I Who Have Never Known Men

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I must describe the event in precise detail, which I find very difficult, because of the shock and amazement. It happened just as the guards were opening the hatch to give us our food. The pots and pans always stayed inside the cage, we piled them up beside the sinks, but we had to hand back the plates which we slid between the bars after each meal. The food would arrive on huge trolleys and we had to pick it up with our hands and place it in the containers, a task that was both unpleasant and difficult. At the back of the room, on the other side of the bars, a big metal door would slide open a fraction, instantly sparking our curiosity. What would they give us today? What would we be able to do with it? Two of the guards would go over to the door, pulling the trolley, while the third would continue to watch us, his whip at the ready. First of all, we had to take the soup ladle, the forty spoons and the blunt knives for peeling the vegetables. That day, there were carrots and beef cut into coarse chunks, and the women immediately began arguing over whether they would cook all the carrots or keep some to eat raw. There were also potatoes, to our delight, because they were a rare treat. The women said it was odd, because in the past world, potatoes had been very cheap and a food so rich in various things that, according to Anthea, a person could keep healthy eating nothing but potatoes. But we found the quantity of food insufficient, even for the tiny appetites of women who were inactive and had virtually nothing to do, and so the pleasure was short-lived. One of the guards slid a key into the lock of the little hatch. At that precise moment, there was a terrifyingly loud noise.

I’d never heard anything like it, but the women froze, because they’d recognised the sirens. It was an ear-piercingly loud, continuous wail. I was dumbstruck and I think I lost track for the first time since I’d acquired the ability to count time. The women who were seated leapt up, those who were at the bars collecting the food, recoiled. The guard let go of the bunch of keys, leaving them in the lock and turned to face the others. They looked at one another briefly, and then they all rushed towards the main exit, flinging the double doors wide open – something they’d never done before – and ran out.

They ran out. For the first time since we women had been imprisoned, we were alone in the bunker.

For me, the initial shock was soon over. I raced forward, slid my arm between the bars, finished turning the key and removed it together with the whole bunch. I gave the hatch a push and it opened. I stepped back, my hands clenched, because I was holding the most precious thing in the world. My internal clock had started up again and I can say that we stood there for more than a minute, staring at the open door, still unable to grasp what had happened. The shock had taken my breath away and I was panting. I got a grip on myself, grabbed the bars and jumped through the hatch to unlock the door of the cage. There were several keys on the key ring, I had to try two before finding the right one. Since I’d never used a key before, I fumbled, but I managed to open the cage door. The women watched me, rooted to the spot. They looked as though they couldn’t grasp what was happening.

‘Come on,’ I shouted. ‘Come on out!’

Then I ran to the other door. I had no idea what I’d find there. It was only a few metres away, which made me wonder whether I’d run into the guards, whether I wasn’t rushing headlong into danger, but I told myself that the women would come to the rescue if necessary, and that forty angry women would be more than a match for a few guards, even if they were armed. I went through the open door, and found myself in a wide, deserted corridor. On either side were doors that opened into rooms which I knew nothing about.

The first woman to join me was Anthea, and just behind her, Dorothy, the one who’d questioned me. They both wore the same expression of disbelief. They spoke, but their words were drowned by the continuous wail of the siren, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I realised that I was talking too, I said that the guards weren’t there any more, that they’d left, they’d run away, and things like that. I kept saying the same thing over and over, as if stating an unbelievable truth that had to be repeated again and again to convince myself. We persevered with our futile conversation for a few seconds, then the siren suddenly stopped, as if stifled by its own noise.

‘They’ve gone,’ I said.

Dorothy nodded. Anthea echoed:

‘They’ve gone.’

We were so disconcerted that we just stood there, utterly at a loss. Then, one by one, the other women appeared, hesitantly at first, and then, as they reassured each other, they began pushing and shoving, thronging the corridor that was too narrow to contain us all. I withdrew, entered one of the rooms, and looked about me. I saw a big table, a few chairs and some cupboards. Of course, at that point, I didn’t know the names of all those things; I saw objects that I didn’t recognise as I threaded my way rapidly between them, because I’d glimpsed another door on the far side of the room. It too was open, and led to the staircase.

Today I say staircase as if, at that time, I knew what it was and what I was looking for. As a matter of fact, we weren’t even certain that we were underground. The women thought so because there were no windows. I’d never found myself at the foot of a staircase, but I’d heard of them and I immediately realised what this was. I ran up a few stairs then turned round to call, unnecessarily, because Anthea and Dorothy had followed me. They were more cautious than I – later they told me they dreaded the sudden appearance of the guards, and that before following me, they’d shouted to the women that they might have to fight, and the women had replied that they were prepared to be killed if necessary, but they would never return to the cage. I was no longer thinking of them. I ran up the stairs recklessly; I ran with a sort of all-consuming elation, an intoxication akin to the feeling I’d no longer been able to induce by making up stories once I’d emerged from my isolation and begun talking to the others. I was borne by an impulse so powerful that, had a guard appeared at that moment, even if he were twice my size, I’d have knocked him over and trampled him underfoot; I was possessed by a wild joy that was heedless of all else. I climbed without becoming breathless, without getting tired, even though I had never taken more than twenty steps in a straight line. I flew up the steps as in the dreams I had later, dreams I’d heard the women describing, where you rise up and glide like the birds that I was soon to watch being carried by the airstreams, effortlessly drifting, dancing for hours in the twilight, just as I was dancing up the steps, weightless, floating, in an exhilarating ascent towards the undreamed-of unknown, the outside, the world that was not the cage; and I had no thoughts, only a visceral thrill that swept me along, and images, perhaps, that raced through my mind, or simply words that gushed up and rose to receive the imminent images – the sky, the night, the horizon, the sun, the wind, and many more, countless words that had accumulated over the years and which were in a hurry, spurring me on. Oh! That first time I went up the stairs! When I think of it, my eyes fill with tears and I feel that compulsion, that surge of triumph. I think I’d be prepared to relive twelve years of captivity to experience that miraculous ascent, the wonderful certainty that made me so light that I flew up the hundred steps in one go, without stopping for breath, and I was laughing.

All of a sudden, I found myself at the top. I was in what we later called a cabin, three walls and a door, also open, the plain spreading out before me. I bounded forward and looked. It was the world.

It was daylight. The sky was grey, but not the lifeless grey of the bunker walls. Huge masses of subtle hues glided gently in a light breeze. I recognised them as clouds; they were tinged with pearl, lit from behind by the sun. A strange emotion choked me, more restrained and exquisite than the exuberance that had borne me up the stairs. I wished I could linger, but there were too many other things to discover. It was drizzling. Fate would have us emerge on a rainy day. Later, we realised that rain was rare in this season. I stepped forward, raised my face and arms to this extraordinary wetness, which I’d heard about but had been unable to imagine. A few drops fell onto my hands and I licked them, enthralled. My dress was soon soaked through and the breeze, light as it was, plastered it to my thighs, and I found that wonderful.

‘But where are we?’ asked a voice behind me.

It was a breathless Dorothy, supported by Anthea. They both looked around, and so did I. There was nothing but a gently undulating plain stretching as far as the eye could see, from one end of the horizon to the other.

‘We’re outside,’ I replied, laughing. ‘And there isn’t a single guard. They’ve all gone.’

‘We’re a long way from a town, there’s no sign at all of any housing. I’d always thought we must be near some big city,’ said Anthea.

Dorothy frowned.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. This plain is vast, it’s unbroken. We are not in my country, you could always see mountains.’

Anthea seemed so puzzled and anxious that I felt sorry for her.

‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘The main thing is that we’re outside, free, and there are no guards.’

The other women began to arrive, out of breath and stumbling, and we moved away from the cabin to make room. Soon, they were all there, looking around in amazement, trying to fathom where they were, repeating, one after the other, that they’d never seen anything like it, almost terrified at being in such a strange place. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t rejoicing wholeheartedly at the miracle of being outside, released from the cage, at seeing the sky and feeling the wind and the rain. They’d wanted something all their lives, but now they had it, they didn’t recognise it. Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.

‘I’m frightened,’ said Annabel.

They huddled together, a small, terrified group in the middle of an unknown land. After the familiarity of the cage, the forty women clung to one another, disorientated by the vast stillness from which nothing emanated.

‘What if they come back?’

I realised they were trying to justify their fear. We scanned our surroundings; all we could see was the stony plain where nothing moved except the scant grass gently swaying in the breeze.

‘We mustn’t stay here, we must leave, hide,’ said Annabel.

‘Go where?’ muttered Frances. ‘There’s nothing. Not a building, not a shelter, not a road, just …’

She looked at the small building from which we’d emerged.

‘Just this sort of cabin, in the middle of nowhere.’

‘We’re lost,’ said a voice.

There was a murmur of unfinished phrases, one picking up from where the previous speaker had trailed off, their words colliding and tumbling over one another. I suddenly lost my temper.

‘Then go back inside! The cage is still down there, if you’re so frightened of being outside!’

‘Oh, you and your …’ retorted Annabel, exasperated.

She stopped short. I think she was going to say insolence, or rebelliousness, but she quickly realised that I was right, that this panicking would get them nowhere. I tried to control myself too, for I sensed that an argument was brewing, and that would have given them an outlet for their anxiety and set them all against me. Anthea, who’d remained calm, backed me up.

‘The child’s right. We must think, and organise ourselves. I don’t understand where the guards have gone, or why they’ve disappeared, and I’m frightened too. It’s not long since they left the bunker and there’s no trace of them.’

‘Eleven minutes,’ I added, ‘since the siren went off –perhaps a little longer, because I lost track of time for a moment. It took us eleven minutes to open the door, get out and climb up the stairs.’

‘Eleven minutes? With a helicopter or small aircraft, that’s plenty of time for them to vanish from sight, I suppose. But what about us? We can’t disappear like that. To get over there, to the horizon, will take us a good two or three hours on foot. If they’re planning to come back and catch us, we’ll be captured in no time.’

‘Not me,’ said Annabel. ‘I’d rather die, I won’t go back. They can drug me as much as they like, I’m sure I could turn the most carefully dosed drug into a lethal poison.’

‘Same here,’ said Greta. ‘I’ll stop breathing. It must be a matter of willpower, I’m sure you can stop your heart from beating.’

These words hardened their resolve, they began to chorus: ‘Me too’, ‘Me too’. Rebellion was stirring, it was plain that this time, they would not be caught unawares, as must have happened in the past, that they wouldn’t allow themselves to be overtaken by events like terrified creatures who could be led to the slaughterhouse, because they could not conceive of the slaughterhouse. They drew themselves up and gazed at the strange landscape. They planted their feet more firmly on the ground, and there were smiles.

‘It’s raining,’ said Frances.

She held out her hands to collect the raindrops as I had done and raised them to her lips. Then she felt her hair and cheeks.

‘I’m soaking wet. I’d forgotten what it’s like. It’s such a long time …’

‘More than twelve years,’ said Greta. ‘Just look how the child has grown.’

They turned to me, their clock, and stared at me in silence for a long time, then they spread out a little. They bent down and touched the ground. Some of them picked up stones to reveal dry, grey soil, for the rain hadn’t soaked through. Annabel moistened her index finger with saliva and held it up to see which way the wind was blowing.

‘The clouds are light. It must be the middle of the day, you can see the sun is high. If it is going in the usual direction, the wind is coming from the west.’

‘Of course, because it’s raining. Westerlies always bring rain.’

‘In your country, maybe, but we’re not in your country.’

‘Oh no! There’d be hills and forests!’

That made them laugh. They needed to relieve the tension.

‘It’s odd, there aren’t any birds. Do the birds shelter when it rains?’ asked Greta who’d only ever lived in the city.

‘But where would they shelter? There isn’t a single tree in sight, only a few shrubs.’

‘And stones,’ said Dorothy. ‘You couldn’t grow anything here. I’ve never seen such poor soil.’

‘Anyway, we haven’t got anything to grow.’

That short phrase hung in the air for a second, as if minds were grasping it, probing it and then setting it aside for later. But it left an echo:

‘We must prepare some food,’ said Greta. ‘It’s time to eat, and I’m hungry. It’s funny, because down there, I never felt hungry.’

