Colony - Hugo Wilcken

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Everyone’s got a scam. The guys who work at the hospital steal quinine and sell it on. The iron-mongers make knives and plans and sell them on. In the camps they catch butterflies and sell them to the guards, who sell them to collectors in America. Everyone’s got a scam.’

      So much to take in. During the long sleepless nights, Sabir turns it all over in his mind. In the solitude of the darkness, problems seem insurmountable. How to avoid these forest camps, for instance? As far as he knows, Sabir hasn’t been classed dangerous, but he has no particular skill other than basic soldiery. He has no money. He knows that most of the other prisoners do, banknotes tightly fitted into the little screw-top cylinder they call a plan, hidden in the rectum. Money given to them by their families. Sabir’s father has disowned him; his mother is dead. No trade, no money; no brawn either: Sabir is a smallish man with a slight build. There are nights when a paralysing nervousness invades him, worse even than the anxiety attacks of the Belgian trenches. It’s such a long time since he’s had to consider a future. He’s got too used to being a judicial object, shunted from prison to prison, prison to court, court to prison. He’s got used to lawyers talking for him, being his voice, just as all the others talk about him and around him. Almost as if he weren’t there at all.

      The new life that awaits him seems very different. Not at all like a mainland prison. Deeply strange and yet somehow familiar: it’s the world of the romans à quatre sous, the pulp novels that Sabir used to devour when on leave from the front. In Sabir’s mind, the bagne – as the penal colony is called – is a savage fantasy land, peopled with shaven-headed convicts in striped pyjamas, boldly tattooed from head to foot, guarded by men in pith helmets and dress whites. The coastline is an impenetrable wall of green jungle; gaudy parrots scream from the trees; crocodiles lurk just below the water’s surface; natives glide to and fro in dugout canoes; bare-breasted women tend to children in palm-roofed huts; wide-mouthed rivers disgorge into an infinite ocean. It’s a netherworld of no definable location, surging up out of the tropics like an anti-Atlantis. When he was a child, Sabir’s mother would tell him that unless he behaved, ‘tu finiras bien au bagne.’ This oft-repeated threat was every bit as real, and yet every bit as fantastic as his long-dead grandmother’s warning that Robespierre stole naughty boys away in their sleep. And every day on the streets of Paris you could hear people grumbling: ‘Quel bagne! Quelle galère! C’est le bagne!’

      What strikes Sabir about most of the other prisoners on board is their extreme youth and vulnerability. Very few of them actually seem like Bonifacio, like the tough hommes du milieu that populate the Paris or Marseilles underworld of Sabir’s imagination: the pimps, the drug dealers, safe crackers, hit men, gangsters. Gaspard, for example – the nervy, cowering country lad to Sabir’s left who cries himself to sleep – looks barely sixteen. One evening, without any prompting, Gaspard sobs out his story, banal and tragic in equal parts. He and another farmhand friend broke into the village café one night for a dare, and forced the till. The café owner came down to see what the disturbance was. Panicked, Gaspard grabbed a bottle of spirits, hurled it at the owner and fled. The man slipped on the stone floor, cracked his head open and bled to death overnight. The gendarmes picked Gaspard up the next day and he confessed that same morning. This boy seems typical of so many of the transportés on board: juvenile, illiterate, from peasant stock, lost, bewildered, completely out of his depth. Only thirty himself, Sabir feels ancient and worldly among these petrified adolescents. As though he’s lived and died an entire life in comparison.

