I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

  Later, in my sleep, I felt arms lift me: it was Anthea wrapping me in a blanket. This time, I didn’t instinctively recoil at the memory of the guards and the whip, but nor did I go back to sleep. I felt a vague sense of unease. I was distracted by the stars, which fascinated me. I gazed at them for ages, they seemed fixed, and yet they moved, so slowly that I couldn’t follow their path. Rose’s song still lingered in my ears.

  After a while, I went to the toilet. On my way back, I noticed that some of the women were lying in twos, away from the group, entwined under the same blanket. I found that strange. When I had the opportunity to talk to Anthea about it, she shrugged and told me they gave each other what they could. I didn’t press the matter, because I could sense she was embarrassed.

  We walked for twenty-six days, and every evening there was the sadness and then Rose’s singing. She never repeated the same song twice. At first, she sang tunes she’d learned before, then she began to make up songs, developing a talent she didn’t know she had. On the twenty-seventh day, when we stopped for lunch, I went on ahead as usual while the women prepared the food, and, for the first time, I spotted something. Halfway down the long slope we’d be heading down after the meal, stood a small, square building that looked so much like the cabin we’d left that at first I thought we must have gone round in a circle. But the lie of the land was different. This cabin wasn’t in the middle of the plain and it wasn’t facing south like ours, the gaping door was facing me. I raced forward and then realised that I ought to tell the others. So I went back, gesticulating madly, and they abandoned the fires and saucepans to come and join me. I forced myself to wait for them. I too had become a good companion.

  They came running up, even Dorothy hurried, despite her shortness of breath. Anthea and I supported her all the way down the hill, and I was glad that this task helped me control my impatience. We stood around the half-open door for a moment, at a loss, terrified: what if there were guards? I stepped forward and pulled the door towards me. The hinges were already rusty and stiff. I pulled harder and they gave way, squeaking. I saw the staircase, the light was on. There was a nasty smell. I went in, with Anthea and Dorothy at my heels, and we started to make our way down. No one spoke, as if a premonition of what we were going to find was beginning to weigh on us.

  The smell soon grew stronger and we weren’t even halfway down the stairs before it became overpowering. The bravest women were just behind us, and we could hear them exclaiming. Dorothy stopped, tore off the bottom of her dress and made a sort of mask which she held in front of her nose. We all did the same. It hardly lessened the smell but we felt protected from it. We continued our descent, breathing as little as possible, pausing to avoid getting out of breath. One by one, the women had fallen silent, and the only sound was the soft clatter of our feet on the stairs. We reached the bottom. The huge double wooden doors were open, as in our own prison the day the siren went off. I stepped inside and stopped dead, paralysed with horror.

  It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others were in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, tormented, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they’d fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

  Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of the artificial night, the door was locked and the guards – of course! – hadn’t bothered to open it. The women had tried. They’d died of grief, long before hunger had killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spent clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible – sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack the steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck.

  Our companions joined us, the first with hasty steps, then drawing slowly to a halt. Anthea, Dorothy and I were gradually pushed back and we found ourselves lined up against the walls of the bunker, as far as possible from the cage, forty live women staring at the forty dead women. We stood there for a long time, speechless with horror, then Dorothy kneeled down and I heard her say softly:

  ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us poor sinners …’

  Later, she told us that she had dredged this up from her childhood, when her grandmother had taught her the Christian prayers without her parents knowing.

  The other women also kneeled down and echoed her words, as if, in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning. The muted drone of jumbled words rose above the terrible jumble of corpses, then Rose’s voice could be heard. She sang, and at once her rich, powerful soprano filled the air. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was so slow, sad and profound that horror turned into grief and I felt my heart contract. When she stopped, we were silent, then we left noiselessly, one at a time, and very slowly made our way back up.

  That evening, Anthea explained that Rose had sung the prayer for the dead, in Latin, a language that had been dead for so long that it was only used for ceremonies. I didn’t understand, I have still not really understood what a ceremony is, but if anyone ever reads these pages, they’ll know.

  That day, we stayed put. Returning to the camp, nobody was able to eat and we sat for hours without speaking. It was not until dusk that we ate a little food and began conversing again. So we hadn’t been the only prisoners. There was another bunker, exactly the same as ours. These two facts devastated us. We had no idea what had happened to us: at times it seemed as if our discovery would shed some light on things, but at others it made everything seem even more confusing. Looking back now, I can quite simply state that we found ourselves plunged even deeper in the absurd.

