by Hugo Wilcken
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.
VI
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 book about orchids here somewhere; he noticed it before. A crinkly paged volume, entitled On the Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. Sabir pulls it out and turns to the introduction: ‘The Orchidaceae is a broad family of perennial plants, characterised by one fertile stamen and a three-petalled flower.’ There’s a lot more in that vein. But no practical advice on how to care for them. The rest of the book is hopelessly scientific, meaningless. Damn the commandant for not having anything more relevant, less highbrow. Damn his nineteenth-century learning!
What to do for this nursery he’s to build? The commandant has said nothing specific about it, save where it’s to be located. The only image that comes to mind is that of a greenhouse. Clearly, you don’t build greenhouses in tropical climates. At the back of the house, his men are lounging about near where the hedge is to be planted, smoking, doing nothing. He sets them to work on a low walled enclosure by the pond. He has a notion that the flowers will at least need protection from the harsh sun and beating tropical rain, so he envisages thick poles at each corner, and some sort of palm thatch. Rush matting for the inner walls, to let in the air. Beyond that, he has no particular idea. Then again, is the commandant going to know any better than him?
Once he’s got the men working, he returns to the house – to think, to sit down, to smoke one of the commandant’s cigarettes. He should be looking for things to steal. And yet he feels emptied by the strain of last night. In a way, it’s been good having to organise the nursery; it’s occupied his mind. Masque’s murder now seems unreal. It’s the dream that lingers after you wake, then follows you around all day. At the same time, it’s impossible to focus on it directly. Instead, Sabir finds himself recalling other deaths. Distant ones. He thinks of his mother. Of his grandmother. Of all sorts of men he knew at the front. Their young faces surprisingly fresh in his mind.
The commandant doesn’t arrive at his house until a little before dusk. In the early days of the garden, he’d carry out daily inspections of the wo
rk; now, he generally invites Sabir into the house to report on the day’s progress. And the first thing he usually does in these meetings is pour himself a rum. Today, for the first time, he offers Sabir a glass as well. This simple act raises their relationship to a different level, if only for the time it takes to drink the rum. There’s something fundamentally social about sharing a drink which makes it impossible to maintain roles of jailer and prisoner, punisher and punished. There’s something perverse about it as well.
‘You’ve got them started on the nursery?’
‘The men are building the outer wall, sir. I’m using the bricks we ordered for the retaining wall by the jetty. We’ll need around eight dozen more bricks, though, sir. Shall I place an order with the kiln? Or will we have to go to Saint-Laurent?’
‘Whatever you think necessary. Write it down and I’ll sign the order tomorrow morning.’
Sabir has the impression that the commandant knows even less than he does about what’s needed, and that’s a comfort. He can feel the rum moving through his body: a prickling sensation crawling down his arms and legs. He hasn’t had any alcohol since that glass of rum at the store on the way out of Saint-Laurent. It’s easy enough to get here, and there are plenty of convicts who drink. But they all end up alcoholics. They’re old at thirty. They rack up huge debts. And they never, ever leave.
‘It’s for my wife, you see,’ says the commandant. ‘She loves orchids. When she was a child, I used to take her out on mountain rambles sometimes. There was one Alpine orchid flower we used to find all over the place … with its two yellow petals …’ The commandant quickly downs his rum and pours himself another. For a minute or two he’s silent, seemingly lost in memories. He snaps out of his reverie. ‘And that’s why I ordered the shipment. Something of an extravagance, of course.’
Outside, it’s growing dim. The commandant tends to get carried away with his conversation, and often at these meetings Sabir has to remind him that he needs to go, if he’s to make the barracks for dinner and lock-up. Today, he pretends to forget. It’s partly the rum. But mostly it’s the murder. Masque’s blue body and his blue face. Would there be reprisals against Pierrot and Antillais tonight? When Sabir left the barracks this morning to be interrogated, the two seemed supremely calm. Antillais was still building his little boat, Pierrot was cleaning his nails with his knife – the same one that had killed a man. Perhaps they’re safe. Perhaps Masque had too many enemies and his empire has crumbled at first touch. All Sabir knows is that he can’t spend another night in the barracks. Not with his knife clenched to his side, in a delirious haze of insomnia.
The commandant is pouring the rum again. ‘She’s been ill, you see. Not physically ill. A nervous complaint. She’s spent some time in Switzerland. Now she’s much better. I took this wretched job for her, do you see? She said she wanted to be as far away from Europe as possible. One of the African colonies, or Indochina. But when this post came up, she told me to take it. She couldn’t wait any longer. She said she wouldn’t marry me unless I took an overseas post. So I took it. Now I want everything to be just right for her arrival. I want her to regret nothing.’
It’s not clear whether the commandant is talking to Sabir or himself. The man’s hands are shaking. Maybe from drinking, but Sabir thinks not. He gets the impression that the commandant is like a ravenous animal, physically hungry perhaps, emotionally starving certainly. This unceasing tide of words and plans – Sabir is a mere shadow to him, an object in a room, solid to touch but nothing more than a receptacle for this outpouring.
Across the trees, a bell tolls, and echoes back across the river to ghostly effect.