The food was in the bunker, on the trolley. A shudder rippled through the women at the thought that we’d have to go back down if we wanted to eat.

‘How are we going to cook it? I don’t see how we can cook!’

‘What does it matter? We must eat, even if the meat is raw!’

‘I won’t go down there. I’d rather die of hunger,’ announced Annabel.

Once again, they drew together, shoulder to shoulder, seeking comfort in the contact, I suppose. Someone had to go, and, of course, it was me. Probably because I remembered no other world than that of the prison, I was the least afraid. When they huddled together, I didn’t join in, and so I was standing apart from the group, and their eyes turned to me. I understood, and smiled at them:

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I’ll go.’

I lost no time, and made my way immediately towards the cabin. They followed a few metres behind, as if to give me their support in doing what they would have been so afraid to do, and I was glad because I baulked when I reached the staircase. Supposing the guards returned? Would the women be able to fight? For a moment I pictured an appalling massacre, imagining myself coming back up to find a heap of corpses and the sniggering guards waiting for me, brandishing their weapons. I braced myself, because I didn’t want to be a coward, and set off down the stairs. Since then, I’ve been back down hundreds of times – that is one of the few things I haven’t counted – and each time it is just as unpleasant, as if I were walking into a trap that could close any minute. When I was alone, I got into the habit of blocking the door of the cabin with a few stones: it was ludicrous, the locks were rusty and the bolts were jammed, and the wind was never strong enough to move the heavy wooden door, but I felt easier.

I rushed down the hundred steps as fast as I could, but taking great care because I’d never descended a staircase before, and I was afraid of falling, then I ran along the corridor to find myself faced with the problem of carrying the huge pots, the carrots and meat, and also the water. I realised that I’d have to make several trips and that it was probably more than I could manage. Half an hour earlier, I’d been so excited that I’d raced up without feeling in the least tired, but now I was short of breath, I felt giddy and my legs were trembling. I reckoned I’d have to make one trip to start with, and so I heaped the meat into a pot. I was halfway up when I met Anthea on her way down.

‘I didn’t think you’d manage all on your own.’

‘You’re right, it’s too much. Besides, we only thought of the pots and the meat and vegetables, but we also need water, to drink and for cooking, and the plates.’

‘And we have to make a fire. Up there, they’re gathering stones and twigs, but how will we light it?’

We decided that we’d take up the things I’d already assembled and then we’d explore the rooms.

Later, we thought a great deal about what we’d discovered, but once again, we never came up with a coherent explanation. There were no sleeping quarters for the guards, nor were there any beds, which Anthea found surprising. So they didn’t sleep there? Did they leave every evening and come back in the morning? Where did they go?

‘They vanished in eleven minutes,’ muttered Anthea. ‘And we’ve found no trace of them. I’m not sure an ordinary helicopter can go that fast.’

The drawers contained various tools: hammers, nails, screwdrivers, all of which I had to learn to use, as well as knives and hatchets that would come in very useful. Anthea was thrilled to find four big rucksacks, and she explained what they were used for. Then I showed her a pile of little boxes. They contained matches, which solved the problem of how to light a fire. But, most importantly, we discovered vast stores of food. First it was stacks of cans that made Anthea shout for joy; she read the labels and recited the names of the dishes with an enthusiasm that made me laugh: sauerkraut, baked beans, pâté and vegetables I’d never tasted. Then we opened the door of a cold store full of frozen meat and poultry, as well as sacks of carrots, leeks, celery and turnips. So we’d have no trouble surviving.

‘I can’t work out how long all this will last, but even with forty of us, it looks to me as if there’s enough to keep us going for years.’

She named everything she saw and my head was soon in a whirl from all I’d learned. She would have gone on exploring for hours, but I told her we had to get back to the others, who were waiting for us. We returned with meat, cans, lots of potatoes and matches. The women kindled the twigs stacked up between large stones.

‘Dorothy was sure you’d find matches,’ said Greta. ‘Men always have matches.’

We went back down to fetch some water. This time, two of the stronger women came with us.

The rain had stopped and the clouds dispersed while the food was cooking. The sun came out, high in the sky, which meant, so the women said, that it was the middle of the day. We ate that first meal sitting in little groups around the fire, whereas, in the cell, each woman used to take her food and sit anywhere. There was plenty of food and, for the first time, there was some left over in the pots, which made the women joke:

‘We’ll get fat!’

‘After dieting so strictly for years, we’ll lose the benefit!’

It was only much later that they explained to me why they found that so funny. Strangely, these women who now laughed so readily hadn’t joked yet since our escape. I was always solemn, and hadn’t changed. I suppose they’d been overwhelmed by the successive shocks.

‘What time is it?’ Greta asked me.

And I was surprised to hear myself answer that it was ten o’clock at night. It was just over three hours since the siren had gone off, and at that moment, we hadn’t been awake for long. So it was true that we hadn’t been following the usual pattern of day and night.

‘You’d better put your watch right,’ laughed Anthea.

‘How do I know where to start?’

‘We’ll watch the sunset this evening. Take that as your starting point and tell us how many hours have gone by at sunset tomorrow. From one sunset to another is a whole day, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dorothy. ‘Doesn’t it depend on the time of year?’

They launched into a confused argument that went completely over my head. The days got longer in summer, shorter in winter, but from one sunset to another was always twenty-four hours, wasn’t it? None of them was completely sure, not even Anthea who was the cleverest. I soon stopped listening to them. Anyway, sooner or later, night would fall: where were we going to spend it?

Of course, there was no question of going back and sleeping in the prison, and the thought of staying close to the cabin wasn’t very appealing. I’d watched the sun’s progress, and I had the impression that we had a few hours before us until dark. I suggested going down to fetch food and blankets, and then moving away. But in which direction? What if the guards came back? How could we predict where they’d come from when there was no sign of any road? Besides, how had they left? Anthea said there were no beds in the rooms. This provoked a fresh torrent of questions, but Dorothy sensed the impending chaos and reminded the women of what she considered the fundamental question: if we agreed to move away, we had to decide which way to go. So how should we decide? Anthea pointed south: in that direction there was a slight dip in the ground that could conceal us.

The women worried a great deal about the return of the guards, but they never came back. It took a long time for them to shake off their fear, and I couldn’t really understand why they weren’t reassured sooner. The guards had disappeared in moments, leaving no trace, as if they’d evaporated. They’d appeared from nowhere and now they had gone back there and I was less surprised than the others, who had lived in a world where things used to make sense. But I had known only the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them, as I gradually began to realise. We were free.

In fact, we’d merely moved to a new prison.

Anthea and I made several trips down to fetch everything we needed. The women waited for us outside the cabin and relieved us of our load, then we went straight back down again. The third time, they grabbed us, pleased and excited.

‘Come and see! Come and see! Look what we’ve made!’

A few paces from where we’d sat to eat was a clump of bushes, not very thick, but fairly high. They’d uprooted the bushes in the centre, scratching their hands, and thrown blankets over the sides. We’d brought up two shovels which they’d used to dig a hole. I didn’t understand.

‘This is the toilet,’ they announced triumphantly.

‘We’re human again,’ declared Dorothy. ‘We can do our business in private, sheltered from view.’

I was used to the toilet in the prison, and I didn’t immediately understand Anthea’s delight. There were tears in her eyes. She went over to the makeshift construction, stopped, smiled and asked:

‘Is anyone in there?’

They all laughed.

‘No, it’s free, you can go.’

‘This way,’ said one of the women, raising a blanket to reveal the entrance.

Anthea went in, lowered the blanket behind her and stood there for a moment. When she reappeared, she told me it was my turn.

The women’s complaints about having to defecate in public had taught me a lot, and finally I appreciated the importance of the occasion. I sensed I was being invited to participate in the life of the past, in that world they spoke of together and which I now saw they no longer intended to exclude me from, even though I already knew that I’d never be able to enter it. And so I walked towards the little area staked out by blankets while they watched me with bated breath. I could see they were giving me something very precious, and my lack of enthusiasm bothered me. I drew aside the coarse, stiff fabric, went through and let it fall back into place. At once I had a curious impression of strangeness. My heart thumped, I felt light-headed. I glanced around: I could only see the thorny branches and the folds of the brown-coloured blankets that created a screen between the others and myself. I shivered. But I soon understood: this was the first time that I’d ever found myself alone. No woman could see me, and I couldn’t see any of them. I found that very disturbing. I stood there at a loss, contemplating my situation. I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for all the others, but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me.

Luckily.

I used the hole, but I felt uneasy because I had to stand with my legs apart, my body half bent over, in an unfamiliar position which I found extremely uncomfortable. I was glad no one could see me in such a pose, whereas I’d never been embarrassed at defecating in front of the other women, happily perched on the toilet seat. Afterwards, I picked up the shovel to cover my faeces as instructed, but I was troubled by the lack of water to wash with and I hoped I hadn’t soiled myself. Then I came out. Later, Anthea taught me how to use a handful of leaves.

Greta and Frances overcame their aversion to going back down into the bunker and accompanied us on several trips while the women prepared the bundles. Each of us had knotted the corners of her blanket to make a sort of bag to hold cans of food, meat and various things we thought would come in handy. We set off. The three big pots full of water were each carried by two women and we took turns, changing over often to ensure the water bearers didn’t get tired and trip up, spilling the lot. It took us more than an hour to prepare. When we left, the sun seemed to be three-quarters of the way across the sky, and we hoped we’d have time to reach the slight dip before dark.

Anthea and I and the two women who’d helped us were very tired. We’d gone up and down the stairs more than ten times, after years when we hadn’t walked more than ten metres in a straight line, and even then, in measured steps, because running wasn’t allowed. The others realised, and helped carry some of our load. When Dorothy noticed I was stumbling, she asked if someone would carry my bundle. Afterwards, that never happened to me again, I soon became the strongest, probably because I was the youngest. In any case, I was the one who found it easiest to become acclimatised, probably because I hadn’t known anything else and wasn’t riddled with regrets.

We were wearing open sandals which impeded our progress because small stones found their way through the holes, hurting our feet and making us limp. Some women tried to go barefoot, but saw that they might graze themselves. It was Laura who had the idea of tearing strips of fabric from her dress and wrapping them round her feet. Soon we had all followed her example.

At the top of the hill, we stopped to look back. Nothing stirred in that vast, arid landscape. We set off again, glancing back frequently, and, as soon as the cabin was out of sight, we wanted to stop, but Greta, who had particularly sharp eyes, said she reckoned there was water down below because she thought she could see the reflections shimmering among the bushes. I’d walked with my nose to the ground, constantly trying not to injure myself despite the makeshift socks. I looked up, but even though I was later to realise I had excellent eyesight, I had no idea what a river running through shrubs might look like. The prospect of water boosted our morale and we decided to go on. Greta hadn’t been mistaken, and, half an hour later, we set down our bundles, removed our dresses and ran towards the cool, shallow water.

I loved my first bath so much that I thought I’d never want to get out. I lay on the bed of the stream, my hair floating in the water, for a long time. I’d have fallen asleep if I hadn’t begun to feel cold after a while.

We thought we were too tired to feel hungry, but once we had bathed and rested, we did light a fire. The wood burned quickly, soon there were embers and the women made a sort of mesh from wire on which to grill the meat. For the first time, I ate something that hadn’t been boiled. It tasted delicious, I felt as though I never wanted to stop eating. In fact, I think I fell asleep with my mouth full!

I awoke in the middle of the night. I was amazed: it was dark! With my eyes wide open, I could barely see my own hands. The sky was a dark mass and rather frightening, as if it might fall in, and it took me ages to realise that once again it was very overcast.

I felt oppressed and tried to reassure myself by remembering what the women had told me about the stars, which are so far away – the constellations and the galaxies. But then another anxiety assailed me, the sense of an infinite void, vertigo, and the fear of falling in this strange darkness, spinning endlessly in nothingness. I curled into a ball as if to protect myself, and became aware that I was lying close to another woman, that I was touching her. That made me start and I instinctively moved away, because of the whip, then I remembered that there were no more guards. All the same, I didn’t like the contact with another human body, and I gently moved away. That was the only time I ever experienced the impulse that flung me into Frances’s arms that night. Someone had thrown a blanket over me, and I found that strange and touching.

