Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  ‘What could I catch it in?’

  ‘There’ll be creeks along the coast,’ says Edouard, ‘once we get started.’ He’s busy trying to get the fire going, using a method Sabir’s not seen before: rubbing a pointed stick into a piece of thick bark, surrounded by dry weeds. Smoke soon rises from the bark and Edouard starts to blow hard on it. The whole process is astonishingly quick, as if Edouard’s been doing this all his life. Where on earth did he learn that?

  The dinner of fresh crabs and condensed milk revitalises everyone.‘Better than that shit they served up in Saint-Laurent,’ remarks Bonifacio. It’s not really enough to eat, though, and there’s the nagging thirst that’ll be unbearable under the sun. Already, Sabir’s finding it difficult to swallow. At least back in camp the river provided an endless water supply. He thinks back to the days he spent gazing into the Maroni, fascinated at the way every cloud and patch of light was perfectly mirrored in the river, so that it no longer looked like a reflection, but the thing itself.

  The sun over the ocean wakes Sabir. The sand’s littered with crab shells, empty tins, the remains of last night’s dinner. In the ruins of the fire he can still distinguish the burnt-out shape of the boat’s bows. Bonifacio is sitting up, facing the jungle, staring up along the beach. Edouard and Carpette are nowhere to be seen. Sabir follows Bonifacio’s gaze: in the distance, someone’s hobbling towards them. As the person draws closer, Sabir’s shocked to see it’s Say-Say. When he’s about thirty paces away, he stops, then shouts out: ‘Everywhere back there is flooded. I can’t get through. There’s no way through.’

  Bonifacio gets up and walks slowly towards him. Say-Say just stands there, frozen. He’s shirtless, his shoulders red raw, ribcage visible. His feet and calves covered in scabs and scratches. He’s so weak, thinks Sabir, it probably took his last strength to get back here. And he knows there’s no point in running. Bonifacio stops a metre or so in front of Say-Say. The two face each other, motionless, wordless. It’s as if they’re about to shake hands. Sabir can’t see Bonifacio’s face, but Say-Say’s is animated by a hopeless resignation. The scene seems almost intimate.

  It’s over in a second. Bonifacio leaps forward, Say-Say falls noiselessly to the sand. His body shudders, quivers for an instant and then is still. It takes Sabir a few moments to understand what’s happened. Only when he sees the blood leaking out from the neck onto the sand does he realise that Say-Say hasn’t simply fallen or been pushed over. Bonifacio gives the body a short kick to check for life, then rolls it over onto its side.

  Sabir spots Edouard and Carpette, up by the palm trees where he’d slept the day before. Looks as if they’ve witnessed the whole thing. By now Bonifacio’s dragged Say-Say’s body by the feet down to the edge of the water. The tide and the sharks will take it later. He strolls calmly back to the fireplace, sits down and busies himself cleaning his knife with a bit of old rag he’s found somewhere. All done with the practised ease of a local butcher. What’s just happened seems so matter-of-fact, so banal, that it leaves Sabir numb, unable to think, feel or imagine.

  A little later, Edouard and Carpette come back down. There’s a shocked, dismal silence as Carpette divides up what’s left of the supplies: a few tins of condensed milk and a couple of onions each, plus some tapioca that’s been drying out on the beach. Sabir’s waiting for Edouard to say something about Say-Say, or even for a fight to break out. But nothing happens, nothing’s said. Edouard’s very subdued, his mind elsewhere.

  It’s Bonifacio who finally breaks the weird silence. ‘Better get going.’ The men set off up the beach, stopping briefly at the rocks where Edouard and Bonifacio had caught the crabs. They poke about in the rock pools, but there’s nothing there – must be the wrong time of day. Beyond the rocks there’s an expanse of sand that takes an hour or two to trudge along. The men spread out along the beach, no one keeping anyone company. The blank numbness hasn’t left Sabir.

  Half-thoughts flicker on and off in his mind, rarely finding their focus. There’s his raging sore throat, brought on by thirst. There’s Say-Say’s death. He can form no real feeling about it. So different from the murder of Masque, who was killed away from view, in the privy. How easy it is to conjure up the horror of the unseen.