‘The evening bell. You’ve missed lock-up.’
‘Yes, sir. I wasn’t thinking of the time. I’m sorry, sir.’
‘No. It’s my fault. I’ve been talking too much.’
‘They’ll probably send a guard down, once they do the headcount.’
‘Yes. They probably will.’ The commandant strokes his chin. ‘But they won’t open up the barracks for you. You’ll have to sleep out tonight. If a guard comes down, I’ll tell him what’s happened. I’ll make sure there’s no trouble for you.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘In the meantime …’
Sabir can see what’s going through the commandant’s mind. His natural instinct is to offer Sabir a bed for the night, but that would hardly be appropriate, given their different circumstances. He could let Sabir sleep on the floor downstairs, but even that would be regarded as peculiar, should a guard come down.
‘Sir, if I might take a lamp, could I suggest that you allow me to sleep in the folly? We put the palm thatch on two days ago, so that way I could at least get some protection from the rain.’
The commandant looks relieved. ‘Why, yes, I think that would be a good solution.’
A few hundred metres from the house, at the back of the garden, there’s a narrow path that leads to a perfectly circular clearing, in the centre of which is the folly. It, too, is circular, with a diameter that’s just big enough for a man to lie down, fully stretched out. The floor decking is no more or less comfortable than the bed board in the barracks. But what a relief to be able to lie down on your own, with only your thoughts and dreams to accompany you. It’s as if the world has expanded and breathes again.
The commandant has given Sabir a blanket. They waited in the house for a guard to come, but none did. In the meantime, the two dined on cold meat. For all the guards know back at the camp, Sabir could have murdered the commandant – and yet no one has bothered to come down to investigate. Tomorrow, he’ll ask permission to move out of the barracks and stay down here, in the folly. He knows the commandant will agree. Nonetheless, anger wells up in Sabir. The commandant, letting Sabir in on his plans and secrets like that – as if they’re the centre of this world, and Sabir’s own life and aspirations are of no consequence. He sits up, takes the photograph of the commandant’s wife from his pocket, holds it to the lamp and stares at it for a long time. Outside the folly, everything is obscure, lugubrious. A world of solid night. There’s nothing else here except Sabir, the lamp and the photograph.
Staring at the photograph, Sabir thinks back to what the commandant said about his wife: the ‘nervous complaint’ she suffers from; the recuperation in Switzerland; the desire to be ‘as far away from Europe as possible’. To Sabir, it sounds like the bare bones of some impossibly mysterious story. Perhaps she’s still pining for a lost lover killed in the war. Or she’s committed a crime passionnel and has had to leave the country. Or she’s succumbed to some dark thread of family madness that runs back through generations.
There is nothing tragic or dramatic about Sabir’s fiancée. No story to tell. She’s the hard-nosed type. No doubt she’s already found herself another man. There was just one occasion, Sabir now remembers. One moment of true drama in his relationship with her. Sabir had been flirting – innocently enough – with a girl at a friend’s wedding. His fiancée was furious with him over it. She went off to stay with her mother, and her parting words were: ‘If I ever find out you’ve slept with another woman, I’ll kill you.’ She said it in such a matter-of-fact voice that he knew she meant it quite literally. That night, he spent his wages at a local brothel. It was the first time he’d visited one since the war.
The commandant’s wife now stands before him. She’s slipped out of her dress. Her underwear resembles the swimming costume she wears in the photo. From the house, Sabir can hear the gramophone playing its German songs, resonating through the forest. Sabir’s vision is more intense than anything he’s seen in the jungle camp. Out here, it can be days or even weeks before you catch sight of a woman: the feminine is a country of the imagination. ‘I knew you’d find me,’ she whispers to him. She smiles, puts her arms around him. This is their secret hideaway. This is where they retreat to when she can get away from the commandant. She’s the bored wife of a chilly colonial administrator, cast into a tropical wilderness. She’s hu
ngry for connection, for company, emotion, sex. And he’s the skilful gardener, tending her beloved grove of orchids. Together they talk, exchange histories. Sabir’s banal existence suddenly seems heroic. As a soldier, he fought for his country. As a convict, his country repaid him with exile.
He lights a cigarette from the lamp, puts the photo back into his pocket. The gramophone music has stopped. It’s given way to an aria of frog croaks, insect clicks, monkey howls and other random noises of the night. Sabir stretches out, finishes his cigarette and closes his eyes. Moments later, the dawn light streams in through the shutter lattices. It’s the first proper night’s sleep he’s had in weeks.
VII
Edouard has health problems. He doesn’t see as well with his good eye as he used to. It’s this terrible sun he’s exposed to, out chopping wood every day. All in all, says Carpette as he and Sabir meet one afternoon, it’s best they get out as soon as possible, while Edouard’s still healthy enough to undertake the journey. Carpette’s arranging the purchase of a boat from one of the Boni ferrymen. He needs the money for it very soon. Does Sabir have his share of the money? They want to leave within two weeks. They still need someone to sail the boat. Has Sabir talked to that Basque boy he mentioned the other day? Is Sabir in, or is he out? I’m in, he replies, with sudden desperation. I’m in.
