I Who Have Never Known Men

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Since I barely venture outside these days, I spend a lot of time in one of the armchairs, rereading the books. I only recently started taking an interest in the prefaces. The authors talk readily about themselves, explaining their reasons for writing the book. This surprises me: surely it was more usual in that world than in the one in which I have lived for people to pass on the knowledge they had acquired? They often seem to feel the need to emphasise that they wrote the book not out of vanity, but because someone asked them to, and that they had thought about it long and hard before accepting. How strange! It suggests that people were not avid to learn, and that you had to apologise for wanting to convey your knowledge. Or, they explain why they felt it was appropriate to publish a new translation of Proust, because previous efforts, laudable though they may be, lacked something or other. But why translate when it must have been so easy to learn different languages and read anything you wanted directly? These things leave me utterly baffled. True, I am extremely ignorant: apparently, I know even less of these matters than I thought I did. The authors express their gratitude to those who taught them, who opened the door to this or that avenue of knowledge, and, because I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, I usually read these words with a degree of indifference. But suddenly, yesterday, my eyes filled with tears; I thought of Anthea, and was overcome by a tremendous wave of grief. I could picture her, sitting on the edge of a mattress, her knees to one side, sewing patiently with her makeshift thread of plaited hairs which kept snapping, stopping to look at me, astonished, quick to recognise my ignorance and teach me what she knew, apologising that it was so little, and I felt a huge wrench, and began to sob. I had never cried before. There was a pain in my heart as powerful as the pain of the cancer in my belly, and I who no longer speak because there is no one to hear me, began to call her. Anthea! Anthea! I shouted. I couldn’t forgive her for not being there, for having allowed death to snatch her, to tear her from my clumsy arms. I chastised myself for not having held on to her, for not having understood that she couldn’t go on any more. I told myself that I’d abandoned her because I was frigid, as I had been all my life, as I shall be when I die, and so I was unable to hug her warmly, and that my heart was frozen, unfeeling, and that I hadn’t realised that I was desperate.

Never before had I been so devastated. I would have sworn it couldn’t happen to me; I’d seen women trembling, crying and screaming, but I’d remained unaffected by their tragedy, a witness to impulses I found unintelligible, remaining silent even when I did what they asked of me to assist them. Admittedly, we were all caught up in the same drama that was so powerful, so all-embracing that I was unaware of anything that wasn’t related to it, but I had come to think that I was different. And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that that is what they call being consumed with remorse. I would no longer be able to get up, think, or even cook my food, and I would let myself slowly waste away. I was deriving a sort of morbid pleasure from imagining myself giving in to despair, when the physical pain returned. It was so sudden and so acute that it distracted me from the mental pain. I found this abrupt swing from one to the other funny, and there I was, I who not surprisingly never laugh, doubled up in agony, and laughing.

When the pain abated, I wondered whether I had ever laughed before. The women often used to laugh, and I believe I had sometimes joined in, but I was unsure. I realised then that I never thought about the past. I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story. At first, I shrugged, telling myself that it would be no great loss, since nothing had happened to me, but soon I was shocked by that thought. After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail. I made the decision almost without realising it: I would do likewise. Over the years, I’d learned to read fluently; writing is much harder, but I’ve never been daunted by obstacles. I do have paper and pencils, although I may not have much time. Now that I no longer go off on expeditions, no occupation calls me, so I decided to start at once. I went into the cold store, took out the meat that I would eat later and left it to defrost, so that when hunger struck, my food would soon be ready. Then I sat down at the big table and began to write.

As I write these words, my tale is over. Everything around me is in order and I have fulfilled the final task I set myself. It only took me a month, which has perhaps been the happiest month of my life. I do not understand that: after all, what I was describing was only my strange existence which hasn’t brought me much joy. Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.

As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories? On the few occasions when the women were willing to tell me about their past, their stories were full of events, comings and goings, men… but I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things – in other words, eating, excreting and sleeping. For a very long time, the days went by, each one just like the day before, then I began to think, and everything changed. Before, nothing happened other than this repetition of identical gestures, and time seemed to stand still, even if I was vaguely aware that I was growing and that time was passing. My memory begins with my anger.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing how old I was. The others had been adult for a long time whereas I appeared to be prepubescent. But my development stopped there: I started to get hair under my arms and on my pubes, my breasts grew a little, and then everything came to a halt. I never had a period. The women told me I was lucky, that I wouldn’t have the bother of bleeding and the precautions to be taken so as not to stain the mattresses. I’d be spared the tedious monthly task of washing out the rags they had to jam between their legs as best they could, by squeezing together their thigh muscles, since they had nothing to hold them in place, and I wouldn’t have to suffer stomach cramps like so many adolescent girls. But I didn’t believe them: they nearly all menstruated, and how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has? I felt they were deceiving me.

Back then, I wasn’t curious about things, and it didn’t occur to me to ask what the point of periods was. Perhaps I was naturally quiet, in any case, the response my rare questions did receive wasn’t exactly encouraging. More often than not, the women would sigh and look away, saying ‘What use would it be for you to know if we told you?’, which made me feel I was disturbing or upsetting them. I had no idea, and I didn’t press the matter. It wasn’t until much later that Anthea explained to me about periods. She told me that none of the women had much education; they were factory workers, typists or shop assistants – words that had never meant very much to me, and that they weren’t much better informed than I was. All the same, when I did find out, I felt they hadn’t really made an effort to teach me. I was furious. Anthea said that I wasn’t entirely wrong and tried to explain their reasons. I may come back to this later, if I remember, but at the time I want to write about, I was livid. I felt I was being scorned, as if I was incapable of understanding the answers to the few questions I asked, and I resolved not to take any further interest in the women.

I was surly all the time, but I was unaware of it, because I didn’t know the words for describing moods. The women bustled about, busying themselves with the few day-to-day activities but never inviting me to join them. I would crouch down and watch whatever there was to see. On reflection, that was almost nothing. They’d be sitting chatting, or, twice a day, they’d prepare the meal. Gradually, I turned my attention to the guards who paced up and down continually outside our cage. They were always in threes, a few paces apart, observing us, and we generally pretended to ignore their presence, but I grew inquisitive. I noticed that one of them was different: taller, slimmer and, as I realised after a while, younger. That fascinated me. In their more cheerful moments, the women would talk of men and love. They’d giggle and tease me when I asked what was so funny. I went over everything I knew: kisses, which were given on the mouth, embraces, making eyes at someone, playing footsie, which I didn’t understand at all, and then came seventh heaven – my goodness! Given that I’d never seen any sky at all and had no idea what the first heaven or any of the others in between were, I didn’t dwell on it. They would also complain about the brutality. It hurt, men didn’t care about women, they got them pregnant and then walked out, saying, ‘How do I know it’s mine?’ Sometimes the women would declare that it was no great loss, and at others they would start to cry. But I was destined to remain a virgin. One day, I screwed up the courage to put aside my anger and question Dorothy, the least intimidating of the two elderly women.

‘You poor thing!’

And, after a few sighs, she came out with the usual reply:

‘What point is there in your knowing, since it can’t happen to you?’

‘Because I want to know!’ I raged, suddenly grasping why it was so important to me.

She couldn’t understand why someone would want knowledge that would be of no use to them, and I couldn’t get anything out of her. It was certain that I would die untouched, and I wanted to satisfy my curiosity at least. Why were they all so determined to keep silent? I tried to console myself with the thought that it was no secret anyway, because they all shared it. Was it to give it an additional sparkle that they refused to tell me, to give it the lustre of a rare gem? By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn’t know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure. Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren’t entirely powerless? They sometimes claimed it was out of modesty, but I could see perfectly well that, among themselves, they had no modesty. They whispered and tittered and were lewd. I would never make love, they would never make love again: perhaps that made us equal and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could.

