn either: Sabir is a smallish man with a slight build. There are nights when a paralysing nervousness invades him, worse even than the anxiety attacks of the Belgian trenches. It’s such a long time since he’s had to consider a future. He’s got too used to being a judicial object, shunted from prison to prison, prison to court, court to prison. He’s got used to lawyers talking for him, being his voice, just as all the others talk about him and around him. Almost as if he weren’t there at all.
The new life that awaits him seems very different. Not at all like a mainland prison. Deeply strange and yet somehow familiar: it’s the world of the romans à quatre sous, the pulp novels that Sabir used to devour when on leave from the front. In Sabir’s mind, the bagne – as the penal colony is called – is a savage fantasy land, peopled with shaven-headed convicts in striped pyjamas, boldly tattooed from head to foot, guarded by men in pith helmets and dress whites. The coastline is an impenetrable wall of green jungle; gaudy parrots scream from the trees; crocodiles lurk just below the water’s surface; natives glide to and fro in dugout canoes; bare-breasted women tend to children in palm-roofed huts; wide-mouthed rivers disgorge into an infinite ocean. It’s a netherworld of no definable location, surging up out of the tropics like an anti-Atlantis. When he was a child, Sabir’s mother would tell him that unless he behaved, ‘tu finiras bien au bagne.’ This oft-repeated threat was every bit as real, and yet every bit as fantastic as his long-dead grandmother’s warning that Robespierre stole naughty boys away in their sleep. And every day on the streets of Paris you could hear people grumbling: ‘Quel bagne! Quelle galère! C’est le bagne!’
What strikes Sabir about most of the other prisoners on board is their extreme youth and vulnerability. Very few of them actually seem like Bonifacio, like the tough hommes du milieu that populate the Paris or Marseilles underworld of Sabir’s imagination: the pimps, the drug dealers, safe crackers, hit men, gangsters. Gaspard, for example – the nervy, cowering country lad to Sabir’s left who cries himself to sleep – looks barely sixteen. One evening, without any prompting, Gaspard sobs out his story, banal and tragic in equal parts. He and another farmhand friend broke into the village café one night for a dare, and forced the till. The café owner came down to see what the disturbance was. Panicked, Gaspard grabbed a bottle of spirits, hurled it at the owner and fled. The man slipped on the stone floor, cracked his head open and bled to death overnight. The gendarmes picked Gaspard up the next day and he confessed that same morning. This boy seems typical of so many of the transportés on board: juvenile, illiterate, from peasant stock, lost, bewildered, completely out of his depth. Only thirty himself, Sabir feels ancient and worldly among these petrified adolescents. As though he’s lived and died an entire life in comparison.
Discipline on board is lax, not at all like in a mainland prison. Most of the men have stripped off and wear nothing but towels around their waists. They sit in small groups, chatting quietly, smoking, fretting, occasionally fighting. The hard men from the military jails in the African colonies – the forts-à-bras – even run a poker game with a makeshift pack of cards cut from cardboard. A stained blanket on the steel floor serves as the card table. These men are generally much older than the others, and everyone’s scared of them. Little cliques have already formed in each of the eight prison cages: the Parisians band together, as do the Corsicans, the Bretons, the Marseillais, the Arabs, the Indo-Chinese. There are a couple of Germans too in Sabir’s cage, deserters from the Foreign Legion who speak hardly any French and sit whispering together. A tall, thin man huddles in the corner and pores obsessively over a tattered map torn from an atlas. Over and over he mouths a string of unfamiliar words, like a magic incantation: Paramaribo, Albina, Maroni, Orinoco, Oyapock, Sinnamary …
As the boat reaches the tropics, the heat and lack of air inside the cages become almost unbearable. Walking, standing, sitting or lying, it’s impossible to get comfortable and just as impossible to sleep. Twice a day the prisoners are given a collective shower: sailors come down into the hold with hoses and drench the men with fresh salt water. It’s a delicious relief, but five minutes later Sabir is dry again and horribly itchy from the salt. Thirst is now an overriding problem; the drinking water has become contaminated and the guards pour rum into the barrels to make it more palatable. On this final leg of the voyage, Sabir feels constantly dizzy, but he can’t tell whether it’s because of the heat, the bad water, the rum, the seasickness or just the stench of six hundred bodies. The men lie listlessly now in their hammocks and conversations have died down to a low mutter, barely audible over the groan of the engine room.
One day the birds finally reappear, at first trailing in the boat’s wake then wheeling around the funnels, filling the air with their sad cries. It’s dawn. Sabir’s hammock is hooked up by a porthole and he can just make out a dark blade cutting across the horizon. Over the next hour the blade thickens and resolves into a vivid green. Not long after, the sea turns yellow. It happens literally from one moment to the next, as if the boat has just crossed a border. A gargantuan river mouth comes into view, several kilometres across. Everyone flocks to the portholes as the river swallows the boat up. An air of nervous expectation hangs over the cages; only Bonifacio remains impassive, unshakeable, as he lies in his hammock smoking cigarette after cigarette.
