I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

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

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

  Was this Earth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Let’s go,’ I urged.

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

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

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

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

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

  The lights never did go out.

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

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

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

  ‘What civilisation?’

  Anthea looked at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I shrugged.

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

  ‘You think we’re on another planet.’

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

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

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

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

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

  That was all, which she found puzzling.

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

  She broke off, frowning.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

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

  She shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Let’s try.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Curiously, she had just described her fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Are you awake?’

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

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

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

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

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

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