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 his lunch, Sabir thinks of his fiancée, for the first time since writing that letter to her under the barracks night-light. It’s the stale, lumpy bread he’s chewing on that reminds him of her: when they’d been together, she’d been working in a bakery. Now, before him, he sees the room he briefly shared with her in Belleville, just around the corner from that bakery. The shabby chair, the table and the water jug: the vision is suddenly vivid and desperately alive. On the sagging single bed, his fiancée, naked and smiling. He stretches out his hand. But as soon as he’s able to discern her features, to focus on the curves of her body, she’s gone – the room, too. He finds himself staring at a line of ants on a tree as the picture fades. Ants, ants everywhere. This is the real life of the dead forest. It takes him a minute to pull out of the dazed sensation his vision has left him with, and finish his bread and sausage.
Now on the move again, through the forest. At times the narrow path feels horribly claustrophobic, barely making its way through the thick vegetation. Looking up can bring on vertigo: the trees stretch up twenty metres and more. There are moments of peculiar beauty – two trees of different species growing towards each other, their different-coloured leaves intermingling to form a dappled, stained-glass effect. Vines stringing from one trunk to another, like wild-growing lace. On one of those vines, Sabir sees a bunch of little white flowers miraculously high up among the dense green.
An hour more until Sabir passes near the first camp, Saigon. A dozen gaunt convicts are bent over, apparently hoeing at some cleared ground. Their movements are jerky, puppet-like. Hard to imagine what crop they might be trying to grow out here: most of the ground is hard caked mud and a tangle of tree roots. To one side, a turnkey stands chatting and smoking with a guard. All the convicts look up at Sabir and one asks where he’s going. The guard, however, just points to a new trail on the other side of the cleared ground and tells him to keep moving.
Sabir picks up his pace as he dives back into the darkness of the forest. In a way, he’s eager to get to his camp. However dire the situation, imagining one’s fate tends to be worse than living it – even in Belgium, the shelling and the attacks were not as bad as the nauseous dread that preceded them. Not long after his encounter with the labouring convicts, Sabir sees a group of practically naked men with axes, half-jogging along the path back to Camp Saigon. One of them stops and calls out Sabir’s name. He turns around to see a man with a hooked nose and a face that is lined and hollow, burnt black by the sun. The man stares at Sabir, shakes his head, murmurs: ‘Got pretty thin, haven’t I? You don’t recognise me.’
‘I do. But I thought you were dead.’
‘Likewise. And yet, here we are. Safe and sound.’
Edouard laughs mirthlessly at his own joke. That faintly aristocratic voice and laugh are his, and yet the ghostly face and bony body belong to someone else entirely. He’s not the first acquaintance Sabir’s bumped into in this colony, although he’s certainly the closest. In Belgium, Edouard and Sabir were stationed on the same trench section for months on end – an eternity of waiting and tedium. And during that time, they shared everything. Food, drink, tobacco, jokes, news, rumours, philosophical musings, card games, clothes, boots, lice – such pairings-off were both practical and more or less the norm in the trenches. Over winter they even slept together to conserve heat, a single blanket wrapped around them both. In short, they lived the life of a couple with more intensity than many husbands and wives. No doubt they saved each other’s lives on occasion, too. Sabir has a distinct memory of Edouard bringing him down with a tackle one morning while he was shaving in the rear ‘bathroom’ trench section. A rifle had been pointing out from a bomb crater not twenty metres away behind the lines. All day they played cat and mouse with the sniper, but Edouard got him in the end. Much later came the attack in 1917 that definitively broke up the unit. When the straggles of survivors finally assembled in one place, Edouard wasn’t there.
‘You know, I’ve often thought of you,’ Sabir finds himself saying now. ‘When you didn’t come back that morning, I was sure you’d been killed. We all did. What happened?’
‘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