I lay still among the women, my companions in life, who were asleep all around me. A light breeze made the leaves rustle, and I listened to this new sound. I was in a different world, and everything was unfamiliar. Since that morning, I had been learning all the time. I felt a surge of happiness: whatever happened, I had left the bunker, and, like the others, I knew I’d rather die than go back there. Already, I no longer understood how I’d been able to bear living there. I said to myself that if it hadn’t killed the women, it was because a person can’t die of sorrow.

I saw the sun rise. The sky grew paler as I watched, the clouds dispersed and it grew light – first grey, then golden as the sun climbed higher. I heard birds singing, and I saw some flying high in the sky. Gradually, the women awoke. They looked surprised, as if the night had made them forget that they’d escaped. Then they laughed and called out to one another. We went down to the river to wash and, on exploring further, we came across a place deep enough to swim. Anthea held me in the water, she wanted to teach me breaststroke, but I was terrified. I couldn’t follow her instructions and I grazed my knees on the stones. But still, I did manage to float and loved allowing myself to drift along with the gentle current. Then we ate the contents of a few cans of food. The women made a fire and managed to collect lots of hot embers, over which they set the potatoes to boil. We spent most of that first day in this way, eating for pleasure and returning to the river to bathe, time and time again, lazing around in the sun, which wasn’t too fierce. But we were still haunted by the fear of the guards, and we decided that two or three of us would keep a constant watch on the cabin from the top of the hill. When it was my turn, I said that I didn’t need company. I had a feeling that I’d enjoy being on my own.

That evening, the questions began to rear their heads again: where were we? What were we going to do?

Was this Earth?

They asked me how long it had been from one sunset to the next: by my clock it had been just over twenty-two and a half hours. Clearly, that didn’t prove a thing, because we had no idea what my heartbeat actually was. None of the women had ever seen such a wilderness of stones in such a mild climate, but they all admitted that they hadn’t travelled much and that in their past lives they hadn’t bothered much with geography. Their knowledge was confined to their immediate surroundings and a few local walks near their home towns. Of course, they’d seen films set in countries they’d never visited, but the Earth was so vast! It did seem odd that the vegetation was so sparse – a few clumps of familiar-looking small trees such as holm oak, boxtree and larch, but oh dear! they found it so hard to remember, and an unusual grass. There were no wild flowers, which meant nothing, since it might not have been the right season. They were struck by the absence of insects but were unable to deduce much from that. The terrain rolled towards the horizon in long sweeping undulations but it would be exaggerating to describe it as hilly. But how could we cope with the idea that this wasn’t Earth?

‘We must look for a town,’ they decided.

But what if the towns belonged to the guards? What if we were recaptured? There were countless arguments, which turned out to be in vain, because the fact was we never did find any towns. We were in no hurry to move: the joy of being in the open air, bathing in the river and eating as much as we wanted made us lazy, and we spent several days in idle discussions which the various pleasures soon interrupted.

I no longer felt the furious hostility of before; my anger had subsided. No longer seething with hatred and trying to find fault with my companions, I realised that it was difficult for them to pursue a train of thought for long, or to follow an argument through to its conclusion. Anthea was the only one capable of doing this. Some of the things she said made me realise that their inability to think clearly was the result of having been drugged for a long time. Perhaps I myself could have been a bit cleverer and thought harder than I did when, later, I found myself alone. For instance, it didn’t occur to me, after finding the road, to follow it in each direction. That only occurred to me recently, now I’m no longer able to do so. What’s more, they weren’t very well educated: they were women who, before these mysterious events, had run their homes and raised their children or, if they worked, were shop assistants, waitresses and checkout girls – jobs that were explained to me gradually. Only Anthea had studied: having been a typist for a few years, she went back to college to become a nurse and had qualified just before we were imprisoned. She’d forgotten a lot. The other women lacked foresight and were disorganised. They quickly became routine-bound; they’d never developed skills they hadn’t needed. On the whole, that didn’t change, and Dorothy, Anthea and I soon took responsibility for our existence.

I’d detested Dorothy because she’d assumed power purely because of her age, but I began to respect her when I saw that she was the first to think about vital matters. Each time the women embarked on a discussion and then lost track, Dorothy would tactfully interrupt them and make a useful suggestion. I saw that her authority came from her wisdom, but I wasn’t inclined to wait for orders from her. I preferred to do as she did and think ahead. After a few days, we realised that we had used up half our provisions.

‘We must go back and get some more food,’ she said, ‘and make a list of what is down there. After that, we will decide whether to stay here or leave.’

In her mind, that ‘we’ still only meant Anthea and her, but I knew it would soon include me.

About fifteen of the women came with Anthea and me. They weren’t going to go down into the bunker, but would help carry everything we brought up. It was also suggested they should keep a lookout, which I thought was pointless. I said so to Anthea.

‘You may be right,’ she replied. ‘But I’ll feel happier too if there’s someone keeping watch at the top. You never know. We don’t have a clue as to why they left, or how, so we can’t be certain they won’t come back.’

That made sense. It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.

So we retraced our steps back to the cabin and, as we drew closer, we fell silent. I’d never been very talkative, but I was used to living amid a steady drone of chatter, and now all that could be heard was the crunching of the stones beneath our feet.

‘If we’re going to walk, we’ll need better shoes,’ observed Anthea. ‘These sandals won’t last two days.’

In our haste to leave, no one had paid attention to the rooms we’d rushed through, but I thought I recalled seeing boots rather like the ones the guards wore.

‘The thing is there are forty of us!’ exclaimed Greta. ‘When you go barefoot, the soles of your feet harden, so perhaps we should …’

But she didn’t finish her sentence and nobody started on the usual speculation. We were getting nearer, and a certain foreboding made us silent. We unwittingly slowed our pace.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ said Annabel, as we reached the cabin.

There was a light wind. If we stopped talking and kept still, it whispered the same song in our ears. That day, the clouds were back, the sky was high and white. I saw that my companions were shivering.

‘Let’s go,’ I urged.

We’d been in the open air, and I recoiled in disgust: when we were two-thirds of the way down, the smell hit me. Anthea explained:

‘That’s our own smell that has lingered. You’ve already forgotten it. The ventilation system provides air that is breathable, but that’s about all.’

Then I heard it: it was the same buzzing noise that I’d heard all my life, and I realised that, since I’d been outside, I’d been vaguely perturbed by its absence.

‘And the lights have stayed on,’ I noted. ‘That’s odd. Shouldn’t everything have been switched off, stopped?’

‘In this world, how can we tell what’s normal? Just as well, anyway! We hadn’t thought of that.’

The lights never did go out.

Neither of us wanted to enter the big room that housed the cage. But we forced ourselves to, before we did anything else, so as not to spoil the pleasure of exploring. The last traces of apprehension vanished when we saw that everything was exactly as we’d left it. We hoped to take the mattresses, because we’d slept on the ground, levelled with the shovel, joking that we’d lost the only comfort the prison had had to offer.

‘They’re too heavy,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see how we could carry them if we move on. We can take them up, but we can only use them if we decide to stay put.’

‘And that would be ridiculous. We must look for civilisation.’

‘What civilisation?’

Anthea looked at me.

‘What do you mean?’

I shrugged.

‘Just think about it. This planet belongs to them, so what would we find other than the people who held us captive? I have no wish to meet them.’

‘You think we’re on another planet.’

It wasn’t a question, but a statement. I wasn’t entirely convinced of what I was saying. I never found out for certain either.

Then we went into the room off to the right, the one that contained a table and a few chairs. Along the wall were six tall, narrow cupboards which Anthea told me were called lockers and were always found in workplaces for people to keep their things in. They were open. In each one, we found two pairs of boots, and I couldn’t remember if these were the ones I’d seen. Anthea took them out and placed them on the table. There were also two shirts, two pairs of underpants and two pairs of trousers.

‘These could come in very useful. But there aren’t enough.’

A drawer contained needles and thread, as well as other objects that I was unable to identify.

‘Scissors, buttons and zips – for repairing their uniforms,’ said Anthea.

That was all, which she found puzzling.

‘No photos, or letters, no personal belongings, but it’s true, they didn’t live here. They probably kept all that somewhere else. They left in such a hurry, they didn’t have time to gather their things.’

She broke off, frowning.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘But if they didn’t live here, why the shirts and the boots?’

She shrugged.

We crossed the room where the cans of food were kept to get to the cold store on the other side. Anthea stopped to check the thermometer on the door.

‘Minus fifty! This food was meant to last for a very long time. Maybe fresh supplies didn’t arrive all that often.’

We quickly took what we needed. I was very cold – a sensation that was completely new to me and which I found painful. Seeing me shiver, Anthea went to fetch a blanket and wrapped me in it.

‘You must take care not to fall ill. I don’t know what I’d do to make you better, I haven’t seen anything that looks like medicines yet. Even though they were always giving us pills! Sit down and rest, I’m going to heat up some water.’

In the other room, we’d seen a small stove and saucepan much smaller than the ones we used. Anthea looked for something to flavour the drink she was making for me and was surprised to find only a few tea leaves in the bottom of a packet. I didn’t like this new taste much, but I drank it obediently and it warmed me up.

Then we went back to the first room. Anthea started looking for some coffee, or more packets of tea, but found nothing. I wasn’t much help because I couldn’t read, and the labels told me nothing. There were a lot of tools: in that department we never lacked for anything, but we had no idea why they were stored there. I have already mentioned the hammer and nails, but there were also saws, planes, all sorts of pliers, picks, shovels and several can-openers. Anthea identified other objects whose names and uses escape me, since I never had occasion to use them.

We took the saws and the shovels. We discovered a huge store of blankets similar to the ones we’d been given, but new. They were probably being kept until they were needed.

‘At the rate we got through them, there are enough to last two hundred years!’ exclaimed Anthea.

We used them to bundle up the things we were going to take up to the top.

‘We won’t be able to carry all that, there’s too much and we’re too weak after all these years doing almost nothing.’

The hundred stairs were daunting enough, but how would we climb them with such a load?

‘We could use the trolley,’ I suggested, ‘if we can get it up the stairs.’

The trolley was heavy and wide. The staircase was straight, so we wouldn’t get stuck, but the weight made us dubious.

‘Let’s try.’

After ten steps, we were out of breath. We had to lift the trolley completely off the grounds so as not to damage the wheels, which would have defeated the object.

‘Greta’s brave and strong. If she came down and helped, we could manage it.’

We called up, because we were certain the women were waiting for us beside the entrance. Greta willingly joined us. Our progress was slow and we had to stop frequently so as not to exhaust ourselves. When Frances and Annabel saw how tired we were, they overcame their qualms and went down to fetch the bundles we’d prepared. We took enough meat for just two days, since we simply had to come back to get fresh supplies, and we left the mattresses behind because they were too heavy. I carefully shut the door of the cold store behind me and, at the last minute, I picked up a chair for Dorothy.

The return was very slow. We had to clear a path for the trolley and found we were making a little road. Annabel went on ahead to request extra help.

‘But this road will tell them where we are!’ complained one of the women.

Anthea and Greta shrugged. Gradually, all the women who dared go down concluded that the guards would never come back. There was something so final, such a total absence of any trace of them in the abandoned rooms, that it was impossible to imagine anyone coming and claiming: ‘This is mine.’

We quickly organised ourselves into teams: some women went on ahead and removed the stones while others followed, scraping the ground with a shovel. At the slightest obstruction, we halted the trolley to clear the way. Because it was heavily laden, it took several of us to get it moving again. When we arrived, the fires were burning and grilled meat awaited us. Dorothy ate sitting on her chair, and we gathered around her.

‘We have to leave,’ she said. ‘We can’t settle here and live from the bunker like parasites. We must remain human beings. I want to know where we are, who imprisoned us and why. I don’t want to die sitting on a chair in the middle of I-don’t-know-where.’

Curiously, she had just described her fate.

‘We have blankets and lots of thread. We’ll make rucksacks, and each woman will carry as much as she can. It doesn’t matter whether we go north or south, since we don’t know in which direction whatever it is we’re seeking lies.’

‘Nor whether we’ll be glad to find it,’ muttered Anthea.

