Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  ‘I’m looking for someone. I don’t know his real name. I’m told people call him Masque.’

  The man continued tormenting the kitten for a moment, then looked up and stared blankly in the way that convicts sometimes did. He said nothing, but made a gesture with his head towards the thick iron doors of the barracks.

  ‘He’s in there?’

  The convict nodded. Manne walked past him and through the doors. Inside, it took a moment for Manne’s eyes to adjust. There were no windows. Just the light behind him, flooding in from the entrance, making it feel as if he was walking into a cave. A complicated matrix of shadows deepened towards the back wall. Two long bed benches ran the length of the barracks. At first it seemed completely empty, but in the far corner Manne made out a body on the bench. He walked towards the figure. Under a tattered image of a showgirl that had been pinned to the wall, a bulky lump of a man came into focus.

  He stirred, looked up. ‘You’re the one who sent your friend looking for me.’

  Surprised, Manne took a moment to reply. ‘I waited for you this morning. Where I was told you’d be. You didn’t show up.’

  ‘I had other things to do. I knew you’d find me if you wanted to.’

  He lay languidly on the bunk, eyeing Manne up, his hands resting behind the back of his head. A sinister carnival of tattoos covered his face. He was bald on top but had tattooed in his hair; around his eyes, there were tattooed glasses. On one cheek, an ace of spades; on the other, an ace of clubs. A freak, in any other circumstances.

  ‘So you’re looking for Edouard.’

  ‘You know where he is?’

  ‘Sure, I know where he is,’ the man drawled. ‘The question is what you’re prepared to sacrifice.’

  ‘I’ve got money, if that’s what you mean. I’m prepared to pay.’ His voice echoed in the emptiness of the barracks. ‘How can I be sure you really know Edouard?’

  ‘Want me to describe him to you? Tall, thin. Mid-forties. Black hair. Doesn’t say much.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘His eye. He has a glass eye.’

  Manne shook his head. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. You’ve just rehashed everything my servant told you.’

  The man shrugged. ‘As you wish. It’s neither here nor there to me.’

  Manne focused hard on the convict’s face in the half-light, until it seemed to dissolve into a seething mess of tattooed images, contrasted by the pure blue of his reptilian eyes… A knife appeared out of nowhere. Masque started casually polishing it with an oily rag.

  ‘Tell me something else about Edouard. Any little detail.’

  The man put down his knife for a moment. ‘Well, I remember something. He has a tattoo. A small one, of a flower. On his back.’

  Manne pulled out the last of his money and handed it to Masque. It disappeared instantaneously in some sort of sleight-of-hand.

  ‘All right, then. He’s over the other side of the river. Should be easy enough to find. You cross the river directly from here. Get a Boni to drop you off at a point where a path leads up to a ridge. Once you get up to the ridge, you turn right. About a kilometre along, there’s a path to your left. You follow that up. There’s an old ruin up there, where Edouard lives with a native woman.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘He cleared some land up there. Planted a garden. He grows vegetables. Some he sells, some he trades with the natives. Sometimes he crosses back over the river. He sells stuff to the barracks keepers. I’m a barracks keeper.’

  Manne walked out into the white light of the afternoon, with the impression of having been transported to somewhere else. He looked around for the black man and his kitten, but they’d vanished, although Manne could only have been in the barracks for five or ten minutes. Nonetheless, there were a few more people about than there had been when he’d arrived at the camp. Convicts and guards were slowly, placidly, trickling back from the construction site. Surely the news about the commandant must have spread. But there was nothing, no urgency at the camp to suggest that.

  Now he was back in the forest, retracing his way to the river through the animal runs. Already, his return to the camp and the encounter with Masque had started to seem fantastic, otherworldly. It wasn’t just Masque. Everything that had happened since his altercation with the commandant had an air of unreality about it. He went back over what Masque had told him about Edouard. That detail about the tattoo on his back. In fact, Manne had no idea whether Edouard had such a tattoo. It had just struck him as an unlikely thing for Masque to have made up on the spot. And the image of Edouard clearing some forest to create a garden seemed a likely one. Edouard, the jungle Crusoe. It made sense to Manne, and he found himself believing what Masque had told him.

  Then there was Masque’s sibylline remark about what Manne might be prepared to ‘sacrifice’. Manne toyed with possible meanings, but only for a moment. He had no desire to analyse things further, he was too tired, too incurious, only able to think one step ahead. His mind marched on to other, more practical matters – how to get across the river, whether he should try to contact Mathilde, if so, how, and so forth.

  At one point, he felt faint and weak again, his legs giving way under him. He lay on the ground for several minutes, panting, trying to gather his strength. This dizziness, this unreality – it probably had something to do with the knock on the head he’d received. In which case, things would soon either get better or get worse. It occurred to him that he was very hungry, too, and that it was now late afternoon, and he hadn’t eaten anything today except some bread and coffee at six o’clock in the morning. Eventually, he got to his feet and continued on.

  Another few minutes and the forest started thinning out. Ahead, he could make out the silhouette of the house against a colossal sun, low in the sky. He dropped to his knees, crawling along until he reached the edge of the forest. In front of him some scrub, then the carpet of dead grass. It was difficult to make out what was happening at the house, but he could hear voices and there seemed to be a fair few people about, coming and going, or loitering about outside.

