Colony

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‘Shrapnel in the eye. Knocked out in a foxhole. They didn’t pick me up for another three days. I was raving; thirst, I suppose. Month in hospital, then invalided out.’

‘It’s amazing, I …’ Sabir is on the verge of telling him how he tried to find Edouard’s family after the war, but stops himself. He stares. When Edouard looks his way, his eyes aren’t completely aligned. One appears to be glass. It’s difficult to tell with his tanned skin, but there doesn’t seem to be any scarring at all around the eye or anywhere else on his face. Unusual to be hit by shrapnel so precisely in the eye and nowhere else.

‘I haven’t thought of that time for so long,’ says Edouard. He chuckles to himself. ‘D’you remember that chap Durand? That madman who always wore a spiked helmet he’d looted from some dead German?’

‘Yes. I remember.’

‘Did you hear what happened to him?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Someone bet him fifty francs he wouldn’t walk into that bar in Lille with the spiked helmet on and order a beer in German.’

‘What happened?’

‘Some drunk English officer drinking there got up and shot him dead!’

They laugh. A flood of faces from the war return to Sabir. Julien Pardieu; le Petit Clouzot; that man with the purple birthmark on his face … most dead, but what has happened to the survivors? Married, with children and jobs? Or more like Sabir and Edouard? For a moment, Sabir’s back in the trenches. Once again, the days of shelling, the nights with prostitutes. His months there seem like the best of times, the camaraderie so different from the suspicion and isolation that reign here.

‘You’re going back to that camp over there?’ asks Sabir.

Edouard nods. ‘We’re supposed to be wood chopping. But if you’re quick, you can get your quota done earlier. Then you can go out butterfly hunting. There are a lot of Morphos round here; you get a franc a piece for them. So you came in on the last convoy?’

‘Yeah. I’m heading for Camp Renée. Know anything about it?’

‘I know it. Got a good friend there. It’s not so bad. Not exactly lax, but the chef de camp is new. The place has only been open a few months. All the clearing’s been done. There’s just construction work, no wood chopping. And that’s what kills you. The chopping.’

They stand chatting uncertainly for a few more minutes, about the camps and the Colony, but not any more about the past. Edouard’s conversation is punctuated by various expressions and convict jargon that Sabir only half-grasps. Still so much to learn: a whole new language, a whole new mythology. When Edouard smiles, which he does only once, his face is rigid like a mask. At one point, he abruptly asks: ‘What about money? Got any money?’

‘Few francs, that’s all.’

Edouard quickly changes the subject. He doesn’t elaborate on the purpose of his question. Eventually, he says: ‘Well, I’ll be off now. You’ve got another couple of hours before you reach Renée. When you get there, go and see Carpette. He’s the keeper of one of the barracks. Tell him you’re a friend of mine. Tell him I asked him to do whatever he can for you.’

‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

‘Camp Renée … you struck lucky … there are worse places … well, be seeing you.’

Edouard disappears back down the trail towards Camp Saigon. And Sabir continues his journey through the forest, at first thinking about Edouard, about his glass eye, and then about Edouard’s friend in Camp Renée who might be able to help him. Such recommendations don’t mean a lot out here, though. Sabir thinks back to his own foolish promise to help the country boy Gaspard. It weighs on him, although no doubt he’ll never see the boy again. Not unless he, too, is sent to this Camp Renée. A camp with a woman’s name, odd that. He wonders at Edouard’s last words: ‘Be seeing you.’ What was the likelihood of that?

At some point in the afternoon the rain comes crashing out of the sky, but Sabir barely notices, lost in self-absorption. In any case, it means that it’s four o’clock and he has only a couple of hours till nightfall. The path winds by the river: the other shore seems to be melting under the lashing rain, collapsing like a flimsy stage set. It hits you hard, this rain, and yet brings no great relief from the heat. That’s what makes it feel so foreign.

The path ends abruptly. Coming out of the forest is like coming out of a dream. Ahead, lined with palm trees, an avenue – vertiginously wide after the confines of the forest. Swathes of jungle have been cleared, perhaps a couple of hundred hectares in all. A number of small buildings have been erected there. At the bottom, six whitewashed barracks with thatched roofs, three on either side of the avenue. The effect is almost pretty. A few convicts wander about, but otherwise the place is almost deserted.

