by Hugo Wilcken
Edouard climbs up from the bank. ‘Tide’s definitely running out. Should’ve left an hour ago.’
Slowly they nose the boat out into the grey river; then with a lurch it swings into the current. At this time of year, the river runs very fast with the tide and there’s no need for paddling, just a little rudimentary steering. Edouard’s at the helm, Say-Say lies curled up at the bottom of the boat. At one point Sabir and Bonifacio have to get out to push the boat off a mudbank, but it’s the sole incident as they make their way easily down the river. Saint-Laurent and the other river camps are all upstream; there’s nothing but Boni and Indian villages until the river mouth. The one disconcerting thing is how low the boat sits in the water; but for all Sabir knows about sailing, this might be quite normal. His mouth is dry, he’s hungover and exhausted from lack of sleep and the mosquito attack. The others seem to be faring little better.
The long night felt not unlike the wait in the trench before an assault, when time slowed to an agonising crawl. In contrast, the run down the river feels as if it’s over in a moment. The river widens, widens, quickens, until the current breaks into exhilarating waves as the tide speeds out. Then the flash of lights at the heads. The Galibi light to the left, on the Dutch side, the Hattes light on the French side. There’s a camp at Les Hattes, probably a patrol boat too. But the évadés are relatively safe once they reach the heads. Even if they’re spotted now, no patrol boat would chase them, because it’d get stranded in the open sea until the tide comes in again.
The boat skips over the tidal waves towards the black sky. It’s not clear at which point they cross from river to open sea, but gradually, over a period of twenty minutes, the boat slows until finally there’s just a steady lap of water against the bows – no more waves, no strong current. The lights are well behind them now, indistinguishable from the stars.
‘All right, let’s hoist the sail.’
Edouard keeps the helm while Carpette and Sabir try to raise the mast. It proves surprisingly difficult. It’s still dark, and there must be a technique to standing up in a boat, but neither of the men have it and both nearly fall overboard over the next half-hour. Eventually they manage to get the mast upright, steadying it with planks of wood and the thick twisted vine the Bonis use for rigging. It doesn’t look too secure, but Sabir gives it a few good knocks and it refuses to budge. The sail goes up, billowing in the gentle wind.
‘It’s a southeasterly; that’s good,’ says Edouard. ‘The star on the horizon. It’s the North Star. We have to steer to the left of that.’
Bonifacio gives Say-Say a kick. ‘Hey, time to earn your passage.’
Say-Say writhes at the bottom of the hold and moans: ‘C-c-c-can’t. Too sick.’
‘I’ll stay at the tiller,’ says Edouard. ‘It’s easy going for now. The boy can take it when it gets rougher.’
Dawn breaks slowly. A monstrous sun rises up from under the ocean, and the switch from night to day feels like exchanging one world for another. It’s perfectly clear weather, the sea preternaturally calm. Behind them, the faint green line of jungle; ahead, a vast canvas of blue.
‘We’ve got to clear the coast,’ says Bonifacio. ‘I say take it straight out, then steer north-west.’
‘No. It’ll be faster with the wind directly behind us. We’ll be out of sight of the coast in an hour.’
Everyone except Edouard lies back in the boat for a while, worn out by the night, by the flight up the river, the hoisting of the mast, the grinding tension of it all. Somehow, Sabir has managed to get soaking wet and he’s enjoying simply lying there in the dawn sun, drying off, recovering from his hangover. The sea salt seems to have soothed the mosquito bites, and brought down the swelling as well. For once, there’s nothing to do, nothing he can do. It’s the first time he’s actually taken pleasure from the sun since arriving in the Colony, and the sensation brings forth a confused matrix of memories. A beach holiday with relatives in Normandy, just after his mother died, and the faint recollection of building walls of sand against the tide. Then another holiday, many years later, with his fiancée – the taste of salt on his lips now evokes an acutely physical memory of sex and the smell of sea on his fiancée’s body. All this in turn bleeds into the photo of the commandant’s wife at the seaside – he watches the seductive sway of her hips as she saunters along the sand towards him, smiling. And now he sees her again, this time in the patrol boat on the river. Older, sadder, bowed by the mystery of tragedy. He realises he prefers her that way and once again feels the blue of her eyes piercing him. The memory of the experience is even more intense than the experience itself, and he has to force himself back to the reality of the ocean, the boat, the four people he’s sharing it with.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Carpette grappling with one of the supply barrels. He extracts a small stove from it, which he lights with some difficulty. The seawater will soon get into everything, Sabir reflects, and how then will they keep the matches dry? Carpette’s brewing some tea – its fresh bitter-sweetness fills the air, mingling with the ocean’s salt smell.
