by Hugo Wilcken
At one point Sabir finds himself mentally humming something that’s both familiar and unfamiliar. It takes him a moment to work out what it is: one of those German songs the commandant used to play. Sabir resists the difficulty of the melody – so different from the music-hall tunes he’s used to – but is drawn into it at the same time. Impossible to tell if it’s a happy piece of music or a sad one, since it sounds so alien to him. He remembers now how the commandant said that it was one of his wife’s favourites.
He imagines the commandant’s wife as she disembarks at the pier near the house for the first time. Puzzlement: something not quite right but she can’t think what it is. As the commandant takes her on a tour of the gardens, it slowly dawns on her. The house is an exact copy of her family estate, back home in France. There’s the lawn where they used to have English-style tea parties in the summer. The tree by the river that she used to sit under, reading her book. And the folly. Where she and her cousin used to meet, where once she tried to seduce him and he refused her. It’s all the same, and yet not the same. Decay has set in. It’s like an old memory that becomes distorted in a nightmare. The lawn is brown, looks as if it’s dying. The windows lack panes of glass. The orchid nursery has no plants in it. And the folly …
The commandant leads her upstairs to the bedroom, the one with the photo of her old house on the bedside table. He wants to have sex immediately; she submits. She undresses without ceremony; it’s a relief to be naked in this heat. She can see that the commandant’s a little afraid of her nudity. The sex is desperate, mechanical. It’s their first time – she refused after the wedding, refused until they were safely out of France. Everything is over quickly enough. No trace of blood on the damp, starched sheets; the commandant has noticed it, but says nothing.
Sabir’s eyes are full of the stars, and it’s almost as if the boat and the ocean aren’t there at all. He hears some noise behind him and turns his head; it takes him a few seconds to focus. It’s the tiller, knocking against the side of the boat. Carpette has his head in his arms; he’s fallen asleep. The boat’s slowly turning around on itself.
‘The tiller, the tiller!’
Carpette rouses himself, grabs at the tiller. Edouard and Bonifacio are awake now.
‘Here, why don’t you let me take it for a while?’ says Sabir.
‘I’m all right. I’m all right,’ replies Carpette angrily, as though Sabir has been deliberately trying to humiliate him. The men settle back down. Sabir wonders how long they have been drifting like that. One hour? Eight hours? Impossible to tell in this timeless night. Impossible to do anything except let one’s mind stray from thought to memory to dream and back again.
Bonifacio’s voice emerging from the dark, sometime later: ‘What’s that? Can you hear it?’
Sabir rouses himself from a light doze. Yes, he can hear it, too. A muffled rumbling sound, coming from far away.
‘Thunder,’ says Edouard.
‘Don’t think so; sounds too regular,’ replies Bonifacio. ‘Boat engine maybe. A steamer.’
‘No, it’s thunder.’
‘How could it be? There are stars up there.’
Edouard gives a derisory snort. ‘Shows how much you know about the sea. We could be minutes from a storm.’
Edouard sounds so certain that Bonifacio doesn’t bother to reply. They sit there motionless in the boat, straining to hear the sound again. A cold, heavy dew has settled, and everything in the boat is wet and slimy to the touch. After a while, the rumbling loses its faraway tone and the sea starts to swell. There’s a minute or two when one might still pretend it’s nothing, just one of those random stirrings you can get on the calmest of seas. But soon enough it’s clear that they’re on the edge of a storm. And all the time, the rumbling’s gaining in intensity, louder, louder.
‘That’s it – we’re in the rollers!’
Bonifacio barks to Say-Say: ‘Hey, sailor boy! Take the helm!’
‘I’m … I’m too sick.’
Bonifacio gives him a violent kick and shouts: ‘You got a free ride ’cause you’re the navigator. So get up and fucking navigate! Take the helm, I tell you!’
‘I … I … c-c-c-can’t,’ the boy whimpers. He’s cowering in a foetal position, his hands over his head.
Edouard intervenes. ‘No time for this. I’ll take it; I’ve been sailing in my time.’