To avoid mudbanks the boat has to zigzag its way upstream, sometimes steaming down the middle, sometimes straying perilously close to the French bank – almost close enough for a man to reach out and touch the green foliage that bursts out over the water. On one occasion they pass what they take to be an Indian village: a rudimentary collection of five or six huts, a few inhabitants by the shore. It’s hard to make out what the Indians are actually doing as they gaze out across the river and beyond, apparently quite uninterested in the faces pressed to the portholes. Occasionally the boat gives a piercing hoot, although there’s no sign of other traffic on the river. And each time it does, great clouds of birds rise gracefully from the trees before dispersing into the sky.
At around noon, their destination finally comes into view: a couple of boulevards hewn out of the jungle, heading into nowhere; a large complex of buildings to the left of a long pier; then beyond that a neatly laid-out residential quarter. Saint-Laurent has the air of an unremarkable French village, miraculously transplanted to the South American jungle. Its little pink bungalows and spruce gardens look faintly ridiculous, cowed by this river and rainforest of unearthly proportions. With so many prisoners now jostling for a glimpse, Sabir manages only brief moments at the porthole. The trees that imprison the town are the tallest Sabir has ever seen. Some of them even sprout out of the river itself, blurring the boundary between land and water. It is indeed the green wall of Sabir’s imagination, sliding slowly along the bank as the boat steams towards Saint-Laurent. The immensity of the forest frightens him, because he knows that from now on he’ll have to live surrounded by it, and that one day soon he’ll have to escape through it.
When the engine cuts out, the silence is extraordinary. Sabir can hear the river lapping at the side of the boat. His blue cloth uniform, which had offered so little protection against the European winter, now suffocates him and he has to resist the temptation to rip it off. Sabir sets his cloth cap carefully on his head. Strange how you feel some vanity even in such circumstances. The town lies ahead, quite still in the dead of the noonday sun. They have been twenty-four days at sea. The air shimmers in the dripping heat. The date is 29 February 1928. It’s Ash Wednesday.
II (#ulink_fdc3f73e-c3fa-5b8c-989c-c2ed1dae251f)
The march to the penitentiary takes only minutes. Sabir is struck by the colourful headdresses of the Creole women among the crowd lining the boulevard, curious to see the new convoy. Some of these women are laughing, calling out to the convicts: ‘Allez, les gars … bonne chance … t’es beau, toi!’The banter sounds too spontaneous, too unnatural; it’s a peculiar counterpart to the scenes on the other side of the Atlantic, just a few weeks before, as the men boarded the ship. Then, the women were weeping, not laughing. Then, Sabir vainly searched the crowd of female faces for a glimpse of his fiancée. Was she there? Most likely not. Sabir had asked her to stay away. Nonetheless a violent feeling, almost hate, grips him now as he thinks of her probable absence that day. It’s practically the first time he’s thought of her since boarding the ship.
To the right, colonial buildings with wide, inviting verandas. To the left, a statue of a man staring imperiously into the river, two black men crouching down beside him. As he marches, Sabir follows the statue’s gaze, beyond the river to the other side. The Dutch bank, according to Bonifacio. There, too, is a smart, whitewashed colonial village: the mirror image of Saint-Laurent. It, too, is completely surrounded by jungle, perched uncertainly by the water as if cornered by an invading army. Although it looks exactly the same, this other side of the river is in fact like a photographic negative, Sabir realises. Because it’s not French. Not a penal colony. Its jungle looks seductive, alive with possibility. A man might disappear into it and emerge on the other side completely changed, a different person.
Little knots of convicts stand idly by the penitentiary gates; they appear to be totally unsupervised. In their red and white striped uniforms and wide straw hats, they remind Sabir of the vaudeville clowns in the shows his mother used to take him to as a boy. As the new convoy are marched through the gates, one of the convicts shouts out: ‘Anyone from Lyons in your cage?’ No one dares answer. Another convict sidles up to the tall man marching beside Sabir – the one who spent the whole trip staring at his tattered map. Apparently they know each other. ‘I’ll send you a note tonight,’ Sabir overhears the convict whisper. ‘I’m working in the botanical gardens. It’s a good job. We’re a man short. When they ask what you do, say you’re a gardener.’
Even once the convoy are inside, the gates of the penitentiary stay open. Convicts seem to wander in and out as they please. This laxness perplexes Sabir because it makes escape look easy, when he’s heard that it isn’t at all. They’re herded into a vast hall with an array of equipment: height gauges, scales, a camera mounted on a tripod, a table with ink-pads for fingerprinting. While Sabir strips, a clerk makes an inventory of the various marks on his body, every wart and mole. Sabir has a small flower tattooed on his left shoulder blade, dating from his army days. The clerk – who Sabir only now realises is actually another convict – examines it very carefully, devotes a short paragraph to it in the registre matricule. ‘What sort of flower is it? What’s its name?’ Flummoxed, Sabir has no response. But later, when he’s asked what his profession is, Bonifacio’s warning about what happens to unskilled prisoners comes back to him. He remembers the convict at the gates and says: ‘Gardener.’