‘Tea up!’
The others prop themselves upright as Carpette pours the tea into stolen tin cups. It’s strong, revitalising, thirst-quenching. Under the tension of the first hour of the escape, Sabir didn’t realise how dehydrated he was. How stupid to have got drunk the night before, when water supplies will be so strictly rationed. And why didn’t he think to drink a litre or two before leaving the freshwater creek?
The tea has visibly lifted everyone’s spirits, though, and a manic euphoria invades the boat. ‘We’re on our way!’ Bonifacio crows. ‘We’ve left that shithole for good!’ He breaks into song – a pre-war music-hall melody. Soon everyone’s singing along except Edouard, who’s still at the tiller, quietly sipping at his tea and staring into the blankness of the ocean. Even Say-Say looks on the way to recovery, and that makes Sabir feel relieved. The euphoria is infectious – mad images jump into Sabir’s mind. What was that thought about all futures having already been played out? It’s exactly the opposite he’s feeling now. What before was a narrow tunnel with its single exit into the dark now seems more like a sunlit field, with different prospects on every horizon.
At one point, Bonifacio notices that Edouard isn’t singing. ‘What’s up with you, then?’ he asks. ‘Lost your voice?’
There’s viciousness in Bonifacio’s tone, as if he’s deliberately trying to pick a fight. At first Edouard appears not to hear, and continues staring out at the horizon. Then he replies: ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’
‘What? On an ocean like this, perfect breeze behind us, perfect weather, provisions for a couple of weeks? Couldn’t have had it better if the governor himself had planned it!’
‘We’ve got at least another ten days. Plenty of time to get becalmed, sunk in a storm, get lost, picked up … it’s a bit early for celebrations.’
‘Killjoy,’ Bonifacio mutters. He now turns to Say-Say, gives him another kick. ‘You’re an ugly p-p-p-prick, aren’t you? Bet you never had a woman in your life. Get us across the ocean in one piece, and I’ll buy you the most expensive girl in the best brothel in Colombia. How’s that sound?’
Say-Say mumbles something inaudible, crawls back to the bottom of the boat. The singing’s over, the elation of a few moments ago dissipates into silence as the hangovers take hold again. The sun’s risen well up over the horizon now. Edouard’s got his spare shirt wrapped around his head, turban-style. Sabir does the same, and unrolls his shirtsleeves as well. His arms are already burnt – it’s the sun’s reflection on the water, which seems to double its strength and deadliness. Now he lies back down again. High in the sky, a bird circles about directly above them. Probably a bird of prey: the wingspan’s too big for a gull. Sabir tries to imagine what the boat looks like from so high up – a speck of human society afloat in the blue.
Minutes, hours pass in silence and immobility, each man occasionally shifting around to get more comfortable or
find some shade from the sail. No one offers to take the tiller from Edouard, nor does he ask anyone to do so. For a long time, Sabir can’t stop himself staring intently at some tiny detail of the boat, and completely losing himself in it – a notch on the mast, or the letter ‘A’ printed upside down on one of the flour sacks-cum-sails. If you stare long and hard enough at any particular spot, he learnt long ago in a prison cell, then it starts to move. It’s as if the power of concentration can bring anything to life, even a splotch of dirt on the hull. Sabir’s mind wanders disjointedly from one thought or image to the next. Memories … Stay still for long enough, deprive your brain of stimulation for long enough, and they’ll always assault you. Faces from the past, people you haven’t thought of in months or years, some still alive, but most dead. Men from the prisons, men from the trenches, they all crowd together in the theatre of Sabir’s mind. Strange how you can forget names, forget almost everything about a person, but somehow the face remains.
‘So you were the commandant’s gardener, then?’
Edouard’s question crashes through Sabir’s reflections, and it takes him a moment to collect himself and reply: ‘Yeah. I was.’
