to France. It’s outrageous!’ The commandant slams his fist down on the table with a rage that hints at something else, some deeper frustration or violence.
One afternoon a new batch of convicts arrives at the camp. Only one of them is assigned to Sabir’s barracks – a Basque boy nicknamed Say-Say. Lying back on the bed board, gazing up at the rafters, Sabir listens as Say-Say reports the news from Saint-Laurent. Bonifacio has pulled off a sensational escape.
‘They’d taken all the dangerous guys from the barracks and put them in cells. They were going to be shipped out to the islands next morning. During the night, Bonifacio got out somehow. Knocked out the turnkey, then stabbed that guard, Muratti. In the stomach. I was on cleaning detail the next day – what a mess. Like an abattoir. The guy didn’t die immediately, though. They took him to the hospital, unconscious. One of the porters told me that, just before he died, he woke up and started screaming.’
Muratti: Sabir remembers this guard. A Corsican, like Bonifacio. A lot of the guards are Corsican, as are a lot of the convicts. They all seem to know each other and they’re all connected in some way, through complex family alliances or ancient, obscure feuds. This guard, Muratti, had something against Bonifacio. Maybe it was personal, maybe it was to do with Bonifacio’s previous escape, maybe it was Corsican business. In any case, Muratti came to the barracks the very day the new convoy arrived, to crow over Bonifacio’s recapture – or perhaps goad him into doing something stupid. Although Sabir could see that it’d taken enormous self-restraint, Bonifacio managed to hold his tongue and ignore the guard’s gibes. Muratti soon got bored with Bonifacio’s silence and went away.
‘Anyway,’ continues Say-Say, ‘the afternoon before the escape, we’re all being exercised in the yard. Bonifacio’s just standing about smoking. Muratti comes up to him, starts talking: “Still here, then?” he says. “Thought you’d be long gone by now.” Bonifacio doesn’t say anything, completely ignores the guy. Muratti keeps baiting him: “When’s the big escape, then? Today? Tomorrow? The next day?” Finally, Bonifacio says: “Tonight. I’m out of this shithole tonight.” “Too fucking late,” says Muratti, “because I’m moving you to the cells after exercise. The boat gets in tomorrow morning.” And he was right, Bonifacio was moved straight after. But then, in the middle of the night, he gets out anyway. How the hell he did it I don’t know, but Jesus …’
He’s interrupted by one of the camp guards. There’s silence during the headcount, but straight after lock-up an argument over Bonifacio’s escape flares up. In the camps, news is a scarce resource, and every morsel must be carefully chewed.
Say-Say continues: ‘He must have paid off the turnkey to open the cell door for him. Then knocked the guy out afterwards, to make him look innocent.’
‘Bullshit,’ says one of the forts-à-bras. ‘I’ve been here since 1921 and I can’t remember a single escape that relied on a turnkey. Can’t trust ’em. They got too much to lose.’
‘He must have paid someone off. What about the walls? How could he have got over the walls? With all those sentries at night.’
‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he hid out in the stores and sneaked out during the day.’
And so on. The only question in Sabir’s mind is why Bonifacio took the stupid risk of knifing Muratti. Because if he’s ever caught, there’s no doubt now as to what his sentence will be. Either way, he’ll have escaped the bagne for ever.
Another long, restless night stretches out before Sabir. It’s under cover of darkness that men settle their differences, go thieving, go to their lovers. The shuffle of bodies, the muffled cries – the sound of pain or pleasure? Not always easy to know. Sleep comes rarely, but when it does, it brings uneasy dreams. Only in Sabir’s waking moments does his fiancée appear to him, beckon him. When he sleeps, his dreams are different. He’s in a wasteland of green. Like the Flemish battlefields in every respect except colour. Back then it was grey skies and kilometre upon kilometre of grey mud; now, it’s an endless expanse of tangled undergrowth that doesn’t seem to be growing so much as dying.
A fresh dispute has broken out, cranking up the tension in the barracks. Antillais is a black convict who’s quite a bit older than the others, maybe even as old as sixty. Until recently, he’s always kept himself to himself, spending all his spare time doting on his pet cat. Every night after lock-up, the cat would get in through a hole in the roof, then laboriously make its way down the wall onto the dirt floor, where Antillais would feed it meat scraps he saved from dinner. He’s even built the cat a little wooden manger where it slept, by the bed board. But one day, one of the forts-à-bras, known as Masque because of his tattooed face, complained about the way the cat pissed and shat all over the barracks. The two men practically came to blows over it, and Masque threatened to strangle the cat if he ever saw it again. Not long after that, the cat disappeared. For a few days, Antillais was broken with grief. A rumour started to do the rounds that Masque had killed the cat and, what’s worse, had cooked and eaten it with friends in the jungle one afternoon after work. Now, Antillais is given to talking to himself and mumbling terrible threats.
Masque fears Antillais, because Antillais is mad enough to risk his own life for revenge. But since Antillais is an old man, it’d be an act of cowardice to have him killed, so Masque can’t do that. He can’t even take normal precautions in the barracks without losing face among the other forts-à-bras. And the strain is beginning to show. Masque is one of the worst of the bullies, and there are plenty of men who wouldn’t mind if something happened to him. The other day, Sabir even noticed one of Masque’s enemies, a convict named Pierrot, pulling Antillais aside and talking to him in a low whisper. Not long ago, Pierrot had been sitting on the bed board counting some gambling winnings when Masque had stridden up, snatched half of the notes from him, pulled a knife and shouted: ‘Take it off me, if you think you fucking can!’ No one’s saying anything, but everyone’s mentally prepared for a bloodletting.
Sabir stares at the scratch marks on the wall opposite, where the cat used to shimmy down. He’s still thinking about Bonifacio’s escape – and about his own. There’ve already been a few failed attempts since his arrival, two from his barracks alone. Men who’ve just taken off, unprepared. They get across the river easily enough, only to be picked up by Dutch soldiers on the other side and sent back to Saint-Laurent. No, the only way is the properly planned, properly financed escape with likeminded individuals. It takes Sabir right back to the money problem. You can earn a few francs hunting butterflies, but even then you need a net. A decent one costs fifteen francs, and it’s weeks before you’re any good with it. He was hoping to make money as an écrivain, but it wasn’t long before he realised that wouldn’t work either. Not that most here aren’t illiterate, because they are. Rather, it’s that so few men have any desire to write letters any more. There’s the scarcity of paper in the camps, the problem of getting the letters back to Saint-Laurent – but that’s not the real reason. It takes four or five months to get a reply, and the longer you’re in the Colony, the wider the gulf grows. Pretty quickly, you’ve got nothing left to say to that other world; relentlessly, the Colony absorbs you until there is no other world. As for the rest – the faded photograph, the tattered letter with its protestation of love – all that becomes a hopeless fiction.
As Sabir closes his eyes, images of Bonifacio’s escape come to him. A fantasy unfolds: instead of Bonifacio escaping, it’s Sabir in that cell, waiting. The cell door is open. The turnkey calls for Muratti the guard, then bows his head, readying himself for the blow from Sabir that will knock him out. It’s done in the blur of a moment. Then Muratti appears. Sabir can feel the blade of a knife against his palm as he hides behind the door. That knife, ready to slip between a man’s ribs. And the thrust … but then everything blanks out, and Sabir finds that he can follow that particular fantasy no further.
Bonifacio’s