Before lock-up, an officer issues everyone with a sheet of writing paper and a stamped envelope. He tells them that there’s no postal service out in the forest camps, and that, in any case, in future they’ll have to buy their own stamps and paper. Sabir spends the rest of the afternoon earning a couple of francs writing letters for the illiterate convicts. Pleas to wives to stay faithful; to come to Guiana; to on no account come to Guiana. Letters begging lovers not to forget them; to brothers commending the care of their wives and children to them; to parents asking for money, assuring them that everything’s all right, that they’re doing well. Appeals to the Ministry of Justice for pardons; instructions to lawyers in the hope of last-minute miracles; threats of vengeance; last wills and testaments …
Those with money have already bought coffee and cigarettes from one of the turnkeys. One prisoner has bought a fresh supply of cigarettes for Bonifacio as well. He has crouched down, wetted his finger and traced a rough map of the river and coastline on the dirt floor. He’s explaining the three routes out of Saint-Laurent: west, across the river; east, through the jungle; and north, down the river and into the sea.
‘Across the river gets you out of French territory and into Dutch Guiana. Opposite you’ve got the town of Albina. From there, there’s a road to the capital, Paramaribo, on the coast. But your uniform’ll give you away. The Dutch will send you back across the river. So you need false papers and workman’s clothes. That way you can pretend you’re working in one of the mines down the river. Even then, they’ll check back with Saint-Laurent if they think you’re French.
‘Or you can try the jungle. It looks the easiest way, but it’s the hardest. I don’t know anyone who’s made it through to Brazil. Jungle’s so thick you can only do a couple of kilometres in a day. There are huge rivers to cross. Without a gun there’s nothing you can catch. You’ll poison yourself eating the fruit. Or the Indians will find you. They’re paid ten francs for each convict they bring back. Or you’ll go crazy with hunger and come back after a few days. If you can find your way back.
‘Then there’s the sea. It’s the riskiest way. The hardest to organise. But it’s your best bet. You need a lot of dough. You need a boat with a sail, food and water for at least ten days. You paddle down the river at night, to catch the dawn tide. Then you’re in open sea. Because of the winds you can’t go south. So you have to head north-west till you get to Trinidad. The English won’t let you stay. But they won’t hand you back to the French either. They give you a few days to sort yourself out and find fresh supplies. Then you have to sail on. You can’t put to shore in Venezuela, because they’ll send you back to Saint-Laurent. But if you make it to Colombia, you’re free.’
In the tropics, night approaches with almost visible speed, sweeping across the forest like a black tide. Within the barracks a feeble night-light casts spindly shadows: everything is obscure, humid. The night brings no particular relief from the heat and the smallest movement seems to take an enormous effort. Unfamiliar noises reach Sabir through the bars, but in the barracks itself there’s silence. It’s as if the strain and shame of their arrival has exhausted everyone to the point where there’s no room for any further emotion. It’s not just the silence that’s different, but the stillness too. Sabir had got used to the gentle rocking of the boat, and the knot in his gut is like a reverse seasickness. For Sabir, this absolute stillness feels as though something that had once been faintly alive has now finally died.
The barracks holds sixty men – roughly the same ones as in Sabir’s cage on the prison boat, minus those already admitted to hospital. Unconsciously, they’ve reconstructed the cage in the barracks, as if afraid of what novelty might bring. To Sabir’s right lies Bonifacio; to his left Gaspard the country lad – who has tearfully dictated a wrenching letter to his parents begging forgiveness. Despite the heat and humidity, he’s shivering and curled up in foetal position: already Sabir has noticed the intense pressure the boy is under from the forts-à-bras to give in to their advances. Soon he might have to choose one of them, if only to protect himself from the others. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for you,’ Sabir told him as he wrote the boy’s letter. ‘I’ll try to help you if I can.’ And somehow this promise felt like an act of rebellion, not against the life of the bagne as imposed by the authorities, but against a convict-created world.
Bonifacio, on the other hand, is dozing peacefully. He’s stripped to the waist; a huge tattoo of a Christian cross covers his back. Sabir remembers how, early on in the trip, someone made a mocking remark about this tattoo. Bonifacio simply got out of his hammock and delivered a single, perfectly executed blow to the man’s stomach, then lay back down. The man was so badly winded that everyone thought he was going to die. Even as he snores now, Bonifacio’s muscleman biceps remain taut, threatening.
