Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  He wonders what Edouard could have meant with his last words. Remember that dream. What was he supposed to remember? What did they talk about so many times? But there’s no point in trying to attach any sense to the ramblings of a dying man. The meaning of his final plea is clearer. During the war, it was very common for comrades-in-arms to enter into pacts by which one would kill the other if either was wounded grievously in the groin or face. It was certainly something he and Edouard would have discussed in the trenches.

  It’s dark by the time Sabir gets back to where Bonifacio and Carpette have camped. One of them’s managed to get a fire going. To one side are the remains of the bird, half-eaten. Sabir picks at it: even cooked, even burnt through, it still tastes rancid, and he can only manage a few mouthfuls, washed down with condensed milk. He wonders whether he’ll be able to hold it all down.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  He and Carpette stare at each other across the fire. Why didn’t he notice how suspiciously Carpette was acting before, how surprised he seemed when Sabir said he’d go and look for Edouard? He shakes his head.

  Bonifacio’s stretched out on the ground. Carpette’s sitting by the fire snivelling. Occasionally he mutters: ‘He was my friend … he was my friend …’The act is understated, convincing. Carpette might even believe it himself. Out here in the forest, cut off from human society, it might be possible to believe anything. Sabir stares at Carpette for some time, then switches his gaze to the hypnotic flames of the fire. He doesn’t want to give anything away. But he half-suspects that Carpette knows well enough what he’s found.

  XIV

  The morning sun and its dappled light. The trail has widened out and has crossed over a couple of other tracks. This part of the jungle seems to be populated – by Indians, at least. The question is how far they are from the nearest Dutch settlement. If they’re reasonably close, then the danger is being betrayed by the Indians. Bonifacio moves on ahead, followed by Sabir, then Carpette. They’re not so far from the river now, Sabir suspects. In any case, it’s coming to an end very soon. Sabir can feel it; feel something closing in.

  The forest is an insomniac blur – the fear of Carpette attacking him kept Sabir awake most of the night. Staring into the jungle, there’s the temptation to simply disappear into it. At other times, the trees on either side of the trail are like the walls of solitary confinement. Sabir thinks of the commandant for the first time since the boat. Perhaps it’s because they’re heading back to French Guiana. He’ll hide out near the house, he decides. After all, it’s the only corner of the Colony he’s familiar with. He’ll know what to steal, who to contact. The camp, the garden. He gets a dim sense of why the commandant wanted to build that house, that garden, to put the convicts to work.

  Bonifacio sidles up to Sabir. ‘Tell me now, then. What did you find?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. I trust you well enough. I want to know if I can trust him.’

  Sabir says nothing for a moment. After so long in the jungle, so long without proper food, he knows he’s not thinking properly. Nor, probably, is Bonifacio. Sabir the judge, Bonifacio the executioner. Only this time it’s merited, by any law of any civilised land. Thinking about Edouard, Sabir is seized with a befuddled anger. What was it the commandant once said about justice? There are times when the punishment must go beyond anything one can know. There must be something terrible, something greater than us … He feels himself shaking again.

  He pulls out Edouard’s drawings from his pocket, shows them to Bonifacio. ‘Murdered.’

  Bonifacio nods. ‘You go on. I’ll catch you up.’

  Sabir walks on in a daze. He might be wrong, it might all be his imagination. Edouard might have been killed by someone else, an Indian. The truth is that he doesn’t care any more. He trudges on, waiting for Bonifacio to catch him up again. Ten minutes pass, twenty minutes, half an hour. He doesn’t even bother to consider what may have happened to Bonifacio or Carpette. He passes by another one of the criss-crossing tracks. Quite apart from the danger of being caught with a guard killer, the thought of being alone with Bonifacio again is intolerable.

  He turns right off the trail. Away from the river, in all probability. Even better, because Bonifacio’s less likely to follow him up a track going the wrong way. Over the first hundred metres, he’s careful not to leave any visible tracks. The idea of Bonifacio haunts him for a while; but after twenty minutes of walking, he begins to feel easier in his mind and he slows his pace. The conviction that Bonifacio isn’t following him flows through him like a gulp of rum. He’s on his own again, truly on his own.

  He’s tempted to stop and lie low for a day, before continuing on down to the river. But he wonders whether he’ll be able to get up again if he sits down. Best continue for the moment, even if it is the wrong direction. Best continue until he’s clearer in his head. His torn shirt is in the final stages of disintegration, falling from his body. The shirt with its unique number that sits above his heart, that tells him he’s been examined, quantified, qualified, found to be a negative asset, found to be worth ten years of hard labour in a foreign land. He gives it a final rip and tosses it into the jungle.

  Now he has the image of Edouard in his head again. On one level, he knows very little about Edouard, and nothing at all about his life after the war. On another level, he knows everything that’s important. It seems as if he held on until Sabir found him, before allowing himself to die. The tears come as he thinks about how he wasn’t able to bury him. He pulls out from his pocket the two drawings he took from Edouard’s bag. He hasn’t properly looked at them before. They remind him of the orchid drawings in that book of the commandant’s he once looked through – flowers that don’t look like flowers, that look like the fanciful creations of an artist. One has its petals complicatedly intersecting to form a good likeness of a crucifix, complete with black markings that might be the man hanging from it. The flower – or the drawing of it – is neither beautiful nor ugly. It’s bizarre. But it commands attention: once Sabir looks at it, it takes an effort to pull away.

