The Guillotine Choice

by Michael J Malone

  Keeping as close as he could to Arab and Ali, Mohand followed a crowd of men towards a low building. Over the door was black lettering that read, ‘Blockhaus’.

  This was a long room with two elevated platforms that ran almost its full length. There was a corridor in the middle for men who might want to walk to the Turkish toilet at the far end. The platforms were the communal bed for the men who were locked in here. A metal bar stretched from one end of the platform to the other. This was where the men would be chained as they slept.

  Ali let out a slow sigh of concern.

  Mohand turned to him and gripped his shoulder. ‘We’ll stick together and be fine.’ His voice held a note of confidence that he didn’t feel.

  ‘Animals,’ said Arab in a murmur. ‘This is where you keep animals.’

  High on the walls, a series of small, barred windows were set into the brick, to allow meagre light to filter darkness from the room.

  The men filed in and quickly moved to claim their own spaces. Mohand recognised many of the men from the voyage. Some of whom he was pleased to see. Others, he would rather not. As with the ship, the fort-à-bras quickly set themselves up as leaders. They picked a space nearer the toilet and settled down to a game of cards with the uncaring attitude of experience. They knew that they could relax and take advantage of any other man in this room they chose.

  Mohand was intrigued as to why they would set themselves down at the end of the room near the toilet. Jean, who had stuck close to the cousins, was happy to explain.

  ‘First,’ he grinned, ‘they don’t care about the smell. Second, they know that every man in here at some point will have to walk past them to go and do their business. If they see someone they like…’ He tailed off, allowing his silence to carry his meaning. ‘Men don’t only go to the toilet for toilet purposes, you know.’

  Mohand made a face. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I’m not talking about perversions here, Mohand. I’m talking valuables.’

  Realisation hit Mohand. ‘Of course. If you have a “plan”, you have to fish it out of your arse at some point.’

  ‘And these old cons can spot someone who’s loaded with a “plan” from fifty paces.’

  Looking down at the ranks of the scarred, tattooed, strong-armed desperados, Mohand could only feel sorry for any poor bastard who fell foul of them. ‘I have nothing,’ he said. ‘And for the first time, I’m grateful of that fact.’

  A long afternoon, when the men were locked into the blockhaus, was followed by a longer evening, and then a night that seemed to stretch into the next century.

  Before the lights were switched off, a turnkey made sure all of the men were lying on a platform with their feet attached to the metal pole.

  Jean had informed Mohand that these men were open to bribes. For a few sous, they would pretend to chain you to the pole, thereby giving you a little piece of freedom in the night. Other men would buy soap from the turnkey and use it during the hours of darkness to extract their foot from the lock. It was also possible to buy an ankle lock of a bigger size, Jean told him. Then the turnkey could lock you in without lying about it, and the lock would be so big that the convict could easily slip his foot from it.

  Mohand had nothing, so he had to succumb to the lock and be chained up for the night. The lock meant that he was unable to change position as he slept. But even if he wanted to change, this would have been made even more difficult by the fact that men were pressing in on either side. So any movement was liable to send off a chain reaction of curses down the length of the room. The ‘bed’ was concrete. There were no mattresses to cushion your bones.

  Only the dead could sleep here, thought Mohand. In those rare moments where sleep did claim him, he was soon awakened by Ali coughing.

  Arab, however, slept like a man totally uncaring of his predicament. In the early hours of the morning Ali’s coughing eased and an exhausted Mohand caught a couple of hours of sleep before the guards roused them with breakfast.

  While the men were busy eating, Mohand took the opportunity to empty his bladder. He hadn’t wanted to draw any attention to himself until he had a better measure of the men he was locked up with and what might happen to them all next.

  He rounded the corner of the toilet and the sight before him was unlike any other he had ever seen.