      Discipline on board is lax, not at all like in a mainland prison. Most of the men have stripped off and wear nothing but towels around their waists. They sit in small groups, chatting quietly, smoking, fretting, occasionally fighting. The hard men from the military jails in the African colonies – the forts-à-bras – even run a poker game with a makeshift pack of cards cut from cardboard. A stained blanket on the steel floor serves as the card table. These men are generally much older than the others, and everyone’s scared of them. Little cliques have already formed in each of the eight prison cages: the Parisians band together, as do the Corsicans, the Bretons, the Marseillais, the Arabs, the Indo-Chinese. There are a couple of Germans too in Sabir’s cage, deserters from the Foreign Legion who speak hardly any French and sit whispering together. A tall, thin man huddles in the corner and pores obsessively over a tattered map torn from an atlas. Over and over he mouths a string of unfamiliar words, like a magic incantation: Paramaribo, Albina, Maroni, Orinoco, Oyapock, Sinnamary …

      As the boat reaches the tropics, the heat and lack of air inside the cages become almost unbearable. Walking, standing, sitting or lying, it’s impossible to get comfortable and just as impossible to sleep. Twice a day the prisoners are given a collective shower: sailors come down into the hold with hoses and drench the men with fresh salt water. It’s a delicious relief, but five minutes later Sabir is dry again and horribly itchy from the salt. Thirst is now an overriding problem; the drinking water has become contaminated and the guards pour rum into the barrels to make it more palatable. On this final leg of the voyage, Sabir feels constantly dizzy, but he can’t tell whether it’s because of the heat, the bad water, the rum, the seasickness or just the stench of six hundred bodies. The men lie listlessly now in their hammocks and conversations have died down to a low mutter, barely audible over the groan of the engine room.

      One day the birds finally reappear, at first trailing in the boat’s wake then wheeling around the funnels, filling the air with their sad cries. It’s dawn. Sabir’s hammock is hooked up by a porthole and he can just make out a dark blade cutting across the horizon. Over the next hour the blade thickens and resolves into a vivid green. Not long after, the sea turns yellow. It happens literally from one moment to the next, as if the boat has just crossed a border. A gargantuan river mouth comes into view, several kilometres across. Everyone flocks to the portholes as the river swallows the boat up. An air of nervous expectation hangs over the cages; only Bonifacio remains impassive, unshakeable, as he lies in his hammock smoking cigarette after cigarette.

      To avoid mudbanks the boat has to zigzag its way upstream, sometimes steaming down the middle, sometimes straying perilously close to the French bank – almost close enough for a man to reach out and touch the green foliage that bursts out over the water. On one occasion they pass what they take to be an Indian village: a rudimentary collection of five or six huts, a few inhabitants by the shore. It’s hard to make out what the Indians are actually doing as they gaze out across the river and beyond, apparently quite uninterested in the faces pressed to the portholes. Occasionally the boat gives a piercing hoot, although there’s no sign of other traffic on the river. And each time it does, great clouds of birds rise gracefully from the trees before dispersing into the sky.

      At around noon, their destination finally comes into view: a couple of boulevards hewn out of the jungle, heading into nowhere; a large complex of buildings to the left of a long pier; then beyond that a neatly laid-out residential quarter. Saint-Laurent has the air of an unremarkable French village, miraculously transplanted to the South American jungle. Its little pink bungalows and spruce gardens look faintly ridiculous, cowed by this river and rainforest of unearthly proportions. With so many prisoners now jostling for a glimpse, Sabir manages only brief moments at the porthole. The trees that imprison the town are the tallest Sabir has ever seen. Some of them even sprout out of the river itself, blurring the boundary between land and water. It is indeed the green wall of Sabir’s imagination, sliding slowly along the bank as the boat steams towards Saint-Laurent. The immensity of the forest frightens him, because he knows that from now on he’ll have to live surrounded by it, and that one day soon he’ll have to escape through it.

      When the engine cuts out, the silence is extraordinary. Sabir can hear the river lapping at the side of the boat. His blue cloth uniform, which had offered so little protection against the European winter, now suffocates him and he has to resist the temptation to rip it off. Sabir sets his cloth cap carefully on his head. Strange how you feel some vanity even in such circumstances. The town lies ahead, quite still in the dead of the noonday sun. They have been twenty-four days at sea. The air shimmers in the dripping heat. The date is 29 February 1928. It’s Ash Wednesday.

       II

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