I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

  I made several trips down into the bunker to bring up the meat, the powders, a mattress and a chair. I cooked a copious meal and had the brainwave of sprinkling my mixture of meat and vegetables with milk powder. After that, I slept for a long time. When I awoke, I realised that there was nothing more for me to do there. I felt vaguely disappointed, as if I had hoped for more from that bunker, as if I’d forgotten that they were all the same. The next one would also have the door locked, but I’d be unlikely to find more milk there. Perhaps there’d be some other novelty? The women had talked of chocolate, bread and cheese. I was looking for something else. I told myself that, while waiting to find out what it was – because I was modest to the point of not thinking ‘before finding it’ – I would enjoy the lovely red meat that I could grill over my fire of twigs, and also the milk, of which I drank a whole gourdful.

  At around eight o’clock in the morning, I felt wonderfully good. I went down into the bunker to fetch a few cans to replace the ones I’d used in the past few days and to see if I could find some thread, which I’d forgotten to do the day before. By the time I was ready to leave, my rucksack weighed a lot more than when I’d arrived, but it didn’t feel too heavy. I was already a lot stronger and I wanted to take the mattress with me, because I’d slept much better than on the ground, but I told myself I ought to be careful, and that there’d be plenty of time to think about that in a few days, at the next bunker, when I’d completely adjusted to my new life. Perhaps I would no longer need it.

  I didn’t leave the usual signs on the ground as I no longer believed there might be any other survivors. But I discarded the mattress in front of the cabin so that if I came that way again, I’d recognise my own traces.

  I think I have given an accurate account of this first bunker. I think so, but I can’t be certain. I’m sure that was the one where I found milk, but afterwards, which one was it where I found tea? The fifth? The tenth? They were all the same, with their forty mummified corpses piled up or scattered across the floor. Only once did I find thirty-eight, and only once did I find all the women lying calmly, as if they’d understood that death was inevitable and had decided to wait in silence. Another time, the keys had fallen within two metres of the bars and I thought how dreadful it must have been to see them without being able to reach them. Sometimes, a tap was running in the cage, making a little trickling sound that startled me at first, but I’d already lost all hope that the door would be open. Each time, there was the food store and the permanent light. I travelled eastwards, from one bunker to another, carrying my provisions, and in the end, I never did take a mattress. My shoes wore out, which didn’t bother me – eventually I was bound to find some boots to fit me. Then came the season when the sky is always cloudy, with the fine drizzle that I knew well, and I was glad to find a waterproof sheet in one of the guard rooms. It was folded on the table, beside a pile of new blankets which hadn’t been put away. That set me thinking again about how rare it was to find unusual objects in the bunkers, as if it had been decreed that they all had to be absolutely identical. I was about to plunge into my habitual speculation about the guards and the meaning of our imprisonment. At first, I felt like shrugging and turning my thoughts to other things. But why? How else would I occupy my mind? After our escape, Dorothy used to say: ‘Let’s organise our life, let’s not waste our thoughts.’ The fact was, I could use my thoughts as I pleased, the idea of wasting them was absurd. My survival was guaranteed, I would never exhaust all the food available, and the rare bad weather had never made me ill. I could allow my mind to wander as it pleased, it didn’t matter if the paths it took were dead ends – all I had to do was put a stop to them. It was certain that the purpose of our deportation and captivity would never be revealed to me through the abandoned objects, and the whip lying on the ground taught me nothing useful. I found the same thing in all the bunkers, even in the guards’ quarters.

  Even in the guards’ quarters: I don’t think I’d ever formulated that so clearly. Those words kept haunting me and were beginning to annoy me, when at last an idea began to form: we had understood that the guards didn’t want to give us any clues as to the reasons for our captivity and our being kept alive, but we’d always assumed that they knew. What if they were as much in the dark as we were? What if they were forced to do a job that they weren’t permitted to understand? What if by putting the same things in all the bunkers, those in charge wanted to keep all information from them as well as from us? I was electrified by this theory, I could feel my footsteps dancing and I began to laugh. I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

  I would be the sole proprietor of this land, I’d said to Anthea shortly before she died. But I knew that the stones and the cold stores would constitute a paltry treasure. I’d set out with the intention of discovering things – possibly the power plant the women had always talked about, the place from which the orders that governed our lives were issued – anything that was new. To think that the guards knew nothing was a new idea, and to me nothing seemed more precious. I would have liked to celebrate. Since I lived as I pleased, walking, eating and sleeping when I felt like it, I couldn’t invent anything special, but that evening, I lit the fire and grilled my meat with a light heart. I promised myself sweet dreams that night. I don’t know if I had them. Every night, I had plenty of company, and, on waking, I always had the vague recollection that I’d been laughing and playing with women and men, but I never managed to remember anything more specific. That always surprises me because when I am awake, I forget nothing.

