I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

  After a few weeks, we found what we were looking for: the river was wide, in the middle the water came up to our thighs, and there were plenty of trees on the banks. We decided to build houses with large stones and a kind of mortar made of mud. For the roofs, we would use sawn tree trunks. We’d noticed that in some places where the current wasn’t so strong, there were water weeds growing. These could be dried and woven together into a rope which we could use to tie together bundles of twigs in a thick layer to make what we called thatch, without being too sure what the word meant. Then we realised that if we mixed those same weeds with the mortar, they made it stronger. We were unpretentious: the sides of the first house were four metres long. It took two months to build and it was very pleasant to shelter inside when it rained. Of course, we couldn’t all fit in at once, but the women who stayed outside huddled together to keep warm, as we had always done since our escape, knowing that next time it rained it would be their turn. The second house took less time. We decided to make it rectangular. The trees weren’t high and we couldn’t support the entire length of the roof with one beam, but we managed to intersect the trunks by supporting them on stone columns, and the whole structure held together very well. Also, we knew that there were never any strong winds.

  Perhaps it is still standing.

  We brought up chairs and tables from the nearby bunker and, accompanied by four of the strongest women, I went to fetch furniture from the others. We also took mattresses. We often found some along the sides of the cages, which we simply pulled through the bars. We never took mattresses that couldn’t be moved without disturbing the dead. When the mattresses had been aired for a while, the smell vanished and they were perfectly usable. Sometimes we made a discovery: a piece of fabric, a store of thread and a bag of sandals which came in handy because, even though we now all had a pair of boots thanks to our pillaging, when we stopped walking we preferred to wear shoes that didn’t encase our feet. We’d ditched the trolley because we knew there was one in all the bunkers and that there were lots of bunkers. We found a new one, dismantled it, brought it back and used it to carry our construction materials from one place to another. Altogether we built five houses, and the first became the kitchen. We installed a chimney because we’d managed to make a sort of stove: we hammered empty cans flat, then we bent over the edges with pincers to fit them together and then hammered them down again, thus making a big metal hotplate which we supported on stone walls. We lit the fire underneath and were able to heat several saucepans over a single hearth. I became skilled at sawing and could make planks for building shelves to store our food, as well as benches.

  I had very much enjoyed building, and I would gladly have carried on, but the other women didn’t want to: after living forty in a cage, they were happy to be nine or ten to a house. They spoke of the facilities in their previous homes, such as running water and baths: those were things of the past that we would have to forget. I had the impression that they found it easier to adapt to our sedentary life than I did. Sometimes, I’d climb a hill and gaze at the plain. I wanted to move on and I became restless. Then I’d think up something to do, an extra table or a bench; the cleverest was a mobile plank system that made it possible to sit on the toilet. I assembled tree trunks sawn in half lengthways to make mobile partitions that could easily be transported, which meant we could do away with the bushes and blankets. It was a long and complicated task which I wanted to accomplish alone. It would have spoilt my fun to have help. When I could think of nothing to build, I’d say that the saws were blunt, that we needed nails or pliers, and I’d convince one of the women to come with me on an excursion of several weeks. On our return, I’d come up with a new idea that would keep me busy for a while, and it always involved making something or other. But we had so few needs that in the end I could think of nothing new. The years passed by. Life was quite monotonous, but one day, a chance conversation with Anthea aroused my desire to learn.

  There were only thirty-eight of us now, living in groups in the four houses. We’d made what Anthea called bunk beds, so that the mattresses didn’t take up all the floor space. I lived with Anthea, Greta, Rose, Annabel, Margaret, one of the oldest women, and Denise, Laura and Frances. We were all easy-going, realistic and seldom argued. The groups that had formed through natural affinity became more defined when we moved into the houses, which I understood all too well because I wouldn’t have wanted to be too close to Carol, who was always excited, or Mary, a sullen woman who was difficult to talk to. I was still puzzled by the couples. Sometimes there were violent arguments, with shouting and crying, and I wondered what could cause so much upset. I had a horror of asking questions, a hangover from my early years, but Anthea realised that I didn’t understand and she explained to me what women can do together. I found that strange, for I hated anyone touching me, which she put down to the memory of the whip.

  ‘In that case, what were men for?’ I asked.

  She was surprised at my ignorance.

  ‘How can I know if no one tells me? In the bunkers where there were dead men, some of them were naked and I could see that they are made differently from us. I suppose that’s got something to do with love. You used to talk about it but we haven’t discussed it for ages, and I’m still none the wiser.’

  Then she repeated what I’d heard so many times before:

  ‘What’s the use of telling you? There are no more men.’

  Anger flared up inside me, but I was no longer a little girl among women: however old I’d been at the start, we’d been out for seven years now and I was certainly over twenty. I was one of the women who thought, who organised our communal life. I’d become skilled, I could saw, nail, sew and weave, and I didn’t want to be treated like a child.

  ‘Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.’