  I say there were forty of them: we had immediately had the impression that there were as many of them as there were of us, but no one had counted. I did that the next day, to discover that they were only thirty-nine, but there were forty mattresses. One of them had probably died before the day the siren went off and her body been removed. Later, when we discussed it, we still said forty, because they were our equals, our less fortunate doubles. I looked to see whether the bunch of keys had been dropped, we wanted to open the cage to remove the bodies and bury them on the plain, but I found nothing. We tried to force open the bars with the tools we’d brought, but either the bars were very sturdy or none of us knew how to go about it, because we failed. In the end, Anthea and I closed the big double door and that was the only ceremony we were able to give them. We would have liked to make a tomb, and seal it up, or to leave a message saying that, behind these wooden doors lay forty women who had died for some unknown crazy cause, but we had nothing with which to write and the wood was too hard for us to carve.

  We made an inventory of the contents of the two rooms as we’d done in the other bunker, and we found the same things, including the boots, which was fortunate because our sandals were in a sorry state. Once again we had fresh meat and we stocked up with canned food.

  After three days, we set off again. A sort of inertia had taken hold of my companions. They spoke little, the evenings were silent, except when Rose sang, and they joined in. I believe they didn’t want to think, so as not to have to face the inevitable, so as not to despair. They believed they’d find towns, civilisation. I expected never to encounter anything other than cabins, and I think they sensed it. I didn’t know the world they described to me, I couldn’t imagine it and, when after a long uphill climb I saw only another dip, I wasn’t surprised, because I had no clear picture of
anything else. But their dejected mood must have affected me, because I lost interest in running on ahead, and it was Greta who spotted the third cabin. We only hastened our steps a little, held back by our apprehension and, as we descended, we didn’t hold out much hope that the cage would be open, that the occupants had managed to escape and that we’d meet them one day on the plain. We were greeted by the stench.

  We were expecting to find women, but these were men. They too had attempted to escape. They’d tried to loosen one of the sinks and pull away the pipes to make instruments with which to prise open the locks. Everything had resisted their efforts: the pipes were twisted but not broken, the porcelain toilet bowls were lopsided, but they hadn’t been able to smash them. The bodies lay scattered everywhere, and were in the same condition as those of the thirty-nine women. The air conditioning was still working. Gradually the smell would fade and the corpses would still be there, mummified or reduced to skeletons, some naked, the others dressed in rags, shirts torn and trousers cut from the same flimsy cloth as our dresses. They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible. Rose, in tears, refused to come down, and we did not sing the music of the dead. We took everything that might come in useful from the store cupboards and left immediately, walking for as long as we could, so as not to make our camp near a mass grave.

  We continued for months, and from then on it was from mass grave to mass grave. We despaired of ever reaching a town. Our expectations had changed: we hoped to find, one day, an open cage. We even decided to leave traces of our visit, to let the others – if there were any – know. In front of the door of each cabin we cleared the ground and drew a big cross, made out of stones. Anthea explained to me that it was the sign of Christianity, the religion of our ancestors, and that a very long time ago, it had been the emblem of the persecuted. No one feared the reappearance of the guards any more, we had no idea what had become of them, but we were certain that they were no longer there. We also made an arrow to show which direction we intended to take.

  ‘But supposing there are others wandering around like us? The cross and the arrow are so obvious that they may well use the same symbols, since they too have only stones to write with! We need a signature,’ declared Dorothy, ‘otherwise, we might come across our own signs and not recognise them.’

  They didn’t know what to choose. In the previous world, people used to sign their own names, but forty names written in the dust? Thirty-nine, in fact, because we’d never known what my name was, and the women called me the child. What should we choose? A circle? A triangle? Two parallel lines? In the end, Anthea suggested a cross with a circle above it.

  ‘That will let them know that we’re women. What else do we need?’

  ‘There might be other women,’ said Greta. ‘Let’s add something, and, since we don’t know anything, not where we are, or why, or where we’re going, let’s add a question mark.’

  This took us an entire day each time. Several of us returned to the bunker where the men were and drew big symbols on the ground. Our bunker and the first bunker of dead women were not marked, but many others were – not all, because I didn’t carry on writing the signature on the ground once I was alone. I’d given up believing that any living beings would come.

  We walked for two years, advancing in small stages, and then we decided we’d have to stop: Dorothy was growing frail. She was aware of it, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. We could see that she was becoming slower and slower. Attempting to get up one morning, she stumbled and at once it was clear that she couldn’t stand up. Anthea put her ear to her chest: her heart was beating very feebly. We decided to wait until she was better, but after two days, she grew agitated.

  ‘There’s no point waiting,’ she said. ‘I’m old, I must be over seventy-five, my heart won’t get any stronger. We must go on.’