Often, in the evening, before falling asleep, I would think about the young guard. I drew on the little I’d been able to guess: in another life, he’d have come and sat beside me, he’d have asked me to dance and told me his name. I’d have had a name which I’d have told him, and we’d have talked. Then, if we were attracted to each other, we’d have walked hand in hand. Maybe I wouldn’t have found him interesting: he was the only one of our six jailers who wasn’t old and decrepit, and I was probably indulgent because I’d never met any other young men. I tried to imagine our conversation, in a past that I hadn’t known: Will it be fine again tomorrow? Have you seen next door’s kittens? I hear your aunt’s going on holiday … but I’d never seen kittens and I had absolutely no idea what fine weather might be, which put an end to my reverie. Then I’d think about kissing, imagining the guard’s mouth as precisely as I could. It was quite wide, with well-defined, thinnish lips – I didn’t like the full lips that some of the women had. I pictured my lips drawing close to his: there was probably something else I needed to know, because I felt nothing in particular.

But then, one evening, instead of falling asleep from the boredom of trying to imagine a kiss that would never happen, I suddenly remembered that the women had spoken of interrogations, saying they were surprised that there’d never been any. I embellished the little they’d said: I imagined the guards coming to fetch one of the women, taking her away screaming and terrified. Sometimes, the woman was never seen again, sometimes she’d be flung back among us in the morning, covered in burns, injured, moaning, and would not always survive. I thought: ‘Ha! If there were interrogations, he’d come and get me and I’d leave this room where I’ve always lived. He’d drag me along unknown corridors, and then something would happen!’

My mind worked incredibly fast: the boy was propelling me along with seeming dedication to his job, but, once we rounded the corner and were out of sight, he stopped, turned to me, smiled and said: ‘Don’t be afraid.’ And then he took me in his arms and an immense sensation surged through me, an overwhelming eruption, an extraordinary burst of light exploding inside me. I couldn’t breathe – and then I breathed again, because it was desperately brief.

After that, my mood changed. I no longer tried to persuade the women to tell me their secrets; I had my own. The eruption proved difficult to achieve. I had to tell myself stories that became increasingly long and complicated but, to my utter dismay, I never experienced that explosion twice in a row, whereas I wished it could have lasted for hours. I wanted to feel that sensation all the time, day and night, swaying deliciously, like the rare patches of grass on the plains caressed by the gentle breeze that blew for days at a time, but which I didn’t see until much later.

I now devoted all my time to the task of producing the eruption. I had to invent exceptional circumstances where we found ourselves alone, or at least isolated in the midst of the others, face-to-face, and then, after much agony, I had the exquisite surprise of finding his arms around me. My imagination developed. I had to exercise rigorous discipline, because I couldn’t dream up the same story twice: surprise was crucial, as I realised after trying several times to relive the exquisite gesture that had transported me, without feeling the slightest stirring. This was extremely difficult because I was simultaneously the inventor of the story, the narrator and the listener awaiting the shock of the unexpected. Thinking back, I’m amazed I managed to overcome so many obstacles! Imagine how fast my imagination had to work to prevent me from knowing what would happen so that I’d be caught unawares! The first time I imagined the interrogation, I’d never made up stories before, I didn’t even know it was possible. I was completely swept along by it, marvelling both at such a new activity and at the story itself. Then I soon became adept at it, like a sort of narrative engineer. I could tell if it had begun badly or if it was heading towards an impasse, and could even go back to the beginning to change the course of events. I went so far as to create characters who reappeared regularly, who changed from one story to another, and who became old friends. I was delighted with them, and it is only now that I’m able to read books that I can see they were rather limited.

I needed to invent increasingly complicated stories: I think that deep down something inside me knew what I wanted from them and objected; I had to catch myself off guard. Sometimes I had to keep it up for several hours, to lull my inner audience into a false sense of security so that she’d be entranced by the pleasure of listening, enjoy the story and lower her defences. Then came the magic moment, the boy’s gaze, his hand on my shoulder and the rapture that invaded my entire being. After that, I was able to sleep. Perhaps, in stopping the story, I was disappointing an inner listener who preferred the story to the turbulence, which is why she always spun it out and would happily have deprived me in order to prolong her own pleasure. Sometimes, halfway through, I’d try to argue with her: ‘I’m tired, I want to go to sleep, let me get to the eruption, I’ll carry on tomorrow.’ But it was no use, she wouldn’t let herself be fooled.

The women noticed that I’d changed. They observed me for a moment, saw me always sitting down, my knees tucked under, my chin resting on my folded arms, and I suppose I had a vacant stare. I was oblivious, because I wasn’t bothered about them any more, and I was surprised when Annabel came to question me.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Thinking,’ I replied.

That puzzled her. She stayed a little longer, waiting for me to say more, then went to convey my reply to the others. They argued for a while, and Annabel returned.

‘What about?’

The full force of my anger returned.

‘When I asked you what people do when they make love, you wouldn’t tell me, and now you expect me to tell you what’s going on inside my head! You keep your secrets, if it makes you happy, but don’t expect me to tell you mine!’

She frowned and went back to the others. This time, the debate went on longer. I’d never seen them talk at such length and with such seriousness – usually they’d burst out laughing after ten minutes. Apparently I’d provoked something new in their minds. Another woman then stood up and came over to me. It was Dorothy, the eldest and most respected. Even I didn’t hate her. She sat down and stared hard at me. Her presence annoyed me greatly because she was interrupting me at a crucial point in the story, which had been going on for a very long time: I was going to be locked up alone in a cell and had overheard a few words about the relief night guard who I had every reason to believe was the young man. How could I carry on in front of this old woman who was staring silently at me? At least I could try not to lose sight of the situation: I was alone, breathless and scared, and I could hear voices and the clink of weapons in the corridor. I didn’t know what was going on and was frightened by the atmosphere of urgency and turmoil. I tried to suspend the scene in my mind while studying Dorothy who was studying me. I told myself that if the eruption didn’t happen soon, I would have to make some sense out of the situation. But what on earth could I imagine that would feed back into the static world in which we lived, women locked up for so many years that they’d lost all notion of time?

‘So, you’ve got a secret,’ said Dorothy at long last.

I didn’t reply, because it wasn’t a real question. I could tell she was trying to faze me with her heavy stare and her silence. There was a time, before I’d found the inner world where I entertained myself, when I was still inquisitive and docile, when I’d have been intimidated. I’d have wondered what I’d done wrong to deserve this scrutiny, and I’d have feared the punishment. But now I knew I was beyond their reach: punishments were never more than being left out, excluded from futile, flighty conversations about nothing in particular, and that was all I wanted so that I could continue my secret pursuit in peace.

Since I didn’t react, she frowned.

‘I spoke to you. It is only polite to reply.’

‘I have nothing to say. They told you I have secrets. You tell me they told you I did. Well, so what?’

‘I want to hear them.’

I began to laugh, as much to my surprise as to anyone else’s. I’d been used to respecting the women’s wishes, especially those of the eldest who had the most authority, but everything had changed because I could no longer see any basis for that authority. I suddenly discovered that they had no power. We were all locked up in the same manner, without knowing why, watched over by jailers who, either out of contempt or because they were obeying orders, didn’t speak to any of us. They never entered the cage. They were always in threes, except when they changed shift, and then we saw six at a time, but they didn’t speak to one another. At mealtimes, one of the big double doors would open, a man would push a trolley along the gap between the cage and the wall, and another unlocked a little hatch through which he passed us the food. They wouldn’t answer our questions and we had long since stopped asking them any. The old women were as helpless as the younger ones. They had seized some imaginary power, a power over nothing, a tacit agreement that created a meaningless hierarchy, because there were no privileges that they could grant or refuse. The fact is that we were on an absolutely equal footing.

I sat still for a few seconds, registering those familiar facts that suddenly became stunning revelations, and looking Dorothy squarely in the eyes.

‘You want to hear my secrets,’ I said, ‘but all you can do is inform me of your wishes.’

I noted with interest the effect my words had on her: at first, when she saw that I was about to answer, she looked smug, she must have thought she’d won my obedience. Then she listened, and grasped the meaning of what I was saying, but she was so taken aback that she thought she hadn’t understood.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just think about it,’ I said. ‘I mean exactly what I said.’

‘You haven’t said anything!’

‘I said I wouldn’t tell you my secrets. You told me you wanted them. That’s not telling me anything new, I was already aware of that. You think you only have to tell me you want to know for me to tell you.’

That was indeed what she thought.

‘That is how things should be,’ she insisted.

‘Why?’

She was disconcerted. I saw she wasn’t thinking about my question, she was so shocked that I could have asked it. She’d inherited a tradition to which I did not belong: when an older woman asks a younger woman to reply, the younger one does so. She’d never questioned that, but I, who had grown up in the bunker, had no reason to comply. After a few moments:

‘What do you mean, “why”?’

