Colony

For Julie and Léon

I did not die – yet nothing of life remainedDante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

COLONY ONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

COLONY TWO

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

COLONY THREE

I

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Hugo Wilcken

Copyright

About the Publisher

Lurid rumours abound about life in the penal colony. There are the labour camps where they make you work naked under the sun; the jungle parasites that bore through your feet and crawl up to your brain; the island where they intern leper convicts; the silent punishment blocks where the guards wear felt-soled shoes; the botched escapes that end in cannibalism. As the stories move through the prison ship, they mutate at such a rate that it becomes impossible to gauge their truth.

In Sabir’s cage, there’s only one man who’s already been out there and actually knows what it’s like. He’s a grizzled assassin called Bonifacio. Although not tall, he’s bulkily built, with the bulging, tattooed biceps of a Paris hoodlum. His cool menace unnerves most prisoners but doesn’t stop a few from pestering him for information. The questions obviously irritate him and he only bothers to reply when bribed with cigarettes, which are in short supply on board. Sabir asks nothing himself, but listens as he lies on his hammock, gazing through the tiny porthole into the punishing intensity of the blue outside. It’s from these overheard fragments that he gradually builds up a picture of what awaits him across the ocean. He now knows that they’ll disembark at Saint-Laurent, a small frontier town on the banks of a river called the Maroni, somewhere north of the Amazon, somewhere south of Venezuela. A splinter of France lost in the jungle.

‘That’s where the main penitentiary is. Where they do the selection,’ he hears Bonifacio explain one day in his thick Corsican accent, shot through with Montmartre. ‘If they think you’re dangerous, you go straight to the islands. There are three of them. Diable is for political prisoners. The main barracks are on Royale and the punishment cells on Saint-Joseph. If you end up on the islands, there’s no chance of escape. But you won’t have to do hard labour.

‘If you don’t have a trade, they’ll send you to one of the forest camps. Some are near Saint-Laurent, some are on the coast. Do anything to avoid them. They’re the worst. You’re out in the sun all day chopping trees. If you don’t fill your quota, you don’t get your rations. You end up with fever, dysentery. If you’re down for the camps, bribe the bookkeeper to get you a job at Saint-Laurent. If that doesn’t work, pay one of the Blacks or Arabs to chop your wood for you. Then buy your way out as quick as you can.

‘If you’ve got a trade they can use, you get to stay at Saint-Laurent. Or they send you up to the capital, Cayenne. You work for the Administration. There are cooks, butchers, bakers, mechanics, bookkeepers, porters … If you get a job, make sure it’s outside the penitentiary. That way, you’re out during the day, you’re unguarded. Best thing is to work for an official, as houseboy or cook. You get to sleep at their house. But you won’t score a job like that first off.

‘To survive, you need dough. To escape, you need dough. To get it, you need a scam. Everyone’s got a scam. The guys who work at the hospital steal quinine and sell it on. The iron-mongers make knives and plans and sell them on. In the camps they catch butterflies and sell them to the guards, who sell them to collectors in America. Everyone’s got a scam.’

So much to take in. During the long sleepless nights, Sabir turns it all over in his mind. In the solitude of the darkness, problems seem insurmountable. How to avoid these forest camps, for instance? As far as he knows, Sabir hasn’t been classed dangerous, but he has no particular skill other than basic soldiery. He has no money. He knows that most of the other prisoners do, banknotes tightly fitted into the little screw-top cylinder they call a plan, hidden in the rectum. Money given to them by their families. Sabir’s father has disowned him; his mother is dead. No trade, no money; no brawn either: Sabir is a smallish man with a slight build. There are nights when a paralysing nervousness invades him, worse even than the anxiety attacks of the Belgian trenches. It’s such a long time since he’s had to consider a future. He’s got too used to being a judicial object, shunted from prison to prison, prison to court, court to prison. He’s got used to lawyers talking for him, being his voice, just as all the others talk about him and around him. Almost as if he weren’t there at all.

The new life that awaits him seems very different. Not at all like a mainland prison. Deeply strange and yet somehow familiar: it’s the world of the romans à quatre sous, the pulp novels that Sabir used to devour when on leave from the front. In Sabir’s mind, the bagne – as the penal colony is called – is a savage fantasy land, peopled with shaven-headed convicts in striped pyjamas, boldly tattooed from head to foot, guarded by men in pith helmets and dress whites. The coastline is an impenetrable wall of green jungle; gaudy parrots scream from the trees; crocodiles lurk just below the water’s surface; natives glide to and fro in dugout canoes; bare-breasted women tend to children in palm-roofed huts; wide-mouthed rivers disgorge into an infinite ocean. It’s a netherworld of no definable location, surging up out of the tropics like an anti-Atlantis. When he was a child, Sabir’s mother would tell him that unless he behaved, ‘