I Who Have Never Known Men

_

I sat looking at her for a long time, then I lay her on the bench and crossed her hands on her chest, carefully placing her palms downwards. I didn’t have to close her almost blind eyes, which had shut of their own accord. There was no reason to delay. I picked up the shovel and went to dig behind the big house, where the others were already buried. It was a very clear night, as always when the sky was cloudless, even though there was no moon. I didn’t need to dig a very deep hole since there were no animals to come and unearth the bodies, and I wouldn’t bother to leave a mound or sign indicating that the remains of a human being lay there. I would remember, and there was no one else to tell. The grave was ready in an hour. I had to carry Laura there. I’d thought about it while I was digging. I was alone and even though she’d lost weight, I doubted whether I would be able to carry her. I found the thought of putting her on the trolley repulsive: it was too short and her legs would swing grotesquely, whereas I wanted to transport her in a dignified manner. I was in a real quandary, and it was only when I went back to her that the idea came to me, when I caught sight of the big table that I’d made such a long time ago. I would balance it on the trolley, then I’d place Laura on it, carefully shrouded in the best blanket. It was very difficult, and I suspected that years of a sedentary existence had sapped my physical strength. It took all my determination. Night had long since fallen when I was ready to accompany Laura to her grave. I went to pick a few wild flowers to scatter around her face, as the women had done. She was pale, and at peace, looking no more dead than when her heart was still beating and she had lost interest in staying alive.

I began to push the trolley. I had to stop frequently, to remove stones and sweep the ground, it was a slow funeral procession, this burial of a woman by the last remaining woman. I stopped, leaned over and straightened up again. I remembered the descriptions of pilgrimages I’d listened to, of those people who went around churches on their knees, begging forgiveness for their sins. I’d never really understood what that was all about, but I sensed I was participating in a very ancient ritual belonging to that planet from which I’d come but which was so foreign to me.

‘There,’ I said to Laura’s corpse when we arrived. ‘It’s almost over.’

I picked her up as gently as I could and it bothered me less than touching a living person. She seemed terribly heavy and I found it very difficult to lay her down without jolting her, but I managed it. I didn’t want to cover her with earth, crush the peaceful face and the white hair which I’d carefully smoothed. I slid the big table to the ground and pulled off the legs, then placed the top on the grave. I levelled the earth all around and stepped back: it was a fine, clean rectangular tomb. The rain, rare as it was, would doubtless bleach the wood, but it would stay put and Laura could quietly turn to dust.

I went to bed. After all that effort, I thought I’d sleep like a log, but I was too excited by the idea of my departure. At around three o’clock in the morning, unable to wait a moment longer, I got up, rekindled the fire to heat some water, and began packing. When there had been thirty or forty of us, we always had to take into account the old women, who walked slowly and couldn’t carry much, but I was strong and I decided to take three weeks’ worth of supplies, which was more than enough to last me until I came to another bunker. Over the years, we’d found six metal gourds, which I filled with water, because rivers were few and far between. It was sometimes several days’ walk from one to the next. Anthea had told me that meat gave you strength and I had seen, when burying Laura, that I need to build up my stamina again. The cans didn’t contain enough, so I decided to go and get some from the cold store and boil it for a long time so that it would keep.

We’d settled five kilometres from a men’s prison and had, as usual, closed the main door – a humble ceremony which we never failed to accomplish. When I’d taken out my supplies of meat, I wanted to have a last look at my dead companions of the last ten years. With time, the stench had gone, because the air conditioning was still working. As we went from bunker to bunker, I’d grown used to the sight of now mummified bodies piled haphazardly. However, one caught my eye. He was sitting apart from the others, a long way from the locked door. Had he wanted to cut himself off from the frenzied group that had attacked the lock until their very last breath, or had he died last, after dealing the final blow to those who could stand it no longer but were unable to stop living, as I had so often done? He had folded a mattress behind him and two on either side, so he was sitting up very straight, his body firmly supported. He seemed to me to have died proud, holding his head up high, his big eyes staring at the dark passage, with an air of self-respect and defiance. I walked around the cage and went close to him: despite the little left of his face, I had the impression he must have been handsome, the dark beard and withered skin didn’t mask the beauty of his features. His fists were clenched, resting side by side on his knees, perhaps this was how warriors of the past died, weapon in hand, looking their fate in the eyes. His torso was half clothed in a torn tunic, I could see the powerful bones of a shoulder that must have been strong. I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious. I sighed and left.

I climbed back up slowly, because I felt a strange nostalgia calling me back. I would never go down into this bunker again. Oh! I would see a hundred others, there were so many of them, but in this one where I had so often come for supplies, I’d never taken the trouble to look at the withered corpses, and now one of them affected me. I hadn’t noticed him among his companions, and when I finally did see him, I was about to leave. In another life, I might have met him. He wasn’t very old, he could have been a friend of my father’s, or my father himself, since I had definitely had a father. Or even a lover. But all I knew of him was his intention to die with dignity, sitting erect, apart from the others, away from the pushing and shoving, the fears and cries in which the others were enmeshed. He was a loner, like me, a proud man, and I was leaving, knowing nothing of him other than his final plan. But that at least he had achieved. He’d wanted to face his destiny to the last, and someone knew it. As long as I lived, my memory of him would live too, there would be a witness to his pride and solitude. I stopped, hesitated for a moment, then went back down to gaze at him for a long time. There was nothing new to be discovered on his parchment face. I felt a profound sadness. I told myself that that was perhaps how, in the time of the humans, people said goodbye to the body of a cherished lover, by trying to engrave them in their memory. I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.

Reluctantly, I bade him goodbye. Back at the village, I boiled my meat. Because I had to keep stoking the fire, I couldn’t go to bed. Dawn was about to break, and I still didn’t feel sleepy. In the prison, sleeping had been compulsory, and I later discovered that it was necessary for one’s well-being and also that it was advisable to keep to the same pattern as everybody else. But I was alone. Nobody was dependent on me any more, and my habits would not disturb anyone. I had complete trust in my body, which would demand sleep when it needed it, so there was no reason for me to go to bed if I didn’t feel like it. I could leave. I put on my shoes, slung on my rucksack and went out. I didn’t even need to put out the fire, lock up the house, or tidy away the few things I was leaving behind. All I had to do was decide which way to go.

I walked towards the rising sun because the sky ahead was magnificent. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and I loved watching the day unfold. I set out at a relaxed, unhurried pace, which I’d be able to keep up for a long time. I took my bearings from the landscape and began the trek which I intended to continue as long as I lived, even if I didn’t know what I expected from it. I walked up the long, gentle slope towards the east, and turned round when I reached the top. I gazed at the ten houses in the village which I’d so enjoyed building. Behind the biggest one was the cemetery where I’d buried Anthea. Only now, I tell myself that what I’d felt for her, the trust that slowly built up, the constant preference for her company and the joy each time I was reunited with her after an expedition were probably what the women called love. Now, I had nobody left to love.

From the start, I counted my steps. My heartbeats had been my unit of time, my steps would be my unit of length. I’d been told that an average step was seventy centimetres, and that there were a hundred centimetres in a metre. When the women spoke of lengths or distances, it was always in metres or kilometres, so I tended to use the same concepts. I soon realised that was completely ridiculous – those terms had meaning for them, but not for me, and I no longer needed to use a shared language. An hour’s walk – that meant something to me. I didn’t need to go to the trouble of converting my steps to kilometres. I would evaluate distances in hours’ walking. I always relied on my confidence in my inner clock and, during that first day, I decided to count the number of steps I took in one hour and to choose a unit that would be my equivalent of the kilometre. So I had to walk at a very regular pace. The ground wasn’t very hilly, alternating between gentle descents and moderate inclines which probably made little difference to my speed. My first stop was after five hours. I’d counted thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-two steps. I embarked on a division operation that I now found less difficult since Anthea had shown me how to do it by writing the numbers in the dirt, but all the same it required an enormous effort of concentration. That came out at seven thousand, one hundred and fifty steps an hour. I decided to check by counting hour by hour, and then by fractions of ten minutes, and ended up, by the evening, with the discovery that I walked regularly at a pace of a hundred and nineteen to a hundred and twenty-two steps a minute.