There’s a stiff breeze now and a light rain has settled in. The boat skips over the waves at a fair pace but Edouard seems to be in control. The trouble is that at this speed quite a lot of water’s sloshing in over the side and Carpette, Bonifacio and Sabir bail furiously. The situation remains constant for quite some time – although Sabir can already feel nerves slowly shredding, beginning to go. Just when it seems that it can get no worse, the swell rises vertiginously. And then the big waves come.
‘Sail down, sail down!’
A gust has ripped through the sails; Sabir struggles against the wind to try and get what’s left down. As he’s balancing himself on the rigging, the boat knifes its way across another incoming wave. The bows spank down hard in the trough with a violence that sends Sabir crashing against the mast. Dazed, he sits down again, tries to regain his equilibrium. He puts his hand to his head: a little blood, he’s gashed his forehead. But without the mast he might easily have been swept overboard.
Between the waves everyone’s desperately bailing. The mast’s still standing but the sails are lifeless rags, flapping in the gale. At one point Sabir hears someone mutter ‘This is it,’ and he turns round: from the starboard side, a mountain of water surges forward. Amazingly high up, its crest is trimmed with a lace-like froth. The wave takes an interminable time coming, then seems to pause above the boat. Sabir has the time to think ‘Has it hit yet?’ at least a couple of times before it finally crashes over them with a force that knocks the wind out of him. An otherworldly moment of underwater silence: Sabir wonders whether he’s still on board or not. Then he surfaces to shouts, a confusion of bodies, barrels, rain and the ocean still washing over the boat. He’s gasping for breath, floundering like a landed fish. And he sees Edouard, coldly handsome, still clinging to the tiller, yelling: ‘Bail, bail, bail, bail!’
One of the barrels is open – Sabir grabs it, empties it to use as a bucket. Frantic bailing: every few minutes a new wave breaks over the boat, although none as big as the giant that somehow didn’t sink them. As each wave washes over, Sabir puts his head down and hunches his shoulders to protect himself. He’s struck by a sense of déjà vu: he realises it’s the same posture he used to take as a soldier when walking into gunfire. Head down, shoulders hunched. Always walk slowly towards enemy lines once you’ve gone over the top, the officers would insist, never run. If you ran ahead, you were likely to be shot by your own side. How difficult it was to walk slowly through no-man’s-land, though.
He hears Edouard’s voice: ‘I think we’ve passed the last line of them …’
They’re back into the normal swell – still large, but not threatening if they bail fast enough. It’s getting light by the time they’ve got most of the water out. There’s another five or six centimetres in the bottom, but that’s it, they’re out of danger for the moment. Sabir collapses, exhausted. Silence for a good half an hour, save the slap of water against the bows. Barrels, tins, other bits and pieces from the supplies bob about in the bottom of the boat. Bonifacio, Carpette, Edouard, Say-Say, they all now lie about haphazardly, like the morning after a debauched party. All there, no one overboard.
The new day brings a desolate calm – the ocean has returned to the glassy flatness of the morning before. Someone stirs. It’s Carpette, salvaging what he can of the supplies. A little later, Bonifacio raises himself as well. ‘Made it by a miracle,’ he says. ‘And no help from this cunt!’ Bonifacio gives a massive kick to Say-Say’s prostrate form. Say-Say’s body quivers with the shock. Bonifacio lies back down again; the effort’s exhausted him.
The sun, the sun: a new punishment af
ter the events of the night. No cover from it, no sail. Sabir looks about for his cloth bag, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere, it must have been washed overboard. Miraculously, Edouard still has his big bag hoisted over his shoulder.
‘Only one thing to do now,’ Edouard says. ‘We tack south till we hit land. We’re probably only a day away.’
That means Dutch or British Guiana. Neither is safe. No one replies. An air of despondent lethargy hangs over the boat. Only Carpette is active, fussing about with what’s left of the supplies. At some point he remarks: ‘Water urn survived. But I think some seawater’s got in.’
‘Is it drinkable?’ asks Edouard.
Carpette takes a sip, grimaces. ‘Maybe if I stick some condensed milk in.’