‘Greta, Anthea and the child will go back down into the bunker to fetch cans. We must assess the weight of what we eat each day and see whether one woman is capable of carrying two months’ food. We will walk. We’ll build up our stamina, and after a while we’ll be able to do twelve to fifteen miles a day, which means six to nine hundred miles altogether. In that time we’re bound to find something. Otherwise …’

She shivered. There was a moment’s silence, which was broken by Anthea:

‘If we take two months’ provisions, we’ll only be able to walk for one month. We have to think of the return.’

No one said anything. We didn’t want to believe that we’d find nothing. But at night, there were no lights. In the past, there were always signs of human existence – roads, planes – even over deserts. This empty plain and silent sky gave the impression of an uninhabited land.

‘We will leave in two days’ time. Tomorrow, we’ll make the rucksacks.’

That night, the sky cleared. After sunset, when night had fallen, I gazed at the stars for ages. Anthea lay still on her back, her eyes open.

‘Are you awake?’

‘I’m not sure that this is the sky above Earth. I can’t find the Great Bear, which is the only constellation I used to be able to recognise. In the other hemisphere, you could see the Southern Cross, but I don’t know what it looked like or where it was.’

The next day, we were very busy. We made several trips down into the bunker to stock up on food; we divided the tools, the shovels and the saucepans into forty piles. Ten women sewed the rucksacks, making them as sturdy as possible. We wanted to take the trolley, but it would slow us down considerably. Thinking back, I can’t see why it seemed so obvious that we had to keep it with us. It was as if we all had a foreboding of what lay in store and were determined to deny it. Anthea particularly wanted to keep the wheels. She gave me some complicated explanation about wheels being the origin of all technical processes. Eventually, she found a way of dismantling it. Everyone took a part of it. We would also take the chair with us.

Our progress was fairly slow because of Dorothy and the other two elderly women, Elizabeth and Margaret. We had to stop every hour for them to rest, and when there was an incline, no matter how gentle, they could never make it to the top in one go. I went on ahead, impatient to find out what was on the other side, and was always disappointed, because there was nothing but the plain, a gentle dip and then the next rise. The women watched me return, hoping that I’d have seen houses, a road, a sign, but I shook my head. We made our way across three large undulations, and the sun was going down when we saw another river, smaller than the first, and we decided to stop for the night. We quickly set up camp – the hearth made of stones, a hole in the middle of some shrubs for a latrine, and three blankets for privacy. The meal was relatively silent, disappointment already setting in.

‘We should have expected it,’ said Anthea. ‘They built the prison far from everything, it was probably supposed to remain a secret.’

The women immediately seized on this idea. They didn’t want to be sad, and soon found a way of starting a new discussion on the old theme of our captivity. After a while, they even began laughing again. When the sun went down, Rose began to sing.

I was amazed. I’d never heard music before, I was barely aware of its existence. ‘Look how beautiful the sky is!’ Annabel exclaimed, and everyone turned to watch the sunset. The few cries of delight soon died away, faced with the unexpected splendour of the colours. I didn’t recognise them, I’d never seen those shades of pink and mauve, only the grey of the bunker. Long trails of purple tinged with violet … some clouds had a greenish hue, shot through with golden light. The sight took my breath away and I was about to question Anthea when Rose’s voice soared up, clear and strong, breaking the silence. I felt a sort of tremor, like a distant echo of the eruption, but it lasted longer and brought tears to my eyes. She sang for a long time, and the other women mouthed the words. The sun disappeared in a sort of long, gentle ovation and dusk settled over the plain.

Later, in my sleep, I felt arms lift me: it was Anthea wrapping me in a blanket. This time, I didn’t instinctively recoil at the memory of the guards and the whip, but nor did I go back to sleep. I felt a vague sense of unease. I was distracted by the stars, which fascinated me. I gazed at them for ages, they seemed fixed, and yet they moved, so slowly that I couldn’t follow their path. Rose’s song still lingered in my ears.

After a while, I went to the toilet. On my way back, I noticed that some of the women were lying in twos, away from the group, entwined under the same blanket. I found that strange. When I had the opportunity to talk to Anthea about it, she shrugged and told me they gave each other what they could. I didn’t press the matter, because I could sense she was embarrassed.

We walked for twenty-six days, and every evening there was the sadness and then Rose’s singing. She never repeated the same song twice. At first, she sang tunes she’d learned before, then she began to make up songs, developing a talent she didn’t know she had. On the twenty-seventh day, when we stopped for lunch, I went on ahead as usual while the women prepared the food, and, for the first time, I spotted something. Halfway down the long slope we’d be heading down after the meal, stood a small, square building that looked so much like the cabin we’d left that at first I thought we must have gone round in a circle. But the lie of the land was different. This cabin wasn’t in the middle of the plain and it wasn’t facing south like ours, the gaping door was facing me. I raced forward and then realised that I ought to tell the others. So I went back, gesticulating madly, and they abandoned the fires and saucepans to come and join me. I forced myself to wait for them. I too had become a good companion.

They came running up, even Dorothy hurried, despite her shortness of breath. Anthea and I supported her all the way down the hill, and I was glad that this task helped me control my impatience. We stood around the half-open door for a moment, at a loss, terrified: what if there were guards? I stepped forward and pulled the door towards me. The hinges were already rusty and stiff. I pulled harder and they gave way, squeaking. I saw the staircase, the light was on. There was a nasty smell. I went in, with Anthea and Dorothy at my heels, and we started to make our way down. No one spoke, as if a premonition of what we were going to find was beginning to weigh on us.

The smell soon grew stronger and we weren’t even halfway down the stairs before it became overpowering. The bravest women were just behind us, and we could hear them exclaiming. Dorothy stopped, tore off the bottom of her dress and made a sort of mask which she held in front of her nose. We all did the same. It hardly lessened the smell but we felt protected from it. We continued our descent, breathing as little as possible, pausing to avoid getting out of breath. One by one, the women had fallen silent, and the only sound was the soft clatter of our feet on the stairs. We reached the bottom. The huge double wooden doors were open, as in our own prison the day the siren went off. I stepped inside and stopped dead, paralysed with horror.

It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others were in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, tormented, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they’d fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of the artificial night, the door was locked and the guards – of course! – hadn’t bothered to open it. The women had tried. They’d died of grief, long before hunger had killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spent clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible – sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack the steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck.

Our companions joined us, the first with hasty steps, then drawing slowly to a halt. Anthea, Dorothy and I were gradually pushed back and we found ourselves lined up against the walls of the bunker, as far as possible from the cage, forty live women staring at the forty dead women. We stood there for a long time, speechless with horror, then Dorothy kneeled down and I heard her say softly:

‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us poor sinners …’

Later, she told us that she had dredged this up from her childhood, when her grandmother had taught her the Christian prayers without her parents knowing.

The other women also kneeled down and echoed her words, as if, in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning. The muted drone of jumbled words rose above the terrible jumble of corpses, then Rose’s voice could be heard. She sang, and at once her rich, powerful soprano filled the air. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was so slow, sad and profound that horror turned into grief and I felt my heart contract. When she stopped, we were silent, then we left noiselessly, one at a time, and very slowly made our way back up.

That evening, Anthea explained that Rose had sung the prayer for the dead, in Latin, a language that had been dead for so long that it was only used for ceremonies. I didn’t understand, I have still not really understood what a ceremony is, but if anyone ever reads these pages, they’ll know.

That day, we stayed put. Returning to the camp, nobody was able to eat and we sat for hours without speaking. It was not until dusk that we ate a little food and began conversing again. So we hadn’t been the only prisoners. There was another bunker, exactly the same as ours. These two facts devastated us. We had no idea what had happened to us: at times it seemed as if our discovery would shed some light on things, but at others it made everything seem even more confusing. Looking back now, I can quite simply state that we found ourselves plunged even deeper in the absurd.

I say there were forty of them: we had immediately had the impression that there were as many of them as there were of us, but no one had counted. I did that the next day, to discover that they were only thirty-nine, but there were forty mattresses. One of them had probably died before the day the siren went off and her body been removed. Later, when we discussed it, we still said forty, because they were our equals, our less fortunate doubles. I looked to see whether the bunch of keys had been dropped, we wanted to open the cage to remove the bodies and bury them on the plain, but I found nothing. We tried to force open the bars with the tools we’d brought, but either the bars were very sturdy or none of us knew how to go about it, because we failed. In the end, Anthea and I closed the big double door and that was the only ceremony we were able to give them. We would have liked to make a tomb, and seal it up, or to leave a message saying that, behind these wooden doors lay forty women who had died for some unknown crazy cause, but we had nothing with which to write and the wood was too hard for us to carve.

We made an inventory of the contents of the two rooms as we’d done in the other bunker, and we found the same things, including the boots, which was fortunate because our sandals were in a sorry state. Once again we had fresh meat and we stocked up with canned food.

After three days, we set off again. A sort of inertia had taken hold of my companions. They spoke little, the evenings were silent, except when Rose sang, and they joined in. I believe they didn’t want to think, so as not to have to face the inevitable, so as not to despair. They believed they’d find towns, civilisation. I expected never to encounter anything other than cabins, and I think they sensed it. I didn’t know the world they described to me, I couldn’t imagine it and, when after a long uphill climb I saw only another dip, I wasn’t surprised, because I had no clear picture of anything else. But their dejected mood must have affected me, because I lost interest in running on ahead, and it was Greta who spotted the third cabin. We only hastened our steps a little, held back by our apprehension and, as we descended, we didn’t hold out much hope that the cage would be open, that the occupants had managed to escape and that we’d meet them one day on the plain. We were greeted by the stench.

We were expecting to find women, but these were men. They too had attempted to escape. They’d tried to loosen one of the sinks and pull away the pipes to make instruments with which to prise open the locks. Everything had resisted their efforts: the pipes were twisted but not broken, the porcelain toilet bowls were lopsided, but they hadn’t been able to smash them. The bodies lay scattered everywhere, and were in the same condition as those of the thirty-nine women. The air conditioning was still working. Gradually the smell would fade and the corpses would still be there, mummified or reduced to skeletons, some naked, the others dressed in rags, shirts torn and trousers cut from the same flimsy cloth as our dresses. They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible. Rose, in tears, refused to come down, and we did not sing the music of the dead. We took everything that might come in useful from the store cupboards and left immediately, walking for as long as we could, so as not to make our camp near a mass grave.

We continued for months, and from then on it was from mass grave to mass grave. We despaired of ever reaching a town. Our expectations had changed: we hoped to find, one day, an open cage. We even decided to leave traces of our visit, to let the others – if there were any – know. In front of the door of each cabin we cleared the ground and drew a big cross, made out of stones. Anthea explained to me that it was the sign of Christianity, the religion of our ancestors, and that a very long time ago, it had been the emblem of the persecuted. No one feared the reappearance of the guards any more, we had no idea what had become of them, but we were certain that they were no longer there. We also made an arrow to show which direction we intended to take.

‘But supposing there are others wandering around like us? The cross and the arrow are so obvious that they may well use the same symbols, since they too have only stones to write with! We need a signature,’ declared Dorothy, ‘otherwise, we might come across our own signs and not recognise them.’

They didn’t know what to choose. In the previous world, people used to sign their own names, but forty names written in the dust? Thirty-nine, in fact, because we’d never known what my name was, and the women called me the child. What should we choose? A circle? A triangle? Two parallel lines? In the end, Anthea suggested a cross with a circle above it.

‘That will let them know that we’re women. What else do we need?’

‘There might be other women,’ said Greta. ‘Let’s add something, and, since we don’t know anything, not where we are, or why, or where we’re going, let’s add a question mark.’

This took us an entire day each time. Several of us returned to the bunker where the men were and drew big symbols on the ground. Our bunker and the first bunker of dead women were not marked, but many others were – not all, because I didn’t carry on writing the signature on the ground once I was alone. I’d given up believing that any living beings would come.

We walked for two years, advancing in small stages, and then we decided we’d have to stop: Dorothy was growing frail. She was aware of it, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. We could see that she was becoming slower and slower. Attempting to get up one morning, she stumbled and at once it was clear that she couldn’t stand up. Anthea put her ear to her chest: her heart was beating very feebly. We decided to wait until she was better, but after two days, she grew agitated.