  Thanks to the tools that we’d kept with us all this time, we were able to build a kind of stretcher. We felled two trees that were nice and straight, trimmed the trunks and bound the chair to them, using tightly plaited strips of fabric. Dorothy was very weak and felt cold all the time, so we wrapped her in blankets, then we strapped her to the back of the chair and four of us carried her, taking care to walk in step so as not to jolt her. But we only kept it up for a few days because she found even that tiring, and then it became painful for her to stay sitting. We nailed branches across the two wooden poles so that we could carry her lying down. She thanked us profusely, and told us that she felt better, but we could see she was short of breath, and while we moved, she kept her eyes shut most of the time. At first, she slept, and the slightest thing awoke her, then we realised that she no longer reacted when we stopped to change bearers. Anthea said that she’d fallen into a light coma. Some of the women wanted us to stop, but Dorothy woke up and wouldn’t hear of it:

  ‘If you stop, I’ll say to myself that half an hour later we might have found something, and I’ll die angry. I want to keep going until my last breath.’

  And that was how Dorothy died, gently rocked by the women while Anthea walked beside her holding her hand. After a while, she could no longer feel her pulse. I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said.

  The others caught up with us and we walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void, alongside the stubborn woman whose wish had been to die without stopping.

  We buried her during the night. There was a fine drizzle. Rose’s funeral lament hung in the air above the plain.

  We stayed by the tomb for several days, as if loath to abandon Dorothy and as if we no longer had any reason to continue. I don’t think any one of us still believed in those cities that would be our salvation, or in a bunker where the cage would be open. Almost every evening, Anthea gazed at the sky, wondering where we were. She said that on Earth, we’d have noticed the changing of the seasons, but here, over several months, the days had barely become shorter, and the weather was not noticeably cooler. There’d have been snowstorms or heatwaves, not this unchanging weather, with hardly any rain and this sparse vegetation. Why move on? We wouldn’t be any the wiser as to our whereabouts, she said, we’ll always be near a bunker and we’ll die one by one.

  From that time on, I was fully aware that one day I would be the last.

  But while we didn’t know where to go, we didn’t have any better reason for staying, and we set off afresh. So far, we’d walked southwards, and now we changed direction. There were still cabins, bunkers and corpses. When Mary-Jane fell ill, we decided to stop. Until she was better, we said, but we knew it was until she died.

  I hadn’t had much to do with Mary-Jane, a fairly selfeffacing woman who followed without protest and never made any suggestions. She collected firewood when it was time to build a fire, carried her load without getting out of breath, and was neither among the last nor the first when we walked. In fact, she didn’t stand out in any way. I suppose that’s what is meant by easy-going. She was one of the women who didn’t sleep alone, and she was often seen with Emma, the first woman who thought that this planet wasn’t Earth. True there were so few of us that we all knew one another, but certain affinities had created loose groups. I wasn’t in the same group as Mary-Jane, but was with Anthea, Greta and Frances, in other words, the group that had formed around Dorothy and which took the decisions. Perhaps that’s what they meant by friendship, but in any case, illness brought us all together.

  Mary-Jane had stomach pains. One day, she lost a lot of blood, whereas she thought she’d reached the menopause a long time ago, and then the pains started. That night, she slept little, a spasm of pain woke her and its suddenness made her cry out. We all went rushing to her side. She immediately got a grip on herself and we heard her groan, her fists in her mouth, her forehead wet with perspiration. We stood beside her, help
less and desperate. At first, she told us to go back to bed, that there was nothing we could do, but none of us was able to and she eventually accepted our presence.

  Emma gently dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, Anthea placed a hot compress on her stomach which Mary-Jane said was soothing. The attack slowly subsided and she fell asleep, exhausted by the pain. Then we lay down on the ground around her and allowed ourselves to go back to sleep. One morning, on waking up, we saw she was no longer with us.

  We’d stopped quite close to a cabin so as to have easy access to supplies. We sat there looking at one another in surprise, seeking her among the others, when it occurred to me to go down into the bunker. There she was. She’d torn her blanket into strips which she’d tied together, then she’d hanged herself from the bars, alongside the forty male corpses. We decided to leave her there. We just cut the rope, laid her out on the floor, carefully wrapped in another blanket, the newest one we had, her hands crossed over her stomach that had hurt her so much, and, for once, Rose agreed to come down and sing in a bunker. Then, we shut the door behind us as we always did. We drew our symbols on the ground and left.

  But this time, it was to seek a place to settle down. It was as if these two deaths had convinced us that there was nothing on this planet that was perhaps not Earth. We wanted a river not too far from a bunker that would fulfil our needs: just like the spot we were leaving, but, of course, we didn’t want to stay so close to the place where one of us had had to kill herself to end her suffering. Dorothy’s death had saddened those who loved her, but she’d been old and it had been a very gentle end. Mary-Jane’s death had been a shock, it frightened us. The older women didn’t want to talk about it. That was no doubt why we left almost at once.