  And yet few convicts would complain about Bonifacio’s sense of justice. By saying he knew how to sail a boat, Say-Say endangered all their lives. Without Edouard’s skill at the helm they’d be dead now. But it was Sabir who insisted that Say-Say come along. He wouldn’t have survived long in camp anyway, Sabir reasons now. The boy would’ve died, one way or the other. There was a terrible inevitability about it. He knew boys like that at the front, saw it in their faces. Sabir feels a moistness in his puffed-up eyes. A childhood image returns to him: his mother waiting for him one day after school, with a bag of sweets from the boulangerie. He’ll find out Say-Say’s real name, he thinks to himself, he’ll write to his mother, tell her that her son hadn’t suffered. Tell her beautiful lies.

  The beach dissolves into messy mangrove swamps, and they’re forced to move inland to avoid them. It’s just as Say-Say said: there are flooded savannahs everywhere, and it’s almost impossible to plot a course through them. For a while you plod along with the mud and water at your ankles, then suddenly you find you’re up to your waist in it. And the only way out is the way you came in. They tramp all day without stopping, hoping to cross the swamps before nightfall. But by late afternoon there’s no sign of an end to them. Edouard spots a triangle of dry ground and they decide to stop there for the night. There’s just enough time to build a little lean-to before the afternoon rains come down: they stand with their hands cupped and open mouths pointed to the sky. After the deluge, they take off their clothes and wring them over the tin cups for drinking water.

  They’re on a little island in the swamps, with nothing to use for firewood. Edouard has tried to get a fire going with mangrove roots, but with no success. And without the smoke, there’s no avoiding the thick clouds of swamp mosquitoes. Dinner is a few sips of condensed milk, half an onion, some salty tapioca that simply aggravates the thirst.

  At dusk, the swamp suddenly comes alive with all sorts of birdlife. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, blackening the skies and paddling among the mangroves, raucously calling to each other like boys in a playground. Edouard tries half-heartedly to hit an ibis with a rock: it looks their way briefly, not in the least scared or interested in them. If only they had a gun … As the sun sinks below the horizon, the birds disappear as suddenly as they came.

  ‘How far do you think we got today?’ Bonifacio asks Edouard.

  ‘Don’t know. With all the going backwards and forwards. Four kilometres along the beach maybe, one or two through the swamps.’

  A terrible day, and just a paltry few kilometres on. Everyone’s too depressed to talk, which is probably just as well, since the resentment in the air is palpable. They sit there picking the leeches off their bodies. The mosquitoes are intolerable. Sabir takes handfuls of mud to smear over his face, arms, legs, but it does little good, and the stink is so great that he finds it hard to sleep.

  At dawn they break camp. They’re in a horribly exhausted state, and yet no one wants to stay a moment longer in this pestinfested swamp. The going is slightly better than the day before, and after an hour they catch a glimpse of the ocean. How abstract and pure it looks, after this interminable mess of mud, sludge, roots, insects. They swing sharply to the left, away from the ocean. The idea is that if they head directly inland, they’ll eventually clear the coastal swamps and get to dry land.

  The slog is mesmerising; Sabir’s mind drifts off. He’s back in Belgium. Wading through the mud of no-man’s-land. There was that one dreadful autumn of lashing rain and sleet, when it felt as if the whole of Flanders was an oozing mire. When it wasn’t so uncommon to come across men drowned in their foxholes. And the constant flooding of the trenches – they even had to bring over engineers from England to build new drainage systems. Until
now, crossing no-man’s-land to get to the enemy lines was something he’d never been able to recall. In the trenches before the assault, yes. In the trenches after the assault, yes. But the actual crossing … Only now, on the boat and here in this swamp, has that feeling returned to him with the force of a dream.

  Ahead, Edouard has stopped and turned around. ‘I can see the sea ahead of us.’

  ‘Can’t be right,’ says Bonifacio.

  ‘It is, though, look.’

  Beyond Edouard is a treeless swathe of swamp, which in turn disappears into the sea.

  ‘Can we have somehow turned a full circle?’

  ‘No, the sun’s still behind us.’