  Manne crawled around the garden’s border until he was at the crumbling wall just inside the forest, the place where he was supposed to have been meeting Masque that morning. He had a half-formulated plan in his head. He’d stay the night there, behind the wall. There were the barrels of dried foodstuffs he’d found there. He’d be able to assuage his hunger at least. The food and the rest would give him the strength to go on. Then at first light, he’d find a way to get across the river.

  Almost immediately, though, the plan fell apart. He searched around for the hole where the barrels of food had been hidden under branches. There it was – and yet the barrels were gone. Manne sat there dumbfounded for a moment. He even wondered if he’d imagined the barrels, dreamt them into existence. His hunger pangs had dissipated somewhat, although all that meant was that he’d wake up in an even weaker state tomorrow. A day without food would be nothing, nothing, if it weren’t for this dizziness, these faint spells that kept assailing him at intervals.

  It was still light, but nightfall wasn’t so far off. He sat down by the wall. An infinite drowsiness had overwhelmed him. He had the impression that if he didn’t get up now, he’d never be able to get up. Closing his eyes, he imagined scaling the wall of the house, to the window of Mathilde’s room. That was what he’d been thinking of doing, until he’d got to the house and seen the activity there, the guards at the doors. Nonetheless, the image was fixed in his mind, he was inside that erotic moment, and it felt real, as if he were actually at her window, waiting for her to open it, staring at her, then past her to the photograph on the bedside table.

  He shook himself out of it, shook himself awake. The guards would probably do a search of the environs in the morning. In all likelihood, they’d find him here. What he needed was somewhere much safer than this, to lie low for a couple of days. He needed to get out of French territory altogether, over th
e river, over the border. Another idea struck him. He had no money left; he’d given the last of it to Masque. But he’d already paid for his trip over to the other side from the Boni boatman. He’d get down to the village and find that man. For another few moments he remained seated by the wall, confusion still washing over him. That feeling again, of being in a maze. The puzzles of the past few days being the intersections of this maze – the points at which different paths could have been taken. The maze itself had no meaning. There was simply the question of whether he’d traverse it, or find himself terminally lost in it.

  With enormous effort he managed to get himself up on his feet. A green-grey twilight was descending over the forest. Dim, flickering candlelight from the house. Noises, too: laughter, the clinking of bottle and glass. The guards had found the commandant’s supply of rum. Gambling that they’d all be inside drinking, Manne edged his way across the garden. Then down the little path that led to the riverbank.

  The Maroni stretched out before him in all its immensity. Its preternaturally smooth surface was like a screen thrown over the water. Manne stood on the bank and gazed out. His mind wandered through a jumble of incidents and conversation fragments, all coming together in dream-like juxtapositions. He recalled a tale he’d heard at the café-bar in Saint-Laurent. Of a man in Paris who’d been accused of murdering his wife, when in fact she’d poisoned herself. Imprisoned while awaiting trial, he’d been tortured by a sadistic prison warden. After weeks of this, he’d lashed out and killed his tormentor. At his trial, he’d been acquitted of his wife’s murder, but then sentenced to transportation for killing the warden.

  A man’s voice tore through the background of forest and river noises. It felt right close by, but it was impossible to judge distances in the jungle. The words had a French cadence to them, although Manne couldn’t catch what they were. Instinctively, he dropped to the ground. For ten or twenty seconds, nothing. Then a sloshing about in the water. A light, slapping noise repeated itself at jerky intervals. Manne was on his stomach now, peering out through the scrub. A full moon was directly overhead. It cast a metallic sheen over the river.

  A canoe was darting across the water, upstream from where Manne was hiding. A man was paddling, and Manne could tell it was a Boni, because of the characteristic way Bonis crouched down to paddle. By contrast, his passenger was European. In the canoe she sat up regally, dangerously, in a way that no Boni would. The boat skimmed along, hugging the bank, heading directly to where Manne was hidden in the scrub. It swooshed past him in a moment. Manne turned his head. The moon shed its pale light over her face, draining it of colour and giving it a shadowy, black-and-white feel. She’d been facing the rear, and so now she was looking in his direction, staring past him, to the house or beyond, to a future accelerating away from her as she began her long journey back.

  The boat progressed further downstream before veering into the current, shooting its way over to the other side of the river. Only then did it occur to Manne that he should have stood up and shouted out Mathilde’s name. Only when it was too late, when he could no longer make out the canoe’s shape in the silvery darkness. He thought of Mathilde’s bluntness. Her rush to get to the point and then beyond it, and how that in some ways reminded him of Edouard. He thought of their final meeting, her almost final words to him: You might have seduced me. His hopeless fantasy of escaping into each other. He wondered why he could never have said something very simple, like telling her that she was beautiful, for instance.

  Manne found himself getting up, tugging at his shirt and pulling it off. Then his shoes, trousers, underclothes. The slight breeze on his skin, coming from downstream, from the sea, felt good. His clothes lay there limply under the moonlight. They were like a person he’d just climbed out of, the crumpled shell of someone that he already no longer knew.