‘That settles it. We’ve got to make for land.’
‘How are we going to do that?’ says Bonifacio, with a gesture of the hand that takes in all the devastation of the boat. Amazingly, the mast is still upright, but the sails are gone. The tiller hangs limply in the stern: the rudder’s been shorn off.
‘There’s a little wind,’ replies Edouard as he takes off his shirt. ‘We’ll have to use our shirts for sails. I’ll see what I can do about the rudder.’
Sabir takes charge of securing the shirts to the mast. Not very effective, but enough to inch the boat forward. In the meantime, Edouard’s fiddling with the tiller, trying to attach a paddle to act as a rudder.
‘It’ll only work if it stays this calm,’ says Bonifacio.
Edouard shrugs. ‘At least let’s bail out the rest of the water. To lighten the load.’
But no one moves to do it. Under the sun, it requires just too much energy.
Bonifacio says: ‘I know one way to lighten the load. We toss this lump of shit to the sharks.’ He delivers another powerful kick to Say-Say’s body. Say-Say squeals in pain. ‘Why didn’t you get up and navigate? What the fuck did you think you were getting a free ride for?’
‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’
‘Could’ve killed us all.’ Bonifacio leans down, starts shaking Say-Say by the shoulders. ‘Answer me, answer me!’
‘D-d-d-don’t know anything about boats. I lied. I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’
‘Fuck!’ Bonifacio spits out the word as if it were a physical obstruction. Then he sits back. ‘You’ve just signed your death warrant.’
‘Had-had to get out of camp. He-he was going to kill me. I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’
Say-Say’s seized with some sort of convulsion, whether from terror or fever, it’s hard to tell. Out of nowhere a knife has appeared in Bonifacio’s hand. Sabir somehow finds his voice and speaks up. ‘Leave the boy alone. Can’t you see he’s sick?’
Say-Say looks to Sabir, points to him with his shaking hand, starts shouting in a disturbed, high-pitched scream: ‘You did it! Your fault! I’d changed my mind. I wanted to go back to camp. You wouldn’t let me. You bastard!’
He continues in this vein for a while, his words increasingly incoherent, then he launches himself at Sabir, punching him uselessly in the chest. Taken by surprise, Sabir’s slow to respond – the two wrestle for a while before collapsing to the bottom of the boat, entwined like exhausted lovers. The boat rocks dangerously.
Edouard steps in. ‘What’s done is done. The main thing is to get this boat to shore.’
‘I want him off the boat,’ replies Bonifacio.
‘No one’s kicking anyone off the boat.’
Sabir has managed to pull himself away from Say-Say, who’s dissolved into tears. He catches a split-second glance from Edouard that’s hard to interpret – there’s something about his glass eye which makes his face unreadable, volatile.
‘Listen, we’ve all got knives here,’ says Edouard to Bonifacio; ‘there’s no point in knifeplay. We’ll all end in the water.’
Bonifacio stares at him for a moment, then suddenly sits down in the bows, overwhelmed by the sun.
‘Just get us to shore.’
XII
Not long after, they sight the low green line on the horizon. The storm must have pushed them much closer to the land than Edouard had realised. There’s no time to feel relief, though, since the boat has sprung a leak and everyone except Edouard at the tiller is bailing like crazy. Carpette’s cursing the Boni who sold him the boat: ‘Never would have got us to Trinidad anyway. Never would have got us to Trinidad anyway.’ He repeats the phrase over and over again, with exactly the same intonation, until Bonifacio finally shouts: ‘Shut it, for God’s sake!’
Closer to land a wind begins to blow; minutes later, they’re riding the offshore swells. Ahead, a beach, but no easy way to guide the boat in. Edouard heads it blindly into the surf and it shoots up through the breaking rollers. A final wave dumps them on the sand with a loud crack. Hauling the boat out of the water takes the last of Sabir’s strength and he flops down on the beach.
Bonifacio has grabbed hold of Say-Say by the shoulders. ‘I don’t know why I don’t kill you. Maybe it’s ’cause I don’t like to kill young boys.’ He fixes Say-Say with his stare that’s so hard to pull away from, then points towards the palm trees which border the beach. ‘Get going before I change my mind.’