  Of the four men, Sabir has the slightest build, and he’s hoisted up a mangrove tree to get a better look. Once he’s climbed to the top and got his bearings, it quickly becomes clear what the problem is. They’ve been wandering up a broad, flat peninsula which stretches into the sea from the south. In other words, there’s no way to reach the mainland to the north; it’s a dead end. The news is met with a sour silence.

  ‘Don’t have a lot of choice, do we?’ says Edouard. ‘All we can do is retrace our steps.’

  They start back in a daze of exhaustion, hunger, depression. Another slog through kilometres of swamp and savannah. No question of stopping to rest: they must get to the beach by nightfall. It takes a terrible concentration to will their feet forward with every step.

  The endless mud; the self-recrimination. How did I end up here? What am I being punished for? Could it have been different? It could have been different. Wrong decisions; missed opportunities. Sabir recalls a fellow soldier who offered to go halves with him in a business venture after the war. He declined. And his comrade-in-arms went on to make his fortune. Years later, Sabir bumped into him, on one of those grand avenues that bisect the beaux quartiers of Paris. Suit and tie, married with a child, apartment in Neuilly. A short conversation, but Sabir didn’t know what to say, was too ashamed to ask for his help.

  He’s passed through some physical barrier – the legs start to move by themselves, and he’s no longer quite there. The present recedes again, against the relentless pressure of the past. The monsters he dreamt of as a child. The creatures who lived under his bed. His mother laughed, assured him that none of that existed. It’s clear now that she was wrong.

  He’s in the Bois de Vincennes with his mother, by the lake. Nearby, a family is picnicking. There’s a little boy who’s caught something and is now proceeding to kill it with a rock. A lizard. Its desperate wriggling is testimony enough of the will to live. As Sabir pushes his toy boat out onto the lake, the thought strikes him that in many years’ time, that boy too would be dead. And that many years on from then, his children, should he ever have any, would also be dead. Instinctively he realises that, with this knowledge, he’s not quite the same boy as he’d been that morning, before the trip to the woods.

  He’s in the cemetery in Paris – it must be his mother’s funeral. Père Lachaise, with the tombs that are like houses. A real city of the dead. With its wealthy suburbs – monstrously huge monuments decorated with statues – as well as its shanty towns, its jumble of broken tombstones displaced by tree roots. Standing by a grave, Sabir puts his hand to his face, and he feels something wet. Tears? No, it’s blood, from the bites of the swarms of sandflies that infest the swamp.

  Hours later, he stumbles onto the beach without even realising it. The others have collapsed on the sand, motionless. Edouard lying beside Carpette, his bag still slung over his neck. All the way through the swamp and back, with that big bag of his. Sabir too lies down on the beach, the feeling of his legs and the pain gradually coming back to him. There’s the roar of the surf and the enveloping darkness. He closes his eyes and, as sleep overpowers him, his mind still spinning, he has the sensation of falling through the night.

  XIII

  ‘Can’t see what we can do but continue south,’ Edouard says next morning.

  ‘Agreed,’ replies Bonifacio. ‘But what happens if we hit swamps there, too?’

  Edouard shrugs. ‘Somewhere south, this peninsula must connect up with the mainland. That’s what we’ve got to aim for.’

  They carry on down the beach. An hour or two later, they pass the place where they landed. The fireplace, the remains of the boat are still there. But no sign of Say-Say’s body. It’s been washed away. As they trudge past, Sabir reflects on Say-Say’s last few days alive. Yes, he’d have realised he couldn’t stay in the barracks. Not with a debt to a known killer. Luckily, he comes down with fever and is sent to hospital. Even more luckily, he’s offered a chance to escape, on condition that he sail the boat. So he lies. Who’d have acted differently? Then, at the last moment, his tormentor Pierrot tells him he’s free of the debt. He goes down to meet the other évadés in a state of turmoil. Halfway to the creek, he takes fright. Decides that with the debt out of the way, he’d rather risk camp than the high seas. But Sabir, he thinks he knows better. Sabir, the judge; Bonifacio was merely the executioner.