Like a proper professional, Bonifacio has never bragged, never once talked about his past. But Sabir has already heard his story, from another prisoner on the ship. Years before, Bonifacio got twenty years’ transportation with hard labour for a run of jewel heists. He was sent out to French Guiana but escaped eighteen months later, making his way to Argentina. There, he was helped out by friends in the prostitution racket. Eventually, he set himself up in the business, running a network of French girls in Buenos Aires. It was a comfortable, prosperous existence, but there was one thing that still rankled. During his trial, Bonifacio had arranged for a fence to send him his cut from the jewel heists. He never got the money. It was quite a fortune – easily enough to have financed an escape from the penal colony as soon as he got there.
One day, years after his escape to Argentina, he risked a return to France. Back in the Paris underworld, there was stupefaction at his sudden reappearance. But thanks to his reputation as an homme régulier, friends helped him trace the man he was after. Bonifacio soon found his former fence living in a bourgeois apartment building not far from the Bois de Boulogne. The man begged for mercy, but Bonifacio showed him none. He gunned him down in front of his wife and children. A few days later, Bonifacio was picked up again, as he strolled down the boulevard Clichy with his Argentinian mistress. Someone had betrayed him to the police. Scared off by Bonifacio’s underworld friends, the fence’s wife refused to testify against him. Unable to pin the murder on him, the authorities simply put Bonifacio on the next prison ship out to Saint-Laurent to finish his original sentence.
Throughout the afternoon, various convicts from other barracks have come up to the bars to talk with Bonifacio in low voices. Sabir also notices that Bonifacio hasn’t bothered to write his letter: he’s sold his paper and envelope to one of the German prisoners for a few sous. Sabir hasn’t had time for his own letter yet. There’s only one he wishes to write, and after that there’ll be no further need. On the boat he dreamt up all sorts of fantasies about escaping back to France, maybe reuniting with his fiancée, somehow returning to his former life. He was going to write to her to tell her he’d arrived safely. But now he changes his mind. Already, something has moved inside him since his arrival in the bagne. During the long, humid afternoon spent transcribing the impossible wishes of others, the realisation has grown in him that his old life is dead. That he can now never expect to resurrect it. That his survival – should he want it – depends on sloughing off this dead skin. That his only real hope is to become someone else entirely.
Thoughts. They become so clear in the darkness. Wondering now what to write to his fiancée, Sabir is inevitably reminded of all the things he’s lost. He recalls his arrival at the holding prison in France before embarkation: the bundle of prison clothes and clumsy wooden-soled shoes he was handed; the humiliating body inspection; the inventory of his personal effects the guard had made. It was only then that he was told that he could send on his things to his family if he wished, otherwise they’d be destroyed. There was a moment of anguish before relinquishing these few mementoes of a different life. He hadn’t realised he’d have to part with them. The letters and photo of his fiancée; a faded picture of his mother as a young girl; his military citation, along with the medal his unit had been awarded. He hadn’t realised these things were important to him. Particularly the photos. How would he be able to remember what his fiancée looked like? Already the face is blurred. It’s the feel of her breasts and body that remains with him most viscerally. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of any young woman’s body – here in this world of men.
‘I’m never coming back,’ he now scribbles under the gloom of the night-light. ‘Consider me dead, and think of me no longer.’
III (#ulink_50a91fd4-7e37-51c3-956b-e8ac1c474d53)
A week later, at dawn parade, an officer singles out a dozen men, including Sabir. They’re to leave immediately for Renée, a new forest camp twenty kilometres down the river. ‘You’ve got until nightfall to report to the chief guard. Otherwise, you’ll be counted as missing.’
An Arab turnkey doles out their day’s rations and walks them out of the penitentiary. It’s the first time since his arrival that Sabir’s been outside, and as he’s watched the crowds of convicts herded in and out of the gates every day, as he’s listened to the incessant chatter about goings-on in town, Saint-Laurent has expanded in his mind. It is, after all, a capital city of sorts. The capital of the bagne. But now as they leave, he’s reminded again of how small it is, how insignificant it seems, compared with what surrounds it. After only a few minutes’ walk, the almost elegant boulevard crumbles into little more than a dirt track through a dusty shanty town.
The turnkey stops as they approach a little shop; a Chinaman lounges by its entrance, puffing on an ivory pipe of a type Sabir hasn’t seen before. ‘If you want to buy anything before you leave, you can get it here,’ says the turnkey. No doubt he gets his cut for bringing them here, that’s his scam. Inside there’s a counter with tobacco, rum, bananas, coconuts, loaves of bread, some kind of boiled meat and rice. Sabir has a few francs he’s earned as an écrivain: he’ll need plenty more to finance his escape, but the temptation to buy something is overwhelming. Such a thing hasn’t been allowed in so long! It’s these half-tastes of freedom that are so dizzying. Sabir parts with some of his cash for a glass of rum – a ridiculous extravagance – and also some tobacco, since he’s heard that in the forest camps smoking is the best way to keep off the mosquitoes.
