Colony. Hugo Wilcken
hand. Sabir can feel a hundred eyes flaming up in the night. But Antillais sails straight past the card game. Nothing happens. Masque doesn’t even turn round. And Antillais continues down the short corridor, into the privy.
For a minute, Masque continues with the card game. Then suddenly he tosses the pack to his assistant and leaps noiselessly to his feet, like a cat. Again, a flash of something in the reflection of the night-light. The assistant starts dealing. In a second, Masque has disappeared down the corridor to the privy.
Now another man jumps up. Impossible to see who it is; he’s too quick. He’s been lying on the bed board right by the privy. The corridor swallows up his shadow as well. Nobody moves. The players freeze mid-game. In the vacuum, the sound of an uneven drip fills the air like a tolling bell. Suddenly, a scuffling. The noise of a garment being ripped, a muffled grunt. Then a pig’s squeal of a scream that splits open the night. It’s followed by a gurgling, guttural noise, like someone trying to clear his throat. Then nothing. The barracks is engulfed in a chaotic silence.
A tiny, eternal moment of stillness before everyone snaps into action, in a storm of energy. The remaining little lamps are snuffed out. Players grab their money from the floor and race to the bed board. Men scramble to hide their knives. The marseillaise blanket and money box disappear and once again silence invades the barracks. Outside, the rain thunders on. And from the privy, groans, growing ever fainter.
A man walks back out through the corridor. It’s Pierrot. The convict whose winnings Masque had brazenly made off with a few weeks back. He strolls over to the water barrel, starts washing his hands. He takes off his shirt, plunges it into the water barrel as well, wrings it out and casually tosses it over a piece of string to dry. Then he lies back down on the bed board by the privy. Another man walks out of the privy. Antillais. He’s muttering to himself. He too finds his spot on the bed board and lies down. Even he stops mumbling now, as an expectant hush shrouds the barracks.
Minutes later, the bars of the door are rattled. ‘On your feet, all of you! Up! Up!’ The captain-at-arms is surrounded by guards, their revolvers unholstered. They pour into the barracks, dashing about like nervous dogs. Turnkeys with lamps follow them in; no doubt it’s the night-duty turnkey who signalled the alarm. The convicts get up from the bed board clumsily, as if drowsy from sleep. A couple of the guards go straight to the privy: it’s where the premeditated murders almost always take place. A minute later, they’re out again, dragging the body between them, trying hard not to get any blood on their uniforms. Masque is obviously dead, although no one’s actually bothering to formally verify it. He’s already nothing, an ugly lump of meat. Soon it’ll be as if he never lived at all. Or he’ll be incarnated in one of those amusing stories convicts like to tell. The man who was killed for cooking a cat.
‘Everyone out! Everyone out!’
As the convicts file out of the door, the captain-at-arms examines their hands and clothes for signs of blood. Pierrot passes through, so does Antillais. No doubt the turnkeys know all about Masque, Antillais and the cat. The convicts march out into a sheet of tropical rain.
Now the guards do a quick inspection of the barracks. They find half a dozen knives and a few other illicit items. But most of the men have hidden their knives well enough to pass such a cursory search. The rain stops from one moment to the next – here, everything happens abruptly, even the weather: the longueurs may be disorientating, but they’re always punctuated by sudden dramas. The men are marched back into the barracks, dripping wet. A smeary crimson trail leads from the privy to where Masque’s body is now laid out.
‘Stand to attention!’ shouts the captain-at-arms. He’s pacing about the barracks, taking a good look at each man. ‘Well, then. Who did it? Who’s the guilty man?’ Silence from the convicts as he walks by, inspecting each one. They’re all staring into the middle distance. Two minutes pass. ‘So no one saw anything, is that it? No one killed him. He stabbed himself in the back. Is that it?’ Still no one says anything. The captain paces the length of the barracks once more, then suddenly yawns, as if he finds the whole affair not only distasteful but boring as well. ‘We’ll see about all this in the morning. You two, get this thing out of here. Go and get a stretcher.’
One of the men designated for stretcher duty is Pierrot. He plays it coolly, not hesitating for a second. Once they come back from the guardhouse with the stretcher, they lift the lifeless body onto it with some difficulty: Masque was a big man. Sabir notices how Pierrot manages to get a fair amount of blood on his trousers. Clever. It makes for a pretty good excuse, should his shirt still have any of Masque’s blood on it the next day.
The commandant sits across from Sabir, behind his heavy brazil-wood desk. It’s littered with a confusion of reports, journals, papers covered in a tiny spider scrawl, piles of books. He picks one up, theatrically lets it drop back onto the desk. ‘If I’d known the climate was as bad as this, I’d never have brought all these books with me. Within a year, they’ll be eaten away by mould. Within three, there’ll be nothing left at all.’
Sabir remains silent. He stares through the glassless window to the punishment cells opposite. Outside one of them, a prisoner and guard sit handcuffed together. The guard is smoking a cigarette. Every time he lifts the cigarette to his mouth, the prisoner has to lift his hand as well. Why doesn’t the guard change hands?
‘Anyway, I’ve had news from Saint-Laurent. My shipment of orchids has arrived there from Florida. There’s a Dutch ship due up from the bauxite mines. The captain will pick up my shipment and deliver it here on the way up to the coast. I imagine it’ll arrive in a couple of days. You’re to stop work on the hedging and start preparing the orchid nursery.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The captain-at-arms has already interviewed you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you’ve nothing further to add about last night’s … unpleasantness?’ The commandant briefly looks away, as though out of embarrassment.
‘No, sir.’
‘Very well. You can get started immediately. No need to return to barracks. I’ll send your men down to you.’
Sabir collects his lunch rations and walks slowly back down through the jungle to the house and garden by the river, buried in thought. He’s ragged from the night’s events, the captain-at-arms’s morning interrogations, and yet almost as agitated by the interview he’s just had with the commandant. He’s to build an orchid nursery now? Sabir has vague images in his head of the flamboyant, strikingly coloured flowers he’s occasionally seen in the fleuristes of Paris. His job as a gardener seems to be moving onto a higher plane. The heavy, brute work is mostly finished with; soon, it’ll be difficult to keep up the pretence. For Sabir, the feeling of being an impostor has always been there. Maybe even for years. Only now it’s as sharp as ever. And yet what a tragedy if he were moved from his position before this escape that Edouard and Carpette are planning.
When the commandant’s up at the camp, Sabir now has free run of the house. This new status has developed imperceptibly, without anyone commenting on it. The guards who spend the day down here are suspicious of him and suspicious of his relationship with the commandant; but they leave him be, since they don’t know what the commandant has sanctioned and don’t wish to ask him. And when he’s here by himself, Sabir can fall into a sort of fantasy. That it’s his house, his garden, and the guards are under his authority.
He’s noticed one change since he was here in the commandant’s reception room yesterday. The commandant has chosen a photograph from his photo album upstairs, framed it and placed it on a sideboard. A studio shot of his wife. It reminds Sabir of something. Lately, the visions he has of his fiancée have subtly changed. Her face seems to be replaced with that of a young woman at the beach. She has a curious smile, dark hair and a striped swimming costume.
Sabir scans the commandant’s library. There actually is a