by Hugo Wilcken
‘Here you are.’
The butler took the money without hesitation, without a thank you, and slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat.
‘Will you be here for lunch, monsieur?’
‘No, I won’t. I have some work to do.’
‘Very well, monsieur.’
Hartfeld walked out of the commandant’s office as calmly as he could. On his way upstairs he tapped on the woman’s door. No answer. He tapped again, whispered: ‘It’s me.’ Nothing. Filled with childish impatience, he was desperate to tell her that he’d found her passport. He crossed over the landing to his room, where he paced about for a few minutes, unable to compose himself. He forced himself to stop, and to draw regular breaths until his heartbeat had dropped to near normal.
Through the window, Manne could see the commandant emerging from the forest, ant-like against the immensity of the trees. He was still thinking of Leblanc’s letter to the commandant. But he couldn’t recall the exact succession of events after he’d looked up from reading it to find the butler staring at him. He felt in his pockets, but the letter wasn’t there. In the shock of the moment, he must have left it on the sideboard or dropped it. And the commandant would find it. Then again, if the letter had shown anything, it was that Manne’s position had already been severely compromised. Keep him under surveillance, it had said, under no conditions allow him to leave camp – something like that. In which case, why had the commandant made a point of asking him to leave by Sunday? Manne felt lost in the maze of other people’s motives. But he had the woman’s passport. He felt alive, electrically alive, for the first time since he’d received Edouard’s letter.
IX
Naked children played in the dirt. Semi-naked women sat cross-legged on the ground, breast-feeding babies, or working at something intricate, although Manne couldn’t quite make out what. Most of the women didn’t even bother to look up from their work as Manne passed through the village. One seemed slightly startled, but then stared up into the distance beyond him, as if she’d heard a noise but Manne himself was somehow invisible.
‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’
Manne turned around. It was a male villager who’d appeared out of nowhere.
‘Boat, yes? Boat?’
Manne nodded, surprised that the man should have immediately known what he was after. With a mixture of gesticulation, broken Dutch and French, he made the man understand that he wanted to be taken across the river, the midmorning of the day after the next. The boatman nodded, punctuating his disjointed speech with a staccato laugh. Once Manne was sure that the boatman had understood, he pulled out some money from his wallet and handed it over. At that, the man wandered off back down to the river. Manne watched as he climbed into a canoe and paddled over to the Dutch side – shrinking until he was nothing but a black spot against the brutal green of the trees on the far bank.
Like finding the woman’s passport, it had all seemed too easy. He walked slowly back along the path towards the house, unsure of what to do with himself. Several hours to kill before dinner. His mind flitted from one subject to another, without settling on any one in particular. Thursday afternoon, and they wouldn’t be leaving until Saturday morning – now he had the woman’s passport, he couldn’t see the point of the delay. Especially after finding Leblanc’s letter. In general, once a decision had been taken, Manne liked to act upon it immediately, and felt frustration when he couldn’t. Perhaps it was in compensation for a larger, overarching procrastination. He stared across to the Dutch side of the river.
Back in the house, he went to the door of the woman’s room and knocked; no response. Nothing to do now but return to his own room, where he lay down, overwhelmed with tiredness. As he dozed in the afternoon heat, he dreamt of an endless column of men marching through a jungle. Some of them were dropping to the ground along the way, out of sheer exhaustion. Manne ran forward, hoping to get past them. Moments later, he found himself at the front of the column. A man in military uniform was leading it. The face was familiar, but it was younger, thinner than the last time Manne had seen it. He woke up, opened his eyes with the image of that same face still there in front of him. He was certain now that he had known Captain Leblanc at the front in Belgium. No wonder Leblanc had been so shocked at the sight of him. It must literally have been like seeing a ghost.
A timid tap on the door. That was what had awoken him.
‘Guépard. What do you want?’
‘I come back from the camp, m’sieur.’
‘Yes?’
‘You ask me to go to the camp, m’sieur. To look for your friend.’
Manne struggled out of his dream. Yes, he could remember asking Guépard to go up to the camp. It felt like weeks ago.
‘I ask a lot of people. And I find someone who knows, m’sieur.’
‘Knows what?’
‘Where your friend is hiding.’
‘Where?’
‘He doesn’t tell me. He says not very far away.’
‘What does he want? Money?’
‘He says he wants to see you. He wants to speak only to you.’
‘Why? Why did you mention me? I told you to say it was your friend, for God’s sake.’
Guépard cringed as though he were about to be struck. ‘Very sorry, m’sieur. I said nothing, m’sieur. You must believe me. He knows who you are. He knows you are looking for your friend. I do not know how.’
‘Where does he want to see me? How do you know he’s telling the truth? How do you know he’s not trying to leech me?’
‘I describe your friend, m’sieur. Tall, one glass eye, called Edouard. The man, he says he knows where your friend is. Not far away, he says.’
‘What does this man want me to do?’
‘He meets you tomorrow morning, m’sieur.’
‘Where do I have to go?’
‘He comes down here, m’sieur. He comes to see you.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I do not know his real name, m’sieur. They call him Masque.’