‘Why should I answer? Why do you think it goes without saying?’

Her gaze faltered. She tried to think, but she wasn’t used to doing so. She looked confused and clutched at the first idea that came to her:

‘You are insolent,’ she said, relieved to find an explanation for the incomprehensible words I’d just uttered, certain that it would be enough to return to the habitual ways, to convention, to commonplaces.

‘You’re a fool,’ I retorted, intoxicated by my new-found certainties. ‘And this conversation is absurd. You think you have power but you’re like the rest of us, reduced to receiving your share of food from enemy hands and with no means of punishing me if I rebel against you. Seeing as they forbid any authority other than theirs, you can neither beat me nor make me go without. Why should I obey you?’

This time it was clear that she wasn’t taking in a word I was saying. I think she’d rather have gone deaf. She muttered, fidgeted a little, then signalled to two younger women to come and help her up, even though she could in fact manage unaided. She returned to her usual position at the other end of the cage. The women stared at her intently, without daring to ask any questions. She closed her eyes to give the impression she was thinking, and fell asleep.

‘It’s because she’s old,’ said the younger ones. ‘An ordeal like that is too much for a woman of her age.’

They resumed their chatter and I returned to my story. I was back in the gloomy cell where I was in solitary confinement. I wasn’t injured – the guards were always careful not to resort to blows. I was huddled in a corner, terrified, and my humiliating posture shocked me. Crouched and trembling – was that fitting for someone who’d just confronted one of the most respected women in the cage, looked her in the eyes and told her she was a fool? Dorothy had been lost for words. I felt a delicious shiver. That was, I think, my first intellectual pleasure. In my imaginary cell, I had to stand up, and now, I had to smile and defy them. It was hard to concentrate on the story, I’d enjoyed the minor battle I’d just waged, and I wanted to savour it, but it didn’t cause the eruption because the young guard wasn’t part of it, so I summoned my inner discipline to return to my private world.

If the women had had any sense, they’d have let matters rest there. It was still possible to pretend that nothing had happened and avoid an unequal battle. I’d realised that I was as strong as they were and that not confiding a secret, which is within everyone’s grasp so long as there is no torture, immediately makes the secret seem infinitely precious. Their knowledge on the subject of love had seemed to me the ultimate object of desire when they’d refused to share it with me. Now, I scorned their pettiness, I told myself that in other times I’d have got what I wanted from the first boy who came along. In asking it of the women, I was granting them a prerogative that they’d never had, and it only underscored my ignorance. But now their curiosity was aroused, it was their turn to feel excluded and scorned. I’d found the eruption to console me: they remained disgruntled and powerless, sustained only by their gnawing exasperation. They began to watch me.

Watch? There were forty of us living in that big underground room where no one could hide from the others. At five-metre intervals, columns supported the vaulted ceiling and bars separated our living area from the walls, leaving a wide passage all around for the guards’ relentless pacing up and down. No one ever escaped scrutiny and we were used to answering the call of nature in front of one another. At first – so they told me, my memories didn’t go back that far – the women were most put out, they thought of forming a human wall to screen the woman relieving herself, but the guards prohibited it, because no woman was to be shielded from view. When I went to pass water, I found it perfectly natural to go and sit on the toilet seat and carry on my conversation – on the few occasions when I was engaged in conversation. The old women cursed furiously, complaining about the indignity of being reduced to the status of animals. If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought. I never argued with the women, in fact I already found them stupid, but I hadn’t formulated it so clearly.

When I think back on it now, what a horrid little prig I was! I prided myself and revelled in having found a distraction that I thought was extraordinary. I felt as if I was being hounded by a mob, whereas we were all equally helpless prisoners. Isolated due to my young age and the constraints imposed on us, perhaps like the others I needed to create an illusion to enable me to cope with the misery. I have no idea. Now that I’m no longer able to go off hiking, I reflect a great deal, but, with no one to talk to, my thoughts soon start going round in circles. That’s why it is interesting to write them down: I recognise them when they recur and I don’t repeat them.

When Dorothy woke up and found the strength to relate our conversation to the others, she didn’t tell them I’d called her a fool. But despite her efforts not to tarnish her image, she’d learned nothing of my secret and was unable to conceal the fact.

‘A secret! A secret! What right does she have to keep a secret in a situation like this?’

Anthea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of the other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me.

‘We must force her. Make her tell us.’

‘How will you do that?’

Carol, the stupidest and the most excitable, parked herself in front of me and in a threatening tone commanded me to speak.

‘Or else!’

‘Or else what?’ I burst out laughing.

She made a violent gesture and it was obvious she was thinking of slapping me. It was so obvious that the guards, who never took their eyes off us, saw her at the same time as I did, and we heard the crack of the whip. We knew that they weren’t aiming the blows at us, and that the whips only cracked in the air of the corridor around the cage, but the noise always frightened us and Carol jumped. None of the women remembered actually being hit, but Anthea told me about it later. It must have happened in the hazy period in the early days of our captivity for such a deep fear to have taken hold of us. No one ever disobeyed the whip, and the women sometimes described the bloody marks that the thongs made on bare skin, the searing pain that lasted for days. Several of the women bore long white scars. Terrified, Carol withdrew, and I gave her a sardonic smile. I was torn between the urge to scoff at her in silence, making the guards my allies, and wanting to explain her stupidity and helplessness to her, when Anthea intervened. She came over to Carol who was shaking with rage and fear, and motioned to her to move away.

‘Come, it’s pointless,’ she said very softly.

A tremor ran through Carol’s body, I thought she was going to fling herself into Anthea’s arms, but we knew only too well that touching one another was prohibited, and she hung her head.

‘Come,’ repeated Anthea.

They went off side by side. I settled down again, my head on my knees, glad to be left in peace at last, but I was unable to immerse myself in my story again. That episode had made me jumpy. I was fidgety and couldn’t regain my concentration. I got up and went over to the women peeling the vegetables and offered to help. But I was clumsy and that annoyed them.

‘Oh, go away and play!’ said one of them.

‘Who with?’

I was the youngest, the only one who’d still been a child when we were locked up. The women had always believed I’d ended up among them by mistake, that in the chaos I’d been sent to the wrong side and no one had noticed. Once the cages were locked, they would probably never reopen. Sometimes, the women said that the keys must be lost, and that even if the guards wanted to, they wouldn’t be able to release us. I think it was a joke, but I’d forgotten about it until now, and it was too late to check.

Alice, the woman who’d dismissed me, seemed embarrassed. She looked at me sadly, perhaps she felt sorry for me and disapproved of the women who were determined to wrest my secret from me.

‘It’s true, poor thing. You’re all alone.’ She looked sympathetic, and that calmed me down a little. The women weren’t often kind to me. I suppose that at that time they resented my being there alive while they had no idea what had happened to their own daughters. The appalling disaster that had befallen us probably explained their attitude: none of them ever bothered about me or made the slightest attempt to comfort me. But perhaps that wasn’t possible? My own mother wasn’t with us and we had no notion what had become of the others. We assumed they were probably all dead. I have raked through my memories of that time, I thought I saw them swaying and groaning, crying and shivering with terror. None of them looked at me and I hated them. I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.

I moved away from Alice and went and sat down again, my legs tucked under me, but I was unable to pick up the thread of my reverie. I was bored. For lack of any other distraction, I began observing them. That day, we’d been given leeks and coarsely cut mutton. As they scrubbed the vegetables, the women argued noisily over how they were going to cook them. I never paid much attention to what I ate, which in my view was neither good nor bad, unless I was still hungry when my plate was empty, which was rare because I had little appetite. Listening to their chatter, I was amazed – anyone would think they had the choice between several recipes and a variety of seasonings, whereas in fact they only had three large pots and water. There was never any option but to boil the vegetables. We’d eat them for lunch and the stock would serve as soup in the evening. Sometimes, extra food was brought in the afternoon, a few kilos of pasta, or, very occasionally, potatoes – nothing that gave much scope for imagination. This was probably their way of telling one another stories; they did what they could. They said – and I had heard it hundreds of times, but without taking any notice – that the stock tasted different depending on whether you put the meat in first or the vegetables, that you could also cook the ingredients separately, shred the leek leaves, or reduce the stock to make it tastier. They bustled around chatting. This was the first time I’d listened closely, and I was surprised at how much they had to say, the passion with which they repeated the same thing in ten different ways so as to avoid accepting that they’d had absolutely nothing to say to one another for ages. But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I’ve realised these past few years. And gradually, I began to feel sorry for those women determined to carry on living, pretending they were active and making decisions in the prison where they were locked up for ever, from which death was the only release – but would they remove the bodies? – and where they couldn’t even kill one another.