At the same time, I tried to evaluate in advance how far it was to a particular point, so as to give myself a sense of distance. The monotonous landscape didn’t help, and I had to be content with a bush, a small rock or some other little landmark. Sometimes I was unsure whether the bush I was walking past was the one I’d selected ten or fifteen minutes earlier or not. But I measured the distance I covered and I could feel myself acquiring a sense of distance, as I had once felt myself acquiring a sense of time.

That first day, in spite of my sleepless night, I walked for ten hours, at my even pace which could take me a long way, and decided to stop as soon as I felt that tiredness was slowing me down. I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone. I was satisfied by this first answer: I wanted to create an internal distance meter, and so it was my plan and my determination to carry it out under the right conditions that governed my decisions. I sat down at the spot where I had felt my pace slacken. I could have gathered a few twigs and branches from the nearest shrubs and lit a fire, but as soon as I’d put my rucksack down on the ground, I realised I was exhausted and decided to eat my boiled meat without heating it up. True, it wasn’t a very appetising meal, but it was pleasantly seasoned with the feeling of having complete freedom at last. I was able to gauge just how much I’d resented having to give in to the other women’s wish to settle down, and I smiled to myself as I thought of the immense journey awaiting me. I flattened the ground, stretched out on a blanket folded in half, rolled myself up in the other one and fell asleep at once. After six hours, I woke up, starving, ate again and fell asleep until sunrise. Before setting off again, I scattered some earth over the hole where I’d relieved myself, then I noticed that I was stiff all over. My ankles, thighs and back ached. I had certainly never walked for such a long time at a stretch. I didn’t know what to do about it. Should I wait and rest, or carry on in the hope that the exercise would relax my muscles? The prospect of spending a day sitting in the middle of that boring plain seemed ridiculous and my impatience got the better of me. But, since I couldn’t rely on the regularity of my speed, I wouldn’t try to perfect my distance meter that day.

In the afternoon, the landscape changed slightly. The long undulations became more marked, there were slopes that measured a good ten thousand steps. It would be exaggerating to describe them as hills, but I was very excited at the idea that this variation could be the beginning of a hilly area. I wanted to speed up my pace, which seemed even more unreasonable given that, although my aches and pains had grown no worse, they hadn’t gone away either, and I suspected that I shouldn’t be reckless and risk being unable to walk at all. Besides, tiredness got the better of me earlier than the previous day and I didn’t want to overstretch myself. I was certain that you don’t build endurance by pushing yourself beyond your limits. I stopped just before six o’clock in the evening and made a fire. I ate a lot, as much and for as long as I could. Before going to sleep, I rubbed my feet with fat because they were hot. One of the cans contained what the women called bean and bacon casserole, with a layer of lard on top which I removed before heating the rest in my saucepan. I’d noticed that when I got this fat on my hands, it softened my skin, and that’s what gave me the idea of using it on my feet, and I also put some on my face. I didn’t fall asleep as quickly as I had done the night before, and I watched the sun set and the first stars come out in the pale, smooth sky.

In the middle of the third day, I saw that there was a cabin on the next slope. I hadn’t expected to come across one so soon. I stopped, sat down in the sparse, dry grass to contemplate my goal from afar. I knew only too well what I’d find there – the eternal procession of despair. At the top, the rusty locks, the lights permanently on, and, down below, the locked prison, the cage and its population of corpses. I’d go down and look at everything very closely. That was the only tribute I was able to pay the victims. And then I’d close the main door. I don’t know if I still hoped to find an open cage one day, or come across the traces of another group of women or men who’d escaped and settled outside, as we had done – only the traces because, as the last survivor from my bunker, I didn’t imagine that others would have lived any longer than my companions. I thought about it because I was in the habit of considering every angle of a question, and I’d never had any form of entertainment other than thinking.

The sun was going down when I set off again. The rest had done me good and my aches were gone. I’d reckoned the bunker was half an hour away, and was pleased to find that I wasn’t mistaken: I reached it in twenty-eight minutes. I put my rucksack down inside the cabin and made my way down the stairs without hurrying. There was almost no smell, but I still tried to breathe cautiously. The women had compared the stench with that of a sewer, of insalubrious marshes or a cesspool – none of which I had known. For me, it was simply the faint smell of corpses. Down below, in the narrow corridor, the doors were open to reveal the usual layout: the guards’ room, the cupboard at the back, the big double doors of the prison. I saw a chair had been knocked over and a saucepan overturned, spilling its contents which had dried leaving a brown stain. This slight disorder was rare and aroused my curiosity, but first of all, I had to go and see the cage. We had always felt this was an obligation, even when we’d become certain that we would never find the door open. We had to pay our respects to the dead, to those contorted bodies that lived there, piled haphazardly, perpetual inhabitants of horror and silence.

They were women. I stared at them for a long time, then I walked around the cage taking in everything: there was nothing new. The knives, forks and plates were still in the cage, revealing that here, when the alarm had sounded, they’d been eating. A whip was lying on the floor of the area where the guards had paced up and down. One of them must have been rather more jumpy than was customary and had dropped his weapon. Perhaps he was the one who’d knocked over the chair as he fled. The whip was lying against the wall, out of reach of the prisoners who’d tried to grab it to the very end. One was slumped against the bars, her arm still outstretched, overcome by death during her final attempt.

The guards’ room contained only the usual items: chairs, a table, lockers. Absolutely nothing had been left behind. Anthea had often told me she found that odd, but I didn’t really understand. I possessed nothing, so I couldn’t imagine the objects she told me about: books, letters, cigarettes, playing cards, razors. I travelled with two blankets, a small shovel, a can-opener, matches and food, and so I didn’t find it surprising that the guards only had their clothes and their weapons. I righted the chair, sat down and felt sad. I hadn’t wanted to look at the dead women, but I forced myself. Apart from the one with her arm outstretched, I hadn’t really seen them. I told myself that I’d been hypocritical and, since I had no one to lie to, I discovered that you can lie to yourself, which felt very strange. Was I missing companionship more than I thought and making myself into another, a witness, if only to deceive her? I pondered this thought for a long time, but I couldn’t see how to develop it further. I was as much a prisoner outside this empty land as I had been in the cage during my early years. I gave up this futile avenue and resumed my usual train of thought, which was always to plan, assess and organise, and went to investigate the food store. That was the only thing that varied from one bunker to the next, as if deliveries had comprised large quantities of the same thing and the choice of how these were used was left up to the guards. In the cold store, I found large hunks of beef which I’d have to defrost before I could cut them up. There was no pork or mutton left. In the cupboard were several tins of powdered milk, which thrilled me. It was at least three years since I’d last had any, and I knew that it was a very nourishing food that would help build up my strength. I was interested in some other tins of powder. At that time, my reading was very poor and I found it hard to decipher the labels. When I managed to do so, I was puzzled by the word ‘orange’. Of course, I’d heard the women say it and I gradually recalled that it was with nostalgia for one of the good things of the past. I diluted a little of the powder in water and tasted it with curiosity. I found it rather bitter and needed sweetening, but I rarely had any sugar. But Anthea had told me about vitamins and I took the tins thinking that they’d improve my diet.

I made several trips down into the bunker to bring up the meat, the powders, a mattress and a chair. I cooked a copious meal and had the brainwave of sprinkling my mixture of meat and vegetables with milk powder. After that, I slept for a long time. When I awoke, I realised that there was nothing more for me to do there. I felt vaguely disappointed, as if I had hoped for more from that bunker, as if I’d forgotten that they were all the same. The next one would also have the door locked, but I’d be unlikely to find more milk there. Perhaps there’d be some other novelty? The women had talked of chocolate, bread and cheese. I was looking for something else. I told myself that, while waiting to find out what it was – because I was modest to the point of not thinking ‘before finding it’ – I would enjoy the lovely red meat that I could grill over my fire of twigs, and also the milk, of which I drank a whole gourdful.

At around eight o’clock in the morning, I felt wonderfully good. I went down into the bunker to fetch a few cans to replace the ones I’d used in the past few days and to see if I could find some thread, which I’d forgotten to do the day before. By the time I was ready to leave, my rucksack weighed a lot more than when I’d arrived, but it didn’t feel too heavy. I was already a lot stronger and I wanted to take the mattress with me, because I’d slept much better than on the ground, but I told myself I ought to be careful, and that there’d be plenty of time to think about that in a few days, at the next bunker, when I’d completely adjusted to my new life. Perhaps I would no longer need it.