  Then she told me everything – men, the penis, erections, sperm and children. It took some time, because there were so many things to learn, I forgot details and she had to go back over them. I had a very good memory, but Anthea said that not even the best memory in the world can remember everything at once. She also explained my own body to me. Since I didn’t have periods, I didn’t know I had a vagina. She was surprised.

  ‘But you must have realised, felt something, even if it was when you were washing?’

  Then she surmised that, having started life as I had done, always surrounded by others, I hadn’t been able to become intimately acquainted with my own body. Of course, I’d soaped myself carefully, from my anus to my vulva, as the women had told me to do after each visit to the toilet, but those washing movements hadn’t taught me that those parts of my body had special qualities. I didn’t tell her about the eruption, which I had in fact long forgotten, and it was only much later that I made the connection between that brief thrill and the pleasures of love.

  Our conversations were fairly haphazard because often Anthea was so amazed at my ignorance that she lost the thread of her explanations. I imagined my insides. Sometimes she cleared a patch of ground and drew in the dirt. She told me about the stomach, the intestine, and then the heart, the blood vessels and circulation. I was interested in everything and I asked her more than she knew.

  ‘When I was training to be a nurse, I learned lots of things that I’ve forgotten because I never used them after the exams. Besides, I think that years of being drugged made me forget some of the rest. Dorothy probably died from heart failure. While it was happening, I tried to remember: the weakness of the heart affects the circulatory system, the kidneys and the lungs, it’s all part of a perfectly logical system that I used to find so beautiful, but I couldn’t rec
all how it worked.’

  ‘What use would it have been to you?’

  ‘None, you’re right, because I didn’t have any medicines. I tried, knowing that it was pointless, just because I needed to know. Like you.’

  I could feel my intestine, there were rumbles, flatulence and, regularly, stools. My genitals were cloaked in silence. Out of curiosity, sometimes, when I went to the river to wash, I would seek out my vagina: I could barely insert the tip of my finger because of the hymen that sealed it like a door closing off a corridor. I imagined it to be long and narrow, closed at each end, like the corridors in the bunkers: at the entrance, that barrier that only a man can break with his penis, further, the neck of the womb that only the baby about to be born can pass through on its way out of the great room inside. I imagined smooth, soft, dark-red walls, and at the very end, the furthest entrances, the tiny orifices of the oviducts along which, in my body, no egg had ever travelled. Then there was the great fringed foliage of the fallopian tubes which enveloped the ovaries where the most important work should have taken place, the slow and regular maturing of the egg. But my eggs were sterile, perhaps shrivelled, dried up, in this world where they had no purpose. My brain knew that there were no men, and it ordered my pituitary gland not to worry about gonads, it was busy enough with the liver, spleen, pancreas, thyroid gland, bone marrow and all the other tasks that were vital to my survival. There was no point devoting itself to a job that served no purpose. It had not permitted any of my eggs to mature. It had barely allowed my breasts and pubic hair to grow, then it had given up. When I was undernourished in the bunker, my body would have had to compensate for the loss of blood, and it had decided that, with no sperm available, there was no need for the eggs to be released to migrate down towards the uterus. My endometrium was flat. I had never seen a ploughed field because we had no seeds; we had nothing to plant, and my womb would never have to expand to hold a baby, so it wouldn’t matter if it shrank or shrivelled up.

  While on the subject of couples, Anthea had also explained that there was a way of doing it by oneself, and during my explorations of my body, I wanted to find out what I could get out of it. I allowed my fingers to roam at length over the regions that are supposed to give pleasure: my mucous membranes felt my fingers and my fingers felt my mucous membranes, but that was it. I wasn’t surprised, because I’d always suspected I wasn’t like the others.

  When we were completely settled in what we now called ‘the village’, I sometimes felt discontented and impatient. I would have liked to carry on looking, but of course, I didn’t even know what for, and I tried hard to control my irritability. Anthea had taught me everything she knew: talking with her, I gradually realised that I often made linguistic mistakes which she automatically corrected. She explained what grammar was and I was delighted to discover something new to be learned.

  ‘But none of us is capable of teaching you grammar!’ she told me. ‘There doesn’t even happen to be a primary-school teacher among us.’

  ‘But when you correct me, what do you base that on?’

  She thought.

  ‘On habit. And vague memories, rules that I once knew and that I would find it very hard to recall.’

  ‘Couldn’t you tell me one, any one?’

  I saw her concentrate, as in the past, the first time she had tried to do mental arithmetic. She smiled at me.

  ‘A relative clause is a clause introduced by a relative pronoun and used to qualify a preceding noun or pronoun.’

  ‘Oh! What’s a clause? And a noun? And a pronoun?’

  I wasn’t familiar with any of these terms because, of course, I hadn’t learned to speak in a systematic way, but by parroting what I heard. Anthea launched into some rather confused explanations, and called Margaret to the rescue, and then Helen, who’d once tried, with Isabel, to teach me the multiplication tables, and soon there were several of them, arguing heatedly and mustering the little they remembered. They were not averse to the idea of resuming my incomplete education, and they discovered that they too could learn from it. Why didn’t they try to speak better? they said. Rose could sing and thus provide us with some precious pleasure, but everybody could speak and find it enjoyable. I was a hardworking pupil. For the others, it was a sort of game which they enjoyed for a while: we didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, and we never said no to anything that was on offer.

