Colony. Hugo Wilcken
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 flash 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