  A man lay stretched out on the floor, his frozen expression twisted into a shape of agony. A ragged line was cut across his throat. He was naked and had been, quite literally, butchered. His innards had been pulled out from the wall of his stomach and lay displayed on top of his groin like an obscene jelly. Blood coated his thighs like a dark, shiny cloth.

  Mohand felt his stomach give and he vomited.

  Just then, he heard a man approach him from behind. This man stumbled into him, cursed and then looked on the floor.

  ‘Wonder what they got,’ he murmured, and moved across to the trough where men were supposed to sit and shit.

  Mohand was open-mouthed at the callousness of it all.

  The new fellow looked at Mohand from his squat.

  ‘Obviously he wouldn’t give up his stuff and lost it the hard way.’

  Mohand struggled to work out what exactly had happened. He had barely slept. Surely he would have heard something. A scream. A scuffle. He remembered what Jean said about men retrieving their ‘plans’. This guy must have been loaded and some other guy had come along with a knife to cut it out of him. Through his lower stomach. It was almost a mercy that they cut his throat first. He felt his gorge rise again.

  ‘Get used to it, kid. This is no picnic.’

  Mohand looked down at the ground, willing the nausea to cease. Until he noticed that he was standing with his bare feet in a puddle of congealed blood. He resisted the scream that rose in his throat. Instead he took a deep breath, walked to the wall and, turning his back to it, wiped his feet on the stone.

  ‘You learn fast, kid.’ The other man stood up and walked out of the privy.

  The lessons for the day were not over for Mohand. After breakfast they were all ordered out of the blockhaus and back into the courtyard. Even the early morning sunshine and the song of the birds could do nothing to dispel the feeling of dread that sat heavy in Mohand’s gut. He had witnessed many terrible things since he had been accused of Samson’s murder, but this morning’s events were beyond any of that. Did these men not value life? Was another man only a piece of meat that could be tossed aside? It seemed to Mohand that the authorities expected only the worst from these men. And the lower they set these expectations, the more men were willing to meet them.

  Around him, men were speculating about the reasons for their being gathered in the courtyard. Another lecture from the dandy in the white suit? A chance to clear out the body of the murdered man in the toilet?

  Minutes passed. The men grew restless, but were afraid to move due to all the guards surrounding them. Then Mohand noticed a man in a long, black cloak walking towards the platform where the guillotine stood. This man was a priest and he was carrying an open book that Mohand guessed to be a Bible. Behind him, two guards were pulling another man, who was a convict, judging by his dress. He wore the same uniform as the rest of the convicts. With one difference. The collar of his tunic had been ripped off. Mohand looked from the man to the guillotine and the reason for this became clear.

  This man struggled to stay on his feet. The guards held an arm each and pulled him closer to the platform. The director walked behind them.

  The convict started screaming.

  ‘Bastards. Bastards.’

  He turned his head and spat on each guard. One of them punched him in the gut. The other hit him with his baton on the back of the head. The convict fell forward on to his knees and the guards carried him the last few steps.

  The assembled convicts facing this tableau quickly realised what was about to happen. To a man, they sank to their knees. Many started praying. This poor soul was being carried to his death. The thought occu
rred to Mohand that the prison authorities must have waited for the new shipment of convicts to arrive before carrying out this execution. A valuable lesson would be given here today.

  Once on the platform, two other convicts arranged the condemned man onto a plank of wood. His body and arms were attached to the board by a broad leather strap. While the man was being arranged, the priest continued to read aloud from his holy book.

  ‘In the name of the Father…’

  Mohand caught the irony of this. Murder authorised by the state and given sanction by its church. Or was the priest there only to give peace to the condemned? Judging by the way the condemned man was behaving, this peace was lost on him. Even while he was being loaded into place below the blade, he continued to struggle against his bonds, throwing his head this way and that. His movements made the frame of the guillotine shake.

  The prison director looked on with the stern expression of a schoolmaster. The man about to die was only part of the scenery. This was all about the lesson. He surveyed the crowd and appeared to take satisfaction in the looks of horror on the men before him.