I didn’t leave the usual signs on the ground as I no longer believed there might be any other survivors. But I discarded the mattress in front of the cabin so that if I came that way again, I’d recognise my own traces.

I think I have given an accurate account of this first bunker. I think so, but I can’t be certain. I’m sure that was the one where I found milk, but afterwards, which one was it where I found tea? The fifth? The tenth? They were all the same, with their forty mummified corpses piled up or scattered across the floor. Only once did I find thirty-eight, and only once did I find all the women lying calmly, as if they’d understood that death was inevitable and had decided to wait in silence. Another time, the keys had fallen within two metres of the bars and I thought how dreadful it must have been to see them without being able to reach them. Sometimes, a tap was running in the cage, making a little trickling sound that startled me at first, but I’d already lost all hope that the door would be open. Each time, there was the food store and the permanent light. I travelled eastwards, from one bunker to another, carrying my provisions, and in the end, I never did take a mattress. My shoes wore out, which didn’t bother me – eventually I was bound to find some boots to fit me. Then came the season when the sky is always cloudy, with the fine drizzle that I knew well, and I was glad to find a waterproof sheet in one of the guard rooms. It was folded on the table, beside a pile of new blankets which hadn’t been put away. That set me thinking again about how rare it was to find unusual objects in the bunkers, as if it had been decreed that they all had to be absolutely identical. I was about to plunge into my habitual speculation about the guards and the meaning of our imprisonment. At first, I felt like shrugging and turning my thoughts to other things. But why? How else would I occupy my mind? After our escape, Dorothy used to say: ‘Let’s organise our life, let’s not waste our thoughts.’ The fact was, I could use my thoughts as I pleased, the idea of wasting them was absurd. My survival was guaranteed, I would never exhaust all the food available, and the rare bad weather had never made me ill. I could allow my mind to wander as it pleased, it didn’t matter if the paths it took were dead ends – all I had to do was put a stop to them. It was certain that the purpose of our deportation and captivity would never be revealed to me through the abandoned objects, and the whip lying on the ground taught me nothing useful. I found the same thing in all the bunkers, even in the guards’ quarters.

Even in the guards’ quarters: I don’t think I’d ever formulated that so clearly. Those words kept haunting me and were beginning to annoy me, when at last an idea began to form: we had understood that the guards didn’t want to give us any clues as to the reasons for our captivity and our being kept alive, but we’d always assumed that they knew. What if they were as much in the dark as we were? What if they were forced to do a job that they weren’t permitted to understand? What if by putting the same things in all the bunkers, those in charge wanted to keep all information from them as well as from us? I was electrified by this theory, I could feel my footsteps dancing and I began to laugh. I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

I would be the sole proprietor of this land, I’d said to Anthea shortly before she died. But I knew that the stones and the cold stores would constitute a paltry treasure. I’d set out with the intention of discovering things – possibly the power plant the women had always talked about, the place from which the orders that governed our lives were issued – anything that was new. To think that the guards knew nothing was a new idea, and to me nothing seemed more precious. I would have liked to celebrate. Since I lived as I pleased, walking, eating and sleeping when I felt like it, I couldn’t invent anything special, but that evening, I lit the fire and grilled my meat with a light heart. I promised myself sweet dreams that night. I don’t know if I had them. Every night, I had plenty of company, and, on waking, I always had the vague recollection that I’d been laughing and playing with women and men, but I never managed to remember anything more specific. That always surprises me because when I am awake, I forget nothing.

Having realised that, in fact, the guards were also victims, I was prepared for the strange encounter that awaited me. I’d been walking for a year, always in the direction of the rising sun. The landscape had changed a little, the long undulations had become hills, and I never climbed them without hope. The rivers were deeper and it was possible to swim in them, which gave me immense pleasure, and I saw new types of tree in the denser woods. I carefully examined the bushes, because I remembered that the women had spoken of wild berries – strawberries, blackberries and raspberries – which all tasted delicious, but I never saw anything that resembled their descriptions. Once, I came across what I thought must be mushrooms, but I didn’t pick them because they’d said that they might be poisonous. It was on leaving one of these woods that I was struck by the lie of the land.

A long valley stretched out ahead, covered with the usual scrawny vegetation and loose stones, but I could immediately make out a strip that looked different: the grass was even sparser, there were virtually no stones. It formed a straight trail to the next hilltop. The women had spoken of roads: could this be one? I went down towards it, deciding of course to follow it, even if it wasn’t heading eastwards, since I’d only chosen this direction to avoid going round in circles. I walked for a day and a half before reaching the summit of a long, low hill. As soon as I looked down, I saw the bus.

I say bus, but of course, initially, I didn’t know what I was looking at. First of all, it was half an hour away and all I could make out was a rectangular shape in the middle of the plain; and then, naturally, I’d never seen a bus. All I had to go on was what the women had told me, and none of them had given me precise descriptions of things that they took for granted. I only knew that it was a vehicle that could carry a lot of people.

My heart was racing as I ran down so fast that I was at the bottom in ten minutes. I stumbled a couple of times, because I couldn’t take my eyes off my goal: a huge rusty structure which was ten paces long and twice my height, standing on wheels that were mostly broken, with windows all around. As soon as I was halfway down, I could see the figures sitting in the bus, and I nearly stopped dead in my tracks, but I quickly got a grip on myself. I ran up to it, dropped my rucksack and stood rooted to the spot, trying to take in what I saw. I recognised a door with a handle, and I tried to turn it, but it came off in my hand. The panes were broken, I tugged at the frame, the door opened and immediately dropped off its hinges. I hauled myself up what remained of the steps and entered the bus.

Over the years, the corpses in the bunkers had mummified; these had become skeletons, dressed in the all-too-familiar uniform, equipped with their weapons and strange masks which hid their facial bones. They were sitting naturally, as if death had struck very suddenly and they’d slipped, without being in the least aware of their last heartbeat, into that final immobility where, for years, nothing had disturbed them. The driver was in his seat, his hands still gripping the wheel. On entering the bus, I’d raised a light cloud of dust which settled around me as I stood there dumbstruck. I mechanically did what I’d been doing for years and which had become the very structure of my mind: I began to count. I enumerated twenty-two passengers on the twenty-four seats, sitting in pairs on either side of a central gangway. So there were twenty-three bodies. Each one had a kit bag, either on his knees, or on the floor between his feet. Incredulously I made a careful check: there was no sign of panic, nothing suggested that they’d been forewarned of any danger. The bus had stopped in the middle of the plain and they had all died on the spot.

I stood looking around me for a long time, allowing my wild curiosity to satisfy itself at its own pace. I already knew that it would remain frustrated – I could count myself lucky if this bizarre world that I inhabited was kind enough to add a few more questions to my list of unanswered ones. It was five o’clock and the sun had begun its descent before I was stirred into action.

My interest was primarily in the kit bags: I had explored more than a hundred bunkers but I’d never seen these bags made of coarse, stiff cloth, with straps and metal buckles. I picked one up. Impatience got the better of me while I was taking it outside, I was tense and my heart was pounding. I tried to calm down, telling myself that I wouldn’t find anything extraordinary, but I didn’t believe that, and my fingers trembled as I undid the knots.

On top was a carefully folded garment, of a kind I’d never seen. It had long sleeves, a stiff collar and a belt, and it wasn’t cut from a fabric I’d ever seen before, but from a thick, fairly supple material with creases, pockets, flat seams – the word came back to me at once – and padded parts. I was used to light cotton that fluttered in the slightest breeze and I thought this must be uncomfortable to wear. It was probably a jacket, a garment the women had mentioned but which the men had never worn in the bunker.

