Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  He’s interrupted by one of the camp guards. There’s silence during the headcount, but straight after lock-up an argument over Bonifacio’s escape flares up. In the camps, news is a scarce resource, and every morsel must be carefully chewed.

  Say-Say continues: ‘He must have paid off the turnkey to open the cell door for him. Then knocked the guy out afterwards, to make him look innocent.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ says one of the forts-à-bras. ‘I’ve been here since 1921 and I can’t remember a single escape that relied on a turnkey. Can’t trust ’em. They got too much to lose.’

  ‘He must have paid someone off. What about the walls? How could he have got over the walls? With all those sentries at night.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he hid out in the stores and sneaked out during the day.’

  And so on. The only question in Sabir’s mind is why Bonifacio took the stupid risk of knifing Muratti. Because if he’s ever caught, there’s no doubt now as to what his sentence will be. Either way, he’ll have escaped the bagne for ever.

  Another long, restless night stretches out before Sabir. It’s under cover of darkness that men settle their differences, go thieving, go to their lovers. The shuffle of bodies, the muffled cries – the sound of pain or pleasure? Not always easy to know. Sleep comes rarely, but when it does, it brings uneasy dreams. Only in Sabir’s waking moments does his fiancée appear to him, beckon him. When he sleeps, his dreams are different. He’s in a wasteland of green. Like the Flemish battlefields in every respect except colour. Back then it was grey skies and kilometre upon kilometre of grey mud; now, it’s an endless expanse of tangled undergrowth that doesn’t seem to be growing so much as dying.

  A fresh dispute has broken out, cranking up the tension in the barracks. Antillais is a black convict who’s quite a bit older than the others, maybe even as old as sixty. Until recently, he’s always kept himself to himself, spending all his spare time doting on his pet cat. Every night after lock-up, the cat would get in through a hole in the roof, then laboriously make its way down the wall onto the dirt floor, where Antillais would feed it meat scraps he saved from dinner. He’s even built the cat a little wooden manger where it slept, by the bed board. But one day, one of the forts-à-bras, known as Masque because of his tattooed face, complained about the way the cat pissed and shat all over the barracks. The two men practically came to blows over it, and Masque threatened to strangle the cat if he ever saw it again. Not long after that, the cat disappeared. For a few days, Antillais was broken with grief. A rumour started to do the rounds that Masque had killed the cat and, what’s worse, had cooked and eaten it with friends in the jungle one afternoon after work. Now, Antillais is given to talking to himself and mumbling terrible threats.

  Masque fears Antillais, because Antillais is mad enough to risk his own life for revenge. But since Antillais is an old man, it’d be an act of cowardice to have him killed, so Masque can’t do that. He can’t even take normal precautions in the barracks without losing face among the other forts-à-bras. And the strain is beginning to show. Masque is one of the worst of the bullies, and there are plenty of men who wouldn’t mind if something happened to him. The other day, Sabir even noticed one of Masque’s enemies, a convict named Pierrot, pulling Antillais aside and talking to him in a low whisper. Not long ago, Pierrot had been sitting on the bed board counting some gambling winnings when Masque had stridden up, snatched half of the notes from him, pulled a knife and shouted: ‘Take it off me, if you think you fucking can!’ No one’s saying anything, but everyone’s mentally prepared for a bloodletting.

  Sabir stares at the scratch marks on the wall opposite, where the cat used to shimmy down. He’s still thinking about Bonifacio’s escape – and about his own. There’ve already been a few failed attempts since his arrival, two from his barracks alone. Men who’ve just taken off, unprepared. They get across the river easily enough, only to be picked up by Dutch soldiers on the other side and sent back to Saint-Laurent. No, the only way is the properly planned, properly financed escape with likeminded individuals. It takes Sabir right back to the money problem. You can earn a few francs hunting butterflies, but even then you need a net. A decent one costs fifteen francs, and it’s weeks before you’re any good with it. He was hoping to make money as an écrivain, but it wasn’t long before he realised that wouldn’t work either. Not that most here aren’t illiterate, because they are. Rather, it’s that so few men have any desire to write letters any more. There’s the scarcity of paper in the camps, the problem of getting the letters back to Saint-Laurent – but that’s not the real reason. It takes four or five months to get a reply, and the longer you’re in the Colony, the wider the gulf grows. Pretty quickly, you’ve got nothing left to say to that other world; relentlessly, the Colony absorbs you until there is no other world. As for the rest – the faded photograph, the tattered letter with its protestation of love – all that becomes a hopeless fiction.

  As Sabir closes his eyes, images of Bonifacio’s escape come to him. A fantasy unfolds: instead of Bonifacio escaping, it’s Sabir in that cell, waiting. The cell door is open. The turnkey calls for Muratti the guard, then bows his head, readying himself for the blow from Sabir that will knock him out. It’s done in the blur of a moment. Then Muratti appears. Sabir can feel the blade of a knife against his palm as he hides behind the door. That knife, ready to slip between a man’s ribs. And the thrust … but then everything blanks out, and Sabir finds that he can follow that particular fantasy no further.