  The idea of cultivating the few pleasures to which we had access developed. Several of the women took a renewed interest in their appearance and, now we had scissors and combs – Greta had found two in the bunkers – we started looking after our hair. We twisted wire to make hairpins, and Alice, who’d been a hairdresser, made chignons for those who wanted to keep their hair long. But that didn’t last, because the combs lost their teeth and we had no way of replacing them.

  We also played draughts: that had been Angela’s idea. She’d asked me to saw some planks and nail them together. Then she drew boxes using charred sticks and we had to cut small rounds of wood and blacken half of them. They taught me the rules, but I never became a good player because I couldn’t see the point of winning a game.

  ‘But it’s the satisfaction of being the best, and of using your brain!’ said Anthea.

  I understood the pleasure of using my brain well enough, but I found it ridiculous to make so much effort just to end up putting the pieces away in an empty box, or arranging them on the board and starting all over again.

  We didn’t find much else. We would happily have made ourselves clothes, but fabric and thread were still hard to come by. We lived a peaceful existence and, eventually, the lovers’ quarrels stopped. The older women were ageing visibly, and they forgot the little passion that had drawn them together. Death made a sudden reappearance: one morning, Bernadette failed to wake up. Like Mary-Jane, she’d been a discreet person, and had remained so right up until her abrupt end, which came completely out of the blue. Then Margaret grew very weak, she lost her memory, could no longer recognise us and was unable to stand. She refused all food except liquids and she became incontinent. Following Anthea’s instructions, I built what she called a rack and we made a hole in the mattress, covered with leaves, which we changed regularly, but even so, there was an unpleasant smell in our house, where her life was drawing to a close. Elizabeth, who’d been her lover at the beginning of our wanderings, came and stayed with us, as if her affection had been revived by Margaret’s predicament. It lasted for two months, then it suddenly worsened, she became distraught, at night she had bad dreams which made her scream. Then she’d find the strength to get up and run outside, or she’d be seized by terrible rages. That was how she died, shrieking curses. All of a sudden, while she was struggling against the women who were trying to help her, she went rigid staring at Elizabeth, flung out her arm as if to hit her and was wracked by a spasm. She drew herself up to her full height and stated very clearly:

  ‘No, it is out of the question!’

  And fell down dead.

  We chose a clearing in the middle of the wood as a burial spot, first for Bernadette and then for Margaret. For each of them we made a little monument with a mound of stones and a wooden cross on which we wrote their names. The women carved them as best they could with old knives, after which they burnt in the letters with glowing brands from the fire. The second tomb was dug beside the first, and the women called this place the cemetery. Rose sang. A great sorrow reigned over the village.

  Death had begun its work. Who would it single out next time? A vague melancholy set in. I think they were wondering why they were wearing themselves out trying to survive from day to day in this alien land where only the grave awaited them, but they didn’t talk about it. They no longer chatted endlessly about nothing, but came and went in silence, slowly, as if weighed down by inevitability. The days went by, and then the months, and the sense of an imminent disaster was dispelled. I realised the day when Elizabeth, who was now the oldest, said to us laughingly:

 
‘It’ll be my turn next, and look how active I still am!’

  She had just come back from the woods with an armful of heavy branches for the fire and, it was true, she wasn’t even out of breath.

  Then we started planning ahead again. In the cold store, there was still a large stock of meat, but Helen and Isabel had worked out that with thirty-six of us, it wouldn’t last more than five years. I refrained, and I was probably not the only one, from saying that our numbers would decrease. There was no question of replenishing our supplies from another bunker, the nearest was a ten-day hike away and the meat would go off before we got back. The idea of emigrating was floated and I was thrilled at the thought of constructing another village. I had enjoyed building, I started thinking up new arrangements and even became quite excited, offering to add new houses to the village for those who wanted a little more privacy. I had become skilled, but apart from the occasional shelf, I rarely had the opportunity to use my talents. My suggestion was greeted with approval, several of the women who lived as couples said that actually they’d prefer to live on their own. But the most urgent problem was that of our clothing: our dresses were in tatters. We could in fact have gone naked, the climate was so mild, at least during the hottest season, but the women objected. The years of incarceration with no privacy under the watchful eye of the guards had made modesty a luxury which no one wished to forgo. Besides, we had almost run out of soap. We decided to send an expedition towards the west, a direction we hadn’t yet explored. Four of us set off, Denise, Frances, Greta and myself, since we were the youngest and strongest. Anthea was probably the same age as the three women who were accompanying me, but she was the nurse, the only one who could understand the women’s ailments and perhaps, despite the lack of medicines, find some remedy, so it seemed best for her to stay behind in the village. We were to fetch fabric, sandals, soap and salt, and identify another site in case we did decide to move. Those who stayed behind promised to cut down trees and lay them to dry so that they’d be ready on our return.