I was sad. I’d always hated my cellmates because of their indifference to me and I’d never spared a thought for them. On our arrival here, they’d been overwhelmed by their fear and despair, and I’d remained isolated, a terrified little girl surrounded by weeping women. In dying, they’d be abandoning me once more. Anger welled up inside me. So they had thought about our situation, they’d been wondering about it for a long time, and they’d always excluded me from their discussions. Anthea was the first to take the trouble to talk to me. I’d found our conversation interesting and had been determined to listen to her, to think, and forget that for years she’d ignored me just as the others had.
‘Why are you talking to me today?’
She looked taken aback.
‘But you’re the one who came to speak to me,’ she said. ‘You’re always on your own, as if you don’t want to join in with us.’
I was about to tell her that they always stopped talking when I drew near, but suddenly I felt terribly tired. Perhaps I was unused to conversing at such length. She saw me yawn.
‘They’ll be turning the lights down soon. Let’s get ready for bed. We’ll speak more tomorrow.’
Of course I was unable to sleep. I wanted to carry on with the story that Annabel had interrupted at the point when I was in a cell waiting for the young guard to appear, but I couldn’t concentrate. Usually, when I told myself a story, I became completely impervious to what was going on around me, but that evening, the comings and goings of the women arranging mattresses, whispering and the gradual descent of silence all disrupted my train of thought. I reflected on the years, the grief, those lost husbands, the children they’d never seen again, and wondered about my own mother, since I must have had a mother. I couldn’t remember her. I only knew that there must have been someone I called mummy, and who wasn’t in the prison. Was she dead? I went over the little I’d heard about the disaster, which boiled down to a few words: screams, the scramble, night and a growing terror. They thought they must have fainted, perhaps several times, and that everything had happened very quickly. On reflection I concluded that this explanation was not enough. There were forty of us who had nothing in common, whereas before each woman had had a family, parents, brothers, sisters, friends: only a meticulous selection could have only brought together strangers. This was confirmed by Anthea the next day.
‘Just think what a huge job that must have been: they made sure that none of us knew any of the others. They took us from all four corners of the country, and even from several countries, checking that fate had not thrown together two cousins or friends separated by circumstances.’
‘Why? What are they looking for?’
‘We nearly drove ourselves mad asking that same question. You were too young, you couldn’t understand, and you’d curl up into a ball on the ground, you wouldn’t answer when we spoke to you.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘We didn’t think you’d get over it. As we weren’t allowed to touch one another, nobody could pick you up and cuddle you or try and comfort you, or even make you eat. We thought you were going to die, but, very slowly, you began to move again. You sidled up to the food at mealtimes and swallowed a few mouthfuls. Then, naturally, we got into the habit of never going over our few memories in front of you, we thought it would be bad for you. And, gradually, we wearied of talking about them among ourselves. It didn’t help. Asking the same questions, in the same way, for years – you eventually tire of it.’
‘And you live like this, with your vegetables, with no prospects?’
‘Only death,’ she snapped. ‘We can’t commit suicide, but we will still die. We just have to wait.’
I’d never thought about our situation so clearly. In my stories, there were always things happening: in my life, nothing would ever happen. I realised that she was right and that the secrets of love were none of my business. Perhaps they’d pretended to know more than me because they knew nothing of the essential. I suspected that the men hadn’t complied like the women: but since I would never encounter a man, what did this difference matter? It was the girls in another era who had to be prepared for their wedding night, I told myself.
That day seemed very short, and I put that down to the intensity of my thinking. When the lights were dimmed, we had to lay out the forty mattresses on which we slept. There wasn’t enough room, they were almost touching, and every morning we piled them up three or four high so we could move around and sit on them. I stretched out and tried to pick up the thread of my story, but was unable to, my mind was blank and there was an overwhelming feeling of grief in my breast.
‘Close your eyes,’ my neighbour said. ‘Don’t let them see you’re not asleep.’
It was Frances, one of the younger women, one of those who’d never laughed at me.
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you notice anything? Anyone would think you’d just arrived from another planet. They won’t allow us not to sleep. If they see your eyes open they call you over to the bars and make you take a pill.’
‘Call? But they never talk to us!’
‘Oh yes they do! With their whips!’
I understood what she meant. It was very rare for a woman to disobey: but when it happened, the whip cracked beside her, until she did as she was told. They were merciless, and handled their whips with the utmost precision: they could crack it twenty times in a row by someone’s ear, and if the woman it was intended for resisted, there was always another who gave in. When Alice, whom they’d forced to eat, tried to strangle herself with her dress twisted into a rope, Claudia had relented and rushed to undo the knot and halt the appalling threat of death, always promised, never given. I closed my eyes.
‘What’s stopping you from getting to sleep?’ asked Frances.
‘How do you get to sleep?’
She didn’t answer. I was choked by sobs. ‘Are we allowed to cry? Without pills?’
‘No – you’d better control yourself.’
Then, something strange happened inside me, I wanted to feel her arms around me and it was so sudden, so unexpected, that I was overcome. I threw myself into her arms before I realised what I was doing.