‘There’s no point waiting,’ she said. ‘I’m old, I must be over seventy-five, my heart won’t get any stronger. We must go on.’

Thanks to the tools that we’d kept with us all this time, we were able to build a kind of stretcher. We felled two trees that were nice and straight, trimmed the trunks and bound the chair to them, using tightly plaited strips of fabric. Dorothy was very weak and felt cold all the time, so we wrapped her in blankets, then we strapped her to the back of the chair and four of us carried her, taking care to walk in step so as not to jolt her. But we only kept it up for a few days because she found even that tiring, and then it became painful for her to stay sitting. We nailed branches across the two wooden poles so that we could carry her lying down. She thanked us profusely, and told us that she felt better, but we could see she was short of breath, and while we moved, she kept her eyes shut most of the time. At first, she slept, and the slightest thing awoke her, then we realised that she no longer reacted when we stopped to change bearers. Anthea said that she’d fallen into a light coma. Some of the women wanted us to stop, but Dorothy woke up and wouldn’t hear of it:

‘If you stop, I’ll say to myself that half an hour later we might have found something, and I’ll die angry. I want to keep going until my last breath.’

And that was how Dorothy died, gently rocked by the women while Anthea walked beside her holding her hand. After a while, she could no longer feel her pulse. I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.

‘It’s over,’ she said.

The others caught up with us and we walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void, alongside the stubborn woman whose wish had been to die without stopping.

We buried her during the night. There was a fine drizzle. Rose’s funeral lament hung in the air above the plain.

We stayed by the tomb for several days, as if loath to abandon Dorothy and as if we no longer had any reason to continue. I don’t think any one of us still believed in those cities that would be our salvation, or in a bunker where the cage would be open. Almost every evening, Anthea gazed at the sky, wondering where we were. She said that on Earth, we’d have noticed the changing of the seasons, but here, over several months, the days had barely become shorter, and the weather was not noticeably cooler. There’d have been snowstorms or heatwaves, not this unchanging weather, with hardly any rain and this sparse vegetation. Why move on? We wouldn’t be any the wiser as to our whereabouts, she said, we’ll always be near a bunker and we’ll die one by one.

From that time on, I was fully aware that one day I would be the last.

But while we didn’t know where to go, we didn’t have any better reason for staying, and we set off afresh. So far, we’d walked southwards, and now we changed direction. There were still cabins, bunkers and corpses. When Mary-Jane fell ill, we decided to stop. Until she was better, we said, but we knew it was until she died.

I hadn’t had much to do with Mary-Jane, a fairly selfeffacing woman who followed without protest and never made any suggestions. She collected firewood when it was time to build a fire, carried her load without getting out of breath, and was neither among the last nor the first when we walked. In fact, she didn’t stand out in any way. I suppose that’s what is meant by easy-going. She was one of the women who didn’t sleep alone, and she was often seen with Emma, the first woman who thought that this planet wasn’t Earth. True there were so few of us that we all knew one another, but certain affinities had created loose groups. I wasn’t in the same group as Mary-Jane, but was with Anthea, Greta and Frances, in other words, the group that had formed around Dorothy and which took the decisions. Perhaps that’s what they meant by friendship, but in any case, illness brought us all together.

Mary-Jane had stomach pains. One day, she lost a lot of blood, whereas she thought she’d reached the menopause a long time ago, and then the pains started. That night, she slept little, a spasm of pain woke her and its suddenness made her cry out. We all went rushing to her side. She immediately got a grip on herself and we heard her groan, her fists in her mouth, her forehead wet with perspiration. We stood beside her, helpless and desperate. At first, she told us to go back to bed, that there was nothing we could do, but none of us was able to and she eventually accepted our presence.

Emma gently dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, Anthea placed a hot compress on her stomach which Mary-Jane said was soothing. The attack slowly subsided and she fell asleep, exhausted by the pain. Then we lay down on the ground around her and allowed ourselves to go back to sleep. One morning, on waking up, we saw she was no longer with us.

We’d stopped quite close to a cabin so as to have easy access to supplies. We sat there looking at one another in surprise, seeking her among the others, when it occurred to me to go down into the bunker. There she was. She’d torn her blanket into strips which she’d tied together, then she’d hanged herself from the bars, alongside the forty male corpses. We decided to leave her there. We just cut the rope, laid her out on the floor, carefully wrapped in another blanket, the newest one we had, her hands crossed over her stomach that had hurt her so much, and, for once, Rose agreed to come down and sing in a bunker. Then, we shut the door behind us as we always did. We drew our symbols on the ground and left.

But this time, it was to seek a place to settle down. It was as if these two deaths had convinced us that there was nothing on this planet that was perhaps not Earth. We wanted a river not too far from a bunker that would fulfil our needs: just like the spot we were leaving, but, of course, we didn’t want to stay so close to the place where one of us had had to kill herself to end her suffering. Dorothy’s death had saddened those who loved her, but she’d been old and it had been a very gentle end. Mary-Jane’s death had been a shock, it frightened us. The older women didn’t want to talk about it. That was no doubt why we left almost at once.

After a few weeks, we found what we were looking for: the river was wide, in the middle the water came up to our thighs, and there were plenty of trees on the banks. We decided to build houses with large stones and a kind of mortar made of mud. For the roofs, we would use sawn tree trunks. We’d noticed that in some places where the current wasn’t so strong, there were water weeds growing. These could be dried and woven together into a rope which we could use to tie together bundles of twigs in a thick layer to make what we called thatch, without being too sure what the word meant. Then we realised that if we mixed those same weeds with the mortar, they made it stronger. We were unpretentious: the sides of the first house were four metres long. It took two months to build and it was very pleasant to shelter inside when it rained. Of course, we couldn’t all fit in at once, but the women who stayed outside huddled together to keep warm, as we had always done since our escape, knowing that next time it rained it would be their turn. The second house took less time. We decided to make it rectangular. The trees weren’t high and we couldn’t support the entire length of the roof with one beam, but we managed to intersect the trunks by supporting them on stone columns, and the whole structure held together very well. Also, we knew that there were never any strong winds.

Perhaps it is still standing.

We brought up chairs and tables from the nearby bunker and, accompanied by four of the strongest women, I went to fetch furniture from the others. We also took mattresses. We often found some along the sides of the cages, which we simply pulled through the bars. We never took mattresses that couldn’t be moved without disturbing the dead. When the mattresses had been aired for a while, the smell vanished and they were perfectly usable. Sometimes we made a discovery: a piece of fabric, a store of thread and a bag of sandals which came in handy because, even though we now all had a pair of boots thanks to our pillaging, when we stopped walking we preferred to wear shoes that didn’t encase our feet. We’d ditched the trolley because we knew there was one in all the bunkers and that there were lots of bunkers. We found a new one, dismantled it, brought it back and used it to carry our construction materials from one place to another. Altogether we built five houses, and the first became the kitchen. We installed a chimney because we’d managed to make a sort of stove: we hammered empty cans flat, then we bent over the edges with pincers to fit them together and then hammered them down again, thus making a big metal hotplate which we supported on stone walls. We lit the fire underneath and were able to heat several saucepans over a single hearth. I became skilled at sawing and could make planks for building shelves to store our food, as well as benches.

I had very much enjoyed building, and I would gladly have carried on, but the other women didn’t want to: after living forty in a cage, they were happy to be nine or ten to a house. They spoke of the facilities in their previous homes, such as running water and baths: those were things of the past that we would have to forget. I had the impression that they found it easier to adapt to our sedentary life than I did. Sometimes, I’d climb a hill and gaze at the plain. I wanted to move on and I became restless. Then I’d think up something to do, an extra table or a bench; the cleverest was a mobile plank system that made it possible to sit on the toilet. I assembled tree trunks sawn in half lengthways to make mobile partitions that could easily be transported, which meant we could do away with the bushes and blankets. It was a long and complicated task which I wanted to accomplish alone. It would have spoilt my fun to have help. When I could think of nothing to build, I’d say that the saws were blunt, that we needed nails or pliers, and I’d convince one of the women to come with me on an excursion of several weeks. On our return, I’d come up with a new idea that would keep me busy for a while, and it always involved making something or other. But we had so few needs that in the end I could think of nothing new. The years passed by. Life was quite monotonous, but one day, a chance conversation with Anthea aroused my desire to learn.

There were only thirty-eight of us now, living in groups in the four houses. We’d made what Anthea called bunk beds, so that the mattresses didn’t take up all the floor space. I lived with Anthea, Greta, Rose, Annabel, Margaret, one of the oldest women, and Denise, Laura and Frances. We were all easy-going, realistic and seldom argued. The groups that had formed through natural affinity became more defined when we moved into the houses, which I understood all too well because I wouldn’t have wanted to be too close to Carol, who was always excited, or Mary, a sullen woman who was difficult to talk to. I was still puzzled by the couples. Sometimes there were violent arguments, with shouting and crying, and I wondered what could cause so much upset. I had a horror of asking questions, a hangover from my early years, but Anthea realised that I didn’t understand and she explained to me what women can do together. I found that strange, for I hated anyone touching me, which she put down to the memory of the whip.

‘In that case, what were men for?’ I asked.

She was surprised at my ignorance.

‘How can I know if no one tells me? In the bunkers where there were dead men, some of them were naked and I could see that they are made differently from us. I suppose that’s got something to do with love. You used to talk about it but we haven’t discussed it for ages, and I’m still none the wiser.’

Then she repeated what I’d heard so many times before:

‘What’s the use of telling you? There are no more men.’

Anger flared up inside me, but I was no longer a little girl among women: however old I’d been at the start, we’d been out for seven years now and I was certainly over twenty. I was one of the women who thought, who organised our communal life. I’d become skilled, I could saw, nail, sew and weave, and I didn’t want to be treated like a child.

‘Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.’

Then she told me everything – men, the penis, erections, sperm and children. It took some time, because there were so many things to learn, I forgot details and she had to go back over them. I had a very good memory, but Anthea said that not even the best memory in the world can remember everything at once. She also explained my own body to me. Since I didn’t have periods, I didn’t know I had a vagina. She was surprised.

‘But you must have realised, felt something, even if it was when you were washing?’

Then she surmised that, having started life as I had done, always surrounded by others, I hadn’t been able to become intimately acquainted with my own body. Of course, I’d soaped myself carefully, from my anus to my vulva, as the women had told me to do after each visit to the toilet, but those washing movements hadn’t taught me that those parts of my body had special qualities. I didn’t tell her about the eruption, which I had in fact long forgotten, and it was only much later that I made the connection between that brief thrill and the pleasures of love.

Our conversations were fairly haphazard because often Anthea was so amazed at my ignorance that she lost the thread of her explanations. I imagined my insides. Sometimes she cleared a patch of ground and drew in the dirt. She told me about the stomach, the intestine, and then the heart, the blood vessels and circulation. I was interested in everything and I asked her more than she knew.

‘When I was training to be a nurse, I learned lots of things that I’ve forgotten because I never used them after the exams. Besides, I think that years of being drugged made me forget some of the rest. Dorothy probably died from heart failure. While it was happening, I tried to remember: the weakness of the heart affects the circulatory system, the kidneys and the lungs, it’s all part of a perfectly logical system that I used to find so beautiful, but I couldn’t recall how it worked.’

‘What use would it have been to you?’

‘None, you’re right, because I didn’t have any medicines. I tried, knowing that it was pointless, just because I needed to know. Like you.’