  He made a signal and a bell tolled.

  ‘This man is to receive the ultimate punishment,’ the director said, projecting his voice into the courtyard. ‘Kill each other and, frankly, we don’t care. Kill a guard, or a citizen, and you will be removed from this Earth. Your head will be cut from your neck while you still breathe, and your worthless carcass thrown to the sharks in the bay.’

  ‘This…’ He paused, as if looking for the right word. ‘…man tried to escape. He killed a guard and, with a friend, slipped into the jungle. He got lost. Starving and desperate, he then murdered his friend. Cooked and ate him.’

  Mohand shook his head as if fighting to discard the images that the director’s words had forced into his mind. He couldn’t take much more of this horror.

  ‘He was caught by a local tribe of Indians,’ the director continued, with a note of satisfaction in his voice, ‘and brought back. Today. In front of you all. He will die.’

  The man on the plank let out a long, slow note of fear. A sound that chilled Mohand to the marrow.

  The director nodded and another convict stepped forward. The condemned man’s head was lined up below the blade and held in place by two half-moon-shaped pieces of wood.

  Mohand thought of Arab and, despite everything he had gone through so far, felt at peace with his decision not to give him up to the courts. He would not wish this kind of treatment on anyone. Not even an enemy. He felt the slow burn of hate towards the French authorities tighten the muscles of his jaw.

  The executioner must have shared the same sense of the dramatic as the director. He looked over the crowd as if revelling in his position of power. Then, after a few seconds posing, he stepped over to the wooden frame and released the blade. Mohand would never forget the sound of it hitting the man on the back of the neck. He looked away, but not before he saw the head fall into the basket and blood flow from the neck stump like wine from a burst barrel.

  The executioner still had a part to play in proceedings. He leaned forward, put his hand into the basket and picked the head up by its ears. He raised it high for everyone to see and shouted, ‘Justice is done.’

  * * *

  After the execution, the silent men were then ushered through to another space and lined up in front of another building. Above the door a sign read, ‘Infirmary’.

  The men shuffled forward one at a time for a cursory examination. It took hours of standing under the force of the sun before the men were all attended to.

  While they waited, speculation mounted as to what tasks they might be given.

  ‘They say that every healthy man is sent out to the jungle to clear the forest.’

  ‘You don’t want to go there,’ one man said. ‘The guards beat you, they steal your food and your clothes and if you don’t meet your quota they beat you again and lock you up without food.’

  ‘There’s a road-building project further down the coast.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe you’ll be able to take time off and go for a swim,’ one wag countered. No one dared laugh out loud in case it drew the attention of the guards. A few of the men sniggered.

  Mohand wanted to scream at them to shut up. Dread crouched in his stomach. He couldn’t stand this speculation. He wanted to know what he was going to be faced with.

  ‘Fools,’ someone said quietly in his ear. ‘These men won’t last a second in the jungle.’

  Mohand turned to the man who spoke.

  ‘Larousse. Bertrand Larousse.’ This man’s eyes seemed to sit low on his face, his bottom lip hung down like a hammock fat with a giant worm. Mohand turned his gaze back to the end of the queue. There was something about the way the man was looking at him. As if he was working out how he could take advantage of him.

  ‘But a man with money. His life can be made easy.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have a sous, Larousse. So go and spin your lies to someone else.’

  ‘So young. So cynical.’

  ‘So shut up and leave me alone,’ Mohand hissed in his face.

  At last it was Mohand’s turn. A man in a white coat pulled at his arm and read the number tattooed there. He wrote this down on a ledger.

  Next, he looked Mohand up and down with a thoughtful expression.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ he said and, leaning forward, looked down Mohand’s throat. Then he tapped on his chest with two fingers.

  ‘You’re fine.’ He finished by scribbling on Mohand’s hand and shouted for the next prisoner.

  After this check-up, Mohand was ushered out of the infirmary and into another queue. This queue led to a desk where a decision was to be made about his future. A man there noted his number and looked at the scribble on his hand from the doctor.