Sabir reports to the bookkeeper as he’s been told to do; after his name and number have been registered, he’s taken to his barracks. It’s set out in the same way as the one in Saint-Laurent, with long planks of wood by the walls that serve as communal beds. Unlike in Saint-Laurent, though, this barracks has a wretched lived-in feel. Threadbare rags and battered tin bowls lie at the base of the bed plank, along with little statuettes and other objects half-carved out of the heavy tropical wood. They’re to be sold to the guards, probably, who’ll then sell them on as souvenirs in Saint-Laurent or Cayenne. On the walls, pictures of glamorous women torn from ancient copies of La Vie Parisienne. And family photos, warped in the heat and damp, of wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, mistresses.

Sabir is told to dump his cloth sack in the far corner and report immediately to the camp commandant. The bookkeeper points out the path he’s to take, to the left of the grand avenue. After a ten-minute walk through the jungle, he comes to a clearing by the river. Here, there are convicts at work, levelling the ground, erecting a wall, building a large house. Sabir can hear a gramophone. Classical music – crisp piano notes and a male voice singing in German. In itself, it’s jolting, since German will always remind Sabir of the front, and those odd fragments of conversation that used to drift across the Flemish mud when the wind was right. Sabir knows nothing about classical music, but the frozen, precise tones seem starkly out of place as they echo across the trees and water, here in the suffocating humidity of the equatorial forest.

Inside, the ground floor of the house appears to be more or less complete and habitable; beyond a short corridor there’s a sitting room. The gramophone in one corner. A table in the middle, and a man sitting by it, his head in his hands – as if in pain or in prayer. He looks up. ‘Ah, the gardener!’ He gets to his feet and extends his hand. Sabir takes a moment to extend his own: it’s a long time since anyone offered to shake hands with him. It feels like reaching into another world.

‘I don’t know where to start. I’ve got some rough plans drawn up here. Or we could go and see the terrain now; perhaps that would be best. If you’ll follow me out here, the back way …’

Sabir keeps right behind the commandant. They’re looking out over land that’s been cleared, some of it levelled as well. ‘There’ll be a series of steps here once I get the stone,’ the commandant continues, ‘and then to the right there’ll be a fountain. That has nothing to do with you, of course; I’ve got a stonemason working on that. Over here, in front, I want a lawn, if I can get the turf, with the flower beds to the side away from the river, and beyond a jardin anglais. You’re going to have to write up some specifications for plant species. I’ve got seeds from France and I have a shipment of seedlings coming from Florida.’

Bewildered, Sabir says nothing throughout, but the commandant, carried away by his own enthusiasm, doesn’t notice. They stroll about the terrain, while the commandant continues to spill out a jumble of horticultural plans that Sabir can barely take in: a hedge to cut the river from the lawn; a fishpond in the jardin anglais, in front of the folly he’s having built. But the fish are a problem since none of the river species would survive. Sabir nods, watches the commandant. He towers over Sabir and is noticeably thin – like a convict rather than an Administration official, most of whom run to fat. He has a carefully trimmed black moustache. His hair is dark, what’s left of it: at the front most of it has gone and he’s cut the rest extremely short. This too, coupled with his tanned face, reinforces the convict look. It’s difficult to say how old he might be. Thirty-five? Forty-five? There’s a certain Teutonic stiffness about him – Sabir wonders whether he’s from one of the ‘German’ départements, Alsace or Lorraine.

Now they’re back in the sitting room, poring over plans. ‘A lot of this I want done within the next four weeks, before my wife arrives. All the basic landscaping at the very least must be done by then. I can give you half a dozen men; it should be sufficient if you’re well organised.’ The commandant has lit a cigarette, a proper French one, not the sawdust-cut rubbish the convicts smoke. Ignored, the cigarette consumes itself in the ashtray: it’s torture to watch. Out of the blue, the commandant shoots Sabir a question: ‘So what’s your experience? Who did you work for?’

‘I was head gardener for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse, sir. I looked after the gardens at the Château Ben Ali.’

‘Really? How interesting …’

Within seconds, Sabir has a whole story worked out in his head, with all sorts of baroque details. But already the commandant has lost interest and has started talking about his garden again.

