enough to undertake the journey. Carpette’s arranging the purchase of a boat from one of the Boni ferrymen. He needs the money for it very soon. Does Sabir have his share of the money? They want to leave within two weeks. They still need someone to sail the boat. Has Sabir talked to that Basque boy he mentioned the other day? Is Sabir in, or is he out? I’m in, he replies, with sudden desperation. I’m in.
That day, Sabir has hauled up a whole case of rum for Carpette to dispose of. He’s sure the commandant has no idea how much he drinks, wouldn’t necessarily miss the case, wouldn’t investigate if he did. And yet the commandant must have realised by now that all sorts of things have gone missing from the house. He could hardly be that stupid or absentminded. If so, then he must also realise that Sabir is the culprit. Because no one else has the kind of access to the house that he has. And the fact that the commandant’s done nothing about it has merely emboldened Sabir even further.
Now that he’s moved to the folly, Sabir’s meetings with the commandant sometimes extend into the night. Sabir accepts the commandant’s rum and wine as well, but is careful to remain sober. The commandant, on the other hand, drinks too much. And when he does, his talk grows ever more grandiose.
‘The trouble is administrators don’t stay here long enough,’ he says one night. ‘They see this as a cursed post to escape from as fast as possible, with as much loot as possible. Well, I’m different. I plan on staying. And damn the rest of the Colony. I have my own little kingdom here. I’ll organise it as I see fit. I’ll continue building on the avenue. I’ll get the convicts out of the barracks. I’ll give them concessions. I’ll let them farm the land, earn an honest living, open up the Colony. Forge a new country. The English managed it in Australia, why can’t we do it here? I’ll build a settlement to rival Saint-Laurent. A new city. Built on republican virtues, of justice and equality before the law.’
Justice? Equality? Back now in the darkness of his folly, Sabir muses briefly on the commandant’s words before sleep overcomes him. Sabir, for one, has never expected or asked for life to be just or equal. These ideas are a luxury that only certain people can afford. People like the commandant. For Sabir and those like him, life is a perpetual struggle, one which leaves little room for such abstraction. And when not engaged in this struggle for survival, Sabir would be consumed with the usual desires, for companionship, intoxication, sex; his free moments would be spent assuaging these desires as best he could. That’s how things had been, until his arrest at least.
In his time, he’s come across those agitators for change – the communists, fascists, anarchists. The pamphleteers. On the factory floor, in the bars he’d drink at. He’s never paid them much heed. The only long stretches of time he ever had for proper thinking was at the front. Even then, the goal of thinking was to achieve the peace of not having to think any more. And the commandant’s books are almost the first he’s read since that time.
Sabir’s mind now wanders back hypnotically to the years of freedom, between demob and the prison gates. In those days, Paris felt dark and oppressive. The city’s monolithic buildings, immense avenues, gold domes and sumptuous façades could lock you into a state of powerless awe. Not that it struck him like that at the time. It’s only once you’ve lost something that you can make sense of it. But no, he now realises, he has no great nostalgia for his native city. No desire to find himself back there, even if it were possible. Now is the moment to escape into a different dream.
The commandant’s shipment of orchids is due. Standing on the riverbank the following day, Sabir glimpses funnels poking out over the trees as the ship twists its way through the forest. While he waits, fretting over what to do with the orchids when they arrive, one of the Boni ferrymen sidles up to him, taking him by surprise. ‘Friend of Carpette? Friend of Carpette?’ Sabir glances about: a couple of guards are lounging by the river drinking, but they’re some distance away.
With a mixture of gesticulation, broken Dutch and French, the ferryman makes Sabir understand that he’s the one who’s selling the boat to Carpette, Edouard and himself. That they’ll have it late next week. That he’ll sink it and secure it with stones in one of the creeks downstream, but he won’t tell them which one and where until he gets the money, all of it. Throughout, he punctuates his disjointed speech with a staccato laugh.
Sabir nods. ‘I understand.’
At that, the man wanders off to his canoe. Sabir notices the ritual scarring he has on his back – horizontal and vertical lines which look almost like a Christian cross. He climbs into his canoe and paddles his way across the river to the Dutch side – shrinking until he’s nothing but a black spot against the brutal green of the trees on the far bank. Finally he melts into the backdrop.
The escape. That’s what’s important. That morning, Sabir went up to the main camp at dawn – ostensibly to commandeer some convicts to help with the orchid shipment, but actually to see Say-Say, the young Basque from his old barracks. His real name is unpronounceable, and his nickname comes from the terrible stutter he gets when nervous. The Colony is a hive of speech difficulties: Say-Say is hardly the only stutterer, and there are also plenty of lispers, mutes, those with all manner of speech tics. Not to mention the convicts who talk to themselves. Sabir has even caught himself at it, on occasion.
Say-Say wasn’t in the barracks; Sabir tracked him down to the camp’s hospital – a grand word for the row of dirty mattresses in a converted barracks, looked after by a convict orderly. He seemed in a bad state. His jug ears bright red, his eyes shining with a fever that shook his body.
‘Here, roll me a smoke, will you? I can’t do it.’
It was true; his hands were trembling too much. Was there any chance he’d be well enough by the time of the escape? Then again, the thing about fevers is that you never know how they’ll play out. A bad one can carry a man off within hours. But some pass in a day or two, with no real consequences.
As he rolled Say-Say a cigarette, Sabir went through the escape plan he and Carpette had worked out, dropping to a low whisper when he thought one of the other convicts was taking too close an interest. Here in the Colony, Sabir has by now realised, it’s not the guards who are your main enemy, it’s the other convicts. He kept talking as they smoked together – explaining about the boat, the sail, the provisions, the paddle down the river before dawn, the ocean crossing to Trinidad, then along the coast to Colombia. The plan had been formed in bits and pieces over several meetings and, spoken out loud like that in its entirety, it sounded too fantastic. As if Sabir were recounting one of those escape yarns you’d hear from someone who’d heard it from someone else. Like so many of the tales that do the rounds here, you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it.
‘We’re not going to hang about until you’re better, though. Either you’re well enough by next week, or we’ll have to find someone else.’
Say-Say leant towards him, gripped Sabir’s arm. ‘Listen, I’m not as bad as I look. I’ve been smoking quinine.’
Quinine: one of the tricks for shamming sickness. You add it to your tobacco and it puts your temperature up, makes you look as if you’ve got a fever.
‘Why?’
‘Had to get out of barracks. I owe Pierrot. Not that much! But he started threatening me. Now he’s sent word here. I’ve got to get out of camp, too. It’s that or …’
Sabir looked around the hall. Men lying flat, their bodies glistening, staring up into nothing. Only one of them was sitting up: a man counting endlessly on his fingers: ‘27, 28, 29 – 27, 28, 29 – 27, 28, 29 …’ A few mattresses down from him, Sabir noticed Antillais, Masque’s co-murderer.