Underneath, there were several items. I began with a smaller packet, made of thick paper. Obviously, I didn’t know it was paper, because I’d never seen any, but I shan’t go into the difficulties I had in identifying and naming all these things because that would be too tedious and I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d have to repeat myself over and over again. I undid the packet carefully, it was fragile and threatened to fall apart. It only contained a brownish dust, odourless and tasteless, probably some sort of food that had dried up. Then, from a small soft leather pouch, I took out a strange instrument that I had to examine closely to find a very thin blade sandwiched between two metal plates, all mounted on a handle that was very easy to hold. You couldn’t use it for cutting unless you removed the blade: it took me a long time to guess that it was a razor. The third item was a glass bottle, which I put to one side as I was much more intrigued by two pieces of carefully folded, big white rectangles of thick, supple fabric. I thought they must be those towels made of terry cloth that the women missed so badly and which I’d learned to manage without. But I could use them to make myself something to replace my tattered dress. There were also two pairs of knickers. I remembered later that for men, the word underpants was used.

And underneath, a book.

Anthea had taught me the alphabet and the rudiments of reading by drawing the letters in the sand. At the time, it bored her, because she couldn’t see what I would do with such knowledge, but I had insisted: there was too little to learn for me not to grasp at everything I could. I had words in my head for things I’d never seen, let alone touched, as I was now doing. I recognised the book at once and I was so overwhelmed that I felt almost giddy. I think that if I’d been standing, I’d have collapsed. I had in my hands the most precious of treasures, a spring from which to drink the knowledge of that world to which I would never have access. As always when I was overcome by emotion, I began to count. The title, written large, had twenty-three letters divided into four words, all beginning with capitals. I looked, without trying to decipher – excitement, impatience and tiredness were a bad mixture which made me tense and dulled my mind. I no longer knew which way to turn, whether to satisfy my curiosity and search the bags or to find out what the book was about, and I had to make an enormous effort to control myself. As the sun was already very low and soon I wouldn’t be able to see enough, I decided to save the book for later, but my excitement made me clumsy and I dropped the bottle that had been in my lap. It was sheer luck that it didn’t break, as it had landed on the jacket and I was able to catch it before it rolled onto the stones. That calmed me down and I resolutely put the book to one side. I returned to the bag and was disappointed: the only other thing it contained was a blanket like the ones in the bunkers. So I picked up the bottle, which wasn’t big, probably half a litre, full of a colourless liquid, like water, and had never been opened. I examined the cork at length and put off finding a way to open it until later. I was absolutely exhausted. The regular existence I led, walking for eight to ten hours every day in the wilderness, hadn’t prepared me for this emotional upheaval. I was trembling with fatigue and I didn’t even have the strength to make myself something to eat. I unfolded the blanket from the bag, stretched it out on the ground to air it and wrapped myself up in my own. I didn’t even realise that I was falling asleep, and was amazed, on waking abruptly, to find it was three o’clock in the morning. I lit the fire and heated up some food. At sunrise, I was back in the bus.

First, I took out all the kit bags and lined them up a few metres from the rusty shell of the bus, then I did likewise with the corpses. Reduced as they were to skeletons, they felt incredibly light. I was especially interested in their clothing. I wondered whether the lightweight cotton trousers and the shirt with epaulettes that I’d seen the guards in the bunker wearing would be more comfortable than my dress. One of the dead men had been small and slim and I decided to keep his clothes to try on after washing them. I put the weapons in two piles: the whips that would never crack again and the big pistols that they’d never drawn in the bunker, but whose use I had been told about. I was tempted to try them out, and took one, aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and at the time, I told myself it was not loaded. Later, I remembered that those things had a safety catch and I thought that perhaps it had been on, but in any case, I wouldn’t have known how to release it. Then I began searching all the bags and I wasn’t surprised to find exactly the same in each one: a jacket, two pairs of underpants, a packet of food – one, better preserved than the others, contained little whitish fragments which crumbled at my touch. I presumed it was bread, that everyday food which I had never eaten – a blanket, a razor and a book. I didn’t even need to decipher the title to realise that they were all the same. I didn’t dwell on the matter, fearing I’d experience anew the agitation that had defeated me the previous evening. Once I’d finished sorting everything out, I wondered why we’d never found any bread in any of the bunkers. I still have no idea.

By midday, everything was in order, the twenty-three skeletons lying side by side, the shirts and underpants in neat piles, the masks and weapons in three separate heaps. I had examined the masks closely, and remembered stories told by the women: they were probably gas masks. That made me wonder what had killed these men: certainly not gas, against which they had protection. Anyway, we’d escaped just minutes after the siren had stopped and nothing had happened to us.

I stood up and stretched. My back ached from bending over for so long, and I spent a long time examining my possessions before heating up my meal. Suddenly I was the owner of a vast number of goods, whereas I was used to owning nothing. I felt overwhelmed. I ate gazing at my skeletons. They’d been custodians of the absurd, carrying out orders whose purpose they were unaware of, themselves having to submit to incomprehensible rules, and perhaps they had no more idea of our identity than we did of theirs. Death had caught them unawares, sitting in the bus: but had they known where they were going? Since the siren, we’d never found any trace of the guards, and we imagined that they’d all been taken off somewhere else: why were these guards still here? The only possible explanations occurred to me much later: they were on a routine trip between two bunkers, they were on their way to sleep, or they might have been new arrivals being driven to their post, oblivious of the danger. The gas masks showed that this land was not safe, but whatever it was that killed them had been unforeseen. Ours was the only prison where the siren had sounded just as the cage door was opened, and that is what had saved us: they were the only ones who were exposed, and that had killed them. This symmetry preoccupied me for a long time. For some reason I found in it a sort of obscure beauty. Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this? Were things still going on? And on this planet of which I will only ever see a fraction, however long I keep walking, was there a place where the bunkers were still operational? Where men and women obeyed the whip, slept and ate at random times, and where a rebellious girl was beginning to count her heartbeats? Was I the only one? Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?

I decided to bury the skeletons, because I wanted to show that whatever had happened to us, we belonged to the same kind, to those who honour the dead. I dug twenty-three shallow graves and laid the skeletons in them, then I covered them with earth and made a little mound on top of each one, on which I placed the masks and the weapons. I arranged them in a circle, I don’t know why, I felt that was best, their heads in the centre and their feet pointing towards the distance. It took me three days, because the ground was dry and I found it tiring. I rested by trying to decipher my books.

They were all carrying the same book: A Condensed Gardening Handbook. It explained how to plant, sow, thin out, hoe and weed, and what to do in which season and what to plant where. I read the entire book carefully and became an expert on grafting roses, which made me laugh. There were lots of illustrations which showed me what a hoe looked like, a tulip bulb and plenty of other things that I’d never seen and never would.

I read and reread the book. I acquired a perfectly useless knowledge, but I enjoyed it. I felt as if I had embellished my mind and that made me think of jewels, those objects which women used to adorn their beauty, in the days when beauty had a purpose.

By the fifth day, everything was in order. I’d chosen two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a jacket, several pairs of underpants, taken as many towels as possible and replaced the rest, neatly folded and wrapped in the blankets, on the seats of the bus. I repacked my rucksack, which was only a little heavier because I’d eaten the contents of many of the cans, when suddenly I spotted the bottles which I’d completely forgotten. Had I become so rich that I could neglect some of my possessions? I had to move on because my water supply was getting low and I needed to find a river or a bunker soon to replenish it, but I could take a little time to find out what was in the bottles. I had no implement to open them with, so I began digging out the cork with the tip of my knife, which was difficult and took a long time. At last, I was able to pour a little of the liquid into my cup. It smelled funny, very strong and not very pleasant to the nostrils. I dipped my finger in and licked it: I didn’t like it. I took a tiny sip, which I swallowed gingerly, but even so it burnt my throat and made me want to cough. So it was alcohol, as I’d been expecting. At first, I was vexed, then I remembered that alcohol has medicinal qualities. In the past it had been used especially for cleaning wounds and numbing the senses when someone was in a great deal of pain. My wounds, nothing more serious than scratches on my legs when I brushed past thorn bushes, never became infected. All the same, it seemed like a good idea to take one bottle. I put the others back inside the bus.

Before departing, I gazed at the scene I was leaving behind: the rust-eaten bus, a shell in the middle of the plain, which, over the centuries, would slowly disintegrate where it stood, the tombs in a circle decorated with the masks and weapons, the silence barely disturbed by the constant whispering of the wind. It all seemed incredibly strange, sinister and moving. I felt the burden of the inexplicable, of my life, of that world to which I was the sole witness. I had nothing else to do in it but continue my journey. One day, I would die here. Like the guards.

