Colony. Hugo Wilcken
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as if the commandant’s on the verge of talking about her again, only once has he actually done so. It was an evening of strangulated monkey howls – no doubt some sort of mating ritual. The commandant had had several rums. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘she was never like any other women. To me, the others are dead. Quite dead! Only she is truly alive.’
Now Sabir’s back in the house. The commandant will return soon, but there’s time enough to look out for any titbits to steal. The office is its usual mess of books, blueprints, papers, empty glasses, full ashtrays. In the corner, under the drinks cabinet, there’s a cupboard. It’s always locked. In fact, it’s the only thing in the house that always is. Sabir has contemplated forcing the lock before, but has so far drawn back from doing so. If the commandant discovered it had been tampered with, he’d have to know it was Sabir. And then what would happen? He might lose all his privileges. And get sent to another camp, where he’d end up chopping trees in the sun, like Edouard. Yet there’s another, more obscure reason for not doing it. To Sabir, locking the cupboard seems to be a message to him from the commandant:take what you want here, anything, except what’s in this cupboard. Spare this and the rest is yours.
It’s the first time he’s seen the key in the cupboard. Sabir pauses, pricked with a sense of guilt that’s gone within the second. Through the window he can see the commandant emerging from the forest, ant-like against the immensity of the trees. He’ll be here in five or six minutes. Sabir turns the key and yanks the cupboard door open. Inside, a few neat piles of papers and letters. He pulls a few out of their envelopes, expecting them to be from the commandant’s wife. Disappointment: they’re not. Some are to do with business affairs, others appear to be from a family member. One envelope has a Swiss stamp. The typed letter inside is on headed paper: Dr Martineau, Eves-les-Bains, near Geneva. Monsieur, I am replying to your letter of 22nd January, 1927, concerning your wife. Sabir pushes the letter back into its envelope and shoves it into his pocket. Beside the piles of letters and papers, a small metal box; inside, a tidy wad of fifty-franc notes. Sabir takes a few of them – best not be too greedy – then shuts the box, locks the cupboard door and slips out of the study.
Minutes later, Sabir watches as the commandant’s face colours with surprise and frustration. ‘What, none of them survived? Not a single one?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, I’ll be … damned!’ The commandant’s on the verge of some explosive rage. He starts to pace about impotently, his struggle to keep calm filling the room. ‘Of course, they did tell me most of them wouldn’t survive. I’ll give them that. But then they promised a good quarter would be all right.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ve left two crates out for you to inspect.’
An unpleasant feeling invades Sabir as they walk out under a terrible sun to where the orchid nursery was to be. It takes him a moment to identify this feeling as remorse; it’s gone almost as soon as it had come. The commandant bends down to inspect the crates and sift through the steaming, sodden plants. Most of them are just a sludgy mess now: decomposition sets in so quickly here. One he holds up to the sun, like a farmer inspecting a stillborn animal. This climate – which doesn’t so much nurture the living, as liquefy it … The commandant sighs, his anger now changed to resignation. ‘I suppose that’s it, then. No point in keeping this stuff.’
The fate of the orchids hangs over the rest of the day. Sabir spends the afternoon digging holes for a boundary fence. The commandant has been most particular about this fence, but whether it’s to keep the jungle out or the garden in, Sabir has no idea. Not long before the end of the workday, the commandant wanders over. He seems muted, deflated. At first he says nothing, looking on as Sabir self-consciously goes about his work.
‘Such a pity about the orchids,’ he murmurs finally. ‘I so much wanted my wife to have them, when she arrived.’
Sabir doesn’t know what to say but momentarily stops what he’s doing, and the commandant places his hand on Sabir’s shoulder as if in commiseration with a son – or even a lover.
‘When will she be arriving, sir?’
‘She’s taken a berth on the Queen Wilhelmina. The boat’s due in at Saint-Laurent early on Thursday morning.’
‘You must be looking forward to it, sir.’
‘Indeed I am.’
Thursday. And the proposed date for the escape is Friday. She might well stay in Saint-Laurent a day or two. Or she might come straight here. In which case, Sabir may just get to see her before the escape. He imagines her on a boat down the river, sitting upright in the canoe like a haughty princess, to be ferried ashore by the Bonis like so much cargo … The trouble is that when he thinks of the commandant’s wife, she is so very real. And yet when he dreams of escape, it feels like fantasy.
This is the first time in his life that he’s felt a small measure of fulfilment. Since leaving the barracks, things have been very different. He’s decently fed now, and he has work to do that doesn’t grind him down, not in the way factory work did. He’s a gardener. He’s developing a skill. The garden offers possibilities. A sort of liberty, even. Because life before his arrest – when he never had the luxury to think past the next meal, the next few francs – was anything but free.
‘What about you?’the commandant says. ‘Did you have a girl back home? Do you have a girl here?’
A girl here? He wonders how the camp commandant could understand so little of convict life.
‘No girl here, sir. A girl back home, though. My fiancée.’
‘Really? What’s her name?’
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