Читать книгу Colony - Hugo Wilcken - Страница 10

It’s this lack of sleep that lends everything its air of unreality. As though he were on the other side of a glass wall, observing a diorama. When he’s working, and often at night too, the vision of his fiancée returns to him, catching him unawares, just as it did during the journey in the forest. Back in France, when she was still near, when she was still a possibility, he thought of other things. Other women even. Now, as he’s trying his best to forget her, this is when she decides to haunt him. To wait for him. Dream back to the summer before last, and the dark hair that framed her face. Once again, she trembles beneath him. Her nakedness troubles him, but he resists the urge to masturbate; he recognises the mental danger of associating sexual relief with her image.

After an uneasy first few days, work on the garden proceeds smoothly. The six men under Sabir’s orders are all country lads: they know about the land, how to prepare a field, how to build drystone walls, the rudiments of landscaping. Thanks to them, he can get by on bluff, delegation and wile. Sabir is careful always to have one of his men along with him whenever the commandant takes him on a tour of the site to explain what he wants done. Already, the lawn area has been levelled and some of the land by the river drained. Once this heavy work is completed, once the seedlings arrive and it’s a question of digging and planting flower beds or rock gardens and preparing hedges, Sabir realises that his job will prove more difficult.

Every day he sees the commandant, and an unlikely relationship develops between the two. The commandant is not such an easy man to fathom after all. While the guards live in bungalows with airy verandas up by the wide avenue at the main camp, he prefers his half-built house down by the river. And he stays there completely by himself, when other officials of his rank keep whole armies of convict servants.

Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon, he asks Sabir into his sitting room, where they look over plans for the garden. During these sessions, in the last hour before the sun goes down, conversation sometimes veers away from the garden and construction work. The commandant never asks about Sabir’s past, but on occasion talks about his own. An idyllic childhood beneath the French Alps; student escapades at the Saint-Cyr military school; the Paris life of a young man about town – a life that could never have conceivably intersected with Sabir’s.

Despite his military career, the one thing the commandant never talks about is the war. One afternoon, though, he does mention a tour of duty in the French colony of Algeria. From one instant to the next, he becomes heated and angry. Algeria, where ‘we build roads, railways, we plant vineyards, create industries, open schools, we allow the colony to prosper … and yet what have we ever managed to do here in Guiana? What has this colony ever done for the Republic? Why do we still have to import all our food, when the Dutch and British farm their land? Why are there bauxite mines in Dutch Guiana, sugar plantations in British Guiana, and nothing here? It’s a damned disgrace! But what can you expect of a colony that has only butterfly wings and stuffed monkeys to send to the Exposition Coloniale?’

The rant takes Sabir by surprise. Later, he finds out that it’s by no means unusual: one of the commandant’s pet obsessions is reform. ‘This absurd colony – corrupt from top to bottom!’ he explodes on another occasion. ‘I go to Saint-Laurent, I order a new batch of trousers for the men here. What do I find? The Administration has none to issue. The storehouse is empty. Why? No one in the Administration will tell me. But I find out from a convict. The keeper of the stores has sold the lot to Brazilian contrabandists! He’s robbed the government of five hundred pairs of trousers! Will he be arrested? Of course not! He’s paid off everyone with the proceeds of the sale. At best, he’ll be sent back to France. It’s outrageous!’ The commandant slams his fist down on the table with a rage that hints at something else, some deeper frustration or violence.

One afternoon a new batch of convicts arrives at the camp. Only one of them is assigned to Sabir’s barracks – a Basque boy nicknamed Say-Say. Lying back on the bed board, gazing up at the rafters, Sabir listens as Say-Say reports the news from Saint-Laurent. Bonifacio has pulled off a sensational escape.

‘They’d taken all the dangerous guys from the barracks and put them in cells. They were going to be shipped out to the islands next morning. During the night, Bonifacio got out somehow. Knocked out the turnkey, then stabbed that guard, Muratti. In the stomach. I was on cleaning detail the next day – what a mess. Like an abattoir. The guy didn’t die immediately, though. They took him to the hospital, unconscious. One of the porters told me that, just before he died, he woke up and started screaming.’

Muratti: Sabir remembers this guard. A Corsican, like Bonifacio. A lot of the guards are Corsican, as are a lot of the convicts. They all seem to know each other and they’re all connected in some way, through complex family alliances or ancient, obscure feuds. This guard, Muratti, had something against Bonifacio. Maybe it was personal, maybe it was to do with Bonifacio’s previous escape, maybe it was Corsican business. In any case, Muratti came to the barracks the very day the new convoy arrived, to crow over Bonifacio’s recapture – or perhaps goad him into doing something stupid. Although Sabir could see that it’d taken enormous self-restraint, Bonifacio managed to hold his tongue and ignore the guard’s gibes. Muratti soon got bored with Bonifacio’s silence and went away.