  Having realised that, in fact, the guards were also victims, I was prepared for the strange encounter that awaited me. I’d been walking for a year, always in the direction of the rising sun. The landscape had changed a little, the long undulations had become hills, and I never climbed them without hope. The rivers were deeper and it was possible to swim in them, which gave me immense pleasure, and I saw new types of tree in the denser woods. I carefully examined the bushes, because I remembered that the women had spoken of wild berries – strawberries, blackberries and raspberries – which all tasted delicious, but I never saw anything that resembled their descriptions. Once, I came across what I thought must be mushrooms, but I didn’t pick them because they’d said that they might be poisonous. It was on leaving one of these woods that I was struck by the lie of the land.

  A long valley stretched out ahead, covered with the usual scrawny vegetation and loose stones, but I could immediately make out a strip that looked different: the grass was even sparser, there were virtually no stones. It formed a straight trail to the next hilltop. The women had spoken of roads: could this be one? I went down towards it, deciding of course to follow it, even if it wasn’t heading eastwards, since I’d only chosen this direction to avoid going round in circles. I walked for a day and a half before reaching the summit of a long, low hill. As soon as I looked down, I saw the bus.

  I say bus, but of course, initially, I didn’t know what I was looking at. First of all, it was half an hour away and all I could make out was a rectangular shape in the middle of the plain; and then, naturally, I’d never seen a bus. All I had to go on was what the women had told me, and none of them had given me precise descriptions of things that they took for granted. I only knew that it was a vehicle that could carry a lot of people.

  My heart was racing as I ran down so fast that I was at the bottom in ten minutes. I stumbled a couple of times, because I couldn’t take my eyes off my goal: a huge rusty structure which was ten paces long and twice my height, standing on wheels that were mostly broken, with windows all around. As soon as I was halfway down, I could see the figures sitting in the bus, and I nearly stopped dead in my tracks, but I quickly got a grip on myself. I ran up to it, dropped my rucksack and stood rooted to the spot, trying to take in what I saw. I recognised a door with a handle, and I tried to turn it, b
ut it came off in my hand. The panes were broken, I tugged at the frame, the door opened and immediately dropped off its hinges. I hauled myself up what remained of the steps and entered the bus.

  Over the years, the corpses in the bunkers had mummified; these had become skeletons, dressed in the all-too-familiar uniform, equipped with their weapons and strange masks which hid their facial bones. They were sitting naturally, as if death had struck very suddenly and they’d slipped, without being in the least aware of their last heartbeat, into that final immobility where, for years, nothing had disturbed them. The driver was in his seat, his hands still gripping the wheel. On entering the bus, I’d raised a light cloud of dust which settled around me as I stood there dumbstruck. I mechanically did what I’d been doing for years and which had become the very structure of my mind: I began to count. I enumerated twenty-two passengers on the twenty-four seats, sitting in pairs on either side of a central gangway. So there were twenty-three bodies. Each one had a kit bag, either on his knees, or on the floor between his feet. Incredulously I made a careful check: there was no sign of panic, nothing suggested that they’d been forewarned of any danger. The bus had stopped in the middle of the plain and they had all died on the spot.

  I stood looking around me for a long time, allowing my wild curiosity to satisfy itself at its own pace. I already knew that it would remain frustrated – I could count myself lucky if this bizarre world that I inhabited was kind enough to add a few more questions to my list of unanswered ones. It was five o’clock and the sun had begun its descent before I was stirred into action.

  My interest was primarily in the kit bags: I had explored more than a hundred bunkers but I’d never seen these bags made of coarse, stiff cloth, with straps and metal buckles. I picked one up. Impatience got the better of me while I was taking it outside, I was tense and my heart was pounding. I tried to calm down, telling myself that I wouldn’t find anything extraordinary, but I didn’t believe that, and my fingers trembled as I undid the knots.

  On top was a carefully folded garment, of a kind I’d never seen. It had long sleeves, a stiff collar and a belt, and it wasn’t cut from a fabric I’d ever seen before, but from a thick, fairly supple material with creases, pockets, flat seams – the word came back to me at once – and padded parts. I was used to light cotton that fluttered in the slightest breeze and I thought this must be uncomfortable to wear. It was probably a jacket, a garment the women had mentioned but which the men had never worn in the bunker.

  Underneath, there were several items. I began with a smaller packet, made of thick paper. Obviously, I didn’t know it was paper, because I’d never seen any, but I shan’t go into the difficulties I had in identifying and naming all these things because that would be too tedious and I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d have to repeat myself over and over again. I undid the packet carefully, it was fragile and threatened to fall apart. It only contained a brownish dust, odourless and tasteless, probably some sort of food that had dried up. Then, from a small soft leather pouch, I took out a strange instrument that I had to examine closely to find a very thin blade sandwiched between two metal plates, all mounted on a handle that was very easy to hold. You couldn’t use it for cutting unless you removed the blade: it took me a long time to guess that it was a razor. The third item was a glass bottle, which I put to one side as I was much more intrigued by two pieces of carefully folded, big white rectangles of thick, supple fabric. I thought they must be those towels made of terry cloth that the women missed so badly and which I’d learned to manage without. But I could use them to make myself something to replace my tattered dress. There were also two pairs of knickers. I remembered later that for men, the word underpants was used.