I could feel my intestine, there were rumbles, flatulence and, regularly, stools. My genitals were cloaked in silence. Out of curiosity, sometimes, when I went to the river to wash, I would seek out my vagina: I could barely insert the tip of my finger because of the hymen that sealed it like a door closing off a corridor. I imagined it to be long and narrow, closed at each end, like the corridors in the bunkers: at the entrance, that barrier that only a man can break with his penis, further, the neck of the womb that only the baby about to be born can pass through on its way out of the great room inside. I imagined smooth, soft, dark-red walls, and at the very end, the furthest entrances, the tiny orifices of the oviducts along which, in my body, no egg had ever travelled. Then there was the great fringed foliage of the fallopian tubes which enveloped the ovaries where the most important work should have taken place, the slow and regular maturing of the egg. But my eggs were sterile, perhaps shrivelled, dried up, in this world where they had no purpose. My brain knew that there were no men, and it ordered my pituitary gland not to worry about gonads, it was busy enough with the liver, spleen, pancreas, thyroid gland, bone marrow and all the other tasks that were vital to my survival. There was no point devoting itself to a job that served no purpose. It had not permitted any of my eggs to mature. It had barely allowed my breasts and pubic hair to grow, then it had given up. When I was undernourished in the bunker, my body would have had to compensate for the loss of blood, and it had decided that, with no sperm available, there was no need for the eggs to be released to migrate down towards the uterus. My endometrium was flat. I had never seen a ploughed field because we had no seeds; we had nothing to plant, and my womb would never have to expand to hold a baby, so it wouldn’t matter if it shrank or shrivelled up.

While on the subject of couples, Anthea had also explained that there was a way of doing it by oneself, and during my explorations of my body, I wanted to find out what I could get out of it. I allowed my fingers to roam at length over the regions that are supposed to give pleasure: my mucous membranes felt my fingers and my fingers felt my mucous membranes, but that was it. I wasn’t surprised, because I’d always suspected I wasn’t like the others.

When we were completely settled in what we now called ‘the village’, I sometimes felt discontented and impatient. I would have liked to carry on looking, but of course, I didn’t even know what for, and I tried hard to control my irritability. Anthea had taught me everything she knew: talking with her, I gradually realised that I often made linguistic mistakes which she automatically corrected. She explained what grammar was and I was delighted to discover something new to be learned.

‘But none of us is capable of teaching you grammar!’ she told me. ‘There doesn’t even happen to be a primary-school teacher among us.’

‘But when you correct me, what do you base that on?’

She thought.

‘On habit. And vague memories, rules that I once knew and that I would find it very hard to recall.’

‘Couldn’t you tell me one, any one?’

I saw her concentrate, as in the past, the first time she had tried to do mental arithmetic. She smiled at me.

‘A relative clause is a clause introduced by a relative pronoun and used to qualify a preceding noun or pronoun.’

‘Oh! What’s a clause? And a noun? And a pronoun?’

I wasn’t familiar with any of these terms because, of course, I hadn’t learned to speak in a systematic way, but by parroting what I heard. Anthea launched into some rather confused explanations, and called Margaret to the rescue, and then Helen, who’d once tried, with Isabel, to teach me the multiplication tables, and soon there were several of them, arguing heatedly and mustering the little they remembered. They were not averse to the idea of resuming my incomplete education, and they discovered that they too could learn from it. Why didn’t they try to speak better? they said. Rose could sing and thus provide us with some precious pleasure, but everybody could speak and find it enjoyable. I was a hardworking pupil. For the others, it was a sort of game which they enjoyed for a while: we didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, and we never said no to anything that was on offer.

The idea of cultivating the few pleasures to which we had access developed. Several of the women took a renewed interest in their appearance and, now we had scissors and combs – Greta had found two in the bunkers – we started looking after our hair. We twisted wire to make hairpins, and Alice, who’d been a hairdresser, made chignons for those who wanted to keep their hair long. But that didn’t last, because the combs lost their teeth and we had no way of replacing them.

We also played draughts: that had been Angela’s idea. She’d asked me to saw some planks and nail them together. Then she drew boxes using charred sticks and we had to cut small rounds of wood and blacken half of them. They taught me the rules, but I never became a good player because I couldn’t see the point of winning a game.

‘But it’s the satisfaction of being the best, and of using your brain!’ said Anthea.

I understood the pleasure of using my brain well enough, but I found it ridiculous to make so much effort just to end up putting the pieces away in an empty box, or arranging them on the board and starting all over again.

We didn’t find much else. We would happily have made ourselves clothes, but fabric and thread were still hard to come by. We lived a peaceful existence and, eventually, the lovers’ quarrels stopped. The older women were ageing visibly, and they forgot the little passion that had drawn them together. Death made a sudden reappearance: one morning, Bernadette failed to wake up. Like Mary-Jane, she’d been a discreet person, and had remained so right up until her abrupt end, which came completely out of the blue. Then Margaret grew very weak, she lost her memory, could no longer recognise us and was unable to stand. She refused all food except liquids and she became incontinent. Following Anthea’s instructions, I built what she called a rack and we made a hole in the mattress, covered with leaves, which we changed regularly, but even so, there was an unpleasant smell in our house, where her life was drawing to a close. Elizabeth, who’d been her lover at the beginning of our wanderings, came and stayed with us, as if her affection had been revived by Margaret’s predicament. It lasted for two months, then it suddenly worsened, she became distraught, at night she had bad dreams which made her scream. Then she’d find the strength to get up and run outside, or she’d be seized by terrible rages. That was how she died, shrieking curses. All of a sudden, while she was struggling against the women who were trying to help her, she went rigid staring at Elizabeth, flung out her arm as if to hit her and was wracked by a spasm. She drew herself up to her full height and stated very clearly:

‘No, it is out of the question!’

And fell down dead.

We chose a clearing in the middle of the wood as a burial spot, first for Bernadette and then for Margaret. For each of them we made a little monument with a mound of stones and a wooden cross on which we wrote their names. The women carved them as best they could with old knives, after which they burnt in the letters with glowing brands from the fire. The second tomb was dug beside the first, and the women called this place the cemetery. Rose sang. A great sorrow reigned over the village.

Death had begun its work. Who would it single out next time? A vague melancholy set in. I think they were wondering why they were wearing themselves out trying to survive from day to day in this alien land where only the grave awaited them, but they didn’t talk about it. They no longer chatted endlessly about nothing, but came and went in silence, slowly, as if weighed down by inevitability. The days went by, and then the months, and the sense of an imminent disaster was dispelled. I realised the day when Elizabeth, who was now the oldest, said to us laughingly:

‘It’ll be my turn next, and look how active I still am!’

She had just come back from the woods with an armful of heavy branches for the fire and, it was true, she wasn’t even out of breath.

Then we started planning ahead again. In the cold store, there was still a large stock of meat, but Helen and Isabel had worked out that with thirty-six of us, it wouldn’t last more than five years. I refrained, and I was probably not the only one, from saying that our numbers would decrease. There was no question of replenishing our supplies from another bunker, the nearest was a ten-day hike away and the meat would go off before we got back. The idea of emigrating was floated and I was thrilled at the thought of constructing another village. I had enjoyed building, I started thinking up new arrangements and even became quite excited, offering to add new houses to the village for those who wanted a little more privacy. I had become skilled, but apart from the occasional shelf, I rarely had the opportunity to use my talents. My suggestion was greeted with approval, several of the women who lived as couples said that actually they’d prefer to live on their own. But the most urgent problem was that of our clothing: our dresses were in tatters. We could in fact have gone naked, the climate was so mild, at least during the hottest season, but the women objected. The years of incarceration with no privacy under the watchful eye of the guards had made modesty a luxury which no one wished to forgo. Besides, we had almost run out of soap. We decided to send an expedition towards the west, a direction we hadn’t yet explored. Four of us set off, Denise, Frances, Greta and myself, since we were the youngest and strongest. Anthea was probably the same age as the three women who were accompanying me, but she was the nurse, the only one who could understand the women’s ailments and perhaps, despite the lack of medicines, find some remedy, so it seemed best for her to stay behind in the village. We were to fetch fabric, sandals, soap and salt, and identify another site in case we did decide to move. Those who stayed behind promised to cut down trees and lay them to dry so that they’d be ready on our return.

It was an enjoyable expedition. We marked the way with big arrows made of stones, so we wouldn’t get lost in that monotonous landscape. We went from hilltop to hilltop to get a good view of our surroundings. It wasn’t until we reached the ninth bunker that we found fabric, but already in the second, we’d found a packet of coffee. I’d never tasted coffee and I didn’t like it very much. I watched my companions shriek with delight and pleasure as they imagined the others’ joy when they returned with such a wonderful find, but I was unable to share their excitement. We found as much salt and soap as we needed, but not a single sandal, which upset us, until Denise said we should have thought of it years ago and taken the leather boots to cut sandals from the legs.

‘We’re not very resourceful, are we!’ said Greta ruefully.

‘We come from a world where it wasn’t necessary, everything was ready-made and we never asked how things were produced,’ replied Frances.

They didn’t like talking about the past any more than they had done before, and would have said nothing further, but it was a long hike and this was a good opportunity. Because Anthea had taught me a lot of things, I felt bolder about asking questions.

‘Tell me what it was like,’ I said. ‘How did you live?’

Initially, they were reluctant to answer, then they relented. At first, they were talking to me, but it turned out they’d never told one another their life stories, and they were enjoying this opportunity. Frances had been married with two children, Paul and Mary. When the disaster struck, she’d been planning to have a third, and, because her memories were so terribly hazy, she didn’t know whether she’d been pregnant and lost the baby or had simply intended to have another child. Her husband was called Lawrence, and she’d met him when she was twenty-three, on the rebound from a love affair which she thought she’d never get over. As she talked, she kept saying:

‘But it’s all so ordinary, it’s the same as everybody else!’

As if she wasn’t aware that for me, nothing was ordinary, since nothing had ever happened to me.

‘The child’s right, nothing’s ordinary when it’s happening to you,’ said Denise. ‘I didn’t have any children, but I wanted them and I always envied those who did.’

When all their lives had been shattered, she was on her second divorce, because, she said, she always chose the wrong men and was never happy with them. Greta couldn’t understand why Denise kept remarrying. She herself had never married, but had lived for years with the same lover and been very happy. That shocked Denise. And they began arguing about whether marriage was a good thing or not. In that wilderness where there were no men to marry, they debated whether it was better to be unfaithful or to leave, and then they burst out laughing. Even I recognised the absurdity of the situation and laughed with them. On reflection, I realise that I laughed a lot more often than I thought. But later, they cried, and I wasn’t able to understand them any more. Then they felt sorry for me, because I’d never experience love, and it was the same as when they talked about chocolate or the joys of a long, hot bath; I believed them without really being able to imagine what they were talking about.

Greta had had a son by this man she’d never married, but apart from naming them, none of them would ever talk about their children. On that subject, my questions were unable to break through their defences. Later, Anthea tried to explain their reticence to me.

‘You can’t understand, and since I didn’t have any children myself, I probably don’t fully understand either, but just think about what might have happened to their children! Growing up alone, like you, among strangers who weren’t in a position to take proper care of them? Or killed? Or dumped in groups of forty in bunkers, living like animals, dying for want of attention? They don’t want to think about their children. They’re probably all dead, and better off that way. If Frances was pregnant, she must have had a miscarriage. You’ve never seen a child, you don’t know what it means – their vulnerability, their trust, the love you feel for them, the anxiety, being ready to lay down your life to save them, and it’s unbearable to imagine a child’s pain.’

It’s true I know nothing of all that and have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.

I don’t remember their accounts very well, probably because there were too many things that I hadn’t experienced and couldn’t picture. They’d say: ‘We went dancing.’ What was dancing? They explained, they formed couples, facing each other. Denise placed her left hand on Frances’s waist and held her right hand up in the air, then they spun around. Yes, but what about the music? The sound of an accordion or a violin? They spelled out waltzes, one, two, three, one, two, three. Having counted my own heartbeats for so long, I could understand a repetitive rhythm, but I could never imagine the sound of the band, nor the laughter of those boys who made them lovesick, nor the rustle of chiffon or silk dresses swirling around them and making them look so beautiful. They spoke of creeping home at dawn, angry parents who scolded them, kisses, jilted lovers, men they were in love with but who didn’t love them, and it was all a muddle in my head. Gradually, I stopped asking them to tell me about their world, and I gave up trying to imagine it. I knew very well that I came from it. I’d had a father and a mother who probably went dancing and got married or left each other, and were torn apart by the disaster like Frances and Lawrence. Perhaps one of the dead women I’d seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

Such thoughts ought to make me weep. But tears never come to my eyes except when I think about Anthea, a woman I actually knew. I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

Every evening we’d collect a huge pile of dead wood and make a fire. We grilled sausages coated with mustard, of which we’d found a few jars, and we ate them with flour cakes baked over the embers. We were relaxed and tired, and I think that for a while, my companions’ nostalgia was allayed as they experienced the vast silence of the plain, the continual rustle of the grass. We were in no hurry to sleep, we listened to the breeze which always whistled the same soft note. Apart from Rose’s powerful soprano, it was the only music I’d ever heard.