  From this desk, prisoners would be assigned to different camps and activities. The deciding factor was health. Those who were physically fit were immediately sent out into the work camps, where the work could be anything from deforestation to the construction of roads. If you had enough money hidden about your person to bribe someone, you might land yourself something less onerous.

  The man then looked at a file where a classification had been given by the prison in Algiers. He wrote something in the ledger and looked up at Mohand. He might have been ordering an expresso for all the interest he showed on his face.

  ‘Deforestation in St Laurent.’

  This was one of the worst activities available. Talk in the queues had all been about where you did not want to go; and this was top of the list. Apparently the conditions were horrific and the rumour was that seventy per cent of the men sent out there died within the first year with anything from malaria, to yellow fever, to falling victim to venomous creatures.

  Outside in the square, Mohand met up with his cousins. Their faces were grim. It seemed that the authorities were keen that the men were split up. Arab was assigned to the camp in Kourou, near Cayenne.

  ‘Bastards,’ Arab swore under his breath. ‘Ali is clearly sick, yet they are sending him out into the forests as well.’

  Ali shrugged. ‘I’ll be fine, Arab. It will take more than a tiny mosquito to keep me down.’

  That night, Ali’s health continued to worsen. In the morning he could barely stir himself to eat his breakfast. Mohand looked with dread at the state of his cousin. His skin was pale and waxy, and he could see every bump and curve of his ribs as his chest rose and fell in his struggle for breath.

  Mohand desperately tried to get the attention of the turnkey.

  ‘My cousin needs a doctor,’ he cried as he pulled on the man’s sleeve. The turnkey slapped his hand away.

  ‘What? You don’t look after the sick here?’

  The turnkey made a face of unconcern. ‘You want a doctor, you pay.’

  It took a moment before he realised what the man wanted.

  He rushed back to Arab.

  ‘Do we have any money?’ he asked him.

 
; ‘Nothing,’ Arab answered, his voice weak with worry.

  Mohand looked at the food he’d been given for his breakfast. Arab had eaten his, but he and Ali hadn’t touched theirs.

  He turned to the men beside him.

  ‘Anyone want to buy our breakfast?’

  Eager hands reached out for the food. Mohand pulled it out of reach.

  ‘Money first.’

  ‘I’ll buy your coffee,’ one man said.

  ‘I’ll take your bread,’ said another.

  They handed over some coin and Mohand rushed over to the turnkey.

  ‘I have money now,’ he said. ‘Please get my cousin to the doctor.’

  The turnkey was an older man, he held out his hand to take Mohand’s pitiful amount of coin. Without looking down at it, he opened his mouth to speak. Mohand could see that he only had one tooth on the bottom row of his gums.

  ‘Where are you from, boy?’ he asked.

  ‘A doctor? Please?’ Mohand was certain his cousin would die if he wasn’t removed from the oppressive heat and stench of the blockhaus. The turnkey just stood before him, waiting for an answer. ‘Algeria. Near the Djurdjura mountains.’

  ‘I thought I recognised the accent,’ the old man said. ‘I’m from Algiers. My father was a Frenchman. I murdered him.’ He nodded as if this was the most just act in the history of mankind. ‘He was a bastard.’

  He walked away from Mohand towards the exit. Mohand could only stare at him.

  ‘A doctor?’ he shouted, unable to escape the strong feeling that he had just been fleeced.

  FIVE

  Out of the Woods

  Arab and Mohand stood and watched while a pair of convicts arrived from the infirmary and loaded Ali onto a stretcher. In silence, they followed, until they were turned away at the door of the infirmary by a guard.

  One of the convicts read their concern and turned to speak to them.

  ‘Come back this evening and we will let you visit him.’

  This kindness completely took Mohand by surprise. He had become so expectant of the worst behaviour man could come up with that such a small gesture almost unmanned him. He felt his eyes prickle with tears.