  At midday they come across a trickle of water spilling over the sands, making its way to the ocean. They follow it back up the beach. The sand turns to rocks, the trickle becomes a shallow creek. The men stop to scoop up the water. What an ecstatic feeling to be able to drink until the thirst is gone – for a moment, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything but this extraordinary physical pleasure.

  When they’ve all had their fill, Edouard says: ‘There’s an incline here. What with this creek, we must be on the mainland. I think we must have passed the swamplands.’

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ asks Bonifacio.

  ‘We can’t go north. We’ll just hit the swamps on the other side of the peninsula. Or we’ll have to cut through kilometres of jungle to get around them. But we can’t do that, because we’ve only got a couple of days’ provisions. Then, even if we manage that, we’re still somewhere in Dutch Guiana, probably nowhere near Paramaribo. And even if we get to Paramaribo, we’ll get picked up immediately in these clothes without papers. Unless anyone’s got friends there. Has anyone?’

  A long, dead silence as it sinks in. They’ve been struggling with short-term survival and have lost sight of the long-term hopelessness of the situation.

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’

  ‘We’re probably only fifty kilometres from the Maroni.’

  ‘You’re saying go back to French Guiana?’

  ‘Got a better idea? We can probably get to the Maroni in a few days. We’ve all got money. We probably all know people who’ll help us out. We’ll lie low by the river until we get hold of another boat.’

  ‘That’s crazy.’

  Edouard shrugs. ‘As I said, if you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it.’

  The two men talk for a little longer, while Carpette and Sabir sit in silence. Edouard’s plan is counter-intuitive, but Sabir has grasped that it’s the only real solution. It’s dawning on Bonifacio as well: quickly enough, he comes round to it. Above all, it’s the idea of an end to this wandering, however temporary, that’s psychologically appealing. There are plenty of escaped convicts up and down the river. Most never get out; they subsist on catching and selling butterflies, or banditry. Eventually they die, or return to camp, or are recaptured. But with money and resolution, Sabir and the others should manage better than most.

  They decide to follow the creek up the incline. Half an hour in, Edouard spots and catches a small turtle, no bigger than a man’s hand. They desperately scour the creek for more turtles as they wade up, but none are to be found. A couple of hundred metres upstream, the creek mysteriously disappears underground. They’re in a broken, uneven terrain and, to continue, they have to scramble over stretches of slippery, moss-covered rock. Huge clumps of bamboo impede their progress – they’re impossible to cut into and you have to either walk right round them or duck and weave your way through. The further in they get, the thicker the snarled jungle becomes. They work out a syste
m: two men up front, slashing a way through the undergrowth with their knives, and two men behind, carrying what’s left of the supplies. Every hour or two, the teams change duties.

  At nightfall, they come across another creek and decide to stay there for the night. Edouard lights the fire while the others fruitlessly search the stream for more food. Divided between four men, Edouard’s turtle comes to nothing much, a mere taste washed down with a few sips of condensed milk. A handful of tapioca and that’s dinner. The men lie down. Hunger and exhaustion have subdued everyone – although Sabir has the impression he’s doing a bit better than the others, thanks to his slight build.

  Bonifacio kicks at Carpette. ‘Hey, sing us a song or something. Tell us a story. Anything to get my mind off my stomach.’ Carpette remains silent. ‘C’mon. Give us the tragic story of your life.’ Still nothing from Carpette, and Bonifacio bellows: ‘Hey, I’m talking to you!’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ replies Carpette nervously.

  ‘Well, what did you get done for?’

  ‘Forgery. Banknotes.’

  ‘Really. And you?’ he says to Edouard.

  ‘Me? I was seeing a girl from one of the shows in Montmartre,’ Edouard replies tonelessly. ‘We were crossing the Pont Henri IV. We had an argument. I pushed her off the bridge.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’ He turns to Sabir. ‘What about you, lover boy? Same story? That pretty girl of yours. Bumped her off, did you?’ Sabir says nothing, and Bonifacio cackles. ‘He’s got these photos of some fancy lass. She’s not really yours, though, is she? Too posh by half. They’re just some old photos you found, aren’t they?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Sabir wonders whether Bonifacio will do something to him. He feels quite fatalistic about the possibility – it might even be what he wants. But nothing happens. Bonifacio simply laughs his mirthless laugh.