‘Stop!’ she whispered, horrified.
And the whip cracked above my head. I recoiled, terrified. This was the first time it had been aimed at me. I still shudder to think of it. I curled up, panting as if I’d been running.
Running? I had never run!
I knew very well that we weren’t permitted to touch one another and, since I’d never known any different, I took it for granted. The rush of feeling I’d just experienced created confused notions in me: holding hands, walking with arms around each other, holding each other – those words were part of my vocabulary, they described gestures I had never made. A walk? I remembered maybe lawns, or seasons, because those words had a very distant ring, a faint echo that quickly died away. I knew the flaking grey walls, the bars at fifteen-centimetre intervals, the guards pacing regularly up and down around the perimeter of the room.
‘What do they want of us?’ I asked again. She shrugged.
‘All we know is what they don’t want.’
She looked away and it was plain that the conversation was at an end. Anthea was the first woman to talk to me for any length of time, perhaps she would be the only one?
I concentrated on keeping my eyes closed, in the hope that eventually I’d fall asleep. For the first time, I understood that I was living at the very heart of despair. I had insulated myself from it, believing that it was out of bitterness, but suddenly I realised it was out of caution, and that all these women who lived without knowing the meaning of their existence were mad. Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more.
I didn’t know how old I was. Since I didn’t have periods and I had virtually no breasts, some of the women thought I wasn’t yet fourteen, barely thirteen, but
Anthea, who was more logical than the others, thought that I must be around fifteen or sixteen.
‘We don’t know how long we’ve been here. Looking at your height, you’re no longer a child, and some of us stopped menstruating a long time ago. Anna’s young, she doesn’t have any wrinkles, neither do I, so they say. It isn’t the menopause that has withered us, it’s despair.’
‘So men were very important?’
She nodded.
‘Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.’
‘So life gave such great pleasure?’
‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are. Look at the way we live: we know we have to behave as if it’s morning, because they make the lights brighter, then they pass us food and, at a given time, the lights are dimmed. We’re not even certain they make us live according to a twenty-four-hour pattern. How would we measure time? They’ve reduced us to utter helplessness.’
Her tone was harsh and she stared straight ahead. Once again, I felt like crying. I curled up into a ball.
‘What’s the matter?’
All of a sudden, her voice was so gentle, so lilting, that I trembled as if being caressed. At least, I suppose it could be described thus: something exquisite coursed through me, so delicious that it frightened me. I curled up even tighter.
‘I don’t want to talk any more,’ I told her. ‘I was happier when I hadn’t understood anything, when I hated you all because you kept your secrets. You don’t have any. You have nothing, and there is nothing to be had.’
‘What secrets did you think we had?’
I no longer felt humiliated by my ignorance, because I’d touched on a knowledge that was too painful to bear.
‘How you make love, with what, what happens, all that. There they are, telling each other stories from the past, making allusions and bursting out laughing, and clamming up when I approach. I thought that was what was important, but it’s all pointless.’
‘Poor child,’ she said, so tenderly and so sadly that I burst into tears.
They probably tolerated crying, as long as we sobbed quietly and didn’t cause a stir; the whip didn’t crack.
Some food arrived and there was a bit of a flurry. When we felt hungry for the second time since the morning, we said it was the evening. We cooked whatever there was, we ate, and shortly afterwards the lights dimmed. The women said that, before the disaster, people used to eat three times a day, in the morning, at noon and in the evening, but we only felt hungry twice during each waking period and we were not sure that we were living according to the same clock as before. It was one of the arguments that came up time and time again, but kept going round in circles because nothing ever changed. Was it that we needed less food since we didn’t work, and two meals a day were sufficient? Had our bodies forgotten old habits to the extent that we could sleep every eight or ten hours? But, did we know how long we slept for? Perhaps they kept us awake for eight hours and only gave us nights of four hours, or six? The guards were relieved at intervals that didn’t correspond to those of our lives – sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes at night, or twice in one day. I was watching them, mustering the little knowledge I had, when I became aware that the young guard with blue eyes must have been away: suddenly, I saw him, pacing up and down the length of the cage, and I realised that I hadn’t thought about him or told myself any stories for several days. He still looked just as handsome.
I went to fetch my plate of food and sat down next to Anthea.
‘Handsome, beautiful – I suppose they’re words from before, from when things happened?’ I asked her.
She gazed at me for a while, then looked away.
‘I was beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I still am, I’d need a mirror. My hair has gone grey, but that doesn’t mean I’m old, the women in my family go grey early. My memories are muddled, I think I was twenty-eight the year they locked us up. At first, I still took the trouble to do my hair, and I was very upset about losing my brushes.’
She spoke in a half-whisper, as if to herself, but I knew she was talking to me.
‘And then my dress wore out. It was a pretty summer frock, very fashionable, with flounces, in that delicate fabric that doesn’t last very long. I was one of the first to wear these sort of tunics we make. Now, there are no dresses from before left, not even any scraps, they’re all worn out down to the last thread. You can’t imagine what they were like.’
‘Being beautiful, was that for the men?’
I was almost sure it was, but I sometimes heard the women say otherwise.
‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’
‘Am I beautiful?’
I saw her smile, but her smile was heart-rending.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. You’d probably have been one of the prettiest girls because you wouldn’t have had that sulky, angry expression. You’d have laughed, you’d have provoked the boys.’
‘Sometimes I provoke the young guard,’ I burst out.
This I had just understood.
When I told myself stories, I always went to sit close to the bars, on the side where he paced up and down. He walked slowly, keeping a close watch on what was going on in the cage, as he always did. Crouching down, facing him, I kept still, following him with my eyes. I watched him, and because he saw everything, he couldn’t have been unaware that I was watching him. Just a girl, sitting there, wearing her shapeless tunic. My hair was long and I kept it tied back at the nape of my neck; other than that, I have no idea what I looked like. I didn’t even know what colour my eyes were until Anthea told me, later, and I had no idea what that meant, to be one of the prettiest girls. It didn’t occur to me that none of the women was beautiful: they were clean, we kept the little soap we were given for washing our bodies and our hair, which was always clean. Most of us had long hair, because we had nothing to cut it with. Nor did we have anything for cutting our nails, which were always breaking when they were too long, and we looked sad, except when there were outbursts of nervous giggles. I don’t know what expression I wore when I looked at the guard: I was totally preoccupied, I was all eyes. He never looked at me: I was sure he knew I was staring at him continually and that it made him feel awkward.
‘I’d like to make him lose his composure.’
‘Whatever for?’ asked Anthea, in surprise.
‘I don’t know. To have power over him. They have the whip and they make us do what they want, which is almost nothing. They forbid everything. I’d like him to be upset, worried, afraid, unable to react. We’ve never been forbidden to sit and stare.’
‘Perhaps they’ll forbid it. They forbid what they like.’
‘Then they’d be acknowledging my existence. If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself.’
She was the brightest of the women, but I’d grasped something that she hadn’t thought of, so I was at least as clever as she was! A delicious thrill ran through me and I smiled at her.
‘They feed forty women, they keep us warm and give us fabric to make clothes. For them, we have no names, they treat us as if there is no difference between one woman and another. But I’m me. I’m not a fortieth of the herd, one cow among the others. I’m going to stare at him until he’s embarrassed.’
I marvelled at my own audacity. For years, we’d been here, reduced to utter helplessness, deposed, deprived even of instruments with which to kill ourselves, defecating under the full glare of the lights, in front of the others, in front of them: and I wanted to embarrass a guard and thought I had found the way to do it.
‘Don�
�t breathe a word to anyone. I don’t want the women to know what’s going on. They would change their attitude, they wouldn’t be able to help it, and what I am doing would lose all its power.’
‘Suppose we all started staring at them – wouldn’t they be even more embarrassed?’
‘They would no longer be embarrassed at all.’
These thoughts came to me with dazzling certainty and I felt absolutely sure of them. Where did they come from? I still have no idea, I only know that I derived enormous pleasure from what was going on in my mind.
‘Something that everybody does becomes meaningless. It’s just a habit, a custom, nobody knows when it started, they just repeat it mechanically. If I want to annoy him, I must be the only one to stare at him.’
Anthea pondered. I’m not sure she completely understood me; I was driven by an unquestionable authority and nothing was going to stop me.
‘I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.’
She gently nodded her head.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘And I shall carry on thinking about it.’
And I resumed my position, sitting cross-legged, my eyes riveted on the young guard.
Was he really handsome or did I only find him handsome because he was the only man who wasn’t old? I, who knew so little, and who couldn’t remember the world, did recognise the signs of age. I’d seen hair turn grey, and then white, speckles appear, baldness threaten the heads of the oldest women, wrinkles, dry skin, folds, weakening tendons, stooped backs. The guard had clear skin, his step was supple as I knew mine was, despite the little space there was for me to test it; he was upright and young like me. I found that strange: weren’t there enough old men left? Maybe they were all dead? Or did they not know what to do with the young men? They couldn’t think of any more tasks to set them and so they sent them to pace up and down between the bars and the wall? There hadn’t been any young guards before, I said to myself, and my heart began to race. How long had he been there? I had the feeling that I hadn’t noticed him straight away, I hadn’t counted the days, I didn’t know when I’d started making up stories because I had no reference points. Unless I was mistaken, if his presence was recent, then, for the first time in years, something had changed. Beyond the walls, in that outside world which was totally concealed from us except for the food we ate and the fabric they gave us, things had happened and those events affected us. The guards had always been so old that we didn’t notice them age. I’d been a little girl when I arrived, now I was a woman, a virgin for ever, but an adult despite my underdeveloped breasts and my aborted puberty: I’d grown, my body had recorded the passage of time. The old women didn’t change any more than the old guards, their hair had turned white, but it happened so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry. The young guard wasn’t a child when he arrived, he was tall, with thick hair, and there were no lines on his face. When he showed the first signs of withering, then I would feel my own skin to see whether I was getting older. He too would be a clock, we would grow old at the same speed. I could watch him and judge how much time I had left from the springiness of his step.
I Who Have Never Known Men Page 4