  Bonifacio’s escape is the violent miracle that can’t be ignored. Sabir realises that, if anything, news of it has made him feel anxious and despondent. Because soon enough, money or no money, he’ll have to emulate Bonifacio. And run those same risks that this other man took so nonchalantly. For Sabir, the thought of escape involuntarily brings up jumbled images of his first school fight; of that night he tried to lose his virginity; of being shelled for the first time in Belgium; of the first corpse he came across in the fields behind the trenches. Bonifacio is gone, like a magic trick, and in an obscure way Sabir feels orphaned.

  The next day passes in a dream. Sabir’s work isn’t onerous; in fact, he’s even started to enjoy it. Having never before given even a passing thought to gardening, he’s now beginning to see how there might be something in it. The commandant has brought a small library with him to the camp, and it includes several old books on botany and horticulture. He’s encouraged Sabir to look through these books and take anything that catches his eye. They’re fairly useless from a practical perspective – a history of the château gardens of the Loire Valley; a tome on flowers and orchids native to France – and at first Sabir borrowed merely to show willing. But now it’s become his habit to sit down with a book during the half-hour the convicts have for their lunch. They make for difficult reading and are often boring; on the other hand, they’re the only books he has access to at the camp.

  Today, Sabir has taken a nineteenth-century treatise on horticulture from the library. After breaking his bread, he opens the book and reads the first lines of the first page: ‘From the intimate union of art and nature is born the perfect composition of a garden, which Time, purifying public taste, now promises to bring us. In such a garden, the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into a haven against the rude shocks of our mortal existence.’

  Not easy to get the hang of sentences like these. During the war, Sabir was a voracious reader, devouring the adventure stories, novels of intrigue and penny dreadfuls that were specially printed for soldiers at the front. At times, he was gripped by a terrible hunger. He’d crunch through novel after novel, day and night, barely aware of what was happening in and around the trenches. But those books were different. The words and phrases flew effortlessly by, their meaning selfevident. With the commandant’s books, on the other hand, you have to concentrate on every line. And yet, as he rereads the passage from the treatise, Sabir has his tiny f
lash of revelation. Since the war, Sabir has been in and out of factory work. But this business of gardening is clearly something more than the pastoral equivalent of that. There’s plenty to learn, if one ever cared to learn it. It’s what it might be like to have a craft, or a special skill. Again he recalls Edouard’s rosebush behind the trenches, and the care he lavished on it. Indeed, it’s a measure of the unreason of this colony that Edouard is out chopping wood while Sabir is in charge of creating a garden. For a brief moment, Sabir catches a glimpse of a different kind of life.

  But when the end of the day approaches, when it’s time to go back to the barracks, he’s filled with fear and anxiety again. There are any number of reasons for escaping – one of them, he’s beginning to realise, is to get away from the other convicts. Those endless nights with their whispers and pressing tensions; the bullying forts-à-bras, self-esteem set on a hair trigger; the night noises that shred your nerves and leave you exhausted in the morning. As he walks back along the path to the main camp, he thinks of Edouard and their meeting in the jungle. He remembers how Edouard told him to go and see a friend of his named Carpette, one of the keepers of the barracks. And that Edouard would ask this Carpette to do what he could to help Sabir.

  He didn’t know what a keeper was before he came here; he’s since learnt that it’s a prized position. While the others are out at work, the keeper has to clean the barracks, fill the water urn from the river, and make sure nothing’s stolen. But it’s also the keeper who sells the convicts the oil he siphons off from the barrack supplies, the coffee he skims from breakfast rations, as well as tobacco, matches, onions, bread and all sorts of other wares. Some of this stuff is pilfered from the kitchen; the rest he gets the turnkeys to bring in from Saint-Laurent when they go into town. The keeper buys wholesale and makes his money selling piecemeal to the convicts at night. It’s a lucrative business.

  Sabir collects his dinner rations and walks down the avenue towards the end barracks, of which Carpette is the keeper. By the time he finds the man he’s looking for, there are only a few minutes left until lock-up. Carpette turns out to be a smallish, fastidious-looking man. He grabs Sabir’s arm and leads him to the privy, where they can talk away from the others. Eyeing Sabir suspiciously, he subjects him to a sort of interrogation.

  ‘How do you know Edouard?’

  ‘We were together during the war.’

  ‘Really? How did you know he’s here?’

  ‘Bumped into him, on my way to camp.’

  ‘When was the last time you’d seen him before that?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him since the war. I thought he was dead.’

  ‘Did you notice his false eye?’

  ‘Yes. I noticed it.’

  ‘Did he tell you how he lost his eye?’

  ‘In the war, I think he said.’

  Carpette gives a short laugh, as if to dismiss the story. ‘Yes, well, Edouard’s told me all about you. Says you’re broke, though.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Sabir replies, mystified by the interrogation and the question about the false eye. He hurries to the point: ‘Look, I need to get out of here. I’ll do whatever I have to. Edouard said you could help me.’