I followed the road.

It hadn’t been used for twenty years and, in places, despite the sparse vegetation, it was so overgrown that it disappeared and I had to climb a little hill to make out the bare strip. It took me in a south-west direction. I wondered whether it would lead to something. That would be logical, if there was any logic in this world. In the bus, two seats had remained empty: was the driver on his way to pick up three more guards, one of whom would have to stand, or was he driving the others to their final destination?

For three days, ten hours a day, I walked, once again spurred on by impatience. I’d stayed in one place for a long time and was reaching the end of my supplies when I saw a cabin. I went in, feeling no emotion, certain that I would only find, as usual, the lights on, the main doors open and the cage locked. In the cold store, I was glad to see a fairly small piece of lamb that would defrost and cook quite fast. Back at the top, I realised that I hadn’t even glanced at the cage and its occupants. That made my heart sink, and I promised to go and pay my respects the next day.

That night, I had a dream that I remembered. In it, I was sitting inside the bus amid the guards, who were alive. I couldn’t make out their faces because of the masks, but I could hear them talking among themselves. I had never actually heard the sound of a man’s voice, but that didn’t occur to me in my dream. The bus was moving. My situation felt completely natural, I didn’t wonder where I was going, or what I was doing among the guards. This seemed to go on for ages and I was perfectly relaxed, surrounded by the men, when suddenly I rediscovered the exquisite eruption of before, when I used to make up stories that I kept to myself.

That woke me. I was alone, under my blanket, lying in the middle of the plain, a few paces from the cabin. I felt an immense sadness on thinking that there had been men and their closeness could trigger that delicious tremor, but I was reduced, poor me! to encountering it by chance in a dream. For a few moments I wondered what gave me my determination to live. I thought of all those women who had been killed by despair well before they reached old age, of Laura who grew tired of keeping her soul tethered to her body, and I felt a sort of vague temptation, a gnawing urge to admit defeat, which terrified me. I got up and took a few steps. It was a clear night, the sky was vast, hill after hill, I had thousands of kilometres to cover. My curiosity, momentarily dampened, was reawakened.

The next day, I went back down the stairs and sat outside the cage. It was one of the few bunkers where the occupants had maintained their dignity to the end. There were no gruesome piles of twisted bodies, they were lying down, each on his own mattress, as if asleep. Perhaps one of them had had a powerful influence over the others and had convinced them that shouting and resistance would achieve nothing, that they had to resign themselves to dying and embrace their fate without putting up a futile struggle. Everything was in order, but, apart from bodies lying everywhere, how can you create disarray when you have nothing? I felt a sort of serenity looking at those corpses: they had died calmly and would spend eternity in tranquil postures. It set me wondering how I would die, whether it would be at night, in my sleep, and I would lie on the plain for ever, exposed to the constant gentle wind, or whether I would fall ill and have to endure pain. I remembered the guns, and then I remembered the safety catch, and told myself I should have persevered, I’d have been bound to find out how to use it, because I might end up wanting to die. I could have gone back to the bus, but I was extremely reluctant to retrace my steps when there was so much new ground ahead. I was young and healthy, and I had plenty of time to worry about that kind of precaution. Besides, I expected to make new discoveries. There had to be more than just cabins on that plain!

I filled one of the big cooking pots with water and boiled my washing for a long time on the guards’ cooker. When it looked clean, I took it up and laid it out on the grass to dry in the sun. That took me the whole day.

I set off again. Now that I had a book and could learn to read, I was sorry not to have a pencil or anything else to write with, to make a note of my route. In the evening, before going to sleep, I practised writing letters in the dirt, copying the sentences and words from the book. I had used a lot of them in speech, so I recognised them, and I thought about how to construct those that were not in there. The first one I tried to spell was ‘cabin’: I had ‘ca’ from ‘can’ and ‘bin’ from ‘compost bin’ – I just had to put the two together to make ‘cabin’. Then I spelled ‘cage’. The magic ‘e’ made the ‘a’ say its own name, unlike the short ‘a’ in ‘cabin’. I felt very pleased with myself for working this out and it looked as though I remembered everything I’d been taught.

Sometimes, busying myself in this way, I automatically spoke the words I was trying to write and I was astonished at the sound of my voice, which had become cracked and raucous. I was probably forgetting how to talk through lack of practice. That worried me a little, then I shrugged: so what if I completely forgot how to speak? I would never talk to anyone again!

All the same, I felt nostalgic for a moment. That wonderful dream never recurred, and I was sometimes acutely aware that I was alone, and always would be, and that the only pleasure within my grasp was the all-too-rare one of satisfied curiosity.

I continued from bunker to bunker. In so far as there were seasons on this planet where things varied so little, winter returned. The temperature was slightly cooler and it often rained during the night. I slept wrapped in the waterproof sheet and I set out a little later in the morning, as I had to wait for it to dry. I wore trousers and the jacket. While waiting for better weather, when I wasn’t working on my reading, I made myself a dress from the towels. The ground became greener and the streams deeper. I lost the road.

It had become harder and harder to follow. At first, I told myself I must have made a mistake and confused it with the natural formation of the land. Much as I disliked doing so, I retraced my steps. I thought I’d found it again at the top of a hill, and I scanned the countryside carefully. The direction I’d come from seemed to be the right one, so I went back the same way, hoping that I’d only missed it through a lapse of concentration. I waited for the low evening sunlight, which emphasised the contours of the landscape, and I saw the thin ribbon stretching up the hill opposite. At dawn the next day, I was able to make out further clues, but after an hour’s walking, I could no longer see any clear signs. I decided to cover a vast semicircular area with a radius of five thousand steps. For three days, I walked back and forth, and had to resign myself to the fact that the road ended there.

I was bitterly disappointed. I had so hoped that it would lead me somewhere, I’d forgotten that nothing made sense in that wilderness. Do people build roads that suddenly vanish? Yes, I told myself, yes, those people did. I felt like sitting down on the ground and weeping, but, luckily, my anger was the stronger and drove me on. I had to decide on a new direction. At first I’d chosen the east, then the road had made me deviate towards the south-west, and now I resolved to go due south.

I had less energy. The road and the bus, which had given me so much hope, had turned out to be insoluble mysteries like everything else, and from time to time I said to myself that it was a pretty meagre reward after two years’ walking. But gradually my natural resilience took over again and, as I made my way from one hilltop to another, it occurred to me to organise my route more cleverly than in a straight line. By going straight, I was only exploring a very narrow area, and perhaps I was missing things to the left or right. The fruitless semicircle gave me an idea: I would walk in huge parallel arcs, two or three hours’ apart, depending on how I felt, and on the appeal of the terrain. Of course, that was much harder to calculate than going straight ahead, when all I had to do was pick out the landmarks and walk towards them. I knew that if you followed the sun, you’d go round in a circle. I got involved in complicated reckonings and experiments on the ground: I needed to follow the sun for a while and then change direction at midday. At that time, I had no means of making a map of my journey, but in the evenings, I drew it on the ground with stones and gazed at it for a long time to ensure I had memorised it. I began to wonder whether the bunkers were dotted around at random, or whether their location was governed by a plan. On our first exploratory trip, it had been twenty-six days before we’d found one, but sometimes I walked for barely a week before being able to stock up afresh. I walked in several semicircles, then, when I was certain I could orientate myself, I made big zigzags along the arcs of the circle: after a few weeks, I realised that the bunkers were arranged in groups of five, one at each corner of a rectangle and one in the centre. By keeping to a straight line, naturally, I missed some. I soon became able, on arriving at a cabin, to work out which way to go to find the next one, and could go to them or avoid them as I chose. I never avoided them and, whether I needed food or not, I’d go down to pay my respects to the dead. I never came across an open prison door.

The coincidence that had made the siren go off at the precise moment when the guard was putting his key in the lock had been unique. Sometimes I marvel at my fate: I had been the only child among the women, and we were the prisoners who had escaped with our lives. For a few years.

This new control over my route dispelled my melancholy mood. After all, I had made one discovery, so why had I allowed it to make me depressed? There would be more.