The turnkey leads them to a place where the dirt road disappears into the trees. ‘You have to follow that path. Camp Renée’s less than a day’s walk from here. You should get there by late afternoon.’ He turns away and is gone without a word: here, no one bothers with hellos or goodbyes. The men wait at the spot for a few minutes, too astonished to do anything. Sabir gazes over to Dutch Guiana across the river. Surely there must be a guard hidden somewhere, watching them, checking up on them, ready to shout, ready to fire on them if they try to get away … Eventually they hurry off down the trail the turnkey had pointed to. Sabir rounds each bend expecting to find a guard there, waiting to pick them up and take them to the camp. But there’s no one. They’re alone in the jungle. At times a darkness envelopes them: trees bow over the trail like two sides of a steeple, a violent blue only occasionally piercing the thick canopy.
Sabir doesn’t know the other men; they aren’t from his barracks. But no one introduces himself. They’re wraiths, walking in silence, each sunk in his own thoughts. It’s the shock of suddenly being alone, unsupervised, for the first time in months. The forest has no bars or walls – and yet the old hands back at the penitentiary have impressed on everyone that, in itself, it offers no salvation. To wander off unprepared, with no plan or rations, is to condemn yourself to failure. Sabir lets the other men get ahead until he really is by himself. The weird forest silence is punctuated by squawks and rustling sounds that might be the wind, a small animal or a snake or bird. Sometimes these noises make him start involuntarily. What would it be like to be here in the forest at night? It’s good to be alone, though, in daylight hours at least. The forced company of other prisoners merely accentuates the loneliness. Only when Sabir’s alone does a sense of himself as a man among others come back to him.
The forest camps, hard labour. He hasn’t been able to avoid that fate after all. Foolishly, he’d assumed he’d get a job at Saint-Laurent as a gardener. Such stupid faith in your hopes and dreams is one of the dangers of prison life. The past is dead, the future stolen away, the present an endless desert – so you retreat into a fantasy world, where finally you’re in control. Among the lifers he’s known, Sabir has seen the syndrome time and time again. You lose yourself in grandiose plans, unrealisable dreams, until life becomes a mirage. And escape can be the worst dream of all. It’s the fantasy paradise of the bagnards, just as the bagne is the fantasy hell for everyone else. Sabir must be on his guard against such daydreaming, because it’s never innocent. If he really is to escape, his plans must be firmly grounded in the real world.
At around noon, judging by the sun’s position, Sabir stops at a clearing. It’s on a small hill, in an otherwise flat terrain. It looks as though someone thought it a good idea to build here, cleared the high land, and then gave up. Before he sits down to eat his bread and dried sausage, Sabir hoists himself a few metres up a tree. For the first time he’s able to look right across the forest he’s in. A horizonless sea of green merges seamlessly into the primary blue of the tropical sky. Whatever direction you look in, it’s the same: blue, green, blue, green. If you stare long enough, the colours start to coalesce until it feels as if there’s no up or down, no left or right. Nothing to grab on to, except the filament of river and its random twists. Feeling giddy, Sabir climbs back down. His rations spill out of his tattered cloth sack.
As he eats his lunch, Sabir thinks of his fiancée, for the first time since writing that letter to her under the barracks night-light. It’s the stale, lumpy bread he’s chewing on that reminds him of her: when they’d been together, she’d been working in a bakery. Now, before him, he sees the room he briefly shared with her in Belleville, just around the corner from that bakery. The shabby chair, the table and the water jug: the vision is suddenly vivid and desperately alive. On the sagging single bed, his fiancée, naked and smiling. He stretches out his hand. But as soon as he’s able to discern her features, to focus on the curves of her body, she’s gone – the room, too. He finds himself staring at a line of ants on a tree as the picture fades. Ants, ants everywhere. This is the real life of the dead forest. It takes him a minute to pull out of the dazed sensation his vision has left him with, and finish his bread and sausage.
Now on the move again, through the forest. At times the narrow path feels horribly claustrophobic, barely making its way through the thick vegetation. Looking up can bring on vertigo: the trees stretch up twenty metres and more. There are moments of peculiar beauty – two trees of different species growing towards each other, their different-coloured leaves intermingling to form a dappled, stained-glass effect. Vines stringing from one trunk to another, like wild-growing lace. On one of those vines, Sabir sees a bunch of little white flowers miraculously high up among the dense green.
An hour more until Sabir passes near the first camp, Saigon. A dozen gaunt convicts are bent over, apparently hoeing at some cleared ground. Their movements are jerky, puppet-like. Hard to imagine what crop they might be trying to grow out here: most of the ground is hard caked mud and a tangle of tree roots. To one side, a turnkey stands chatting and smoking with a guard. All the convicts look up at Sabir and one asks where he’s going. The guard, however, just points to a new trail on the other side of the cleared ground and tells him to keep moving.