‘What in God’s name was he growing down there?’
‘We hadn’t planted the beds yet. He’s brought seed over from France. Seedlings, too. He was getting them from Martinique.’
Edouard makes an indistinct, disapproving noise, then lapses into silence. The commandant and his garden already seem like another world – further away, more alien than the war comrades and prison acquaintances who invaded Sabir’s mind moments before.
Ten minutes later, Edouard abruptly continues, as though he’s been ruminating on the subject all this time: ‘Doubt if he’ll have any luck with seed from France, though. Why didn’t he go to the botanical gardens? Why bother with Martinique when we cross-breed quite a few European varieties for this climate, right in Saint-Laurent?’
‘I just did what he told me. I don’t know anything about plants. He’s got the money to do what he wants, I suppose. He even shipped crates of orchids in from Florida.’
Edouard snorts. ‘The idiot wants to import orchids from America when the forest is awash with them!’
Another long silence, then another question: ‘So what did you do with the orchids?’
‘Most of them were dead.’
‘Most of them would be, though. Buyers are warned of that.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that. I threw the lot away in the end.’
Edouard chuckles, says: ‘You did the right thing, though! The rest would have died anyway. Even in the botanical gardens, even with the indigenous species, I had the devil of a time keeping the buggers alive.’
Carpette’s been listening in with barely disguised jealousy; he now moves over to where Edouard’s sitting and whispers something in his ear. But Bonifacio shouts out: ‘Hey! We’re all in this together. No secrets, no whispering.’
After that, silence sets in, as everyone muses on Bonifacio’s warning. No whispering – yes, it’s easy enough to see why. Whispering means conspiracy. Once two or more people have taken against someone, it’s not hard to push that person overboard. So, from now on, all relations will have to be public. It’s a new constraint that not even the penal colony could have enforced. Life on board is not life in the Colony, Sabir muses, nor is it the life of free men. Rather, it’s a limbo, a closed world with its own rules and strategies.
Sabir mentally reviews what he knows of each man, tries to get a feel for their motivations. There’s Bonifacio. It’s difficult to know what to think of Bonifacio. He’s tactically ceded some authority to Edouard, but Sabir can see well enough that Edouard has rubbed him up the wrong way, and that ultimately he’ll react. If Sabir could take Edouard aside, he’d tell him that it’d be far safer to let Bonifacio take the lead now. After all, once they get to Colombia, or maybe even Trinidad, they’ll be free to go their separate ways.
In Belgium too, Sabir recalls, Edouard always provoked this kind of reaction among those in authority, or those who aspired to it. Officers invariably disliked him; he was as reckless with their commands as he was with his own life. Often enough he disobeyed orders, but in a way which showed them up as absurd, making the insubordination difficult to punish. Sabir remembers an incident in which an officer received a bullet wound to the wrist. At first he claimed that Edouard had shot him in a heated argument, and Edouard was briefly detained. The following day, however, the officer withdrew the claim and reported the wound as a self-inflicted accident. Edouard never told Sabir what had really happened. In fact, it was rare for him ever to say too much about himself. And what he did say usually came out in enigmatic dribs and drabs. Edouard was something of a cold fish – yet Sabir can’t help feeling that the black jokes, the ironies, the insouciance in the face of death, they were all a front. For what, he’s at a loss to say. Some sort of passion. In certain ways, it strikes him now, Edouard is like the commandant.
Then there’s Carpette. He’s followed on from his position as barracks keeper to take charge of food and drink on the boat, that’s his role. Sabir’s wary of him now. Judging from the occasional hostile glance, it seems that Carpette has taken against him. Because of his conversations with Edouard, but also because it was his fault that Bonifacio’s on board. In turn, Sabir feels a certain anger towards Carpette, which at first he finds difficult to explain to himself. But as the day wears on, it occurs to him that the boat is not unlike a trench, with its confined space and its tedium. Because of this, his wartime relationship with Edouard feels resuscitated, as if they’re still the paired-off comrades-in-arms – or époux, to use the trench argot of the time. It’s jealousy he’s feeling.
