I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

  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 we
re 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 n
ot 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.