Sabir picks up his pace as he dives back into the darkness of the forest. In a way, he’s eager to get to his camp. However dire the situation, imagining one’s fate tends to be worse than living it – even in Belgium, the shelling and the attacks were not as bad as the nauseous dread that preceded them. Not long after his encounter with the labouring convicts, Sabir sees a group of practically naked men with axes, half-jogging along the path back to Camp Saigon. One of them stops and calls out Sabir’s name. He turns around to see a man with a hooked nose and a face that is lined and hollow, burnt black by the sun. The man stares at Sabir, shakes his head, murmurs: ‘Got pretty thin, haven’t I? You don’t recognise me.’
‘I do. But I thought you were dead.’
‘Likewise. And yet, here we are. Safe and sound.’
Edouard laughs mirthlessly at his own joke. That faintly aristocratic voice and laugh are his, and yet the ghostly face and bony body belong to someone else entirely. He’s not the first acquaintance Sabir’s bumped into in this colony, although he’s certainly the closest. In Belgium, Edouard and Sabir were stationed on the same trench section for months on end – an eternity of waiting and tedium. And during that time, they shared everything. Food, drink, tobacco, jokes, news, rumours, philosophical musings, card games, clothes, boots, lice – such pairings-off were both practical and more or less the norm in the trenches. Over winter they even slept together to conserve heat, a single blanket wrapped around them both. In short, they lived the life of a couple with more intensity than many husbands and wives. No doubt they saved each other’s lives on occasion, too. Sabir has a distinct memory of Edouard bringing him down with a tackle one morning while he was shaving in the rear ‘bathroom’ trench section. A rifle had been pointing out from a bomb crater not twenty metres away behind the lines. All day they played cat and mouse with the sniper, but Edouard got him in the end. Much later came the attack in 1917 that definitively broke up the unit. When the straggles of survivors finally assembled in one place, Edouard wasn’t there.
‘You know, I’ve often thought of you,’ Sabir finds himself saying now. ‘When you didn’t come back that morning, I was sure you’d been killed. We all did. What happened?’
‘Shrapnel in the eye. Knocked out in a foxhole. They didn’t pick me up for another three days. I was raving; thirst, I suppose. Month in hospital, then invalided out.’
‘It’s amazing, I …’ Sabir is on the verge of telling him how he tried to find Edouard’s family after the war, but stops himself. He stares. When Edouard looks his way, his eyes aren’t completely aligned. One appears to be glass. It’s difficult to tell with his tanned skin, but there doesn’t seem to be any scarring at all around the eye or anywhere else on his face. Unusual to be hit by shrapnel so precisely in the eye and nowhere else.
‘I haven’t thought of that time for so long,’ says Edouard. He chuckles to himself. ‘D’you remember that chap Durand? That madman who always wore a spiked helmet he’d looted from some dead German?’
‘Yes. I remember.’
‘Did you hear what happened to him?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Someone bet him fifty francs he wouldn’t walk into that bar in Lille with the spiked helmet on and order a beer in German.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some drunk English officer drinking there got up and shot him dead!’
They laugh. A flood of faces from the war return to Sabir. Julien Pardieu; le Petit Clouzot; that man with the purple birthmark on his face … most dead, but what has happened to the survivors? Married, with children and jobs? Or more like Sabir and Edouard? For a moment, Sabir’s back in the trenches. Once again, the days of shelling, the nights with prostitutes. His months there seem like the best of times, the camaraderie so different from the suspicion and isolation that reign here.
‘You’re going back to that camp over there?’ asks Sabir.
Edouard nods. ‘We’re supposed to be wood chopping. But if you’re quick, you can get your quota done earlier. Then you can go out butterfly hunting. There are a lot of Morphos round here; you get a franc a piece for them. So you came in on the last convoy?’
‘Yeah. I’m heading for Camp Renée. Know anything about it?’
‘I know it. Got a good friend there. It’s not so bad. Not exactly lax, but the chef de camp is new. The place has only been open a few months. All the clearing’s been done. There’s just construction work, no wood chopping. And that’s what kills you. The chopping.’
They stand chatting uncertainly for a few more minutes, about the camps and the Colony, but not any more about the past. Edouard’s conversation is punctuated by various expressions and convict jargon that Sabir only half-grasps. Still so much to learn: a whole new language, a whole new mythology. When Edouard smiles, which he does only once, his face is rigid like a mask. At one point, he abruptly asks: ‘What about money? Got any money?’
‘Few francs, that’s all.’
Edouard quickly changes the subject. He doesn’t elaborate on the purpose of his question. Eventually, he says: ‘Well, I’ll be off now. You’ve got another couple of hours before you reach Renée. When you get there, go and see Carpette. He’s the keeper of one of the barracks. Tell him you’re a friend of mine. Tell him I asked him to do whatever he can for you.’
‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’
‘Camp Renée … you struck lucky … there are worse places … well, be seeing you.’
