Colony. Hugo Wilcken

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СКАЧАТЬ each other!’ No, he certainly wasn’t like other enlisted men. For a start, he wasn’t even working class. He was educated, he read educated books. He had a business, he’d been an importer of exotic plants. Why did he join the infantry, when he was clearly officer class? He had the reputation of being a brave soldier, in any case. Scrambling up the dirt walls to take potshots at the German wire-cutters with his old hunting rifle, in full view of the enemy lines. Reckless, death-wish behaviour. Sabir also recalls that Edouard used to be a keen sketcher. He always carried a little sketchbook with him. Sabir once flicked through one of them and found it full of desolate landscapes. A single tree stump in a field, a dark farmhouse against the sky …

      Darkness smothers the barracks. Over by the night-light, a card game is getting under way. The game they play here is called the marseillaise, a version of baccarat. Often it goes on until dawn. Not that Sabir has ever joined in. It’s too easy to get addicted to gambling, and once that happens, it’s the end. You’ll never get out. You’ll start winning, maybe huge amounts; you’ll find yourself living for the game, thinking about it incessantly all day and playing it all night. Then, after a while, you’ll start losing. When you’ve exhausted your funds, you’ll borrow money you can’t hope to pay back. Soon you’ll owe half the barracks. You’ll become an outcast, no one will play with you. You start receiving threats. Your nerves are gone, you’re pulling your knife at the slightest provocation. You’re in a hopeless spiral that can only end one way.

      Masque is the banker. He rattles the money box and a few convicts get off the bed board to join in. It’s the banker’s job to deal the cards, manage the game, settle any disputes. He gets a ten per cent cut of all the winnings, so it’s a lucrative position. You’ve got to be ruthless to do it, though, ready to defend yourself and draw your knife the moment there’s any trouble. Consequently, it’s always the toughest fort-à-bras who takes the job. Masque has been banker for the past month, but lately he’s let his second take over the role almost every night. Maybe he thinks it makes him too vulnerable to an attack from Antillais. If so, he seems to have changed his mind tonight. The tension in the barracks visibly eases: if Masque doesn’t think he’s going to be attacked, he must have good reason.

      Sabir watches the game from his corner. Behind the players, several people wait in attendance. There’s the man who earns a few sous spreading the blanket they play on. Another convict puts the cigarettes in front of each player; yet another pours the coffee: an entire mini-economy revolves around the game. Masque says nothing as he deals. His tattoos are a carnival joke. He’s bald on top but has tattooed in his hair. Around his eyes, tattooed glasses. On one cheek, an ace of spades; on the other, an ace of clubs. On his upper lip, a purple moustache. In civil society, he’d be a freak. But men like Masque rarely try to escape; the bagne is their life and it’s impossible for them to live outside it.

      One by one, the makeshift lamps go out. But the game goes on. One of the players, Sabir notices, is the Basque boy Say-Say, the one who’d come up from Saint-Laurent with the story of Bonifacio’s escape. He looks about seventeen, has freckles, big jug-handle ears and bad teeth. Too ugly to appeal to the forts-à-bras, but they’ve found another way to misuse him anyway. He had a full plan on arrival in the camp, and was too young and inexperienced to shut up about it. So the forts-à-bras coerced him into the card game and are in the process of picking him clean. Once they’ve done that, there’ll no longer be any future for him in this camp. Being from the Basque country, though, Say-Say probably knows his way around a sailing boat. As he watches the boy lose again, Sabir recalls the lad who’d bunked beside him on the journey out. Gaspard, with the country accent you could hardly understand. What happened to him, he wonders. Is he still alive? He remembers the promise he made to the boy to look out for him and feels a stab of shame. Perhaps he can redeem himself by transferring the promise to this other hopeless case.

      Hard rain starts to pound the roof. That means it’s about midnight. Before coming here, Sabir would never have believed how clockwork the weather could be. Life’s uncertainties have become certain, and vice versa. He listens to the dead sound of cards being shuffled, fingered, slapped down onto the blanket. There’s an occasional muttered curse. Everyone not involved in the game is lying down now, except a toothless old convict who’s darning a pair of trousers. Out of the corner of his eye, Sabir notices Antillais silently rising from the bed board. He moves like a ghost towards the card game. Masque has his back to him. A flash of something in Antillais’s hand. Sabir can feel a hundred eyes flaming up in the night. But Antillais sails straight past the card game. Nothing happens. Masque doesn’t even turn round. And Antillais continues down the short corridor, into the privy.

      For a minute, Masque continues with the card game. Then suddenly he tosses the pack to his assistant and leaps noiselessly to his feet, like a cat. Again, a flash of something in the reflection of the night-light. The assistant starts dealing. In a second, Masque has disappeared down the corridor to the privy.

      Now another man jumps up. Impossible to see who it is; he’s too quick. He’s been lying on the bed board right by the privy. The corridor swallows up his shadow as well. Nobody moves. The players freeze mid-game. In the vacuum, the sound of an uneven drip fills the air like a tolling bell. Suddenly, a scuffling. The noise of a garment being ripped, a muffled grunt. Then a pig’s squeal of a scream that splits open the night. It’s followed by a gurgling, guttural noise, like someone trying to clear his throat. Then nothing. The barracks is engulfed in a chaotic silence.

      A tiny, eternal moment of stillness before everyone snaps into action, in a storm of energy. The remaining little lamps are snuffed out. Players grab their money from the floor and race to the bed board. Men scramble to hide their knives. The marseillaise blanket and money box disappear and once again silence invades the barracks. Outside, the rain thunders on. And from the privy, groans, growing ever fainter.

      A man walks back out through the corridor. It’s Pierrot. The convict whose winnings Masque had brazenly made off with a few weeks back. He strolls over to the water barrel, starts washing his hands. He takes off his shirt, plunges it into the water barrel as well, wrings it out and casually tosses it over a piece of string to dry. Then he lies back down on the bed board by the privy. Another man walks out of the privy. Antillais. He’s muttering to himself. He too finds his spot on the bed board and lies down. Even he stops mumbling now, as an expectant hush shrouds the barracks.

      Minutes later, the bars of the door are rattled. ‘On your feet, all of you! Up! Up!’ The captain-at-arms is surrounded by guards, their revolvers unholstered. They pour into the barracks, dashing about like nervous dogs. Turnkeys with lamps follow them in; no doubt it’s the night-duty turnkey who signalled the alarm. The convicts get up from the bed board clumsily, as if drowsy from sleep. A couple of the guards go straight to the privy: it’s where the premeditated murders almost always take place. A minute later, they’re out again, dragging the body between them, trying hard not to get any blood on their uniforms. Masque is obviously dead, although no one’s actually bothering to formally verify it. He’s already nothing, an ugly lump of meat. Soon it’ll be as if he never lived at all. Or he’ll be incarnated in one of those amusing stories convicts like to tell. The man who was killed for cooking a cat.

      ‘Everyone out! Everyone out!’

      As the convicts file out of the door, the captain-at-arms examines their hands and clothes for signs of blood. Pierrot passes through, so does Antillais. No doubt the turnkeys know all about Masque, Antillais and the cat. The convicts march out into a sheet of tropical rain.

      Now the guards do a quick inspection of the barracks. They find half a dozen knives and a few other illicit items. But most of the men have hidden their knives well enough to pass such a cursory search. The rain stops from one moment to the next – here, everything happens abruptly, even the weather: the longueurs may be disorientating, but they’re always punctuated by sudden dramas. The men are marched back into the barracks, dripping wet. A smeary crimson trail leads from the privy to where Masque’s СКАЧАТЬ