I made another discovery.

It was at the end of the day. I was tired and was looking for a patch of ground that would be a good place to stop. It had rained for several nights, but that evening the sky was cloudless, so I could rely on dry weather, which was a relief because I hadn’t been able to light a fire and had eaten my canned food cold and congealed. In other words, I needed a thick grove where I’d find plenty of wood to cut, with as few brambles as possible. I looked carefully about me, but with a specific objective, which nearly caused me to miss the mound of stones. I’d almost gone past it when the feeling of something unusual made me stop. I turned round and saw the mound that stood out so sharply against the monotony of the plain. There were never piles! It was two metres wide and reached almost to my knees. I’d never encountered anything like it – at most, I’d seen a few large stones close to each other, but what I found here couldn’t be natural. I took off my rucksack, put it slowly down on the ground and caught my breath.

I was almost afraid to start moving the stones. I had to rouse myself. The stones were fairly large and I could only pick up one at a time. I realised that I was likely to graze my palms, so I tore off a strip from the blanket and wrapped it around my hands, which slowed me down, but in a way, I found it a relief. I was terribly afraid of being disappointed and finding, after all that effort, nothing but a few shade-loving insects. The pile was artificial, there was absolutely no doubt about that. If it concealed nothing, I would have to ask myself why someone had made it and all I’d have gained would be a new question, that worthless treasure which was beginning to weary me. This world was like a jigsaw puzzle, I only had a few pieces which didn’t fit together. Once, Anthea had explained that game to me and it sounded as though I’d have enjoyed it.

I concentrated on removing the stones evenly from the top of the pile to avoid a rock slide. It was slow work and it took me more than an hour to reach the last layer of stones, which were much smaller and in the shape of a circle. I took the shovel I used every evening to level the ground and began to scrape the earth carefully. I was on my knees, like the pilgrims of the past, and certainly trembling like one. The shovel soon struck a metal surface.

My whole being leapt! An intense tremor rippled through me and I felt giddy. I stood still for a few moments, regaining my breath, stunned and almost afraid. I put down the shovel and bandaged my hands again to remove the last stones. Drops of perspiration fell from my forehead and I was quaking with impatience, but I continued to work slowly and methodically. Within three minutes, everything was clear: in front of me was a round metal cover, a metre in diameter, with a slightly rusty handle set off-centre. I picked up a screwdriver to free and raise it. Was I going to have to lift this heavy-looking plate? I was confused and almost in despair, telling myself that I probably wouldn’t have the strength, but I tugged at the handle just in case. I felt something move, I tugged again and found that the plate rotated on a horizontal axis, stiffly, and with a scraping sound, but it required no more strength than I had. It rose up, surrounded by a rim of steel, and I saw, at a depth of half a metre, a small ledge on which I could stand. I lowered myself in gingerly, my hands on the edges. As soon as I’d gained a foothold, I realised I was on the top step of a very narrow spiral staircase that was unlit. At that time, I’d never experienced the profound darkness of enclosed spaces, because the light never went out in the bunkers, but the women had spoken of switches. I felt along the wall. They hadn’t given a precise description, but I thought they must be small objects positioned near doors. I began groping my way down the stairs, and when I reached the third step I felt something small and smooth with a button. I pressed: a big light came on, just at my feet. The wall was grey and rough like the walls in the bunkers, but the staircases were never spiral like this, and you couldn’t control the light. I continued my descent, hurrying at first, but I think I’d only got to about the tenth step when I started feeling dizzy. I stopped, and, despite my impatience, forced myself to wait a few minutes until the giddiness had passed. As soon as I started moving again, it returned. Later, I was able to run up and down it, but that first time, even though I was consumed with curiosity, I had to stop several times. There were eighty open-work metal steps. At last I saw the floor, made of the same rough material as the walls. One last turn and I was at the bottom, in a corridor that was six or seven paces wide and twelve paces long, lined from top to bottom with shelves laden with cans, bottles and packets of all kinds, and closed at the end by a door of a very strange material that I had never seen before. It opened easily to reveal a big square room, which wasn’t grey and gloomy like the bunkers. The walls were entirely covered in a beautiful wood with a dark sheen, and the floor was soft underfoot. I understood that, for the first time in my life, I was about to walk on carpet. Lamps at various points in the room gave off a warm glow, which fell in brighter puddles on a big table, and there were wide, low chairs which I recognised at once as the kind of object that used to be called armchairs. I was choked with admiration. I’d never seen anything so beautiful, because I’d never seen anything beautiful that was the work of a human hand. I had seen the beauty of the sky, the changing shapes of the clouds, softly falling rain; I had seen the slowly moving stars, and a few flowers, but here, I was seeing furniture, paintings hanging on the walls, vases, a small carving – but I shouldn’t be describing these things so precisely, because that first moment I saw only the interplay of lines, shapes and harmonious colours, an unfathomable configuration that completely overwhelmed me, and brought tears to my eyes because of the feeling of calm and tranquillity that reminded me of the women’s singing, in the past, when it rose up over the plain. The colours were beautifully in tune with each other, and harmonised with the volumes and dimensions of the room. I was still giddy from the descent, and I crouched down because I felt as though I might fall over. After a few minutes, I thought it would be a good idea to close my eyes, the giddiness hadn’t gone but was even getting worse. I rested my head on my folded arms. I breathed deeply and did something I hadn’t done for years, I began counting my heartbeats. This recourse to a very old habit seemed to soothe me. All the same, more than an hour went by before I could calmly begin exploring my new kingdom. I tried several times to raise my head and open my eyes, but I was immediately overcome with emotion, I had to curl up in a ball again and wait, patiently, for the storm to subside.

I was confronted with the human past, in a place that had been designed for the pleasure of the person who would live there. It was completely different from the bunkers. I had only known the prisons, the instruments that served basic needs, the whips and straw mattresses that had to be piled up so we could move around. But this secret underground place was a home.

I have never changed anything in the way this room is arranged; each time I use an object, I put it back in exactly the same place. There were three chairs on either side of the table on which stood a lamp with a beautiful ochre lampshade, and a large clear glass dish. Away from the table, there were three armchairs around another, lower table, and a big bed with a colourful bedspread on which several cushions were casually scattered. When I was able to look around, I saw, on my right, what must have been the kitchen, with a sink, hotplates and a cupboard containing saucepans and white china plates with a blue floral pattern. One of the taps provided hot water, and the other cold. To the left of the sink was a door unlike anything I’d ever seen, a single wooden door painted white, which opened into a much smaller room, with a toilet, a washbasin and a bathtub.

When I’d inspected everything, I sat down on one of the chairs, and then in an armchair. I began to laugh. It had taken more than two hours for my amazement and emotion to turn to joy.

There was so much to investigate and taking it all in was so thrilling that I hadn’t yet realised that one of the ornaments on the wall was a shelf laden with books. My head started spinning again, and I stood staring across the room at them for ages. I had read and reread my gardening manual and knew it by heart. I could feel my eyes widening before this gift, and, to get over the shock, I began to count: there were nineteen books, eight of which were very fat, about three fingers wide. I went over to them: their titles were printed on the spines. At first, I was so intimidated that I tried to decipher them from a distance and thought I’d forgotten how to read. I raised my hand and took one – it felt surprisingly heavy – then I sat down and stood it up on its edge. On it was written: Elementary Treatise on Astronautics. I opened it. The pages were full of words and strange signs among which I recognised the few symbols that Anthea had taught me: plus, minus, multiply by, divide by and equals. I think it was only fatigue that made me wise enough not to go any further that evening. Afterwards, I discovered that some of the others were more in-depth studies on the same subject. I have read them all, every single word. I didn’t understand a thing.