Sometimes, as I returned to the group around the fire, I’d feel a rush of emotion; I was moved by the flickering of the flames in the night, the silhouettes of the women resting, the interplay of words or Denise’s reedy voice carrying the laments of another era across the plain, and I understood what Anthea called beauty, which apparently had been so abundant in their world.

After four months, we set out for home. We’d gone round in a huge circle, so it only took us a month to return to the village. We were slightly apprehensive, but there had been no deaths. The timber promised for the new buildings was ready and we set to work. I enjoyed it immensely. We’d found two excellent sites to move to if we decided to leave our present settlement, but that seemed unlikely because I could see that the women were happy in their new houses and wouldn’t agree to leave until the cold store was practically empty. All the same, when the houses were finished, I went on a quick expedition with Anthea to the nearest place: the river was nice and wide, rich in aquatic plants, with a clayey bed which she said might be useful for making bricks. There was a small wood, vital for timber. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that there aren’t many trees left,’ she said. ‘They don’t grow very fast and we may run out of wood before we run out of meat.’

Shortly after our return, Angela announced that she was unwell. She had giddy spells, memory lapses and a feeling of exhaustion that rest could not cure. She didn’t think she was older than sixty or sixty-five, but she came from a family where people didn’t live to a very old age, she told us, and, should the situation arise, she didn’t want us to allow her to suffer or deteriorate as Margaret had done.

‘What do you want us to do?’ protested Anthea. ‘I understand what you’re asking and, if I had syringes and medicines, I’d promise anything you like. But here?’

‘There are the knives,’ replied Angela. ‘You know just where to strike to pierce the heart.’

It proved unnecessary. She soon fell into a coma and died within three days, but the idea took root in Anthea’s mind. She thought of Mary-Jane who’d gone off to hang herself in the bunker.

‘You see, it keeps haunting me, gnawing at me. She fled all alone in the middle of the night, and perhaps she cried out in pain while making her rope. I feel I abandoned her. Angela was right: I know where the heart is and how to plunge in a knife to stop it. I think that if anyone else suffers the same pain as Mary-Jane, it will be my duty to do what is necessary, but I’m afraid of being too cowardly.’

‘You can teach me,’ I said. ‘I could do it. I’m not like the rest of you.’

The thirteenth year after our escape, we decided to move because we’d almost run out of meat. Several more women had died and now there were only thirty-two of us left, but these deaths had always happened either quite quickly or calmly and I hadn’t yet had to carry out my promise. With the few trees still left and the trolley wheels, we built makeshift carts on which we loaded the tables and chairs. We went to a site that was a three-week trek from the first village, and we built ten houses. The first one was as big as possible, and the others were smaller, to accommodate just a few women. It was a huge task but one which, naturally, gave us enormous pleasure. We had become good carpenters and our roofs were sound structures. We even managed to make excellent bricks with mud from the riverbed, and our walls may not have been completely straight, but they held up. We tried to make gardens around the front doors by gathering a few of the rare wild flowers, but they always died, no matter how carefully we watered them.

Greta, Anthea, Frances and I shared a house. Most of the women were living as couples, except for Denise, Annabel and Laura who set up as a threesome. But we only built one kitchen and we ate our meals together, at tables arranged in a big square. Once the village was built, which took a good year, we began to dread idleness. Some of the women had really taken to woodwork and I went on several expeditions to find other types of tree or thicker trunks. Sometimes, I found a hollow branch which I’d bring back for Rose. She wanted to carve a flute, but was never satisfied with the result. None of us had learned the simple things, such as pottery, or the art of recognising herbs, and Anthea said that even a land as arid as this ought to provide more resources for creativity than the things we’d thought of so far. For example, if properly treated, the aquatic plants we’d used for making thatched roofs could perhaps be used for knitting and weaving. Frances remembered that flax had to be retted, but what was retting? Another woman suggested letting the wood soak for a long time and then bending it. But our efforts were fruitless, and after a few disappointments we gave up.

Gradually, the futility of all our attempts dampened our spirits. Our bed and board were guaranteed, a few metres of fabric satisfied our modesty, and a few kilos of soft soap met our hygiene requirements. We were going to die one by one without having understood anything of what had happened to us and, as the years went by, our questions petered out. The lights in the bunkers were still on, and I simply couldn’t resign myself to never understanding anything. Where did the electricity come from? There had to be a power station operating somewhere, Anthea had told me. Was it entirely automated? Were there still some people who operated it without knowing why? Would it stop one day and the meat rot in the cold stores? No one dreamed of seeing rescuers appear, and the few remaining questions were always about our failure. I didn’t dare admit that I wanted to carry on walking and exploring, because I knew they’d think I was crazy.

Our mood was not one of despair, which Anthea explained to me was a violent feeling that led to great emotional outbursts, but rather one of equanimity. There were no longer extensive conversations on every subject, nor the nervous jollity of before. During the year when we were building the new village, the women had become animated again, but then they lapsed into the old sluggishness, never hurrying to complete any task, since there were so few that they preferred to draw them out. That made them seem like old women. They had no reason to look up, so they walked with a stoop. The last passions had fizzled out, their hair was going grey and they seemed to have lost the desire to live. We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death. They continued to eat, drink and sleep, while in the shadows, surrender, silent capitulation and death lurked. They became thin, the furrows on their dejected faces grew deeper, they easily became breathless, their hips were painful and their legs swollen. Elizabeth suffered from haemorrhages, Greta stomach pains and Anna became paralysed down one side of her body.

She could no longer speak, one eye was closed and the other begged. We all knew what she was asking, but Anthea, weeping, was unable to grant it.

‘You told me that you’d be able to do it,’ Anthea murmured, not daring to meet my eye.

‘I’ll do it,’ I told her.

I didn’t really understand. If that was what Anna wanted and we could offer her no other relief, why was it so difficult for them to act? I think I understand them now that I have cried, but I can’t be sure, because even though I’ve spent most of my life with them, I am well aware that I was always different. I’m probably missing a chunk of their past.

She had explained everything to me in detail. You had to count the ribs down from the collarbone, then find the edge of the sternum and go back three fingers. She showed me on her own breast the exact spot where I would have to plunge the knife in hard, with a single swift stroke.

‘Then, when it’s my turn, you’ll know what to do.’

They all went out of the house where Anna lay and I was left alone with her. I sat beside her. She looked at me and I saw, on what remained of her face, that she was trying to smile at me. I drew back the blanket from her emaciated chest, and had no difficulty in counting the protruding ribs, nor in locating the edge of the sternum. I placed my finger on the spot and I could feel the beating of her heart, which seemed vigorous. It was certain that if we did not intervene, she could remain the victim of this appalling condition for a long time. She raised the arm she was still able to move and stroked my cheek while I placed on her skin the point of the knife that I had spent ages sharpening. I was swift and accurate, her arm fell back and her heart was beating no more.

I received that caress several times – the only one I was able to tolerate – the silent gratitude of a woman receiving death at my hands. None wanted to endure pain and I think they were in a hurry to die. I don’t know how many I killed – I who count everything, that was one thing I didn’t count. Each time, even when they were contorted with the most violent pain, I saw their tormented faces relax as I was about to strike, and it didn’t make me cry because I sensed their haste and their relief. It was only at the moment of death that they admitted their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile plain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days. And I know that at that moment, they loved me. My hand never trembled. We became strange accomplices during their last moments, when I was the chosen companion, the one who would unravel their incomprehensible fate, closer than their forgotten lovers, dead in the bunkers or under another sky, closer than their weeping lovers waiting at the door for me to come out, the knife wrapped in a thick rag that would conceal any drops of blood, and nod my head confirming that it was all over, that the sick woman’s suffering was at an end, and that, at least for one of us, the agony was over. Then we could hum the song of death. Afterwards, we’d gaze at one another for a moment in silence, then the women would go inside and shroud the dead woman in a blanket, the newest and best one we had. At nightfall, we’d carry her to the cemetery and lower her gently into her grave. One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we’d been born.

It wasn’t necessary for me to stop Anthea’s heart. Each death had contributed a little to killing her. There had been so much hope when we’d escaped from the prison, and then this slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars. Was it after finding the second bunker when we’d been terrified at the sight of the thirty-nine dead women, heaped up or collapsed on top of one another? Or the first time we’d descended a staircase with no further hope of finding the cage open? Or when Mary-Jane had hanged herself? When did we know for certain that we had no future, that we would continue to live as parasites on those who’d locked us up, stealing below ground to take our food from the departed enemy? And how was it that we hadn’t died from sheer nausea? She mulled over these questions endlessly, and I listened in silence. The impossibility of finding any answers fuelled the grief that was killing her. When there were only six of us left, and Greta died, Anthea no longer had the strength to stand and had to be carried to the cemetery. We used a litter like the one on which Dorothy had died, and Anthea lay on her back gazing up at the sky as we walked, still wondering if it was that of planet Earth. There was a moon. The women always said that it looked like the moon they’d known, but they weren’t sure they could trust their own memories. Anthea’s sight had grown poor, she screwed up her eyes with a futile persistence. When we arrived, Greta was already lying in her grave and Laura was keeping vigil. Rose had passed away, but the women had learned the song and their voices resonated for a long time over the plain, because they repeated it several times. I had never sung. We hadn’t sung in the bunker, and afterwards it was too late, I had a lump in my throat. Nor could I shout, I could only produce a raucous croak that didn’t travel far. I do not know whether I am still able to speak. Of course, all I have to do is try, but I don’t seem to want to. And what does it matter if I’ve become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?

We stood at the graveside for a long time, in silence. From time to time, one of the women would repeat the terrible words: ‘From the depths, I call on you, O Lord.’ Perhaps that isn’t exactly the right translation, none of us really knew that dead language which they chanted over a land that was almost dead, but they’d told me what they understood. Their voices soared up, they gazed at the dark sky as if they somehow expected a reply, but nothing ever crossed that vault except the silent movement of the stars. Then, one after the other, they fell silent, the chorus died out like an untended fire, and silence descended, barely ruffled by the lightest of winds that permanently blows. All that was left for us to do was to throw earth over the emaciated body that was barely discernible under the blanket and then make our way slowly back to the village of empty houses.

The women placed the litter next to the bed and left us alone. I settled Anthea in her bed – she’d grown so thin that I could lift her easily. I covered her well because she’d become very sensitive to the cold, and we bade each other goodnight. But I could hear her crying, and I was unable to sleep. I went over and sat on the edge of her bed. She asked me to hold her hand. She knew how much I hated touching anyone and I understood that if she was asking me to overcome my revulsion, it was because she desperately needed this pitiful contact.

‘You know that you are going to end up alone,’ she said.

I often thought about it.

‘I looked after you as best I could when you were little, and later I taught you everything I knew. But soon I won’t be there for you any more. I feel as though I’m deserting you.’

‘You have no choice,’ I replied.

‘How will you survive?’

‘I’ll move on. I’ll carry on looking. If it had been up to me, I’d never have stopped, but I could see that the others couldn’t go on any more.’

‘Will you be able to cope? Won’t you go mad?’

‘I have no idea what you mean by madness. You know I’m not like the rest of you. I haven’t experienced the things you miss so badly, or if I ever did, I don’t remember anything, and that hasn’t done me any harm. To me it feels as if I’ve always been alone, even among all of you, because I’m so different. I’ve never really understood you, I didn’t know what you were talking about.’

‘It’s true,’ she agreed. ‘You are the only one of us who belongs to this country.’

‘No, this country belongs to me. I will be its sole owner and everything here will be mine.’

After that, she lay silent for a long time. I suppose she was thinking about the old days, when she’d led a life that made sense and that she had lost, because sometimes tears ran down her cheeks, and I wiped them gently away. Otherwise, we remained still and I could feel her irregular heartbeat, even in her hand. I’d learned to recognise that kind of rhythm, which gets weaker and weaker. You think it’s stopped, but it starts up again, but there’s no hope; life isn’t tenacious enough to win. I wasn’t sure that Anthea would see the dawn. At one point in the night, she asked if I could bear to cradle her in my arms.

