Colony - Hugo Wilcken

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jewel heists. He never got the money. It was quite a fortune – easily enough to have financed an escape from the penal colony as soon as he got there.

      One day, years after his escape to Argentina, he risked a return to France. Back in the Paris underworld, there was stupefaction at his sudden reappearance. But thanks to his reputation as an homme régulier, friends helped him trace the man he was after. Bonifacio soon found his former fence living in a bourgeois apartment building not far from the Bois de Boulogne. The man begged for mercy, but Bonifacio showed him none. He gunned him down in front of his wife and children. A few days later, Bonifacio was picked up again, as he strolled down the boulevard Clichy with his Argentinian mistress. Someone had betrayed him to the police. Scared off by Bonifacio’s underworld friends, the fence’s wife refused to testify against him. Unable to pin the murder on him, the authorities simply put Bonifacio on the next prison ship out to Saint-Laurent to finish his original sentence.

      Throughout the afternoon, various convicts from other barracks have come up to the bars to talk with Bonifacio in low voices. Sabir also notices that Bonifacio hasn’t bothered to write his letter: he’s sold his paper and envelope to one of the German prisoners for a few sous. Sabir hasn’t had time for his own letter yet. There’s only one he wishes to write, and after that there’ll be no further need. On the boat he dreamt up all sorts of fantasies about escaping back to France, maybe reuniting with his fiancée, somehow returning to his former life. He was going to write to her to tell her he’d arrived safely. But now he changes his mind. Already, something has moved inside him since his arrival in the bagne. During the long, humid afternoon spent transcribing the impossible wishes of others, the realisation has grown in him that his old life is dead. That he can now never expect to resurrect it. That his survival – should he want it – depends on sloughing off this dead skin. That his only real hope is to become someone else entirely.

      Thoughts. They become so clear in the darkness. Wondering now what to write to his fiancée, Sabir is inevitably reminded of all the things he’s lost. He recalls his arrival at the holding prison in France before embarkation: the bundle of prison clothes and clumsy wooden-soled shoes he was handed; the humiliating body inspection; the inventory of his personal effects the guard had made. It was only then that he was told that he could send on his things to his family if he wished, otherwise they’d be destroyed. There was a moment of anguish before relinquishing these few mementoes of a different life. He hadn’t realised he’d have to part with them. The letters and photo of his fiancée; a faded picture of his mother as a young girl; his military citation, along with the medal his unit had been awarded. He hadn’t realised these things were important to him. Particularly the photos. How would he be able to remember what his fiancée looked like? Already the face is blurred. It’s the feel of her breasts and body that remains with him most viscerally. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of any young woman’s body – here in this world of men.

      ‘I’m never coming back,’ he now scribbles under the gloom of the night-light. ‘Consider me dead, and think of me no longer.’

       III

      A week later, at dawn parade, an officer singles out a dozen men, including Sabir. They’re to leave immediately for Renée, a new forest camp twenty kilometres down the river. ‘You’ve got until nightfall to report to the chief guard. Otherwise, you’ll be counted as missing.’

      An Arab turnkey doles out their day’s rations and walks them out of the penitentiary. It’s the first time since his arrival that Sabir’s been outside, and as he’s watched the crowds of convicts herded in and out of the gates every day, as he’s listened to the incessant chatter about goings-on in town, Saint-Laurent has expanded in his mind. It is, after all, a capital city of sorts. The capital of the bagne. But now as they leave, he’s reminded again of how small it is, how insignificant it seems, compared with what surrounds it. After only a few minutes’ walk, the almost elegant boulevard crumbles into little more than a dirt track through a dusty shanty town.

      The turnkey stops as they approach a little shop; a Chinaman lounges by its entrance, puffing on an ivory pipe of a type Sabir hasn’t seen before. ‘If you want to buy anything before you leave, you can get it here,’ says the turnkey. No doubt he gets his cut for bringing them here, that’s his scam. Inside there’s a counter with tobacco, rum, bananas, coconuts, loaves of bread, some kind of boiled meat and rice. Sabir has a few francs he’s earned as an écrivain: he’ll need plenty more to finance his escape, but the temptation to buy something is overwhelming. Such a thing hasn’t been allowed in so long! It’s these half-tastes of freedom that are so dizzying. Sabir parts with some of his cash for a glass of rum – a ridiculous extravagance – and also some tobacco, since he’s heard that in the forest camps smoking is the best way to keep off the mosquitoes.

      The turnkey leads them to a place where the dirt road disappears into the trees. ‘You have to follow that path. Camp Renée’s less than a day’s walk from here. You should get there by late afternoon.’ He turns away and is gone without a word: here, no one bothers with hellos or goodbyes. The men wait at the spot for a few minutes, too astonished to do anything. Sabir gazes over to Dutch Guiana across the river. Surely there must be a guard hidden somewhere, watching them, checking up on them, ready to shout, ready to fire on them if they try to get away … Eventually they hurry off down the trail the turnkey had pointed to. Sabir rounds each bend expecting to find a guard there, waiting to pick them up and take them to the camp. But there’s no one. They’re alone in the jungle. At times a darkness envelopes them: trees bow over the trail like two sides of a steeple, a violent blue only occasionally piercing the thick canopy.

      Sabir doesn’t know the other men; they aren’t from his barracks. But no one introduces himself. They’re wraiths, walking in silence, each sunk in his own thoughts. It’s the shock of suddenly being alone, unsupervised, for the first time in months. The forest has no bars or walls – and yet the old hands back at the penitentiary have impressed on everyone that, in itself, it offers no salvation. To wander off unprepared, with no plan or rations, is to condemn yourself to failure. Sabir lets the other men get ahead until he really is by himself. The weird forest silence is punctuated by squawks and rustling sounds that might be the wind, a small animal or a snake or bird. Sometimes these noises make him start involuntarily. What would it be like to be here in the forest at night? It’s good to be alone, though, in daylight hours at least. The forced company of other prisoners merely accentuates the loneliness. Only when Sabir’s alone does a sense of himself as a man among others come back to him.

      The forest camps, hard labour. He hasn’t been able to avoid that fate after all. Foolishly, he’d assumed he’d get a job at Saint-Laurent as a gardener. Such stupid faith in your hopes and dreams is one of the dangers of prison life. The past is dead, the future stolen away, the present an endless desert – so you retreat into a fantasy world, where finally you’re in control. Among the lifers he’s known, Sabir has seen the syndrome time and time again. You lose yourself in grandiose plans, unrealisable dreams, until life becomes a mirage. And escape can be the worst dream of all. It’s the fantasy paradise of the bagnards, just as the bagne is the fantasy hell for everyone else. Sabir must be on his guard against such daydreaming, because it’s never innocent. If he really is to escape, his plans must be firmly grounded in the real world.

      At around noon, judging by the sun’s position, Sabir stops at a clearing. It’s on a small hill, in an otherwise flat terrain. It looks as though someone thought it a good idea to build here, cleared the high land, and then gave up. Before he sits down to eat his bread and dried sausage, Sabir hoists himself a few metres up a tree. For the first time he’s able to look right across the forest he’s in. A horizonless sea of green merges seamlessly into the primary blue of the tropical sky. Whatever direction you look in, it’s the same: blue, green, blue, green. If you stare long enough, the colours start to coalesce until it feels as if there’s no up or down, no left or right. Nothing to grab on to, except the filament of river and its random twists. Feeling giddy, Sabir climbs back down. His rations spill out of his tattered cloth sack.

      As he eats

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