Do I understand Shakespeare’s plays any better, or the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, or what is going on in Dostoevsky’s novels? I think not. They all speak of experiences that I have not known. I think I do better with objects – it took me hours to work out how to use a corkscrew and open a bottle of wine, but I managed it. Feelings remain a mystery to me, perhaps because the sensations associated with them are foreign to me, or because they repel me as did physical contact, which seems to be so important in love. Whenever I think of Anthea’s death and the effort it took to hold her in my arms, tears come into my eyes. I try to imagine myself being warm: there’s always a point when the whip cracks. A lot of things the women used to tell me about still puzzle me: I know that there used to be such a thing as money, that everything had to be bought and that they always found it strange to go and stock up from the cold stores without having to pay anyone, but it all remained rather abstract and I can’t really understand why people kill for money like poor old Raskolnikov. True, I have killed, but I did so to relieve my companions’ suffering, and I always had the impression that they were grateful to me. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so certain: my ignorance of human feelings is so vast that they might have hated me without my being aware of it. Nor do I understand why it is humiliating to wear second-hand clothing – I have rarely worn anything else! I loved Rose’s songs and I expect I’d have appreciated music more than literature. If there are recordings in this place and the equipment to play them, I haven’t identified them.

I realised that five hours had gone by since, up above, I had felt tired and decided to stop, then noticed the mound of stones. I was hungry. I opened one of the cans and ate the contents cold. I assumed that the hotplates were working perfectly, like the lamps, but I’d had enough shocks. I was exhausted and didn’t even want to try them. I unfolded my blanket and laid it on the carpet, putting off using the bed until later. After the whirlwind of emotions, I thought I’d sleep for a long time, but the excitement was too much and after three hours, I woke with a start and was starving again. I went into the kitchen and boiled some water in a pretty little saucepan. The door of the cold store was to the right of the sink, and I was amazed to find a room that was even bigger than the one in the bunkers, crammed to the ceiling with all sorts of meats, but also vegetables and fruit. Each bag had been carefully labelled: there were foods that I’d heard of, but which weren’t to be found in the bunkers, like chicken, venison and roebuck, powdered eggs, tomatoes, parsley, cheese and hundreds of other delicacies which I’ve since become familiar with. And bread, which delighted me especially. I decided to have a party, with a chicken which I sprinkled with herbs, tomatoes, potato croquettes and strawberry jam spread on bread and butter. I put everything out to defrost in the kitchen. Later, I found out how to use a sort of oven in which you can reheat food in a few seconds, but that time, I had to wait several hours. I was so busy that the time flew by. I ran a scalding bath and for the first time I experienced the luxury that the women had so missed. Later, it became something quite mundane and it was only on my return from expeditions that I rediscovered the magic of immersing myself in deliciously hot water in which I liked to fall asleep. There were bars of soap. Of course, everything was new to me and required long periods of thought: the soap bar had me baffled. I was amazed by its scent, which was so unusual for me who had known no other smells than those of the grasses, the few wild flowers and the earth after the rain. I tasted it and pulled a face, it was certainly not something to eat, then I recalled things the women had told me and I rubbed it on my hands, but that was no use, because I hadn’t realised that you had to wet them first. In the end, I got there and I used soap to wash my hair. When it was dry, I was amazed to find my hair so light and flowing, framing my face so graciously.

I nearly forgot! Of course, one of the most wonderful discoveries was the mirror. I had never seen myself. Anthea had told me I was pretty, but that meant nothing to me, and still didn’t. Even so, I was fascinated and spent hours gazing at myself. I didn’t know my expressions; I learned what my smile looked like, and my serious or worried look, and I stared at them thinking: ‘That’s me.’

Even now, I like to look in the mirror. Over the years, I’ve followed the progress of the wrinkles furrowing my brow. My cheeks have grown thinner and my lips have become pale, but it’s all me and I feel a sort of fondness for the reflection in the mirror. I must have been fourteen or fifteen when we got out, and Laura had died twenty-three years later. I’d walked for two years before arriving here, in this place which I call my home: so then I was just over forty. That was twenty-two years ago. I suppose I am an old woman, but I still love looking at my face. I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it is the only human face I ever see. I smile at it and receive a friendly smile back.

I opened the cupboards in the bathroom and found a pile of towels, but nothing else. I presumed they were awaiting the baggage of the occupant who’d never arrived. There was nothing put there in advance, which was a pity as it would have told me something about him.

Then I went back into the kitchen, made some white coffee and put some egg powder in water to make an omelette according to the instructions on the packet. Then, I pulled back the bed covers and slept with my head on a pillow for the first time in my life. I liked that very much.

The next day, I began my inventory of the corridor. It contained various tools and a number of objects whose use I never did fathom. I suppose they’re electrical gadgets, perhaps assembled, perhaps in parts. The women had talked of radios, televisions, telephones, motorcycles and cars, and the books on astronautics made me wonder whether it was laboratory equipment that had not found its destined use. There were no written instructions except for the defrosting oven in the kitchen, thanks to which I was able to learn to use it. I prowled around the equipment in the corridor for ages, picking it up and putting it back, because I knew full well that my determination wouldn’t make up for the information I lacked. I still go and look at it sometimes. After all, I didn’t really know how to read when I found the gardening manual, but I managed to decipher it. I can count well, I can add and subtract easily, but I still find multiplication and division difficult. According to Anthea, that’s because I didn’t learn my multiplication tables until I was quite old, and you need to learn them when you’re very young for them to be etched in your mind. Other than that, I know nothing, and the objects in the corridor come from a sophisticated technological civilisation of which I haven’t the least idea. The women had taught me what they knew, which was little – they’d forgotten a lot and, besides, they lacked the implements to show me things. So, I know that people used to knit, and we could have made knitting needles by smoothing very straight twigs, but we didn’t have any wool. I sew when I find thread, which isn’t often. There was none in the house. With time, I completely wore out my trousers and shirts, but I found a nice piece of fabric in a bunker and I’m wearing tunics again.

The most precious thing I found in the bunker is paper. There were several reams, and a box of pencils. That was how I was at last able to learn to write. The books helped me, even the ones on astronautics. Admittedly, I didn’t understand the mathematics, but they contained many lengthy chapters of explanations in which I studied the ways of saying things, the spelling and the grammar. I spent a lot of time studying the incomprehensible diagrams which went with the text. I copied them and that taught me to draw accurately, keeping the proportions right, so that I was able to map my excursions.

I decided that this bunker would be my home base. I asked myself hundreds of questions about its purpose. It wasn’t marked by a cabin, but by a mound of stones that could easily be overlooked, and I wondered whether they were meant to conceal it or mark it. It contained more provisions than I’d ever seen in the prisons, and I’d be able to live there for ever. It seemed to me that it was a luxurious place, but obviously I didn’t have a clear idea of luxury. In the ceiling, there are the same air-conditioning grates as in the other bunkers and, when I keep absolutely quiet, I can hear the same soft hum that indicates that everything is working. The bed is very big, several people could sleep in it, and there’s room for six people to sit around the table. In the kitchen there are four dozen glasses and several different kinds of plate. Does one person need all that? I am really sorry that there are no clothes, for not only would it have been useful to find some, but I could also have learned a lot from them. The books only taught me to write. Was this the home of a leader or an outlaw’s hideout? I am certainly too ignorant to interpret things that would probably have been blindingly clear to the women with whom I’d lived, for they at least had seen the world.

Then I gave up asking pointless questions. I examined everything, but I knew no more about the absent owner of my home than I had done on my arrival. I no longer think about him. Whatever his plans had been, he failed and his domain was now mine. Neither he nor I can do anything about that.

After two months, I set off exploring again. I made more than fifty expeditions, either walking in straight lines or in concentric semicircles. I found nothing but locked prisons. Perhaps there were other places like the one where I’d made my home, but I didn’t see them, even though I never forgot to inspect the ground, patiently looking for another mound of stones. I have understood nothing about the world in which I live. I have criss-crossed it in every direction but I haven’t discovered its boundaries.

On my last trip, I was standing on top of a hill, before me stretched a long walk down and a new plain and I could see a cabin in the distance. Suddenly, I was overcome with despondency. I told myself another staircase, the guards’ room, the cage and forty emaciated corpses. I sat down and the realisation dawned on me that I’d had enough. For the twenty or so years that I’d been alone, hope had buoyed me up, and suddenly, it had deserted me. I had imagined, a thousand times, a bunker where the cage would be open, where the prisoners, intoxicated with joy could have escaped. They’d have found the sky, the plain, they’d have trembled, dreamed of towns, of rescuers, but would, like us, have discovered this same hollow freedom. It was as if I could see them before me, looking at me and demanding an explanation: is this what you have to offer us? Leave us alone, we’re better off dead than desperate. I bowed my head and set off home.