I suddenly found myself contemplating our situation. Until that moment, I’d simply endured it without thinking about it, as if it were a natural state. Do we wonder why we’re sleepy at night, or hungry when we wake up? I knew, as did the others, that suicide was one of the things that was prohibited. At first, some of the more desperate or more active women had tried the knife or the rope, and that showed how closely the guards were watching us, because they immediately heard the crack of the whip. The guards were excellent marksmen, reaching their target from a distance, slashing the belts the women were planning to use as ropes, or jerking the crudely sharpened knife from the hands that held it. They wanted to ensure we stayed alive, which made the women believe that they wanted to use us in some way, that there were plans. They imagined all sorts of things, but nothing ever happened. We were fed, not over-generously, which caused those who were too fat to lose weight, and we didn’t really lack for anything. We had to cook our meals in huge pots and to hand back the two blunt knives when the vegetables were peeled. Occasionally, we were given a few lengths of fabric to make clothes. They were crudely fashioned since we had no scissors and we had to tear the fabric very carefully. I wrote a moment ago that nothing ever happened, but that’s not exactly true: the arrival of the pieces of material created great excitement. We knew which dresses were worn-out beyond repair, and which ones could still be salvaged, and we’d embark on complicated calculations to enable us to make the best use of the new cotton. We had to take into account the quantity of thread that came with it; sometimes there were remnants of fabric but we had nothing with which to sew them together. One day, Dorothy came up with the idea of using hair as thread. She recalled how, a very long time ago, hair had been used for embroidery. Anna and Laura had the longest hair, which we used for our first attempts. These were unsuccessful because the hairs snapped. Then someone suggested plaiting several hairs and we achieved a certain degree of success: the stitches didn’t hold for long, but there was plenty more hair to redo them.

The guards didn’t give us sanitary towels or toilet paper, which the women complained about a great deal. I had no recollection of ever using either, so I managed very well with running water, which was in plentiful supply, and, since I didn’t have periods, I didn’t have the worry of what to do about the blood. The women collected the tiniest scraps of material and used them for their periods, then rinsed them thoroughly in the water, because we received very little soap, which was black and runny, and we kept it for washing our bodies.

This almost total lack of physical activity would have made us weak, but we forced ourselves to do exercises every day, which was the most boring thing in the world, but even I put up with it because I realised it was necessary. Once or twice a woman was ill: a thermometer was included in the supplies and the whip made it clear that she was to take her temperature. Medicine would arrive if she was feverish. We seem to have been in rather good health. What with the food and the continuous lighting and heating, we must have been costing someone or something a lot of money, but we didn’t know why they were going to so much trouble. In their previous lives, the women had worked, borne children and made love. All I knew was that these things were greatly valued. What use were we here?

I was taken aback by my thoughts. Suddenly, the secret that was being denied me and the one I didn’t want to share seemed to be of little worth compared with that of the guards: what were we doing here, and why were we being kept alive?

I went over to Anthea who had always been the least hostile towards me. She smiled at me.

‘Well, have you come to tell me your secret?’

I gave an irritable shrug.

‘Don’t be as stupid as the others,’ I said. ‘Look at them. They’re pretending, they behave as though they still have some control over their lives and make momentous decisions about which vegetable to cook first. What are we doing here?’

Anthea looked wary. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We can’t talk about that either! You spend your time kidding yourself that you know things, and you’re using me, who doesn’t know a thing, to convince yourself of your superiority! No one has any idea why we are being so carefully guarded and you’re afraid to think about it.’

‘Don’t always talk about us as a group.’

‘Well, let’s talk about you. Answer me with your own thoughts. If you have any.’

We’re not allowed to hit one another, but if we talk calmly and don’t allow our expressions to betray anger, we can exchange cutting words.

‘What’s the use of talking about it? It won’t make any difference.’

‘There you go again with your stupidity! As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing. Look: they know that, they talk for hours on end about nothing.’

‘But will talking teach us anything about what we’re doing here? You have no more idea than I or any of the rest of us do.’

‘True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’

She put down the piece of fabric she was sewing with plaited hairs and folded her hands on her knees.

‘Is that what you’re doing, when you sit alone with your eyes closed, thinking about us?’

‘I do as I please. Don’t try and force my secret out of me, I’m not some featherbrain who can be tricked so easily.’

She laughed.

‘You’d have been very bright! You’d have had a great future, you would!’

‘We have no future any more. All we can do is entertain ourselves by conversing.’

‘You make fun of the discussion over the vegetables, and yet what you suggest is just as pointless.’

I began to laugh. It was most enjoyable having someone as intelligent as myself to talk to.

‘I find the subject more interesting. Do we know why they locked us up?’

‘No.’

‘Or where the others are?’

‘If there is a reason, we don’t know what it is. Since we’re here, and we’re being kept alive, we think there must be others alive somewhere, but there’s no evidence, and that’s just as well. No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this. There isn’t the slightest clue. They rounded up the adults – you’re almost certainly here by accident. At first – well, not really at first, because there’s a period that remains hazy in everybody’s minds – but after that, from the time when our memories became clearer, we know we used to think all the time. They could have killed you – but they don’t kill – or taken you away, sent you elsewhere, if there are other prisons like this one, but then your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don’t want us to know anything. We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing.’

Never had any of the women spoken to me at such length. I sensed that she’d passed on to me everything she knew, and I experienced a mild light-headedness which was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories.

‘Can you tell me anything else?’

‘Nothing.’

She sighed and took up her needlework, inspecting it mechanically.

‘And we’ll never be any the wiser. We will die, one by one, as age gets the better of us. Dorothy will probably be the first, she has a bad heart. She looks over seventy. I don’t think I’m forty yet; with no seasons, we can’t keep track of time. You will be the last.’

She stared at me for ages without saying a word. Since I had greatly exercised my imagination of late, I could guess her thoughts: one day, I would be alone in the huge grey room. In the morning, a guard would pass me my food, which I’d cook on the hotplate, and I’d eat, sleep and die alone, without having understood our fate or why it had been inflicted on us. I was scared stiff.

‘Is there nothing we can do?’

‘There’s not one of us who hasn’t thought of killing herself, but they’re too quick. You mustn’t try and hang yourself: twist a piece of fabric into a rope and the minute you start tying it to the bars, they’ll be there. Mary, who’s sitting over there talking to Dorothy, tried to starve herself to death: they chased her with the whip and harassed her until she gave up. You know the knives they give us: they’re completely blunt. They’re just about good enough for scraping carrots, and we’re not allowed to try and sharpen them. Once, a long time ago, Alice, one of the most desperate women, persuaded another woman to strangle her. It happened at night, after they’d turned the lights down. We thought the guards were pacing up and down automatically, deceived by our stillness: but they watch us so closely all the time, that they realised what was happening and the whips cracked.’

‘They never touch us.’

‘At one time they did, there were wounds that were very slow to heal. We don’t know why they stopped. There’s no point rebelling. We must just wait until we die.’

She resumed her sewing. She was piecing together the least worn parts of a dress to make something or other. When I think back on it, I tell myself the lengths of fabric were almost excessive: it was hot in the bunker and we could have lived without clothes. I picture the two latrines in the centre of the room. Since there were forty of us, there was nearly always a woman sitting there doing her business, and I found it hard to believe that they allowed us to cover ourselves to satisfy our modesty. I watched Anthea and it occurred to me that seeing as I would be the last, I’d better learn to sew. Unless the women who died left me their clothing, and those hand-me-downs would last me until the end.