Edouard disappears back down the trail towards Camp Saigon. And Sabir continues his journey through the forest, at first thinking about Edouard, about his glass eye, and then about Edouard’s friend in Camp Renée who might be able to help him. Such recommendations don’t mean a lot out here, though. Sabir thinks back to his own foolish promise to help the country boy Gaspard. It weighs on him, although no doubt he’ll never see the boy again. Not unless he, too, is sent to this Camp Renée. A camp with a woman’s name, odd that. He wonders at Edouard’s last words: ‘Be seeing you.’ What was the likelihood of that?
At some point in the afternoon the rain comes crashing out of the sky, but Sabir barely notices, lost in self-absorption. In any case, it means that it’s four o’clock and he has only a couple of hours till nightfall. The path winds by the river: the other shore seems to be melting under the lashing rain, collapsing like a flimsy stage set. It hits you hard, this rain, and yet brings no great relief from the heat. That’s what makes it feel so foreign.
The path ends abruptly. Coming out of the forest is like coming out of a dream. Ahead, lined with palm trees, an avenue – vertiginously wide after the confines of the forest. Swathes of jungle have been cleared, perhaps a couple of hundred hectares in all. A number of small buildings have been erected there. At the bottom, six whitewashed barracks with thatched roofs, three on either side of the avenue. The effect is almost pretty. A few convicts wander about, but otherwise the place is almost deserted.
Sabir reports to the bookkeeper as he’s been told to do; after his name and number have been registered, he’s taken to his barracks. It’s set out in the same way as the one in Saint-Laurent, with long planks of wood by the walls that serve as communal beds. Unlike in Saint-Laurent, though, this barracks has a wretched lived-in feel. Threadbare rags and battered tin bowls lie at the base of the bed plank, along with little statuettes and other objects half-carved out of the heavy tropical wood. They’re to be sold to the guards, probably, who’ll then sell them on as souvenirs in Saint-Laurent or Cayenne. On the walls, pictures of glamorous women torn from ancient copies of La Vie Parisienne. And family photos, warped in the heat and damp, of wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, mistresses.
Sabir is told to dump his cloth sack in the far corner and report immediately to the camp commandant. The bookkeeper points out the path he’s to take, to the left of the grand avenue. After a ten-minute walk through the jungle, he comes to a clearing by the river. Here, there are convicts at work, levelling the ground, erecting a wall, building a large house. Sabir can hear a gramophone. Classical music – crisp piano notes and a male voice singing in German. In itself, it’s jolting, since German will always remind Sabir of the front, and those odd fragments of conversation that used to drift across the Flemish mud when the wind was right. Sabir knows nothing about classical music, but the frozen, precise tones seem starkly out of place as they echo across the trees and water, here in the suffocating humidity of the equatorial forest.
Inside, the ground floor of the house appears to be more or less complete and habitable; beyond a short corridor there’s a sitting room. The gramophone in one corner. A table in the middle, and a man sitting by it, his head in his hands – as if in pain or in prayer. He looks up. ‘Ah, the gardener!’ He gets to his feet and extends his hand. Sabir takes a moment to extend his own: it’s a long time since anyone offered to shake hands with him. It feels like reaching into another world.
‘I don’t know where to start. I’ve got some rough plans drawn up here. Or we could go and see the terrain now; perhaps that would be best. If you’ll follow me out here, the back way …’
Sabir keeps right behind the commandant. They’re looking out over land that’s been cleared, some of it levelled as well. ‘There’ll be a series of steps here once I get the stone,’ the commandant continues, ‘and then to the right there’ll be a fountain. That has nothing to do with you, of course; I’ve got a stonemason working on that. Over here, in front, I want a lawn, if I can get the turf, with the flower beds to the side away from the river, and beyond a jardin anglais. You’re going to have to write up some specifications for plant species. I’ve got seeds from France and I have a shipment of seedlings coming from Florida.’
Bewildered, Sabir says nothing throughout, but the commandant, carried away by his own enthusiasm, doesn’t notice. They stroll about the terrain, while the commandant continues to spill out a jumble of horticultural plans that Sabir can barely take in: a hedge to cut the river from the lawn; a fishpond in the jardin anglais, in front of the folly he’s having built. But the fish are a problem since none of the river species would survive. Sabir nods, watches the commandant. He towers over Sabir and is noticeably thin – like a convict rather than an Administration official, most of whom run to fat. He has a carefully trimmed black moustache. His hair is dark, what’s left of it: at the front most of it has gone and he’s cut the rest extremely short. This too, coupled with his tanned face, reinforces the convict look. It’s difficult to say how old he might be. Thirty-five? Forty-five? There’s a certain Teutonic stiffness about him – Sabir wonders whether he’s from one of the ‘German’ départements, Alsace or Lorraine.
Now they’re back in the sitting room, poring over plans. ‘A lot of this I want done within the next four weeks, before my wife arrives. All the basic landscaping at the very least must be done by then. I can give you half a dozen men; it should be sufficient if you’re well organised.’ The commandant has lit a cigarette, a proper French one, not the sawdust-cut rubbish the convicts smoke. Ignored, the cigarette consumes itself in the ashtray: it’s torture to watch. Out of the blue, the commandant shoots Sabir a question: ‘So what’s your experience? Who did you work for?’