‘Anyway,’ continues Say-Say, ‘the afternoon before the escape, we’re all being exercised in the yard. Bonifacio’s just standing about smoking. Muratti comes up to him, starts talking: “Still here, then?” he says. “Thought you’d be long gone by now.” Bonifacio doesn’t say anything, completely ignores the guy. Muratti keeps baiting him: “When’s the big escape, then? Today? Tomorrow? The next day?” Finally, Bonifacio says: “Tonight. I’m out of this shithole tonight.” “Too fucking late,” says Muratti, “because I’m moving you to the cells after exercise. The boat gets in tomorrow morning.” And he was right, Bonifacio was moved straight after. But then, in the middle of the night, he gets out anyway. How the hell he did it I don’t know, but Jesus …’

He’s interrupted by one of the camp guards. There’s silence during the headcount, but straight after lock-up an argument over Bonifacio’s escape flares up. In the camps, news is a scarce resource, and every morsel must be carefully chewed.

Say-Say continues: ‘He must have paid off the turnkey to open the cell door for him. Then knocked the guy out afterwards, to make him look innocent.’

‘Bullshit,’ 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 of them, he’s beginning to realise, is to get away from the other convicts. Those endless nights with their whispers and pressing tensions; the bullying forts-à-bras, self-esteem set on a hair trigger; the night noises that shred your nerves and leave you exhausted in the morning. As he walks back along the path to the main camp, he thinks of Edouard and their meeting in the jungle. He remembers how Edouard told him to go and see a friend of his named Carpette, one of the keepers of the barracks. And that Edouard would ask this Carpette to do what he could to help Sabir.

He didn’t know what a keeper was before he came here; he’s since learnt that it’s a prized position. While the others are out at work, the keeper has to clean the barracks, fill the water urn from the river, and make sure nothing’s stolen. But it’s also the keeper who sells the convicts the oil he siphons off from the barrack supplies, the coffee he skims from breakfast rations, as well as tobacco, matches, onions, bread and all sorts of other wares. Some of this stuff is pilfered from the kitchen; the rest he gets the turnkeys to bring in from Saint-Laurent when they go into town. The keeper buys wholesale and makes his money selling piecemeal to the convicts at night. It’s a lucrative business.

Sabir collects his dinner rations and walks down the avenue towards the end barracks, of which Carpette is the keeper. By the time he finds the man he’s looking for, there are only a few minutes left until lock-up. Carpette turns out to be a smallish, fastidious-looking man. He grabs Sabir’s arm and leads him to the privy, where they can talk away from the others. Eyeing Sabir suspiciously, he subjects him to a sort of interrogation.

‘How do you know Edouard?’

‘We were together during the war.’

‘Really? How did you know he’s here?’

‘Bumped into him, on my way to camp.’

‘When was the last time you’d seen him before that?’

‘Haven’t seen him since the war. I thought he was dead.’

‘Did you notice his false eye?’

‘Yes. I noticed it.’

‘Did he tell you how he lost his eye?’

‘In the war, I think he said.’

Carpette gives a short laugh, as if to dismiss the story. ‘Yes, well, Edouard’s told me all about you. Says you’re broke, though.’

‘That’s true,’ Sabir replies, mystified by the interrogation and the question about the false eye. He hurries to the point: ‘Look, I need to get out of here. I’ll do whatever I have to. Edouard said you could help me.’

‘Get out of here?’ Carpette continues to stare, as if sizing up a rival. Unlike other convicts, his hair has grown out a little, enough for a side parting. It’s the privilege of a keeper to wear one’s hair like that, and it sets him apart from the others, giving him an air of purpose and authority. Finally he says: ‘You work down by the river, don’t you? You sometimes go into his house, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you get in there alone?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘There must be plenty to steal there. Booze, food, tobacco, oil, clothes, cutlery, pens, ink, paper … Look around, for Christ’s sake.’

‘All right. I will.’

‘Don’t be greedy. Don’t steal too much. Couple of bottles of rum, not the whole case.’

‘I understand.’

‘Problem is, whatever you take, you won’t be able to sell it here. Because it’ll be spotted by the guards. They’ll find out who’s doing it, then they’ll bleed you dry. But I can fence it for you. I can get someone to take the stuff down to Saint-Laurent.’

The evening bell rings; Sabir hurries back to his own barracks. That night, although sleep seems just as impossible, Sabir is less anxious than usual. The meeting with Carpette was ambiguous; he must now earn the man’s trust. Carpette has merely offered to fence stolen goods for him, no doubt in order to take his own cut. But he’s noticed that while most other convicts go about in dirty rags or half-naked, Carpette looks after himself: his striped convict shirt had been clean and in good condition. In other words, he’s a survivor, he hasn’t let the Colony entirely degrade him. That’s a good sign, and he’s glad to have made contact with someone like that.

He wonders why it hasn’t occurred to him before to steal from the commandant. Now he thinks about it, he’s noticed how things are always going missing down by the river. The bricks and timber arrive by boat, but by the time they’re unloaded, there’s always less than on the order form. At times, the pilfering has seriously impeded his own work. Three spades disappeared and he had to wait for new ones to come up from Saint-Laurent before he could continue with the digging. He now realises it was probably his own men who took them.

It’s this question of money and how to get it that creates so much of the anxiety, that makes the Colony so different from Sabir’s prison experiences in France. In a mainland prison, there were times when it felt like going back to childhood – you were fed and housed and all the important decisions of your life were taken by someone else. Here in the Colony, that’s all stripped away. Inaction is no kind of option: the pursuit of money is the pursuit of life over death.