I was sad. I’d always hated my cellmates because of their indifference to me and I’d never spared a thought for them. On our arrival here, they’d been overwhelmed by their fear and despair, and I’d remained isolated, a terrified little girl surrounded by weeping women. In dying, they’d be abandoning me once more. Anger welled up inside me. So they had thought about our situation, they’d been wondering about it for a long time, and they’d always excluded me from their discussions. Anthea was the first to take the trouble to talk to me. I’d found our conversation interesting and had been determined to listen to her, to think, and forget that for years she’d ignored me just as the others had.

‘Why are you talking to me today?’

She looked taken aback.

‘But you’re the one who came to speak to me,’ she said. ‘You’re always on your own, as if you don’t want to join in with us.’

I was about to tell her that they always stopped talking when I drew near, but suddenly I felt terribly tired. Perhaps I was unused to conversing at such length. She saw me yawn.

‘They’ll be turning the lights down soon. Let’s get ready for bed. We’ll speak more tomorrow.’

Of course I was unable to sleep. I wanted to carry on with the story that Annabel had interrupted at the point when I was in a cell waiting for the young guard to appear, but I couldn’t concentrate. Usually, when I told myself a story, I became completely impervious to what was going on around me, but that evening, the comings and goings of the women arranging mattresses, whispering and the gradual descent of silence all disrupted my train of thought. I reflected on the years, the grief, those lost husbands, the children they’d never seen again, and wondered about my own mother, since I must have had a mother. I couldn’t remember her. I only knew that there must have been someone I called mummy, and who wasn’t in the prison. Was she dead? I went over the little I’d heard about the disaster, which boiled down to a few words: screams, the scramble, night and a growing terror. They thought they must have fainted, perhaps several times, and that everything had happened very quickly. On reflection I concluded that this explanation was not enough. There were forty of us who had nothing in common, whereas before each woman had had a family, parents, brothers, sisters, friends: only a meticulous selection could have only brought together strangers. This was confirmed by Anthea the next day.

‘Just think what a huge job that must have been: they made sure that none of us knew any of the others. They took us from all four corners of the country, and even from several countries, checking that fate had not thrown together two cousins or friends separated by circumstances.’

‘Why? What are they looking for?’

‘We nearly drove ourselves mad asking that same question. You were too young, you couldn’t understand, and you’d curl up into a ball on the ground, you wouldn’t answer when we spoke to you.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘We didn’t think you’d get over it. As we weren’t allowed to touch one another, nobody could pick you up and cuddle you or try and comfort you, or even make you eat. We thought you were going to die, but, very slowly, you began to move again. You sidled up to the food at mealtimes and swallowed a few mouthfuls. Then, naturally, we got into the habit of never going over our few memories in front of you, we thought it would be bad for you. And, gradually, we wearied of talking about them among ourselves. It didn’t help. Asking the same questions, in the same way, for years – you eventually tire of it.’

‘And you live like this, with your vegetables, with no prospects?’

‘Only death,’ she snapped. ‘We can’t commit suicide, but we will still die. We just have to wait.’

I’d never thought about our situation so clearly. In my stories, there were always things happening: in my life, nothing would ever happen. I realised that she was right and that the secrets of love were none of my business. Perhaps they’d pretended to know more than me because they knew nothing of the essential. I suspected that the men hadn’t complied like the women: but since I would never encounter a man, what did this difference matter? It was the girls in another era who had to be prepared for their wedding night, I told myself.

That day seemed very short, and I put that down to the intensity of my thinking. When the lights were dimmed, we had to lay out the forty mattresses on which we slept. There wasn’t enough room, they were almost touching, and every morning we piled them up three or four high so we could move around and sit on them. I stretched out and tried to pick up the thread of my story, but was unable to, my mind was blank and there was an overwhelming feeling of grief in my breast.

‘Close your eyes,’ my neighbour said. ‘Don’t let them see you’re not asleep.’

It was Frances, one of the younger women, one of those who’d never laughed at me.

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you notice anything? Anyone would think you’d just arrived from another planet. They won’t allow us not to sleep. If they see your eyes open they call you over to the bars and make you take a pill.’

‘Call? But they never talk to us!’

‘Oh yes they do! With their whips!’

I understood what she meant. It was very rare for a woman to disobey: but when it happened, the whip cracked beside her, until she did as she was told. They were merciless, and handled their whips with the utmost precision: they could crack it twenty times in a row by someone’s ear, and if the woman it was intended for resisted, there was always another who gave in. When Alice, whom they’d forced to eat, tried to strangle herself with her dress twisted into a rope, Claudia had relented and rushed to undo the knot and halt the appalling threat of death, always promised, never given. I closed my eyes.

‘What’s stopping you from getting to sleep?’ asked Frances.

‘How do you get to sleep?’

She didn’t answer. I was choked by sobs. ‘Are we allowed to cry? Without pills?’

‘No – you’d better control yourself.’

Then, something strange happened inside me, I wanted to feel her arms around me and it was so sudden, so unexpected, that I was overcome. I threw myself into her arms before I realised what I was doing.

‘Stop!’ she whispered, horrified.

And the whip cracked above my head. I recoiled, terrified. This was the first time it had been aimed at me. I still shudder to think of it. I curled up, panting as if I’d been running.

Running? I had never run!

I knew very well that we weren’t permitted to touch one another and, since I’d never known any different, I took it for granted. The rush of feeling I’d just experienced created confused notions in me: holding hands, walking with arms around each other, holding each other – those words were part of my vocabulary, they described gestures I had never made. A walk? I remembered maybe lawns, or seasons, because those words had a very distant ring, a faint echo that quickly died away. I knew the flaking grey walls, the bars at fifteen-centimetre intervals, the guards pacing regularly up and down around the perimeter of the room.

‘What do they want of us?’ I asked again. She shrugged.

‘All we know is what they don’t want.’

She looked away and it was plain that the conversation was at an end. Anthea was the first woman to talk to me for any length of time, perhaps she would be the only one?

I concentrated on keeping my eyes closed, in the hope that eventually I’d fall asleep. For the first time, I understood that I was living at the very heart of despair. I had insulated myself from it, believing that it was out of bitterness, but suddenly I realised it was out of caution, and that all these women who lived without knowing the meaning of their existence were mad. Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more.

I didn’t know how old I was. Since I didn’t have periods and I had virtually no breasts, some of the women thought I wasn’t yet fourteen, barely thirteen, but Anthea, who was more logical than the others, thought that I must be around fifteen or sixteen.

‘We don’t know how long we’ve been here. Looking at your height, you’re no longer a child, and some of us stopped menstruating a long time ago. Anna’s young, she doesn’t have any wrinkles, neither do I, so they say. It isn’t the menopause that has withered us, it’s despair.’

‘So men were very important?’

She nodded.

‘Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.’

‘So life gave such great pleasure?’

‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are. Look at the way we live: we know we have to behave as if it’s morning, because they make the lights brighter, then they pass us food and, at a given time, the lights are dimmed. We’re not even certain they make us live according to a twenty-four-hour pattern. How would we measure time? They’ve reduced us to utter helplessness.’

Her tone was harsh and she stared straight ahead. Once again, I felt like crying. I curled up into a ball.

‘What’s the matter?’

All of a sudden, her voice was so gentle, so lilting, that I trembled as if being caressed. At least, I suppose it could be described thus: something exquisite coursed through me, so delicious that it frightened me. I curled up even tighter.

‘I don’t want to talk any more,’ I told her. ‘I was happier when I hadn’t understood anything, when I hated you all because you kept your secrets. You don’t have any. You have nothing, and there is nothing to be had.’

‘What secrets did you think we had?’

I no longer felt humiliated by my ignorance, because I’d touched on a knowledge that was too painful to bear.

‘How you make love, with what, what happens, all that. There they are, telling each other stories from the past, making allusions and bursting out laughing, and clamming up when I approach. I thought that was what was important, but it’s all pointless.’

‘Poor child,’ she said, so tenderly and so sadly that I burst into tears.

They probably tolerated crying, as long as we sobbed quietly and didn’t cause a stir; the whip didn’t crack.

