LITMIR.BIZ

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your nerves and leave you exhausted in the morning. As he walks back along the path to the main camp, he thinks of Edouard and their meeting in the jungle. He remembers how Edouard told him to go and see a friend of his named Carpette, one of the keepers of the barracks. And that Edouard would ask this Carpette to do what he could to help Sabir.

      He didn’t know what a keeper was before he came here; he’s since learnt that it’s a prized position. While the others are out at work, the keeper has to clean the barracks, fill the water urn from the river, and make sure nothing’s stolen. But it’s also the keeper who sells the convicts the oil he siphons off from the barrack supplies, the coffee he skims from breakfast rations, as well as tobacco, matches, onions, bread and all sorts of other wares. Some of this stuff is pilfered from the kitchen; the rest he gets the turnkeys to bring in from Saint-Laurent when they go into town. The keeper buys wholesale and makes his money selling piecemeal to the convicts at night. It’s a lucrative business.

      Sabir collects his dinner rations and walks down the avenue towards the end barracks, of which Carpette is the keeper. By the time he finds the man he’s looking for, there are only a few minutes left until lock-up. Carpette turns out to be a smallish, fastidious-looking man. He grabs Sabir’s arm and leads him to the privy, where they can talk away from the others. Eyeing Sabir suspiciously, he subjects him to a sort of interrogation.

      ‘How do you know Edouard?’

      ‘We were together during the war.’

      ‘Really? How did you know he’s here?’

      ‘Bumped into him, on my way to camp.’

      ‘When was the last time you’d seen him before that?’

      ‘Haven’t seen him since the war. I thought he was dead.’

      ‘Did you notice his false eye?’

      ‘Yes. I noticed it.’

      ‘Did he tell you how he lost his eye?’

      ‘In the war, I think he said.’

      Carpette gives a short laugh, as if to dismiss the story. ‘Yes, well, Edouard’s told me all about you. Says you’re broke, though.’

      ‘That’s true,’ Sabir replies, mystified by the interrogation and the question about the false eye. He hurries to the point: ‘Look, I need to get out of here. I’ll do whatever I have to. Edouard said you could help me.’

      ‘Get out of here?’ Carpette continues to stare, as if sizing up a rival. Unlike other convicts, his hair has grown out a little, enough for a side parting. It’s the privilege of a keeper to wear one’s hair like that, and it sets him apart from the others, giving him an air of purpose and authority. Finally he says: ‘You work down by the river, don’t you? You sometimes go into his house, don’t you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Can you get in there alone?’

      ‘Sometimes.’

      ‘There must be plenty to steal there. Booze, food, tobacco, oil, clothes, cutlery, pens, ink, paper … Look around, for Christ’s sake.’

      ‘All right. I will.’

      ‘Don’t be greedy. Don’t steal too much. Couple of bottles of rum, not the whole case.’

      ‘I understand.’

      ‘Problem is, whatever you take, you won’t be able to sell it here. Because it’ll be spotted by the guards. They’ll find out who’s doing it, then they’ll bleed you dry. But I can fence it for you. I can get someone to take the stuff down to Saint-Laurent.’

      The evening bell rings; Sabir hurries back to his own barracks. That night, although sleep seems just as impossible, Sabir is less anxious than usual. The meeting with Carpette was ambiguous; he must now earn the man’s trust. Carpette has merely offered to fence stolen goods for him, no doubt in order to take his own cut. But he’s noticed that while most other convicts go about in dirty rags or half-naked, Carpette looks after himself: his striped convict shirt had been clean and in good condition. In other words, he’s a survivor, he hasn’t let the Colony entirely degrade him. That’s a good sign, and he’s glad to have made contact with someone like that.

      He wonders why it hasn’t occurred to him before to steal from the commandant. Now he thinks about it, he’s noticed how things are always going missing down by the river. The bricks and timber arrive by boat, but by the time they’re unloaded, there’s always less than on the order form. At times, the pilfering has seriously impeded his own work. Three spades disappeared and he had to wait for new ones to come up from Saint-Laurent before he could continue with the digging. He now realises it was probably his own men who took them.

      It’s this question of money and how to get it that creates so much of the anxiety, that makes the Colony so different from Sabir’s prison experiences in France. In a mainland prison, there were times when it felt like going back to childhood – you were fed and housed and all the important decisions of your life were taken by someone else. Here in the Colony, that’s all stripped away. Inaction is no kind of option: the pursuit of money is the pursuit of life over death.

       V

      Five forty-five, the morning bell, not quite light. Men lined up in the dull green of the tropical dawn, queuing for breakfast rations: a crust of bread and a splash of coffee. The coolness of the air on Sabir’s body feels good – this hour before daybreak offers the only real respite from the heat. Standing in line next to Sabir is Antillais, the man whose cat has vanished. The night before, Antillais calmly announced to the barracks that his tormentor Masque would be dead within the week. Masque attempted to laugh it off. Surely he’ll kill Antillais now. The tension in the barracks is palpable.

      It’s difficult to tell how old Antillais really is. Not just because of his colour, but because people age more quickly in the Colony. Someone told Sabir, though, that Antillais has been here over thirty years. In other words, since before the twentieth century. What would that be like? But thirty years is perhaps no different from five. When everything else stops, time accelerates towards the horizon. One moment you’re a young man; seconds later you’re old, ready to die. It’s all over. Perhaps, in Antillais’s position, Sabir would also risk his life to avenge the death of a pet. Why not? In some way, the bagne actually lessens your sense of mortality. It’s like during the war, at the front, when you’d find yourself taking incredible risks for the smallest things. An image of Edouard comes to mind, calmly climbing out of the trench to recover a packet of cigarettes.

      This morning, some of the commandant’s wife’s luggage is arriving by boat. It’ll be Sabir’s job to oversee its delivery to the house, make sure nothing’s stolen. Not easy, since he’ll have to watch not only the convicts bringing the crates up to the house, but also the Bonis who’ll ferry them to the riverbank in their canoes. The Bonis live in tribes up and down the river, but they’re not Indians, they’re the descendants of runaway slaves. They’re incorrigible thieves (a convict told Sabir he’d once come across a whole village of them dressed in striped convict shirts), but expert boatsmen as well. They make their living ferrying goods and people across the river. And sometimes they supply convicts with the boats they need for their escapes. But they’re ruthless businessmen and the boats never come cheap.

      The commandant is generally up at the main camp during the day, but this morning he’s stayed down by the river to await the arrival of the ship. He seems excited about it and his eyes have a glow to them. Perhaps he’s already started on the rum; Sabir has noticed that he’s a bit of a drinker. Not that it’s anything unusual here. The commandant might even pass as fairly abstemious, compared with the guards.

      It’s impossible to know exactly when the boat will get in, since there’s no direct communication with Saint-Laurent. No telegraph or phone lines. There used to be, and there probably will be again, but something always happens to the cables. They’re

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