Yet, I set about writing this account: apparently, even if I no longer have the strength or the heart to go off exploring again, my hope, which waned briefly, has not really expired. The bunker I didn’t enter might have been the one, or the next one, or another one to the west that time I went east. Who knows whether, one day, a very old man or a very old woman might arrive here, see the raised cover, be amazed, hope, and start descending the spiral staircase? That person will find these sheets of paper piled on the big wooden table and read them, and someone will at last receive a message from another person. Perhaps, at this very moment, as I end my days exhausted, a human being is walking across the plain as I did, going from bunker to bunker, a rucksack on their back, determinedly seeking an answer to the thousands of questions consuming them. I know that I can’t wait much longer, that I will soon have to deal myself the death blow that my companions so often requested, because the pain is becoming increasingly relentless.

From time to time, at night, I go upstairs and sit outside. I listen. Recently, I resolved to try and shout at the top of my voice: ‘Hello! Is anybody there?’ My voice was croaky and weak, but I still listened. I heard only the soft rustle of the grass in the breeze. Another time, I collected lots of branches and made a fire that could be seen from a long way off. I kept it going all night, although my common sense told me that there was no one. But it also told me that there are so many bunkers and that probably, most probably, there was another one where the siren had gone off when the door was open, and why should they all be dead? The night goes by, I think of my life, the girl in a rage who taunted the young guard, angry at the present – as if I had a future – or easily climbing the hundred stairs, caught in the web of illusions in the middle of the boundless desolate plain, under a sky that is nearly always grey, or such a pale blue that it seems to be dying. But a sky does not die, it is I who am dying, who was already dying in the bunker – and I tell myself that I am alone in this land that no longer has any jailers, or prisoners, unaware of what I came here to do, the mistress of silence, owner of bunkers and corpses. I tell myself that I have walked for thousands of hours and that soon I will take my last ten steps to go and put these sheets of paper on the table and come back to lie down on my deathbed, an emaciated old woman whose eyes, which no hand will close, will always be looking towards the door. I have spent my whole life doing I don’t know what, but it hasn’t made me happy. I have a few drops of blood left, that is the only libation I can offer destiny, which has chosen me. Then I see the pale winter dawn break and I go back down to sleep, if the pain allows me any respite, on the big bed where there is room for several people.

There is always light. Sometimes I hope that one night it will go out, that something will happen. The women were always wondering where it came from. I never really understood their explanations of power stations, pylons, conductor wires, and I have never seen anything corresponding to their hazy descriptions. I have seen only the plain, the cabins, and the shelter where I am ending my days. I have long since stopped trying to imagine things I do not know. I have spent a lot of time studying the objects on the shelves in the corridor, but I have learned nothing. They are perhaps weapons, or a means of communication that would have enabled me to contact humanity. Too bad. I gave up reading and rereading the books and treatises on astronautics. So few things happened during all those years of walking. I found the bus, I lost the road, I arrived here. In any case, I had to die some day. Even if I’d led a normal life, like the women before, I would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive? If I hadn’t fallen ill, I think I’d have set off again all the same, and would still be walking, because I have never had anything else to do.

I know, even when I pretend the contrary, that I am the only living person on this planet which has almost no seasons. Only I can say that time exists, but it has passed me by without my feeling it. I saw the other women grow old. I go over to the mirror and look at myself: I suppose I didn’t use to have those lines across my cheeks and around my eyes, but I don’t remember my face before the wrinkles. The women had explained to me what photos were, but I don’t have any. All I know about time is that the days follow on from one another, I feel tired and I sleep, I feel hungry and I eat. Of course, I count. Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off – not far because the wind is never strong – where it may or may not germinate. The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.

Most likely no one will come. I shall leave the door open and my story on the table, where it will gradually gather dust. One day, the natural cataclysms that destroy planets will wipe out the plain, the shelter will collapse on top of the little pile of neatly arranged pages, they will be scattered among the debris, never read.

I found out I was ill three months ago. I was on the toilet, passing a motion, when I experienced a new sensation: something warm was trickling down my vagina, that part of my body which had always been so silent that I never thought about its existence. I leaned over the bowl and saw a big black clot, with yellowish filaments. Before I had a chance to panic, I lost a stream of blood, and the pain was so acute that I passed out. When I came to, I was lying on the floor, and it no longer hurt. I got up without too much difficulty, I felt a little giddy, perhaps because of the haemorrhage, but it quickly wore off. I washed, then I cleaned the bloodstained floor, and, remembering what Anthea had taught me, I grilled a piece of red meat to make up for the loss.

The women had talked of the menopause, but I don’t suppose that it affected me, because I’d never reached puberty. However, there’s no reason to suppose that I don’t have a uterus, or ovaries, even if they haven’t developed normally. I was puzzled, then I told myself that there was no point worrying and tried to forget the incident. I’m not adept at this kind of mental activity, and even if I had been, it would not have served me for long. The same thing happened the following day. My symptoms were similar to those of Mary-Jane, who according to Anthea, had a cancer of the sexual organs and went and hanged herself from the bars when she could no longer stand the pain. There was no other alternative, and I wouldn’t receive any different treatment. Anthea had told me that they performed operations, gave morphine. Perhaps there are medicines in the corridor, but I am unable to identify them, and I’ve never found anything that looks like those bottles from which the guards sometimes took white pills when someone had a temperature.

The pain has been excruciating from the beginning, and it is becoming too frequent. I am suffering more than half the time, it takes away all pleasure from life and I’m unable to enjoy the moments of respite because I am so weak. I can no longer climb the stairs in one go and, when I get to the top, I am cold. After a quarter of an hour’s walk, I have to rest. Probably the fact that I no longer eat much doesn’t help, but if I force myself, I feel nauseous. I am nearing my end.

I am all alone. Even though I sometimes dream of a visitor, I have walked backwards and forwards over the plain for too long to believe it possible. No one will come because there are only corpses. How could the father of Prince Hamlet, if he was dead, appear and talk to him? The dead cannot move, they decompose on the spot and are eventually reduced to bones that will crumble at the slightest touch. I have seen hundreds, and none of them has ever come and talked to me in the middle of the night. I would have been so happy if they had! Anthea had tried to explain to me what the Christians meant by God, and the soul. Apparently, people believed firmly in it, it’s even mentioned in the preface to one of the books on astronautics. Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: ‘Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.’ Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity – which I wonder whether I belong to – really had a very vivid imagination.

I can’t be very old: if I left the bunker at around fifteen, I’m not much over sixty. The women said that, in the other world, life expectancy was more than seventy. But it required medical care. There, I’d have had periods and children, and my useless womb wouldn’t have rotted. I often have haemorrhages, my womb is disintegrating, I know better than to hope that one day it will be reduced to nothing and I’ll regain my health. For some time I have been coughing and I have chest pains: Anthea had told me about metastasis. In any case, it would soon be time to take a hand, but I shan’t wait, I will do it in a little while, because I have almost finished my story and, after the final full stop, there will be nothing to hold me back.

As soon as I realised I was ill, I thought about ways of killing myself. I don’t want to hang myself and dangle mummified on the end of a rope for ever. I want to be lying with dignity, like the man sitting between the folded mattresses; I want to be looking straight ahead of me, but if the pain is too great, I risk something unpleasant. I don’t have either enough time or strength left to go to the bus and retrieve one of the guns that I placed on the tombs, so I sharpened a knife for a long time. If I brush my finger against it, I cut myself. The blade is thin, flat and sturdy. I know where to plunge it so that it goes in straight between two ribs, pierces my heart and stops it. When the pain leaves me in peace, I find it hard to believe that I will do it, when it rampages, my doubts vanish.

I will sit on the bed, and arrange the cushions and blankets rolled up around me so that my body is firmly supported. Everything will be perfectly clean and tidy. I hope there’ll be no blood, which I know is possible. Perhaps nobody will ever come, perhaps one day, an astounded human being, arriving at the foot of the stairs as I did so long ago, will see the dark wood-panelled room, the neatly arranged bed, and an old woman sitting upright, a knife in her heart, looking peaceful.

It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.