by Hugo Wilcken
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 boa
rds, 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.
IV
It’s this lack of sleep that lends everything its air of unreality. As though he were on the other side of a glass wall, observing a diorama. When he’s working, and often at night too, the vision of his fiancée returns to him, catching him unawares, just as it did during the journey in the forest. Back in France, when she was still near, when she was still a possibility, he thought of other things. Other women even. Now, as he’s trying his best to forget her, this is when she decides to haunt him. To wait for him. Dream back to the summer before last, and the dark hair that framed her face. Once again, she trembles beneath him. Her nakedness troubles him, but he resists the urge to masturbate; he recognises the mental danger of associating sexual relief with her image.
After an uneasy first few days, work on the garden proceeds smoothly. The six men under Sabir’s orders are all country lads: they know about the land, how to prepare a field, how to build drystone walls, the rudiments of landscaping. Thanks to them, he can get by on bluff, delegation and wile. Sabir is careful always to have one of his men along with him whenever the commandant takes him on a tour of the site to explain what he wants done. Already, the lawn area has been levelled and some of the land by the river drained. Once this heavy work is completed, once the seedlings arrive and it’s a question of digging and planting flower beds or rock gardens and preparing hedges, Sabir realises that his job will prove more difficult.
Every day he sees the commandant, and an unlikely relationship develops between the two. The commandant is not such an easy man to fathom after all. While the guards live in bungalows with airy verandas up by the wide avenue at the main camp, he prefers his half-built house down by the river. And he stays there completely by himself, when other officials of his rank keep whole armies of convict servants.
Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon, he asks Sabir into his sitting room, where they look over plans for the garden. During these sessions, in the last hour before the sun goes down, conversation sometimes veers away from the garden and construction work. The commandant never asks about Sabir’s past, but on occasion talks about his own. An idyllic childhood beneath the French Alps; student escapades at the Saint-Cyr military school; the Paris life of a young man about town – a life that could never have conceivably intersected with Sabir’s.
Despite his military career, the one thing the commandant never talks about is the war. One afternoon, though, he does mention a tour of duty in the French colony of Algeria. From one instant to the next, he becomes heated and angry. Algeria, where ‘we build roads, railways, we plant vineyards, create industries, open schools, we allow the colony to prosper … and yet what have we ever managed to do here in Guiana? What has this colony ever done for the Republic? Why do we still have to import all our food, when the Dutch and British farm their land? Why are there bauxite mines in Dutch Guiana, sugar plantations in British Guiana, and nothing here? It’s a damned disgrace! But what can you expect of a colony that has only butterfly wings and stuffed monkeys to send to the Exposition Coloniale?’
The rant takes Sabir by surprise. Later, he finds out that it’s by no means unusual: one of the commandant’s pet obsessions is reform. ‘This absurd colony – corrupt from top to bottom!’ he explodes on another occasion. ‘I go to Saint-Laurent, I order a new batch of trousers for the men here. What do I find? The Administration has none to issue. The storehouse is empty. Why? No one in the Administration will tell me. But I find out from a convict. The keeper of the stores has sold the lot to Brazilian contrabandists! He’s robbed the government of five hundred pairs of trousers! Will he be arrested? Of course not! He’s paid off everyone with the proceeds of the sale. At best, he’ll be sent back to France. It’s outrageous!’ The commandant slams his fist down on the table with a rage that hints at something else, some deeper frustration or violence.
One afternoon a new batch of convicts arrives at the camp. Only one of them is assigned
to Sabir’s barracks – a Basque boy nicknamed Say-Say. Lying back on the bed board, gazing up at the rafters, Sabir listens as Say-Say reports the news from Saint-Laurent. Bonifacio has pulled off a sensational escape.
‘They’d taken all the dangerous guys from the barracks and put them in cells. They were going to be shipped out to the islands next morning. During the night, Bonifacio got out somehow. Knocked out the turnkey, then stabbed that guard, Muratti. In the stomach. I was on cleaning detail the next day – what a mess. Like an abattoir. The guy didn’t die immediately, though. They took him to the hospital, unconscious. One of the porters told me that, just before he died, he woke up and started screaming.’
Muratti: Sabir remembers this guard. A Corsican, like Bonifacio. A lot of the guards are Corsican, as are a lot of the convicts. They all seem to know each other and they’re all connected in some way, through complex family alliances or ancient, obscure feuds. This guard, Muratti, had something against Bonifacio. Maybe it was personal, maybe it was to do with Bonifacio’s previous escape, maybe it was Corsican business. In any case, Muratti came to the barracks the very day the new convoy arrived, to crow over Bonifacio’s recapture – or perhaps goad him into doing something stupid. Although Sabir could see that it’d taken enormous self-restraint, Bonifacio managed to hold his tongue and ignore the guard’s gibes. Muratti soon got bored with Bonifacio’s silence and went away.
‘Anyway,’ continues Say-Say, ‘the afternoon before the escape, we’re all being exercised in the yard. Bonifacio’s just standing about smoking. Muratti comes up to him, starts talking: “Still here, then?” he says. “Thought you’d be long gone by now.” Bonifacio doesn’t say anything, completely ignores the guy. Muratti keeps baiting him: “When’s the big escape, then? Today? Tomorrow? The next day?” Finally, Bonifacio says: “Tonight. I’m out of this shithole tonight.” “Too fucking late,” says Muratti, “because I’m moving you to the cells after exercise. The boat gets in tomorrow morning.” And he was right, Bonifacio was moved straight after. But then, in the middle of the night, he gets out anyway. How the hell he did it I don’t know, but Jesus …’