A bell rings. A guard and a turnkey appear. The keeper of the barracks shouts out: ‘All present and accounted for, chef.’ The turnkey bolts the doors before moving on to the next barracks; one by one, the little makeshift lamps are winked out and after a while only the central night-light is left burning, silhouetting the men as they lie slumped on the boards, most of them still in their sweaty work clothes.
Although he’s exhausted, Sabir can’t sleep. He hasn’t had a proper night’s rest since the holding prison in France. Sleep was impossible on the ship and it’s turning out to be just as difficult in the barracks. He can’t get used to the hard boards, can’t get used to sharing the barracks – and the bed board – with so many men. In France, he sometimes had a cell to himself, and never shared with more than four or five other prisoners. In the half-gloom, his mind wanders back to his meeting with the commandant. Sabir knows nothing whatsoever about horticulture or landscape gardening. His story about working for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse surprised even himself, and it takes him a moment to work out where he got the name from. On the prison ship, there was a prisoner called Lacroix, who was always bragging about how he was the valet for this Comtesse d’Entremeuse – apparently he’d been caught stealing jewellery from her dressing table. All the other prisoners thought him a pompous idiot. Throughout the voyage, he bored everybody stupid with his stories of the Comtesse, the château and the high life they led there. As if he thought her nobility had somehow rubbed off on him. Then, just a few days before reaching the South American coast, he fell ill. He turned yellow and started shaking. Within hours he was dead.
Sabir is thinking about his new job as a landscape gardener. As a working-class Parisian, he’s never even been into a private garden before. His friend Edouard, on the other hand, would know about such things. Sabir remembers now that in civilian life Edouard ran a nursery. He recalls Edouard telling him how he’d import exotic varieties and sell them to rich families at absurdly inflated prices. And how the bottom had fallen out of it all, once the war came. Sabir wonders whether there’ll be any way he can communicate with Edouard, ask his advice.
There’s one incident about Edouard that sticks in his mind. At one time, behind the trenches, soldiers used to maintain little jardins potagers, which they planted with potatoes and other root vegetables to supplement their diet. Edouard somehow managed to grow a rosebush on his patch. He tended it with great care and, in the summer of 1917, it finally blossomed into an explosion of red. Set against the fields of mud and the trees stripped of leaves, the effect was bizarre. For a brief moment, the rosebush became one of the sights of the sector; men used to stop by it on their way to the bombed-out village just behind the lines, where the mobile brothel had been set up. A month later came the major assault, after all those months of immobility. And it was then that Edouard disappeared.
For whatever reason, this incident comes to mind as Sabir thinks about his job. And although he knows nothing about gardens, he’s certainly met people like the commandant before: men fizzing with ideas, carried away by their own enthusiasm. They’re eternally planning and constructing, but more often than not their plans come to nothing. There were officers like that in the army, and he knew how to handle them.
As Sabir lies there, lost in speculation, he sees a man get up and go over to the night-light. The man leans over as if to light a cigarette from it, but Sabir sees him deliberately blow the lamp out. Everything’s black – there’s no noise save the occasional snore and a mysterious shuffling sound. A tingling fear invades Sabir. All those stories he’s heard about what happens in the barracks at night … He draws his feet up, ready to kick out should anyone attack him. Why didn’t he get himself a knife in Saint-Laurent when he had the chance? As his eyes get accustomed to the dark, he can make out a grotesque ballet of shadows. He can hear whisperings too, but it’s impossible to work out what’s happening. He holds his position, nerves on a hair trigger, muscles tensing at every click or rustle, until he can feel an ache crawling up his legs, towards his gut and arms. An hour or more passes like that. Eventually he hears a mutter: it’s the keeper of the barracks. In the dark, Sabir sees him rise from the bed board and move towards the lamp. The flash of a match illuminates the barracks with a terrible violence.
The lamp is lit again and all the shadowy forms Sabir thought he could see melt away to nothing. But there’ll be no sleep now.
It’s this lack of sleep that lends everything its air of unreality. As though he were on the other side of a glass wall, observing a diorama. When he’s working, and often at night too, the vision of his fiancée returns to him, catching him unawares, just as it did during the journey in the forest. Back in France, when she was still near, when she was still a possibility, he thought of other things. Other women even. Now, as he’s trying his best to forget her, this is when she decides to haunt him. To wait for him. Dream back to the summer before last, and the dark hair that framed her face. Once again, she trembles beneath him. Her nakedness troubles him, but he resists the urge to masturbate; he recognises the mental danger of associating sexual relief with her image.
After an uneasy first few days, work on the garden proceeds smoothly. The six men under Sabir’s orders are all country lads: they know about the land, how to prepare a field, how to build drystone walls, the rudiments of landscaping. Thanks to them, he can get by on bluff, delegation and wile. Sabir is careful always to have one of his men along with him whenever the commandant takes him on a tour of the site to explain what he wants done. Already, the lawn area has been levelled and some of the land by the river drained. Once this heavy work is completed, once the seedlings arrive and it’s a question of digging and planting flower beds or rock gardens and preparing hedges, Sabir realises that his job will prove more difficult.
Every day he sees the commandant, and an unlikely relationship develops between the two. The commandant is not such an easy man to fathom after all. While the guards live in bungalows with airy verandas up by the wide avenue at the main camp, he prefers his half-built house down by the river. And he stays there completely by himself, when other officials of his rank keep whole armies of convict servants.
Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon, he asks Sabir into his sitting room, where they look over plans for the garden. During these sessions, in the last hour before the sun goes down, conversation sometimes veers away from the garden and construction work. The commandant never asks about Sabir’s past, but on occasion talks about his own. An idyllic childhood beneath the French Alps; student escapades at the Saint-Cyr military school; the Paris life of a young man about town – a life that could never have conceivably intersected with Sabir’s.
Despite his military career, the one thing the commandant never talks about is the war. One afternoon, though, he does mention a tour of duty in the French colony of Algeria. From one instant to the next, he becomes heated and angry. Algeria, where ‘we build roads, railways, we plant vineyards, create industries, open schools, we allow the colony to prosper … and yet what have we ever managed to do here in Guiana? What has this colony ever done for the Republic? Why do we still have to import all our food, when the Dutch and British farm their land? Why are there bauxite mines in Dutch Guiana, sugar plantations in British Guiana, and nothing here? It’s a damned disgrace! But what can you expect of a colony that has only butterfly wings and stuffed monkeys to send to the Exposition Coloniale?’
The rant takes Sabir by surprise. Later, he finds out that it’s by no means unusual: one of the commandant’s pet obsessions is reform. ‘This absurd colony – corrupt from top to bottom!’ he explodes on another occasion. ‘I go to Saint-Laurent, I order a new batch of trousers for the men here. What do I find? The Administration has none to issue. The storehouse is empty. Why? No one in the Administration will tell me. But I find out from a convict. The keeper of the stores has sold