Nightfall, after the evening meal. Stretched out on the hard board bunk, hands behind his head, Sabir watches the to and fro of the barracks. There’s a night-light between the two bed boards but many of the men have their own little lamps as well, fashioned out of empty tins. There’s not much conversation. A few of the convicts have quizzed Sabir about Saint-Laurent, but once they realise that he’s got no interesting news and no money, they drift off to their own corners. One man is mending his butterfly net, another is carving something out of a wood block, yet another is squeezing parasites from the soles of his feet. In the middle, a card game is in progress.

A bell rings. A guard and a turnkey appear. The keeper of the barracks shouts out: ‘All present and accounted for, chef.’ The turnkey bolts the doors before moving on to the next barracks; one by one, the little makeshift lamps are winked out and after a while only the central night-light is left burning, silhouetting the men as they lie slumped on the boards, most of them still in their sweaty work clothes.

Although he’s exhausted, Sabir can’t sleep. He hasn’t had a proper night’s rest since the holding prison in France. Sleep was impossible on the ship and it’s turning out to be just as difficult in the barracks. He can’t get used to the hard boards, can’t get used to sharing the barracks – and the bed board – with so many men. In France, he sometimes had a cell to himself, and never shared with more than four or five other prisoners. In the half-gloom, his mind wanders back to his meeting with the commandant. Sabir knows nothing whatsoever about horticulture or landscape gardening. His story about working for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse surprised even himself, and it takes him a moment to work out where he got the name from. On the prison ship, there was a prisoner called Lacroix, who was always bragging about how he was the valet for this Comtesse d’Entremeuse – apparently he’d been caught stealing jewellery from her dressing table. All the other prisoners thought him a pompous idiot. Throughout the voyage, he bored everybody stupid with his stories of the Comtesse, the château and the high life they led there. As if he thought her nobility had somehow rubbed off on him. Then, just a few days before reaching the South American coast, he fell ill. He turned yellow and started shaking. Within hours he was dead.

Sabir is thinking about his new job as a landscape gardener. As a working-class Parisian, he’s never even been into a private garden before. His friend Edouard, on the other hand, would know about such things. Sabir remembers now that in civilian life Edouard ran a nursery. He recalls Edouard telling him how he’d import exotic varieties and sell them to rich families at absurdly inflated prices. And how the bottom had fallen out of it all, once the war came. Sabir wonders whether there’ll be any way he can communicate with Edouard, ask his advice.

There’s one incident about Edouard that sticks in his mind. At one time, behind the trenches, soldiers used to maintain little jardins potagers, which they planted with potatoes and other root vegetables to supplement their diet. Edouard somehow managed to grow a rosebush on his patch. He tended it with great care and, in the summer of 1917, it finally blossomed into an explosion of red. Set against the fields of mud and the trees stripped of leaves, the effect was bizarre. For a brief moment, the rosebush became one of the sights of the sector; men used to stop by it on their way to the bombed-out village just behind the lines, where the mobile brothel had been set up. A month later came the major assault, after all those months of immobility. And it was then that Edouard disappeared.

For whatever reason, this incident comes to mind as Sabir thinks about his job. And although he knows nothing about gardens, he’s certainly met people like the commandant before: men fizzing with ideas, carried away by their own enthusiasm. They’re eternally planning and constructing, but more often than not their plans come to nothing. There were officers like that in the army, and he knew how to handle them.

As Sabir lies there, lost in speculation, he sees a man get up and go over to the night-light. The man leans over as if to light a cigarette from it, but Sabir sees him deliberately blow the lamp out. Everything’s black – there’s no noise save the occasional snore and a mysterious shuffling sound. A tingling fear invades Sabir. All those stories he’s heard about what happens in the barracks at night … He draws his feet up, ready to kick out should anyone attack him. Why didn’t he get himself a knife in Saint-Laurent when he had the chance? As his eyes get accustomed to the dark, he can make out a grotesque ballet of shadows. He can hear whisperings too, but it’s impossible to work out what’s happening. He holds his position, nerves on a hair trigger, muscles tensing at every click or rustle, until he can feel an ache crawling up his legs, towards his gut and arms. An hour or more passes like that. Eventually he hears a mutter: it’s the keeper of the barracks. In the dark, Sabir sees him rise from the bed board and move towards the lamp. The flash of a match illuminates the barracks with a terrible violence.

The lamp is lit again and all the shadowy forms Sabir thought he could see melt away to nothing. But there’ll be no sleep now.