  He’s climbing a gentle incline, a sure enough sign that he’s moving away from the river. At one point, the vines that form the low canopy thin out. A brilliant tropical sun paints the vegetation in vivid colours. The very air feels luminous. Looking up, Sabir notices bunches of wild-growing bananas, sheltering in the shade of the higher trees. He jumps up to catch a low-lying branch, swings his way onto a tree, and starts climbing. Halfway up, he has another of those attacks of dizziness. It’s very strong and for a moment he thinks he’s going to lose his balance. But the moment passes. Just before he reaches the bananas, he gets a clear view down the slope. There’s the silver thread of the river – closer than any of them had realised. They’d been following a trail that runs parallel to it, a kilometre or two into Dutch Guiana. All Sabir has to do is go back the way he came, cross over the trail and continue straight on.

  With some difficulty he manages to knock a few banana bunches to the ground, then he climbs back down. The fruit tastes sour and sweet at the same time. Not unpleasant to eat, not particularly nice, either, but it fills his belly. He gorges on it. Halfway through eating, he realises that the bananas are going to make him sick, but it doesn’t stop him.

  Sabir continues a little way up the incline, not really knowing what he’s doing. His trousers are almost as ragged as his shirt was, shredded by the rapier weeds he’s had to walk through. There’s no good way to hold them up any more, and he decides that it’d be easier to discard them as well and simply walk on naked, like an Indian.

  Up here, in any case, the going is easier. Not long after the bananas, he glimpses something through the trees that looks like a stone wall. Sabir clambers his way across the forest to investigate. It’s some sort of ruin. The jungle has reclaimed most of it. What’s left is a crumbling wall, a rusty saw, an old wheel – a world that merely alludes to the whole. There’s also what must have
been an enclosure once, a large kitchen garden, now overgrown with ferns and forest undergrowth. What it all reminds him of is the ruin where they gathered, just before the escape.

  Sabir lies down by the wall, convulsed by horrible stomach pains. Moments later he’s violently sick. It goes on for ages. Even when there’s nothing left to throw up, it continues: there are brief moments of respite before the retching begins again, and then again. In among the green-yellow of the half-digested fruit he sees bits of pink and red, as if he’s vomiting up his stomach lining as well.

  When it’s all over, maybe an hour later, he’s shivering and bathed in a rank-smelling sweat. The stomach pains are largely gone, but his chest and throat muscles ache from the retching. He’s far too weak to move. The wall gives him shelter from the afternoon rains, and the water eventually washes away the vomit that surrounds him. The light fades, then seems to cut out as if it has been switched off.

  It’s night. Stars glisten through the rain. He manages to prop himself up against the wall at one point, but that’s the best he can manage. He’s very ill. He wonders whether he’ll be any better in the morning. But it seems unimportant.

  A memory comes back to him: months ago he shared a cell with a man nicknamed Lazare. He was quite famous, newspaper articles had been written about him. He’d been condemned to death for the murder of his wife’s lover. His execution was scheduled for dawn one day – he’d been given his last meal, the guillotine had been set up and the guards had even marched him to the place of execution, when a presidential reprieve was announced. He’d been a minute or two from losing his head. Sabir questioned Lazare about the incident and he didn’t seem to mind talking about it. ‘You’re marched out of your cell, aware of every second, every part of every second. The smallest sensations are amazingly intense and somehow more real than usual. And yet at the same time it’s almost as if it’s not happening to you at all. As if you’re watching a scene from afar …’ All night Sabir drifts in and out of sleep, his mind shifting between memories, dreams, fantasies. He remembers how when he first arrived in the Colony, he wrote that letter to his fiancée. How it struck him then that the only way out, the only solution, was to change, become someone else.

  Light again. Sabir opens his eyes. The wall is gone. Now he’s lying by the edge of the river. He has no idea how he got there; in fact, it seems impossible. But he accepts that it is so. He wants to move, tries to hoist himself up, fails, collapses back on the ground. Then again, no doubt he’s as good here as he is anywhere. The wandering is over. And this mysterious journey to the river was the end of it. He props his head up with his arm and gazes across the water. He even fancies he can make out the commandant’s house, on the other side. He’d planned on making his way there. Back to the garden he created. Back to the folly, unsullied by Bonifacio. To the commandant’s wife. To her naked body, and the annihilating desire.

  He remembers lying low by the river, opposite where he is now, watching the boat go by. The look she gave him as their eyes locked was one of absolute recognition. Let her find him here, then. On the other side. He thinks of the wall and the ruined garden enclosure he found, back up the hill, away from the river. One day, he’ll take her there. And the garden will be more alive than any the commandant could have envisaged. He imagines it filled with all manner of bizarre flowers, like the ones Edouard had sketched in his little drawings. It was Edouard who took the decision to return, after all. Edouard and his glass eye.