‘I was head gardener for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse, sir. I looked after the gardens at the Château Ben Ali.’
‘Really? How interesting …’
Within seconds, Sabir has a whole story worked out in his head, with all sorts of baroque details. But already the commandant has lost interest and has started talking about his garden again.
Nightfall, after the evening meal. Stretched out on the hard board bunk, hands behind his head, Sabir watches the to and fro of the barracks. There’s a night-light between the two bed boards but many of the men have their own little lamps as well, fashioned out of empty tins. There’s not much conversation. A few of the convicts have quizzed Sabir about Saint-Laurent, but once they realise that he’s got no interesting news and no money, they drift off to their own corners. One man is mending his butterfly net, another is carving something out of a wood block, yet another is squeezing parasites from the soles of his feet. In the middle, a card game is in progress.
A bell rings. A guard and a turnkey appear. The keeper of the barracks shouts out: ‘All present and accounted for, chef.’ The turnkey bolts the doors before moving on to the next barracks; one by one, the little makeshift lamps are winked out and after a while only the central night-light is left burning, silhouetting the men as they lie slumped on the boards, most of them still in their sweaty work clothes.
Although he’s exhausted, Sabir can’t sleep. He hasn’t had a proper night’s rest since the holding prison in France. Sleep was impossible on the ship and it’s turning out to be just as difficult in the barracks. He can’t get used to the hard boards, can’t get used to sharing the barracks – and the bed board – with so many men. In France, he sometimes had a cell to himself, and never shared with more than four or five other prisoners. In the half-gloom, his mind wanders back to his meeting with the commandant. Sabir knows nothing whatsoever about horticulture or landscape gardening. His story about working for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse surprised even himself, and it takes him a moment to work out where he got the name from. On the prison ship, there was a prisoner called Lacroix, who was always bragging about how he was the valet for this Comtesse d’Entremeuse – apparently he’d been caught stealing jewellery from her dressing table. All the other prisoners thought him a pompous idiot. Throughout the voyage, he bored everybody stupid with his stories of the Comtesse, the château and the high life they led there. As if he thought her nobility had somehow rubbed off on him. Then, just a few days before reaching the South American coast, he fell ill. He turned yellow and started shaking. Within hours he was dead.
Sabir is thinking about his new job as a landscape gardener. As a working-class Parisian, he’s never even been into a private garden before. His friend Edouard, on the other hand, would know about such things. Sabir remembers now that in civilian life Edouard ran a nursery. He recalls Edouard telling him how he’d import exotic varieties and sell them to rich families at absurdly inflated prices. And how the bottom had fallen out of it all, once the war came. Sabir wonders whether there’ll be any way he can communicate with Edouard, ask his advice.
There’s one incident about Edouard that sticks in his mind. At one time, behind the trenches, soldiers used to maintain little jardins potagers, which they planted with potatoes and other root vegetables to supplement their diet. Edouard somehow managed to grow a rosebush on his patch. He tended it with great care and, in the summer of 1917, it finally blossomed into an explosion of red. Set against the fields of mud and the trees stripped of leaves, the effect was bizarre. For a brief moment, the rosebush became one of the sights of the sector; men used to stop by it on their way to the bombed-out village just behind the lines, where the mobile brothel had been set up. A month later came the major assault, after all those months of immobility. And it was then that Edouard disappeared.
For whatever reason, this incident comes to mind as Sabir thinks about his job. And although he knows nothing about gardens, he’s certainly met people like the commandant before: men fizzing with ideas, carried away by their own enthusiasm. They’re eternally planning and constructing, but more often than not their plans come to nothing. There were officers like that in the army, and he knew how to handle them.
As Sabir lies there, lost in speculation, he sees a man get up and go over to the night-light. The man leans over as if to light a cigarette from it, but Sabir sees him deliberately blow the lamp out. Everything’s black – there’s no noise save the occasional snore and a mysterious shuffling sound. A tingling fear invades Sabir. All those stories he’s heard about what happens in the barracks at night … He draws his feet up, ready to kick out should anyone attack him. Why didn’t he get himself a knife in Saint-Laurent when he had the chance? As his eyes get accustomed to the dark, he can make out a grotesque ballet of shadows. He can hear whisperings too, but it’s impossible to work out what’s happening. He holds his position, nerves on a hair trigger, muscles tensing at every click or rustle, until he can feel an ache crawling up his legs, towards his gut and arms. An hour or more passes like that. Eventually he hears a mutter: it’s the keeper of the barracks. In the dark, Sabir sees him rise from the bed board and move towards the lamp. The flash of a match illuminates the barracks with a terrible violence.
The lamp is lit again and all the shadowy forms Sabir thought he could see melt away to nothing. But there’ll be no sleep now.
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