Some food arrived and there was a bit of a flurry. When we felt hungry for the second time since the morning, we said it was the evening. We cooked whatever there was, we ate, and shortly afterwards the lights dimmed. The women said that, before the disaster, people used to eat three times a day, in the morning, at noon and in the evening, but we only felt hungry twice during each waking period and we were not sure that we were living according to the same clock as before. It was one of the arguments that came up time and time again, but kept going round in circles because nothing ever changed. Was it that we needed less food since we didn’t work, and two meals a day were sufficient? Had our bodies forgotten old habits to the extent that we could sleep every eight or ten hours? But, did we know how long we slept for? Perhaps they kept us awake for eight hours and only gave us nights of four hours, or six? The guards were relieved at intervals that didn’t correspond to those of our lives – sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes at night, or twice in one day. I was watching them, mustering the little knowledge I had, when I became aware that the young guard with blue eyes must have been away: suddenly, I saw him, pacing up and down the length of the cage, and I realised that I hadn’t thought about him or told myself any stories for several days. He still looked just as handsome.

I went to fetch my plate of food and sat down next to Anthea.

‘Handsome, beautiful – I suppose they’re words from before, from when things happened?’ I asked her.

She gazed at me for a while, then looked away.

‘I was beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I still am, I’d need a mirror. My hair has gone grey, but that doesn’t mean I’m old, the women in my family go grey early. My memories are muddled, I think I was twenty-eight the year they locked us up. At first, I still took the trouble to do my hair, and I was very upset about losing my brushes.’

She spoke in a half-whisper, as if to herself, but I knew she was talking to me.

‘And then my dress wore out. It was a pretty summer frock, very fashionable, with flounces, in that delicate fabric that doesn’t last very long. I was one of the first to wear these sort of tunics we make. Now, there are no dresses from before left, not even any scraps, they’re all worn out down to the last thread. You can’t imagine what they were like.’

‘Being beautiful, was that for the men?’

I was almost sure it was, but I sometimes heard the women say otherwise.

‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’

‘Am I beautiful?’

I saw her smile, but her smile was heart-rending.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. You’d probably have been one of the prettiest girls because you wouldn’t have had that sulky, angry expression. You’d have laughed, you’d have provoked the boys.’

‘Sometimes I provoke the young guard,’ I burst out.

This I had just understood.

When I told myself stories, I always went to sit close to the bars, on the side where he paced up and down. He walked slowly, keeping a close watch on what was going on in the cage, as he always did. Crouching down, facing him, I kept still, following him with my eyes. I watched him, and because he saw everything, he couldn’t have been unaware that I was watching him. Just a girl, sitting there, wearing her shapeless tunic. My hair was long and I kept it tied back at the nape of my neck; other than that, I have no idea what I looked like. I didn’t even know what colour my eyes were until Anthea told me, later, and I had no idea what that meant, to be one of the prettiest girls. It didn’t occur to me that none of the women was beautiful: they were clean, we kept the little soap we were given for washing our bodies and our hair, which was always clean. Most of us had long hair, because we had nothing to cut it with. Nor did we have anything for cutting our nails, which were always breaking when they were too long, and we looked sad, except when there were outbursts of nervous giggles. I don’t know what expression I wore when I looked at the guard: I was totally preoccupied, I was all eyes. He never looked at me: I was sure he knew I was staring at him continually and that it made him feel awkward.

‘I’d like to make him lose his composure.’

‘Whatever for?’ asked Anthea, in surprise.

‘I don’t know. To have power over him. They have the whip and they make us do what they want, which is almost nothing. They forbid everything. I’d like him to be upset, worried, afraid, unable to react. We’ve never been forbidden to sit and stare.’

‘Perhaps they’ll forbid it. They forbid what they like.’

‘Then they’d be acknowledging my existence. If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself.’

She was the brightest of the women, but I’d grasped something that she hadn’t thought of, so I was at least as clever as she was! A delicious thrill ran through me and I smiled at her.

‘They feed forty women, they keep us warm and give us fabric to make clothes. For them, we have no names, they treat us as if there is no difference between one woman and another. But I’m me. I’m not a fortieth of the herd, one cow among the others. I’m going to stare at him until he’s embarrassed.’

I marvelled at my own audacity. For years, we’d been here, reduced to utter helplessness, deposed, deprived even of instruments with which to kill ourselves, defecating under the full glare of the lights, in front of the others, in front of them: and I wanted to embarrass a guard and thought I had found the way to do it.

‘Don’t breathe a word to anyone. I don’t want the women to know what’s going on. They would change their attitude, they wouldn’t be able to help it, and what I am doing would lose all its power.’

‘Suppose we all started staring at them – wouldn’t they be even more embarrassed?’

‘They would no longer be embarrassed at all.’

These thoughts came to me with dazzling certainty and I felt absolutely sure of them. Where did they come from? I still have no idea, I only know that I derived enormous pleasure from what was going on in my mind.

‘Something that everybody does becomes meaningless. It’s just a habit, a custom, nobody knows when it started, they just repeat it mechanically. If I want to annoy him, I must be the only one to stare at him.’

Anthea pondered. I’m not sure she completely understood me; I was driven by an unquestionable authority and nothing was going to stop me.

‘I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.’

She gently nodded her head.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘And I shall carry on thinking about it.’

And I resumed my position, sitting cross-legged, my eyes riveted on the young guard.

Was he really handsome or did I only find him handsome because he was the only man who wasn’t old? I, who knew so little, and who couldn’t remember the world, did recognise the signs of age. I’d seen hair turn grey, and then white, speckles appear, baldness threaten the heads of the oldest women, wrinkles, dry skin, folds, weakening tendons, stooped backs. The guard had clear skin, his step was supple as I knew mine was, despite the little space there was for me to test it; he was upright and young like me. I found that strange: weren’t there enough old men left? Maybe they were all dead? Or did they not know what to do with the young men? They couldn’t think of any more tasks to set them and so they sent them to pace up and down between the bars and the wall? There hadn’t been any young guards before, I said to myself, and my heart began to race. How long had he been there? I had the feeling that I hadn’t noticed him straight away, I hadn’t counted the days, I didn’t know when I’d started making up stories because I had no reference points. Unless I was mistaken, if his presence was recent, then, for the first time in years, something had changed. Beyond the walls, in that outside world which was totally concealed from us except for the food we ate and the fabric they gave us, things had happened and those events affected us. The guards had always been so old that we didn’t notice them age. I’d been a little girl when I arrived, now I was a woman, a virgin for ever, but an adult despite my underdeveloped breasts and my aborted puberty: I’d grown, my body had recorded the passage of time. The old women didn’t change any more than the old guards, their hair had turned white, but it happened so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry. The young guard wasn’t a child when he arrived, he was tall, with thick hair, and there were no lines on his face. When he showed the first signs of withering, then I would feel my own skin to see whether I was getting older. He too would be a clock, we would grow old at the same speed. I could watch him and judge how much time I had left from the springiness of his step.

So, there had been a change. Somewhere, a decision had been taken which affected us, the impact of which we could assess: one of the old men had disappeared – perhaps he’d died – and had been replaced. Had this escaped the notice of those who governed our lives, were they not concerned about giving us a piece of information, or had they relaxed their vigilance?

I didn’t take my eyes off the guards. They always went in threes, pacing up and down the corridor. They were silent. When they passed one another, their eyes didn’t meet but I had the impression that they watched each other as closely as they watched us. The authorities must have been afraid that they’d disobey orders, or that they’d speak to us. Once again, I had a sudden insight, I understood why they had to be in threes: it prevented any complicity. They weren’t permitted to have private conversations, which might have conveyed something to us; they had to maintain the role of suspicious jailers all the time.

The two men on duty with the young guard had been there for ages. During the early years, the women had tried to talk to the guards, to make demands or move them to pity, but nothing could break down their cruel indifference. Then, they gave up and behaved as if they couldn’t see the guards, as if they’d banished their presence from their minds – or as if they themselves were bars that the women had become so used to that they no longer bumped into them. Nobody imagined that they felt in the least humiliated, but the prisoners’ pride was preserved intact. They no longer complained to the guards or took their imperturbability as an insult. And that made the gaze of this girl, sitting absolutely still, all the more powerful.