  The water was intoxicatingly cool. Immersing himself in it set off a mini-chain of childhood memories. Of swimming on hot July afternoons at the family holiday house in Normandy before his mother had died, of the sensuousness of salt and sun prickling at the skin. And the swimming was easy for the first few minutes; he even thought he might make it over to the other side relatively quickly. But at one point the current picked up and he could feel himself being pulled downstream. He knew not to try to swim against the current, but across it. As long as he continued to make some progress towards the other bank, he thought, it didn’t matter how far down he was swept.

  The Maroni was a couple of kilometres across – an hour’s swim, he calculated. And for the first twenty minutes or so he continued to feel confident. But then gradually he found his strokes getting slower and slower, and it was harder and harder to lift his arms. After a while, without noticing when it had happened, he realised he was just going through the motions. He wasn’t really swimming any more, wasn’t making any progress towards the other side. He was just bobbing up and down, pulled along by the current, pulled into the centre of the river.

  Now he was flailing around, lunging at the water, fighting the rising panic. It was the thought of being swept out to sea, the horror of drowning. The panic didn’t stop the cascade of images. On the contrary, Manne had a vision of himself naked at the river’s edge again, jumping into the water. Always seeing himself in the third person. A sense of hopelessness invaded him. Decisions could always be changed, overturned, reversed in some way. Every decision, that is, except the one he’d just taken. A world of boundless possibility had been revealed to him, a world hidden until now, the very moment when it would be denied him. Of course I’m going to drown, he thought, I knew it before I even jumped in. He was still struggling, throwing his arms against the current, but the more he struggled, the more disorientated and tired he became. Then slowly, miraculously, the panic began to subside.

  Sometimes his head was above water. Here, noises seemed harsh to him, his movements jerky, the objects within his visual field angular and sharply defined; he was in pain, he choked and wheezed, gasping and gulping down the air. And sometimes his head went below the water’s surface. This world was so different. Here, all movements were slow and graceful; perspective rounded and soft; sound dulled; colours dimmed. Here, breathing was impossible, but the desire to do it had also dimmed, had begun to flicker out.

  For a while he alternated between the two worlds. The last time he had his head above water, he thought he could even glimpse the other shore. But by now it was a matter of indifference as to whether he got there or not. His head went down again, back into the amniotic darkness, and a deep sense of peace filled him, of himself flowing out into the water, just as the water flowed into him. He marvelled at the way people hung on so tenaciously, in the most terrible circumstances, when in reality it was easy to let go. Whose life was anything but a temporary fix, an eternal plugging of holes? He was aware of living within a tiny fragment of time, stretched out to all infinity …

  Point on a matrix. A million discrete moments that didn’t add up to a life. ‘Release me. You’re a better man than that.’ He drifted weightlessly, effortlessly, in a world with no ups or downs. Hartfeld was a sham, waterlogged and falling apart. Manne had never been born. Somewhere behind it all was Capgras. The block of marble he’d chipped away at, until there was nothing left.

  The years of roaming. Of departing before he even arrived. Everything since the war now falling away, dissolving into the water.

  In the end, what was clearest in his mind – the one image that stayed with him – was his great-uncle’s greenhouse. The orchids, all flawlessly aligned in rows. Their reflection in the frosty glass, one winter morning. And their still, perfect beauty.

  COLONY THREE

  I

  The sun is in his face. It’s ferocious; he’s shielding his eyes from it. That’s the moment he realises that he’s there, conscious. For a while he’s been feeling something, the wet ground beneath him, but in a primitive way, as a reptile might feel it. Now he peeks from between his fingers – a dazzle of yellow, and a blue so pur
e it’s hard to look at. He experimentally moves his head, then raises himself up on his elbows. The fact that he can actually do it surprises him. He’s lying half in the water, half out. He’s naked. His skin is all grey and red and puckered and swollen – from the water, or from the sun. In any case, he doesn’t feel as bad as his skin looks. In fact, there’s a sort of lightness about him. It’s no effort at all to spring to his feet.

  Who is he? Where is he? At first the confusion feels disturbing; then later, liberating. He looks across the river, determines which way the current is flowing. He’s on the Dutch side. Impossible to tell how long he’s lain there, whether hours or days. He looks around, takes in the surroundings. Nobody about, no sign of human life on the bank, nor on the river. At the water’s edge, magnificent coconut palms stretch up endlessly into the sky, as if trying to take flight, to escape the world.

  It’s a steep climb up away from the river. Soon enough he’s plunged into the forest. On the one hand, it’s a relief, the trees protecting his nakedness from the sun. On the other hand, some sort of rapier fern is cutting at his feet, and it’s not long before everything below his knees is covered in blood. As he gets further up, the ferns thin out, the ground dries up and levels out.

  He’s on a rocky ridge. He’s climbed up maybe a kilometre. He should be exhausted, he should be in pain, but he’s not. There’s a store of raw energy in him, still there, still ready to give. Even where the ferns have torn at his feet and legs, he feels nothing. There’s only his ravenous hunger: that’s the only thing that might slow him, stop him.