Bonifacio has his knife in his hand again. Say-Say moves slowly away, up the beach, head hanging low like a punished schoolboy, feet dragging against the sand. Edouard’s clearly too tired to remonstrate – for the first time since the riverbank, Bonifacio has managed to impose his will without challenge. Sabir watches as Say-Say disappears into the coastal jungle. No one says a word, and for the moment Sabir has no energy to think about anything, either.
It’s sometime in the early afternoon. The men sit and lie about in a daze at the water’s edge. Sabir’s skin has started to blister; he should look for shade but he’s too tired for it. At some point Edouard gets up and starts tinkering with the boat. He’s gone awhile but eventually returns to sit with the other three. ‘The bows are split. The boat’s had it, that’s for sure.’
‘Where do you think we are?’
‘Dutch Guiana. At a pinch, British Guiana.’
Bonifacio shakes his head. ‘Christ’s sake. We’d have done better just crossing over the river.’
‘Well, we can’t set sail in that boat again. No way of repairing it. We’ll have to continue on foot.’
‘We’d better head north,’ says Bonifacio. ‘If we’re in British Guiana and we can make it to Georgetown, I know someone there. Maybe we can get a boat. If we’ve landed too low, we’ll have to try Paramaribo.’
‘You’re right. North’s our best bet. Do we all agree?’
Sabir mumbles something, Carpette just sits there without saying a word.
‘What about supplies?’
Now Carpette rouses himself and replies in a flat tone: ‘Sack of condensed milk tins. Another sack of tapioca, but it’s wet through. If we spread it out to dry, it might be all right.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Few onions. We lost the meat and rice. Stove, water urn, cups survived. Everything else went overboard.’
The bad news sinks in. They sit listening to the crashing waves and the cry of the gulls. ‘I say we stay the night on the beach,’ Edouard says. ‘We’re in no state to move on now.’
No replies, but no desire to move. At some point in the afternoon, Sabir manages to raise himself and get his shirt off the mast. It’s ripped but still wearable, painful to slip over his blistered, sunburnt skin. He moves up from the water’s edge to lie under the palms. He’s feeling weak and finds himself shaking a little – he wonders whether it’s fever. That could be a death sentence in present circumstances. But maybe it’s just a delayed reaction to the events of the night. He finds himself thinking about Edouard again, and how he turned out to be so proficient at the tiller. Sabir can’t remember his ever mentioning sailing to him. His family’s from the Ardennes, nowhere near the coast.
On top of the blisters, Sabir notices a dark purple bruise on his chest. From when Say-S
ay assaulted him on the boat. A shiver of guilt runs through him. He sees now that he’d already sensed Say-Say’s secret. Already at the hospital he’d realised Say-Say knew nothing about boats. Somehow Sabir managed to put this realisation aside and not act on it. He’s at a loss to explain it to himself. But perhaps Say-Say will be lucky, and find his way to a settlement where someone will take pity on him. It’s out of Sabir’s hands now.
At some stage he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep, awaking only when the four o’clock rain crashes out of the sky. Sabir waits it out huddled under a palm tree, cupping his hands for rainwater. The deluge stops after twenty minutes; in another twenty minutes he’s dry again. Sabir gets up gingerly, both refreshed from the sleep and weak from thirst and hunger. The sun hovers low at the edge of the forest. On the beach, someone’s breaking up the boat for firewood – Carpette, judging by his silhouette. Bonifacio and Edouard are over by some rocks in the distance. It’s hard to see what they’re up to. Sabir stays put, not wanting to talk to Carpette, and only moves down when he sees the other men walking back.
Edouard has a barrel with him. ‘Crabs. Size of your hand. We can toss them on the fire.’
Carpette’s pouring water from the battered water urn. He hands a cup to Bonifacio, who takes a swig then spits half of it out.‘Disgusting.’
‘It’s that or nothing.’
‘Should have tried for some run-off from the rain.’