I’d stopped telling myself stories: watching the guard, I was creating one. I needed patience, I had nothing else to give. I don’t know how many waking periods I spent in this way. I thought a lot, and it occurred to me that we should stop speaking in terms of day and night, but of waking and sleeping periods. My certainty grew stronger: we were not living according to a twenty-four-hour cycle. When the lights were turned down, no one was tired: the women said it was because they had nothing to do. Perhaps they were right, but I didn’t know what it was like to work. My conviction came from continually watching the young guard. The relief guards didn’t come when we awoke, at mealtimes, when we went to bed or when we were moving around, but in between, at irregular intervals. The main door would open a fraction, the three men pacing up and down around the cage would converge, and sometimes they’d all leave the room as the next shift entered; at other times, only one or two were replaced. Was there any connection between their timetable and ours? How could I measure the passage of time? The only indicators I had were my body rhythms.

Anthea taught me that the heart always beats at the same rate, between seventy and seventy-four times a minute in a healthy person.

I began to count.

I had learned very little. Thirty, forty, fifty, seventy, eighty, I had to sort out the tens in my mind, but then I realised I didn’t know my tables and I barely knew how to do division. If, between the time when they turned the lights full on and the time when the guards changed shift, when the young guard came on duty, my heart had beaten seven thousand, two hundred times, that would have made a hundred minutes. It was just a question of multiplying Anthea’s seventy-two by a hundred, but what I had was three thousand, two hundred and twenty, or five thousand and twelve! I was incapable of performing the necessary operations. It was all very well concentrating and counting, but I couldn’t make use of the figures I obtained.

‘Can you teach me to do sums?’ I asked Anthea.

‘Without pencil and paper?’

She explained:

‘We are not as heartless as you think, and we have discussed your education a great deal. Teach you to read? With what, and to read what? Counting was possible up to a point, but only for mental calculations and we weren’t able to show you arithmetical operations. You wouldn’t know how to read a number. Helen and Isabel taught you your tables, but you must have forgotten because you never used them. Besides, when you realised that it wasn’t a game, you refused, it made you cross. We couldn’t force you and we couldn’t punish you, because of the guards. We couldn’t make you want to learn things you thought were pointless, and, in the end, we didn’t really see the need. Eight eights, and what then? What do you find sixty-four of here? Was there any point teaching you anything?’

I knew what reading was, but I’d never seen anything written. At most, I had understood the idea of letters, of their configuration, of words. The women had spoken of books and of poets.

‘If ever we get out, I’ll be stupid.’

‘If ever …’

She stared at me and I sensed that images were going through her mind, of which I had no idea. Of course, I must have seen the sun, the trees, days and nights, but I had no recollection whatsoever. Although I could guess what filled Anthea’s inner gaze, I couldn’t picture those things.

‘I’m afraid there’s no chance of that, you poor child,’ she said after a while. ‘But it’s true that if that were to happen, you’d be able to criticise us for having been very poor teachers, and we’d delight in your criticism.’

I looked at the women: they’d just been given the vegetables, and were bustling about as usual, trying to find a new way of cooking cabbage and carrots when all they had was water and salt. They didn’t seem so stupid, because I understood that, having nothing in their lives, they took the little that came and made the best use of it, exploiting the slightest event to nourish their starving spirits.

‘Yesterday, between the time when the lights came full on and when the young guard arrived, in other words when they changed shift, my heart produced three thousand, two hundred and twenty beats, and today, five thousand and twelve. How long is that?’

I saw her gasp.

‘What? Did you count them?’

‘It could help measure time.’

The young guard paced slowly up and down the length of the cage, the other two followed a few steps behind him. They never moved away from one another, they never walked side by side. While talking to Anthea, I kept my eyes on my prey: he never once looked in my direction.

‘If you counted, the least I can do is try and work it out,’ she said. ‘It’s such a long time since I did that! But do I know how fast your heart beats?’

‘You told me what a normal rate was.’

‘Yes, but there are variations from one person to another, and how do I know whether your heart beats at a normal rate? I can’t even take your pulse since we’re not allowed to touch.’

‘I can take it, I already have. I’ll say “tick-tock” at each beat. Compare that with your own heart, it’ll give us something to start from.’

My rate was slower than hers.

‘You’re younger. You are probably closer to the average than I am; my heart used to beat quite fast. How can we tell?’

‘What does it matter if the unit isn’t precise? The main thing is to have a unit. Take seventy-two.’

‘No. Given that we can’t be sure anyway, I’ll divide by seventy. It’s easier, and even then, I’m not sure I won’t get in a muddle.’

She fell silent, her eyes glazed over and she began to mumble. I listened to her without taking my eyes off the guard.

‘Three thousand, two hundred and twenty divided by seventy makes forty-six. At least, I think it does. I’m amazed it goes exactly. I’m going to start again.’

One of the old guards stared at me intently for two or three seconds.

‘Yes, it’s definitely forty-six. I’ll try five thousand and twelve.’

The guards had the time to complete their round before she finished.

‘Seventy-one or seventy-two, there are fractions.’

‘So that’s either forty-six minutes after we get up, or seventy-one or seventy-two?’

‘Forty-six minutes, or one hour and eleven or twelve minutes.’

She was thrilled.

‘How odd! What connection can there be between forty-six minutes and one hour twelve?’

I was lost.

‘We used to work seven or eight hours a day, depending on what our job was,’ she explained. ‘We’d begin at the same time every day, or people worked shifts, to ensure continuity. But we never had variations of twenty-five or twenty-six minutes from one day to the next. Does that mean something?’

She was alluding to a way of life that I knew nothing about, and I could only listen to her.

‘Carry on counting. Count the times tomorrow.’

Tomorrow? But was it tomorrow in the old sense of the word?

This first achievement made me ambitious. I told myself that heartbeats were not the only rhythms, and I started listening to my body. I knew that menstruation occurred every twenty-eight days and I was saddened that I didn’t possess that indicator, but I observed the variations in my appetite. Sometimes, I was very hungry when I woke up, and it felt like a long time until the meal was ready. We’d got it into our heads that they gave us food at specific times, but I saw that this was mistaken. Between the two meals, sometimes three hours went by, sometimes five. When I’d counted about ten times, it seemed that the young guard arrived at different times. I won’t list the figures I obtained – although I remember them perfectly, for they are the birth dates of my thoughts. Anthea found them so odd that she wondered whether the times weren’t completely random. But the young guard almost never stayed longer than six hours, according to my heart. When he appeared, he looked fresh and rested – from watching him, I had come to know him well – but at the end of his shift, he showed little signs of fatigue. His step maintained its elasticity, he held his head high: I couldn’t say precisely what it was that suggested weariness. Was he a little paler? His gaze less penetrating? Were his movements just a fraction slower? The relief guard always came on duty at times that were separate from our meal and sleep times. I found that strange.

‘This gives us a clue,’ I told Anthea. ‘Their time is not the same as ours. We and the guards live together, in fact: wouldn’t it be natural for us to follow the same patterns?’

I could see that she hadn’t grasped my reasoning.

‘When one of the guards doesn’t appear for seven or eight hours, presumably it’s because he’s gone off to sleep. But those periods are never the same as our sleep times. I shall have to keep watch, to make a mental note of their absences.’

Anthea looked puzzled, then frowned and nodded.

‘What can two different time patterns mean?’

‘You’re the one who’s known the real world. I can’t make anything of it.’

She told me that she was unable to make any sense of it either. She couldn’t connect the two things and she felt it was time to take the other women into our confidence.

‘I can’t think any more. It’s all too complicated, I can’t absorb all the facts. We must share what we’ve discovered, and ask the others what they think.’

Obviously, I was none too pleased, but I realised that Anthea was out of her depth and I gave her my permission. She went about it through discreet little chats: she took one or two women to one side, warned them that she was about to tell them something astonishing, and asked them to keep their expressions blank so as not to alert the guards. The idea of being astonished by the life we led already caused a stir, and Anthea quickly became adept at calming them down. During the early years, they’d learned to control themselves, then, with the absurd monotony of the days, they’d no longer had anything to control. The announcement of something new sent them into a tizzy. At first, the novelty itself was less of a shock than the fact of its existence. They said: ‘It’s not possible!’ and then they faltered. Anthea invented techniques. She began by saying: ‘Stay calm. Carry on with what you were doing’ – peeling a vegetable, finishing off some sewing, plaiting their hair, there were so few things to do – ‘without altering your speed. To do that, you need to be aware of your speed, of your movements.’ On hearing this, the women were of course intrigued, but only moderately. Because we lived under surveillance, the idea of remaining impassive was quickly understood, and they followed Anthea’s orders without difficulty. The word got around that something extraordinary was happening and, above all, that they must not give anything away. It seemed to me that if there was a little buzz of excitement, it was discreet enough to escape the guards’ attention. The women had chattered happily about everything when there was nothing to talk about, and there didn’t appear to be any change. They took stock of what they knew about the world before, and realised that they’d forgotten a lot. Most of them were not very well educated, and had lived quietly taking care of their homes, their children, the shopping and housework. I don’t think they had much to forget. They started to cogitate; their minds were numbed and they found it hard.