‘What’s he going to do? Come and knock on my door?’
‘He says there is an old ruin here. By the edge of the trees.’
‘Yes, I know where he means.’
‘He will meet you there, at eight o’clock in the morning.’
After Guépard had gone, Manne paced up and down his room in a state of total consternation. This talk of Edouard would probably come to nothing. Guépard had no doubt been taken in by a convict on the lookout for a few francs. Nonetheless, Manne could feel the adrenaline pumping through him as he fumbled for cigarettes and matches. Already he’d dismissed Edouard. Already he’d set this other escape in motion, and already, in his mind, he was visualising it, taking the woman across the river, leading her through the jungle to Moengo, then up to Paramaribo. The woman was there, flesh and blood, and Edouard wasn’t, had merely been an idea, a memory. He couldn’t ignore that. And yet, all of a sudden, here he was again, resurrected.
Manne sat down by his desk, opened his journal and began to write:
I remember E. once telling me of a trip he made to New Guinea in search of tiger orchids. In the remote mountain area he was exploring, he had come across a group of native men, hunting in the forest. He had tried to communicate with them using signs and the smattering of the regional lingua franca he had picked up. They had seemed terribly excited at having found him, and were evidently asking him to do something for them, but he couldn’t understand what. They had led him on a trek through the forest, to an enormous, rectangular clearing. At one end of it, E. had been astonished to see a biplane. He now understood that the clearing was supposed to be a runway, and what they wanted him to do was pilot the plane. As he got closer, he realised that it wasn’t a plane at all, only an extremely good replica, its body made out of forest wood, its wings palm leaves sewn to a wooden frame, all dyed a vivid red. Its tail sported a German cross and, along the side of the body, what had appeared at a distance to be a few letters in Gothi
c script. On closer inspection, they turned out to be mere approximations, generic squiggles. The natives had bade him climb into the cockpit. There, too, were skewed approximations of engine controls, as if seen from afar.
Frustratingly, Manne couldn’t recall how Edouard had said he’d extricated himself from the situation. He couldn’t even remember where and when Edouard had told him about it. The story floated free in his brain, without connection to anything else. Manne flicked forward through the empty pages of his journal. They’d never be filled now. Because with Edouard’s story, his journal had somehow come to its end, however unsatisfactorily. There was nothing more to write.
X
All afternoon, Manne had kept an eye out for the commandant’s wife, watching the garden from his window, listening for her footsteps on the stairs, several times crossing the landing to knock on her door. And yet when he finally came downstairs, there she was, elegantly dressed for dinner and already seated. He risked a glance in her direction, and caught an expression that was penetrating, questioning. Quickly, he glanced away again.
‘You know, Hartfeld,’ the commandant said as he poured the wine, ‘there was no need to send your servant up to camp.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your servant. You sent him up to Renée for some writing paper, didn’t you? No need for that. I’ve plenty of writing paper in my office. You only had to look in my office.’
The butler served the meal, and they ate in silence. Manne considered the commandant’s sally, examined it for its implications. Writing paper, the office … an oblique reference to Manne’s being caught reading the commandant’s correspondence? In any case, the comment irritated him: surely it was up to Manne to do what he liked with his servant.
The commandant now turned to his wife. ‘My dear, I heard some news up at the camp that might interest you.’ The woman said nothing, and the commandant continued: ‘About your friend. The convict botanist. Damned if I can remember his name. What was it, my dear? What was his name?’
‘Boppe. Pierre Boppe.’
‘Ah yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten. Pierre Boppe.’
He rolled the name around in his mouth. He hadn’t forgotten, obviously. The commandant was drunk, more so than usual, or so Manne first thought. But it might have been something else. Tonight he seemed in an excitable, febrile mood.
‘Well, it seems he had an accident. Apparently he drowned. Swimming in the river.’
‘Oh …’ The woman put her hand to her mouth, clearly taken aback at the news.
The commandant now turned to Manne. ‘Astonishingly common here, actually. The current’s much stronger than it looks. And quite a few convicts drown every year. Of course, some can’t swim. They go to the river to cool off and then get swept off their feet by the current. But often enough it’s swimmers who are trying to escape. They take it into their heads that they can make it over to the other side.’
The commandant shrugged his shoulders, went on with his meal, noisily clunking his knife and fork against the plate. Manne looked over to the woman, who had stopped eating and was visibly subdued. Another interminable stretch of silence, this time continuing throughout the rest of the meal. Manne’s impression was that the commandant’s comments had meant to be gentle assertions of authority; instead they’d killed the dinner completely. In the silence, Manne lost himself once more in thought. All sorts of details and problems about the escape had occurred to him. He wondered how long it would be before the commandant discovered that they’d gone. And what might happen if they couldn’t get a ride immediately out of Albina. The commandant might get the Dutch police to stop them, after all. They’d be so much safer in a large town, rather than Albina or Moengo.
As they finished dessert, Manne looked over to the commandant’s wife, for the first time since the beginning of dinner. She mouthed ‘my room’ to him, before getting up from her chair. ‘Think I’ll turn in. I’m very tired tonight.’
