Because soon enough, money or no money, he’ll have to emulate Bonifacio. And run those same risks that this other man took so nonchalantly. For Sabir, the thought of escape involuntarily brings up jumbled images of his first school fight; of that night he tried to lose his virginity; of being shelled for the first time in Belgium; of the first corpse he came across in the fields behind the trenches. Bonifacio is gone, like a magic trick, and in an obscure way Sabir feels orphaned.
The next day passes in a dream. Sabir’s work isn’t onerous; in fact, he’s even started to enjoy it. Having never before given even a passing thought to gardening, he’s now beginning to see how there might be something in it. The commandant has brought a small library with him to the camp, and it includes several old books on botany and horticulture. He’s encouraged Sabir to look through these books and take anything that catches his eye. They’re fairly useless from a practical perspective – a history of the château gardens of the Loire Valley; a tome on flowers and orchids native to France – and at first Sabir borrowed merely to show willing. But now it’s become his habit to sit down with a book during the half-hour the convicts have for their lunch. They make for difficult reading and are often boring; on the other hand, they’re the only books he has access to at the camp.
Today, Sabir has taken a nineteenth-century treatise on horticulture from the library. After breaking his bread, he opens the book and reads the first lines of the first page: ‘From the intimate union of art and nature is born the perfect composition of a garden, which Time, purifying public taste, now promises to bring us. In such a garden, the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into a haven against the rude shocks of our mortal existence.’
Not easy to get the hang of sentences like these. During the war, Sabir was a voracious reader, devouring the adventure stories, novels of intrigue and penny dreadfuls that were specially printed for soldiers at the front. At times, he was gripped by a terrible hunger. He’d crunch through novel after novel, day and night, barely aware of what was happening in and around the trenches. But those books were different. The words and phrases flew effortlessly by, their meaning selfevident. With the commandant’s books, on the other hand, you have to concentrate on every line. And yet, as he rereads the passage from the treatise, Sabir has his tiny flash of revelation. Since the war, Sabir has been in and out of factory work. But this business of gardening is clearly something more than the pastoral equivalent of that. There’s plenty to learn, if one ever cared to learn it. It’s what it might be like to have a craft, or a special skill. Again he recalls Edouard’s rosebush behind the trenches, and the care he lavished on it. Indeed, it’s a measure of the unreason of this colony that Edouard is out chopping wood while Sabir is in charge of creating a garden. For a brief moment, Sabir catches a glimpse of a different kind of life.
But when the end of the day approaches, when it’s time to go back to the barracks, he’s filled with fear and anxiety again. There are any number of reasons for escaping – one of them, he’s beginning to realise, is to get away from the other convicts. Those endless nights with their whispers and pressing tensions; the bullying forts-à-bras, self-esteem set on a hair trigger; the night noises that shred 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