  ‘Get out of here?’ Carpette continues to stare, as if sizing up a rival. Unlike other convicts, his hair has grown out a little, enough for a side parting. It’s the privilege of a keeper to wear one’s hair like that, and it sets him apart from the others, giving him an air of purpose and authority. Finally he says: ‘You work down by the river, don’t you? You sometimes go into his house, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you get in there alone?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘There must be plenty to steal there. Booze, food, tobacco, oil, clothes, cutlery, pens, ink, paper … Look around, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘All right. I will.’

  ‘Don’t be greedy. Don’t steal too much. Couple of bottles of rum, not the whole case.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Problem is, whatever you take, you won’t be able to sell it here. Because it’ll be spotted by the guards. They’ll find out who’s doing it, then they’ll bleed you dry. But I can fence it for you. I can get someone to take the stuff down to Saint-Laurent.’

  The evening bell rings; Sabir hurries back to his own barracks. That night, although sleep seems just as impossible, Sabir is less anxious than usual. The meeting with Carpette was ambiguous; he must now earn the man’s trust. Carpette has merely offered to fence stolen goods for him, no doubt in order to take his own cut. But he’s noticed that while most other convicts go about in dirty rags or half-naked, Carpette looks after himself: his striped convict shirt had been clean and in good condition. In other words, he’s a survivor, he hasn’t let the Colony entirely degrade him. That’s a good sign, and he’s glad to have made contact with someone like that.

  He wonders why it hasn’t occurred to him before to steal from the commandant. Now he thinks about it, he’s noticed how things are always going missing down by the river. The bricks and timber arrive by boat, but by the time they’re unloaded, there’s always less than on the order form. At times, the pilfering has seriously impeded his own work. Three spades disappeared and he had to wait for new ones to come up from Saint-Laurent before he could continue with the digging. He now realises it was probably his own men who took them.

  It’s this question of money and how to get it that creates so much of the anxiety, that makes the Colony so different from Sabir’s prison experiences in France. In a mainland prison, there were times when it felt like going back to childhood – you were fed and housed and all the important decisions of your life were taken by someone else. Here in the Colony, that’s all stripped away. Inaction is no kind of option: the pursuit of money is the pursuit of life over death.

  V

  Five forty-five, the morning bell, not quite light. Men lined up in the dull green of the tropical dawn, queuing for breakfast rations: a crust of bread and a splash of coffee. The coolness of the air on Sabir’s body feels good – this hour before daybreak offers the only real respite from the heat. Standing in line next to Sabir is Antillais, the man whose cat has vanished. The night before, Antillais calmly announced to the barracks that his tormentor Masque would be dead within the week. Masque attempted to laugh it off. Surely he’ll kill Antillais now. The tension in the barracks is palpable.

  It’s difficult to tell how old Antillais really is. Not just because of his colour, but because people age more quickly in the Colony. Someone told Sabir, though, that Antillais has been here over thirty years. In other words, since before the twentieth century. What would that be like? But thirty years is perhaps no different from five. When everything else stops, time accelerates towards the horizon. One moment you’re a young man; seconds later you’re old, ready to die. It’s all over. Perhaps, in Antillais’s position, Sabir would also risk his life to avenge the death of a pet. Why not? In some way, the bagne actually lessens your sense of mortality. It’s like during the war, at the front, when you’d find yourself taking incredible risks for the smallest things. An image of Edouard comes to mind, calmly climbing out of the trench to recover a packet of cigarettes.

  This morning, some of the commandant’s wife’s luggage is arriving by boat. It’ll be Sabir’s job to oversee its delivery to the house, make sure nothing’s stolen. Not easy, since he’ll have to watch not only the convicts bringing the crates up to the house, but also the Bonis who’ll ferry them to the riverbank in their canoes. The Bonis live in tribes up and down the river, but they’re not Indians, they’re the descendants of runaway slaves. They’re incorrigible thieves (a convict told Sabir he’d once come across a whole village of them dressed in striped convict shirts), but expert boatsmen as well. They make their living ferrying goods and people across the river. And sometimes they supply convicts with the boats they need for their escapes. But they’re ruthless businessmen and the boats never come cheap.

  The com
mandant is generally up at the main camp during the day, but this morning he’s stayed down by the river to await the arrival of the ship. He seems excited about it and his eyes have a glow to them. Perhaps he’s already started on the rum; Sabir has noticed that he’s a bit of a drinker. Not that it’s anything unusual here. The commandant might even pass as fairly abstemious, compared with the guards.

  It’s impossible to know exactly when the boat will get in, since there’s no direct communication with Saint-Laurent. No telegraph or phone lines. There used to be, and there probably will be again, but something always happens to the cables. They’re too easy to cut and it’s always in somebody’s interests to cut them. So now the camp is as isolated as a medieval village. The commandant has invited Sabir into his house while they wait, ostensibly to talk about progress on the garden, but his mind is elsewhere. He drifts back to his favourite subject, the reform of the Colony: ‘I’m not interested in setting up just another logging camp, where we slowly work the men to death. What’s the point of that? How will it benefit the Colony? How will it benefit France? Logging would be a good idea, if we had professional loggers with proper equipment exporting the wood to Europe. That doesn’t happen here. We have convicts with rusty, clapped-out axes. The timber ends up being used for fuel in Saint-Laurent. The bagne feeds the bagne. It’s slowly consuming itself.