‘As you wish, my dear. You’ll stay for a cognac, though, won’t you, Hartfeld?’
‘Well …’ Manne caught an almost imperceptible nod from the commandant’s wife.
The butler poured the two men drinks. For a good few minutes, dinner’s silence continued. Finally, the commandant said: ‘You’re not a religious man, by any chance, Hartfeld?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that a priest comes up to the camp once a month, to say Mass. It so happens that tomorrow he’ll be here. Just thought I’d let you know, in case you were the churchgoing sort.’
‘I’m not, I’m afraid.’
‘Didn’t think you would be. Scientific man like you.’
‘You’re a churchgoer yourself?’
‘Not in the least. Dreadful superstition. Mind you, the Gospels make for a marvellous story. Oh, I quite believe in the crucified Christ. It’s the resurrected one that makes no sense.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a strange end to a tragic tale, is it not? It’s … well, as if Hamlet had survived and were crowned king, if you follow my example. Everything that had come before would have lost its sense.’
Manne could think of no reply to that. For a moment he thought the commandant was going to say a lot more, as though the story of Christ were the subject of an eccentric pet thesis. But he fell silent, moodily gazing into his drink. Manne sat with him for a few more minutes before draining his own glass. He stood up to bid goodnight to the commandant, who barely looked up, waving his hand as he might to dismiss a servant.
As he approached the woman’s door it opened silently, and he slipped into her room. Inside, everything was grey and dim, with just a single lamp casting long shadows. Facing him, a full-length mirror that almost looked like another door. It was a shock to catch his reflection in it unexpectedly. In the gloom, he looked insubstantial, hardly there at all. A tiny cascade of thoughts ran through his mind. Usually, he realised, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he framed himself in a certain way, in fact to look just like he did in his mind’s eye. But it was not how others saw him. That other person, the object and not the subject, was someone different, a stranger. All this struck him in a split second. Now he turned to the woman. She’d changed out of her elegant robe, into a plain white nightdress.
‘I found it,’ he whispered. ‘I found your passport.’
‘I know that.’ She didn’t elaborate. ‘You went down to the village? Did you get a boat?’
‘Yes. For the time we agreed. Eleven o’clock the day after tomorrow.’
‘Good. Good.’
Behind her was a bed, the sheets in a state of rumpled disorder. Next to it was a small table, on which stood a framed photo of the house itself, with the vast river in the background.
Manne was about to say something when the woman cut him off with a ‘shhh!’ In the void, he could hear her breathing and her husband’s heavy, drunken step on the stairway. With a single fluid movement, the woman went back to the door and quietly turned the key in the lock. The steps were closer; the commandant was on the landing now. An eternity later, Manne could hear him slowly turning the door handle, trying not to make any noise. When it wouldn’t open, he turned it with more insistence, then finally rattled it violently. Finally a banging at the door that tore through the fragile silence. ‘Renée! Open this door!’
Manne stood stock-still, every muscle taut, frozen as he gazed into the woman’s eyes. She stared back. The contact felt so powerful that he forced himself to look beyond her, at the photo of the house on the bedside table.
‘Open this door. Open up!’ Again she didn’t reply. After another brief silence, the commandant raised his voice to a shout: ‘Renée! I order you to open this door immediately!’
‘No. Go to bed. You’re drunk.’
Another rattling of the door, another silence, this time longer. Manne pictured the commandant on the landing, wondering what to do next. Eventually, he heard the uncertain footsteps again, then the opening and closing
of another door.
‘Wait a few minutes,’ the woman whispered to him.
The two of them stood there like statues, centimetres away from each other but not touching. Under her nightdress he could make out the contours of her body, whose absolute foreignness both seduced and frightened him. He could feel her eyes scrutinising his face, just as he scrutinised hers, every tiny feature magnified a thousand times.
‘I think he’s gone,’ the woman whispered finally. ‘He may be waiting on the landing. I’ll have a look.’ She silently unlocked the door, put her head around it. ‘You go now. We can talk tomorrow.’
Manne crept back to his room. For a long time he prowled about, smoking cigarette after cigarette, unable to sleep until the tension inside him had wound down. He went through the details of the escape with the woman, wondering what the best strategy would be to ensure the Dutch police wouldn’t stop them. It somehow pleased Manne that there was still plenty to think about, because he had the impression that once he’d imagined every detail, actually carrying out the escape would be almost superfluous.
XI
He woke just before dawn, jolted from an indistinct dream that seemed filled with desire. Downstairs, Manne found the breakfast table already set. He wandered over to the kitchen.
‘Charles, I wonder if you could tell the commandant when he rises that I would like to see him.’
The butler turned his attention away from the stove, fractionally too slowly for Manne’s liking. ‘I’m afraid he’s gone up to the camp, monsieur.’
‘What? At this hour? It can’t be much later than six.’
‘I’m afraid he’s already left.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘It is not for me to say, monsieur. Normally he returns for lunch.’
‘I see. Well, could you please serve me some breakfast.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