Which leaves Say-Say, lying sick at the bottom of the boat, although no longer shaking with fever. The navigator. Who is this frightened boy? Arriving in the barracks, and eager to impress, he boasted about his full plan. There’s his stutter that comes and goes. Sabir, too, once had a mild stutter. It largely disappeared at puberty, materialising only occasionally at moments of high stress. But then in Belgium, in the trenches, it vanished altogether, never to return.
Carpette, Edouard, Say-Say, Paris, Belgium … thoughts follow ever-meandering paths, bifurcating, dwindling away until there’s nothing left but a mental daze. By the afternoon, it’s searingly hot, and difficult to think clearly about anything. Sabir opens his eyes occasionally and is struck by the overwhelming blueness. Never has the world seemed so simple, so bare. Boat, sea, sky, sun, horizon. A few other men, like fractured reflections of oneself. A light so strong it’s almost disintegrating. World without adjectives – except hot, hot, hot.
At some point, Carpette hands out some dried meat and stale bread, together with a ration of water – refreshing, but it doesn’t kill off Sabir’s thirst, which he realises will remain with him until they reach Trinidad. Say-Say gets up briefly to relieve himself over the side of the boat and very nearly falls in. The laughter on board has a sun-struck, hysterical edge to it. Every time someone gets up, there’s a fear that he’ll fall overboard, or even capsize the boat.
Soon after, the sky opens up. For a while they sit there enjoying the rainwater washing away the salt that’s dried out their skin and worsened the effect of the sunburn. Carpette takes off the top of the urn to catch as much of the water as possible; Sabir gulps down whatever he can cup in his hands. The heavy lash of tropical rains mingles with the monotonous sounds of the sea to mesmerising effect. At the same time, the ferocity of the deluge is disturbing. The bottom of the boat starts to fill with water, and they spend the next hour bailing out as best they can.
Abruptly the rain stops and, a quarter of an hour later, the clouds clear. The giant sun has sunk low in the sky – night’s not far off. Where did the day disappear to? The escape down the river feels like either a moment ago, or a lifetime ago. Sabir looks over to Edouard. He’s been at the tiller from the very beginning, for more than twelve hours. Sabir can see the tension runni
ng down Edouard’s arm, the muscles and tendons prominent. His hand is raw and cracked from the salt and sun, his face set like a mask.
‘Here, let me take it for a while,’ says Sabir. But Carpette heads him off and grabs the tiller from Edouard.
‘On the horizon,’ directs Edouard, ‘the North Star. Steer to the left of it.’
There’s not enough time to dry off properly before the sun goes down, and Sabir’s sodden clothes stick to his body uncomfortably. Day and night overlap each other briefly as stars prick against the orange sky, but the dark soon smothers all colour. It’s a relief to be able to relax one’s eyes: only now does Sabir realise that he’s been squinting against the sunlight all day and that’s why his face muscles hurt. The men settle in for the night; Sabir lies down, too. Again, the confusion of thoughts, from which he wishes more than ever that there could be some escape. But he finds it impossible to doze for more than a few minutes at a time, despite his exhaustion from the sun.
Edouard’s still sitting up, unable to unwind after the gruelling day at the tiller. His and Sabir’s eyes meet briefly under the starlight. Edouard’s expression is surprisingly probing, and yet he says nothing. The image of the rosebush Edouard grew behind the lines in Belgium returns to Sabir. In his mind’s eye, he sees the red violence of the rosebuds as they burst open like exit wounds. Later, when the time’s right, he’ll ask Edouard about that rosebush.
Bonifacio’s making a snuffling sound that might be a snore. Now would be the moment to dispose of him. He and Edouard could manage it, although there’d always be the risk of capsizing. Then again, why kill him now? Better to let things ride and see if they can get to Trinidad in one piece. Nevertheless, Sabir can’t help wondering about it, fantasising about it, picking over his own impotence in the matter. Stare up at the sky instead, with its billion peepholes. For a second or two, a shooting star flits across his field of vision. With its silver filament against the night, it looks like ordnance sailing over the trenches. Shooting stars – good luck or bad luck? Sabir can’t remember. The moon’s rising at a near-visible pace and is now almost directly above him. A gaping white hole punched through the blackness. The moonlight feels almost dazzling and Sabir makes an involuntary move with his hand as if to shade his eyes from it.