  Twilight: an entire day has passed in a moment. From now on, every day will be like this. It’s getting difficult to focus on anything, to feel anything, to draw the line where he might end and the world begins. Sabir shifts position, puts his head down on the soft, moist ground and stares up at the sky. Only now does he realise that he’s lying half on the bank, half in the river. Water laps over him.

  After a while, he closes his eyes. The river and forest have vanished, the Colony, too. It’s 1917 again. It always will be. He’s nineteen years old, by now battle-hardened. Night falling, the stink of the trenches. Officers patrolling behind the lines. Some in armoured vehicles, some on horses. Messages relayed, field telephones cranked up, German voices drifting across the wasteland.

  Those bodies. The men who are about to perish. Many of them fathers, all of them sons. All children. The sky explodes into a beautiful fireworks of artillery barrage. There really is nothing more going on than the card game they’re playing, he and Edouard and a couple of other soldiers in his trench section. It’s the only reality. Nothing since has ever been so real.

  He sees his fiancée, Marie. He remembers the beginning, meeting her for the first time at a baptism. The happy moments of an unhappy life – could anything be more perfect than that? They fucked only hours later. He remembers the end, too: that night before his arrest, when finally he realised it was hopeless. On opposite sides of the bedroom, the screaming distance between them: ‘We can save it! We can change it!’

  Pulling him down, headlong into a bottomless pit – then gazing back up at the boundless sky. All the voices in his head dying down, reduced to a garbled murmur.

  A mother’s farewell, as you dash away to war. The still-ticking watch on a dead soldier’s wrist. The sound of cards, shuffled, fingered, slapped down on the makeshift table. The artillery rumble. Distant but insistent, like the muffled cries of a baby. Do you remember that dream? We talked about it so many times. The flat, desolate landscape in the twilight. The silhouette of a single tree stump. And the dark farmhouse against the sky.

  COLONY TWO

  I

  ‘After so many years of travelling, I feel as if I’ve killed every last certainty within me.’

  The line stared out at Manne from an otherwise blank page in his journal. It was in his neat script, but he couldn’t remember writing it. For a minute, he let his pen hover over the words before putting it down again. So early in the morning, and yet the air already shimmered with the heat. He sat back deep in his deckchair, his mind empty as he stared out into the hypnotic blue.

  By the rails, he could see one of the merchant sailors standing with a female passenger, very young but not especially attractive. The sailor was openly flirting with her, and she was doing nothing to discourage him. He’d put a bronzed arm around her waist, and was now edging it ever lower. Manne couldn’t hear what they were saying, but as in any exchange it was always the bodies that expressed the essential, never the words. He watched them for a while, idly wondering whether they’d sleep together before the end of the voyage, or even the day. The girl, Manne had learnt at the captain’s table, had come out from France, changing boats in Guadeloupe. She was engaged to marry a prison guard at Cayenne. They hadn’t met before, only exchanged letters and photographs. Apparently it was quite a common arrangement: the girl was probably an orphan or prostitute, or both, and getting married would extricate her from a difficult situation. As for the guard, it was his only means of meeting and marrying a white woman.

  Manne’s mind strayed back to dinner the night before, where he’d heard about the girl. The conversation had mostly been colonial chitchat – and yet there’d been this sexual tension among the passengers, split roughly evenly between men and women. Ribald jokes, flushed faces, hands drifting over hands, décolletés tugged down. It felt like the desperation of the war years, and Manne couldn’t help tying it in some way with the boat’s ultimate destination – the penal colony. Mere whimsy, no doubt. It was not so different from the bohemian soirées he remembered from Paris before the war, with the endless café-hopping, the occasional bed-hopping. The dynamics of the captain’s table were simply those of a late supper in Montparnasse after a show.

  Talk on board generally veered away from the bagne. In fact, mention of the girl and the prison guard had been the first whisper of it at the captain’s table. It made the Colony seem both stranger and more banal than the mental picture Manne had drawn from books he’d read – memoirs with titles such as My Green Hell, Ten Years Among the D
ead or Dry Guillotine. In the years Manne had spent criss-crossing the Americas, the bagne, if it came up at all, was usually spoken of with irritation, even anger. The brothels of Buenos Aires were all run by escaped bagnards, it was said, and in northern Brazil they terrorised the local population. That France would send its undesirables to this continent clearly injured some native sense of pride.

  The sailor and the girl wandered off, arm in arm, leaving Manne alone on deck. For a while he sat reading his book – Baudelaire’s translation of Arthur Gordon Pym – before dozing and broiling in the morning sun. An hour later he woke with a start, his skin prickly with sweat and heat. He’d been dreaming of Edouard again. It had been very fragmentary, and all he could recall now was Edouard’s face, and his glass eye as it stared back lifelessly at him. It took him a moment to shake himself free of this image and notice the other people now leaning over railings, looking out towards the green line on the horizon. The boat was approaching Georgetown, its first stop on the mainland. Manne watched as the line thickened and clarified. He’d been to British Guiana once before, years ago. He’d worked his passage across on a boat from Liverpool, when he’d started to feel unsafe in England. A brief stop in Georgetown, of which he remembered almost nothing, before sailing on to Belém and along the Brazilian coast.