That’s what makes it feel so foreign.
The path ends abruptly. Coming out of the forest is like coming out of a dream. Ahead, lined with palm trees, an avenue – vertiginously wide after the confines of the forest. Swathes of jungle have been cleared, perhaps a couple of hundred hectares in all. A number of small buildings have been erected there. At the bottom, six whitewashed barracks with thatched roofs, three on either side of the avenue. The effect is almost pretty. A few convicts wander about, but otherwise the place is almost deserted.
Sabir reports to the bookkeeper as he’s been told to do; after his name and number have been registered, he’s taken to his barracks. It’s set out in the same way as the one in Saint-Laurent, with long planks of wood by the walls that serve as communal beds. Unlike in Saint-Laurent, though, this barracks has a wretched lived-in feel. Threadbare rags and battered tin bowls lie at the base of the bed plank, along with little statuettes and other objects half-carved out of the heavy tropical wood. They’re to be sold to the guards, probably, who’ll then sell them on as souvenirs in Saint-Laurent or Cayenne. On the walls, pictures of glamorous women torn from ancient copies of La Vie Parisienne. And family photos, warped in the heat and damp, of wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, mistresses.
Sabir is told to dump his cloth sack in the far corner and report immediately to the camp commandant. The bookkeeper points out the path he’s to take, to the left of the grand avenue. After a ten-minute walk through the jungle, he comes to a clearing by the river. Here, there are convicts at work, levelling the ground, erecting a wall, building a large house. Sabir can hear a gramophone. Classical music – crisp piano notes and a male voice singing in German. In itself, it’s jolting, since German will always remind Sabir of the front, and those odd fragments of conversation that used to drift across the Flemish mud when the wind was right. Sabir knows nothing about classical music, but the frozen, precise tones seem starkly out of place as they echo across the trees and water, here in the suffocating humidity of the equatorial forest.
Inside, the ground floor of the house appears to be more or less complete and habitable; beyond a short corridor there’s a sitting room. The gramophone in one corner. A table in the middle, and a man sitting by it, his head in his hands – as if in pain or in prayer. He looks up. ‘Ah, the gardener!’ He gets to his feet and extends his hand. Sabir takes a moment to extend his own: it’s a long time since anyone offered to shake hands with him. It feels like reaching into another world.
‘I don’t know where to start. I’ve got some rough plans drawn up here. Or we could go and see the terrain now; perhaps that would be best. If you’ll follow me out here, the back way …’
Sabir keeps right behind the commandant. They’re looking out over land that’s been cleared, some of it levelled as well. ‘There’ll be a series of steps here once I get the stone,’ the commandant continues, ‘and then to the right there’ll be a fountain. That has nothing to do with you, of course; I’ve got a stonemason working on that. Over here, in front, I want a lawn, if I can get the turf, with the flower beds to the side away from the river, and beyond a jardin anglais. You’re going to have to write up some specifications for plant species. I’ve got seeds from France and I have a shipment of seedlings coming from Florida.’
Bewildered, Sabir says nothing throughout, but the commandant, carried away by his own enthusiasm, doesn’t notice. They stroll about the terrain, while the commandant continues to spill out a jumble of horticultural plans that Sabir can barely take in: a hedge to cut the river from the lawn; a fishpond in the jardin anglais, in front of the folly he’s having built. But the fish are a problem since none of the river species would survive. Sabir nods, watches the commandant. He towers over Sabir and is noticeably thin – like a convict rather than an Administration official, most of whom run to fat. He has a carefully trimmed black moustache. His hair is dark, what’s left of it: at the front most of it has gone and he’s cut the rest extremely short. This too, coupled with his tanned face, reinforces the convict look. It’s difficult to say how old he might be. Thirty-five? Forty-five? There’s a certain Teutonic stiffness about him – Sabir wonders whether he’s from one of the ‘German’ départements, Alsace or Lorraine.
Now they’re back in the sitting room, poring over plans. ‘A lot of this I want done within the next four weeks, before my wife arrives. All the basic landscaping at the very least must be done by then. I can give you half a dozen men; it should be sufficient if you’re well organised.’ The commandant has lit a cigarette, a proper French one, not the sawdust-cut rubbish the convicts smoke. Ignored, the cigarette consumes itself in the ashtray: it’s torture to watch. Out of the blue, the commandant shoots Sabir a question: ‘So what’s your experience? Who did you work for?’
‘I was head gardener for the Comtesse d’Entremeuse, sir. I looked after the gardens at the Château Ben Ali.’
‘Really? How interesting …’
Within seconds, Sabir has a whole story worked out in his head, with all sorts of baroque details. But already the commandant has lost interest and has started talking about his garden again.
Nightfall, after the evening meal. Stretched out on the hard board bunk, hands behind his head, Sabir watches the to and fro of the barracks. There’s a night-light between the two bed boards but many of the men have their own little lamps as well, fashioned out of empty tins. There’s not much conversation. A few of the convicts have quizzed Sabir about Saint-Laurent, but once they realise that he’s got no interesting news and no money, they drift off to their own corners. One man is mending his butterfly net, another is carving something out of a wood block, yet another is squeezing parasites from the soles of his feet. In the middle, a card game is in progress.
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