‘I’m so cold.’

I offered to go and fetch another blanket. She nodded and smiled feebly.

‘I need to be held.’

That cost me an effort which I’m certain I managed to hide. I lay down beside her and she rested her head on my shoulder, and I clasped her to me.

‘I have loved you so much,’ she told me.

She drifted off into a light sleep, and I think she dreamed, because she sometimes made little movements and muttered indistinctly. Day was beginning to break when she grew completely calm. She was breathing very softly. I wasn’t afraid of falling asleep, and I concentrated my attention on her ebbing life. I didn’t know exactly when she stopped breathing, we were both so tranquil and silent. Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey, and I didn’t notice the change. When I was certain it was all over, I lay there for a long time, holding her to me, as she had wanted.

It was all I could do.

Frances, Denise, Laura and I were the only ones left. A few months later, Frances had a fall in the house and broke her legs. Anthea had explained to me about these fractures in elderly women, and there was no chance she would recover. Frances was in such pain that she didn’t even want us to lift her or make her more comfortable. She asked me to stab her immediately, she didn’t want to suffer a moment longer than was necessary. I left her alone with Denise and Laura while I ensured that the knife was as sharp as possible. On my return, the two able-bodied women rose to leave the house, and something strange happened: they both stopped as they passed me and hugged me, as if they were thanking me for what I was about to do. I knelt beside Frances, who gripped my shoulders and pulled me towards her, to place a kiss on each of my cheeks.

‘You are kind,’ she said.

That touched me. I smiled at her and she was smiling as the knife went in.

On our return from the cemetery, Denise asked me to do the same for her, but I don’t know why it was impossible for me to do it to a woman who was still in good health, even if I knew how much grief she was suffering. She had to wait three years, when she became semi-paralysed, like Anna, except her face wasn’t affected and she was able to talk.

‘Now, will you?’

‘Now, it’s different. I must do it.’

And so I remained alone with Laura. Apart from me, she had been the youngest of the women and her death didn’t seem imminent. Although she’d accompanied me on several expeditions, I didn’t have a spontaneous liking for her. She was rather grumpy and was constantly complaining. When we were alone, her personality changed. She never protested at my decisions and, to be honest, it would have required a lot of imagination to protest against what I exaggeratedly call decisions. If I said it was time to go and fetch some meat from the nearest bunker, wash our clothes or light a fire, it was always because we were getting low on meat and our dresses were dirty. She appeared to let herself be completely guided by me, and I realised that she’d lost all interest in her life.

One morning, as I was returning to the village laden with cans of food, I was struck by her absent air. It was the season when it rains the least and I’d put the bench outside the door. I found her sitting there, staring into space. For years, her eyesight had been poor, and now, she was gazing into the distance without even screwing up her eyes, although she said this helped her distinguish things. Her hands were resting on her thighs, but with her palms upturned, as if she’d forgotten to turn them over, which made her look strange, neglected, a woman plonked there whom nobody had taken the trouble to tidy up, like a garment dropped in a hurry lying crumpled on the floor. Her thighs were slightly apart. Before, in the prison, Laura had been thin, like all the others, then she’d grown fat, complaining all the time that she couldn’t control her appetite. But since the death of her lover, Alice, she’d lost interest in food and had shed a lot of weight. Now she’d resumed the attitude of a corpulent woman whose knees didn’t touch when her legs were together, because of the size of her thighs, as if her body no longer recognised itself in the present. Her dress had ridden up slightly, revealing her withered, fragile flesh. I was the one who’d made that dress, meticulously assembling scraps of fabric that were still usable from the least worn tunics, and she’d watched me work, as if she couldn’t really understand why I busied myself so. Then she’d put on the dress and recovered her wits for a moment to thank me. We’d always been very particular about manners, even back in the bunker – probably to differentiate ourselves from the guards and their whips.

I went up to her, talking so as not to give her a fright. I told her that I’d brought back some soup, that we could eat soon, and some soap because our last packet was nearly finished.

‘But I was right, I looked everywhere but there’s no more thread, I shan’t be able to mend your dress.’

In the past, we’d used her hair to sew with, but now our hair had stopped growing and was short and sparse.

As I spoke to her, I was thinking that I’d have to go on an expedition because we were going to run out of soap too, but I held back from saying so. I was only talking for the sake of it, frightened by her expression that was so vacant, so absent, that she looked as if she was asleep with her eyes open. She started violently, turned her head towards me and, as she’d told me before, must have seen only a vague shape.

‘Oh, it’s you, child,’ she said as if she’d forgotten that there were only the two of us left. ‘You’re a good girl. I’m not much help to you.’

I said a few comforting words and went inside to light the fire. She followed me slowly and stood beside me. She watched me, seemingly unable to think of a way to help.

‘Do you think I’ll live much longer?’ she asked.

Her tone was calm and normal. She was asking an ordinary question and would happily listen to the answer and then think of something else. Surely such a lack of interest in her own concerns could only be a sign of impending death?

The women had only ever called me ‘child’, and even now that I’ve been alone for such a long time, and because I have no other name, I still have a vague feeling that I am the youngest, even though there is no one left with whom to compare my age. I thought back to the days when I’d been furious and full of contempt, when I’d had the impression that they were laughing at me, that I knew nothing and they knew everything, and I found it heart-rending to see that Laura was now consulting me as if I were an oracle. She just stood there, not knowing what to do with her body.

‘Do you feel ill?’

I had been so slow to reply that she must have forgotten her question. She looked taken aback, struggled to think, and nodded.

‘I’m tired. But everyone’s tired, aren’t they?’

Everyone: the two of us.

‘Yes, everyone,’ I replied calmly.

If she didn’t remember that everyone was dead, why remind her?

The fire had got going. I put on the logs, covered it and picked up a saucepan. I chose two cans containing tomato soup. Anthea had taught me to read the labels and I was delighted to discover that they were the kind that contained little meatballs. Laura stood beside me, as if she couldn’t think what else to do. Her legs seemed unsteady. It wasn’t very obvious, and I wasn’t certain. I told myself at first it was her disorientated air that made me think that, but since she stopped living shortly afterwards, it’s likely that she was finding it hard to stay on her feet. I led her gently to a chair at the big table, sat her down and placed a bowl and glass in front of her.

‘We’ll be eating in a few minutes.’

‘If you like,’ she replied.

I looked at her carefully. Her face was utterly devoid of expression and it was probably my own anxiety that made me think she looked lost. Her eyes had a glazed look and her arms dangled by her sides. I wanted to place them in her lap, but that reminded me of the gesture I’d made so often, crossing the arms of a dead woman on her chest, and then closing her eyes, so I held back. But at the same time I was certain she was dying.

Like that, on her feet, without being ill? It wasn’t her body that was giving up, but her spirit, which had grown increasingly weary of animating those muscles, of making that heart beat, of going through all the motions of living, the spirit that nothing had nourished for such a long time, that had watched its sisters die and that had for its only companion a woman who disliked her and whom she disliked. How tragic! I said to myself. How tragic! She had, in the past, lived out twenty or twenty-five years of her legitimate destiny, and then crazy events had taken place and she’d entered a world of absurdity, surrounded by strange women who were as confused as she was. Despite all that, she had tried to love. I thought of Alice, a lively, impatient woman, who used to say to me: ‘Go away and play!’ when I disturbed her and then apologised. They’d lived together in a little house. They argued noisily and made up again with great promises: you had to do something to pass the time. I sat down in front of Laura, I sincerely wanted to say some helpful words that would sustain her, but, to be honest, in this sterile land, in the silence and the solitude, ignorant and sterile myself, what could I give her? Why should she want to live? We were doing nothing, we were going nowhere, we were nobody.

‘You see,’ I said to her, ‘I want to go off exploring. I don’t want to end my days here, eating canned food only for it to come out again later.’

She looked up. You could see she was trying very hard to understand what I was talking about. Then, to help her, I said:

‘I’m going off exploring.’

‘But there’s nothing,’ she said, surprised. ‘Only the bunkers.’

Thinking was a great effort for her.

‘There aren’t even any seasons.’

‘We don’t know. We gave up too soon. We only searched for two years, didn’t we?’

‘That was because of the old women. We had to keep stopping so they could die in peace. And sometimes they took such a long time. They kept feeling better and we thought they’d recover.’

‘I want to leave. I’m not old.’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Wait. I shan’t be long.’

She understood me. We both knew that she couldn’t cope on her own, that she wouldn’t have the strength to go and get food from the bunkers or gather enough wood for her fire, and that I couldn’t abandon her.

The soup was hot. We ate in silence, then I went to wash up in the river. When I returned, she was sitting on the bench again, waiting for me. She’d sit then until she felt sleepy and then would go and lie down on her mattress to sleep. While asleep, she’d be waiting to wake up.

I didn’t want her to die, but how could I have wanted her to live? Several times during the afternoon, I felt a tremor of impatience. I was overjoyed at the idea that I was going to be free. To calm my excitement, I began working out what I’d need. I’d take one of the big bags and pack enough provisions for two weeks, two blankets – because I’d grown used to sleeping on a mattress and I was afraid I’d find the ground too hard. Later, when I’d adjusted, one blanket would be enough and my load would be lighter. I’d need lots of matches, a small shovel and boots. I must remember to take some soap. My dress was in complete tatters, but I’d be bound to find some fabric and thread, because I’d regularly come across bunkers with fresh supplies. I’d have to make sure I found the right size boots if I wanted to walk a long way. In the past, I’d had the unpleasant experience of blisters, and for years, I’d been living in sandals. We’d never found any socks and the skin of my feet had become soft, but I knew it would soon harden.

I bustled about, devoting myself happily to the too few domestic tasks, and my mind busied itself planning the route. I kept going over the list of things I needed to take, enumerating, repeating, summarising, to the point where I began to feel very irritable. Soon I’d have done everything it was possible to do: the floor was swept, the mattresses turned, the blankets shaken, there was nothing left to wash or put away. I went out and sat on a chair facing Laura. She was staring at the sky, at the point where the sun would set later, and her gaze was more vacant, more absent than ever. Her breathing was even. Her hands were once again resting on her thighs palms upturned, and I could see a tiny artery pulsing on the outside of her wrist. It was regular, clear and strong. That’s why I don’t think she died of a physical illness, but that she abandoned her unflagging body which would have carried on for years, except for her eyes. She heard me coming, muttered a few words, so softly that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t feel like asking her to repeat them. What could she have to say to me? What did we have of the slightest interest to tell each other? That it was a fine day, that it was unlikely to rain that night, that the sun was going down? She was no more interested in telling me than I was in hearing it, and most likely she’d only attempted to speak to me out of politeness, to show that she was glad of my company, which was probably not entirely true. What could I give her, other than food and drink, which would only prolong an existence she no longer desired?

‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

That satisfied her. We were in agreement, without being too sure over what. Or perhaps over the fact that we had nothing in common. And so we sat in silence.

I didn’t watch the sky. I was fascinated by Laura. She seemed to be disappearing inside herself, withdrawing further and further. At first, there was still some expression on her face, the ghost of the smile she’d given to welcome me, a hint of weariness, a faint grimace when an insect settled on her hand. She didn’t budge, I brushed the creature away but she seemed oblivious. The setting sun illuminated her face. There was no shadow, nothing to see except for skin, taut over tissue that was still living, a live model, with peaks and troughs, different from those of a plain or a hill, that the eyes could explore but without learning anything other than their configuration. I could have touched her, for sure, run my hands over her cheeks, but would she have felt it? There was a moment when everything was as if suspended. I could see clearly that the little artery in her wrist was still beating, but I was certain that Laura was dead. Her breathing was soft and regular, with an automatic rhythm that was unable to stop, but she was no longer thinking. In the past, Anthea had explained what an electroencephalogram was: Laura’s would have been flat. Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming, noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows. As the sun touched the horizon, her wrist stood out clearly in the evening light and I saw that there was no more movement under her white skin. I let out a deep sigh. My last tie had been cut.