They couldn’t think of anything.

Meanwhile, I carried on counting. Gradually, I managed to count automatically, while I was chatting or eating, and soon, in my sleep. I woke up with a number in my mind: at first, it seemed improbable. I was dubious, then convinced. Anthea told me I’d developed an aptitude which was perhaps not as extraordinary as all that; it was simply that no one had ever needed it before.

I counted my heartbeats one by one, and I soon found myself faced with huge numbers that defied mental calculations. At seventy-two beats a minute, an hour was equal to more than four thousand, two hundred, and by the end of the day I had reached over fifty thousand. It was no longer manageable. So I found a different technique: I counted seventy-two then I mentally chalked up one. I started again and chalked up two, but I was afraid of getting confused with these two different scales. Then a woman would come along and act as an abacus: I’d say one, she’d remember it, then I’d say two. She soon became unnecessary because I didn’t make any mistakes. I saw that I was keeping track of the figures accurately. Gradually, I no longer needed to say the numbers out loud. Something fell into place inside me that alerted me automatically every seventy beats. I became a human clock.

Our days lasted between fifteen and eighteen hours, with random variations. From the moment the lights were turned down, which we called the beginning of night, about six hours went by before we were awakened. That was how we established that we were living according to an artificial clock. We needed to understand why.

Emma put forward the craziest theory.

‘We’re not on Earth. We are on a planet that rotates every sixteen and a half hours.’

‘How would we have got here?’

‘How did we get into the bunker?’ I asked.

Nobody had the least idea, which amazed me.

I’d put my own lack of memories down to the fact that I’d been so young and to the women’s state of shock that Anthea had described to me, but the others knew no more than I did. Apparently, life had been going on as usual, when suddenly, in the middle of a night that had begun like any other, there’d been screams, flames, a stampede, things which I, who’d always lived in the quiet of the bunker, couldn’t begin to imagine.

‘There were strange drugs that affected the brain and created false memories,’ said Emma.

Anthea wasn’t convinced of this. There’d been all sorts of unconfirmed rumours, stories of brainwashing, genetic engineering or robots so sophisticated that they were mistaken for human beings.

‘The fact is that none of us seems to have any coherent memories that would enable us to piece together what happened. We don’t even know if there was a war,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can recall only vague images: I see flames, people running in all directions, and I think I’m tied up and frightened. It goes on for a very long time. I’m still frightened, but there aren’t even any images any more.’

‘Well, I can’t even tell you that much,’ said Annabel. ‘There’s my day-to-day life, and then a sort of panic which I’ve always been terrified of reliving. Then, I’m here, lying on a mattress and everything feels perfectly normal.’

‘Wars aren’t like that. There are bombs and air-raid sirens.’

‘There wasn’t a war. Not where we were, at any rate. Of course, those were troubled times, but educated people said that we hadn’t lived in peace for a very long time.’

‘We were invaded by another country.’

‘Or Martians!’

They were as ready as ever to burst out laughing and I began to understand that it wasn’t out of stupidity or hopelessness, but as a means of survival.

‘So why would they have taken us to another planet? What use could we be to them?’

‘Clearly none at all,’ chipped in another. ‘We’re still on Earth. Fifteen or twenty years ago – no, less, you can tell from looking at the child – when we were locked up, there was a purpose, they were keeping us in reserve for something. And then a file got lost, the admin workers made sure no one found out, and they carried on guarding us and keeping us alive, but no one was responsible for us. We’re the result of an administrative blunder.’

‘But sixteen hours! That doesn’t explain sixteen hours!’

‘And it’s ridiculous that we can’t find any pattern in the guards’ routine. My memories of before are fuzzy, but I’m sure we worked regular hours. We even had to clock on.’

‘Once, only once since I’ve been counting, the young guard stayed nearly eleven hours at a stretch, pacing up and down around the cage. By the end, he looked drawn and pale, but he didn’t complain. I’ve never seen him looking impatient,’ I said.

Our conversations followed these lines, going over and over the same ground. Attempts to recall the early years of imprisonment were fruitless. Apparently, the women had slowly emerged from an inner fog to find themselves accustomed to the strange life they led. There was no suggestion of a rebellion. They’d had husbands, lovers and children. As a result of being too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they’d forgotten almost everything. But they didn’t try to shut me up, because they were horrified at having lost their own history. Anthea gradually became convinced that they’d been drugged.

‘Look at us, look at how we live. We have been deprived of everything that made us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you’re human, you can’t help it. We made up new rules with what we had left, we invented a code. The eldest pours the soup into the bowls, I supervise the sewing, when there is any, Annabel reconciles those who squabble, and we have no idea how all that came about. We must have been living in a dream for a long time and when we woke up, we’d adapted to the situation.’

‘What about when Alice wanted to kill herself and Claudia stopped her?’

‘That’s one memory that stands out amid all the confusion. No one knows when that was.’

I’d been counting for four months. We’d decided no longer to worry about the anarchic routine they imposed on us – my heart would act as our clock. One evening, as the lights were being dimmed, we decided that it was eleven o’clock, and that from that moment, I would count the days as twenty-four hours, as in the past. Sometimes, when we were in the middle of lunch, joylessly eating the boiled vegetables, a woman would ask me the time and I’d reply:

‘Two o’clock in the morning.’

That rekindled a spirit of rebellion in their dulled minds. We had our own time, which had nothing in common with that of those who kept us locked up; we’d rediscovered the quality of being human. We were no longer in league with the guards. Inside the bars, my strong, regular heart fuelled by youthful anger had restored to us our own territory; we’d established an area of freedom. New jokes sprang up. When the hatch opened for the second time and we were given a few kilos of pasta, if it was eight o’clock in the morning according to my heart, there was always one woman who’d say:

‘Ah! Here’s breakfast!’

Or, if it was midnight:

‘The show’s over, let’s have dinner in town.’

And we’d have a fit of giggles. I laughed too, I remember now, because I’d stopped seeing the women as enemies since I’d been giving them what I could: the time. I hadn’t forgotten the young guard, and when he was on duty, I continued to watch him, sitting close to the bars, hoping that one day he’d betray himself and give some sign that he’d noticed me, but that did not happen. I still wonder whether it was out of discipline, or whether he really hadn’t been struck by the fact that one of the women, always the same one, never took her eyes off him for a moment. I didn’t tell myself any more stories.

I’d created the only new thing possible in our static lives. While my gaze was riveted on the young guard, no one disturbed me. Had they done so, it would have drawn attention to me. That left me plenty of time to think. I began to fear that, once again, we would be stultified by habit. It seemed to me that certain discussions no longer aroused much interest, and some of the women began yawning when we tried once again to fathom the rationale behind the time difference. They moaned that we were wearing ourselves out for nothing, that we wouldn’t find an explanation, that everything was arbitrary. I told myself that if their enthusiasm waned, I’d start hating them again and feeling alone, whereas I’d been enjoying myself. They’d go back to making jokes that excluded me and I’d be angry again. But Anthea thought I was wrong and that they really had woken up. ‘It’s even dangerous,’ she added. ‘I’m afraid that the guards will realise and will drug us again. We’ll sink back into apathy, we’ll be half dead and we won’t even realise it. I can’t imagine anything more humiliating.’

Inevitably, with memory comes pain. Sitting facing one another, they found the courage to compare their scant memories. They tried to exhume the past in long conversations which groped their way around the obstacles. They fought against the amnesia which perhaps afforded relief, and against fear. They listened to one another attentively, and when one of them had an idea, she interrupted the woman who was speaking, in a rush to get it out before she forgot it. But they maintained a certain reticence as protection against the tears that would have alerted the guards. I was no longer excluded. I had earned my place among them, even though all I could do was listen.

But this didn’t last long, because suddenly, there was a major event.