  And underneath, a book.

  Anthea had taught me the alphabet and the rudiments of reading by drawing the letters in the sand. At the time, it bored her, because she couldn’t see what I would do with such knowledge, but I had insisted: there was too little to learn for me not to grasp at everything I could. I had words in my head for things I’d never seen, let alone touched, as I was now doing. I recognised the book at once and I was so overwhelmed that I felt almost giddy. I think that if I’d been standing, I’d have collapsed. I had in my hands the most precious of treasures, a spring from which to drink the knowledge of that world to which I would never have access. As always when I was overcome by emotion, I began to count. The title, written large, had twenty-three letters divided into four words, all beginning with capitals. I looked, without trying to decipher – excitement, impatience and tiredness were a bad mixture which made me tense and dulled my mind. I no longer knew which way to turn, whether to satisfy my curiosity and search the bags or to find out what the book was about, and I had to make an enormous effort to control myself. As the sun was already very low and soon I wouldn’t be able to see enough, I decided to save the book for later, but my excitement made me clumsy and I dropped the bottle that had been in my lap. It was sheer luck that it didn’t break, as it had landed on the jacket and I was able to catch it before it rolled onto the stones. That calmed me down and I resolutely put the book to one side. I returned to the bag and was disappointed: the only other thing it contained was a blanket like the ones in the bunkers. So I picked up the bottle, which wasn’t big, probably half a litre, full of a colourless liquid, like water, and had never been opened. I examined the cork at length and put off finding a way to open it until later. I was absolutely exhausted. The regular existence I led, walking for eight to ten hours every day in the wilderness, hadn’t prepared me for this emotional upheaval. I was trembling with fatigue and I didn’t even have the strength to make myself something to eat. I unfolded the blanket from the bag, stretched it out on the ground to air it and wrapped myself up in my own. I didn’t even realise that I was falling asleep, and was amazed, on waking abruptly, to find it was three o’clock in the morning. I lit the fire and heated up some food. At sunrise, I was back in the bus.

  First, I took out all the kit bags and lined them up a few metres from the rusty shell of the bus, then I did likewise with the corpses. Reduced as they were to skeletons, they felt incredibly light. I was especially interested in their clothing. I wondered whether the lightweight cotton trousers and the shirt with epaulettes that I’d seen the guards in the bunker wearing would be more comfortable than my dress. One of the dead men had been small and slim and I decided to keep his clothes to try on after washing them. I put the weapons in two piles: the whips that would never crack again and the big pistols that they’d never drawn in the bunker, but whose use I had been told about. I was tempted to try them out, and took one, aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and at the time, I told myself it was not loaded. Later, I remembered that those things had a safety catch and I thought that perhaps it had been on, but in any case, I wouldn’t have known how to release it. Then I began searching all the bags and I wasn’t surprised to find exactly the same in each one: a jacket, two pairs of underpants, a packet of food – one, better preserved than the others, contained little whitish fragments which crumbled at my touch. I presumed it was bread, that everyday food which I had never eaten – a blanket, a razor and a book. I didn’t even need to decipher the title to realise that they were all the same. I didn’t dwell on the matter, fearing I’d experience anew the agitation that had defeated me the previous evening. Once I’d finished sorting everything out, I wondered why we’d never found any bread in any of the bunkers. I still have no idea.

  By midday, everything was in order, the twenty-three skeletons lying side by side, the shirts and underpants in neat piles, the masks and weapons in three separate heaps. I had examined the masks closely, and remembered stories told by the women: they were probably gas masks. That made me wonder what had killed these men: certainly not gas, against which they had protection. Anyway, we’d escaped just minutes after the siren had stopped and nothing had happened to us.

  I stood up and stretched. My back ached from bending over for so long, and I
spent a long time examining my possessions before heating up my meal. Suddenly I was the owner of a vast number of goods, whereas I was used to owning nothing. I felt overwhelmed. I ate gazing at my skeletons. They’d been custodians of the absurd, carrying out orders whose purpose they were unaware of, themselves having to submit to incomprehensible rules, and perhaps they had no more idea of our identity than we did of theirs. Death had caught them unawares, sitting in the bus: but had they known where they were going? Since the siren, we’d never found any trace of the guards, and we imagined that they’d all been taken off somewhere else: why were these guards still here? The only possible explanations occurred to me much later: they were on a routine trip between two bunkers, they were on their way to sleep, or they might have been new arrivals being driven to their post, oblivious of the danger. The gas masks showed that this land was not safe, but whatever it was that killed them had been unforeseen. Ours was the only prison where the siren had sounded just as the cage door was opened, and that is what had saved us: they were the only ones who were exposed, and that had killed them. This symmetry preoccupied me for a long time. For some reason I found in it a sort of obscure beauty. Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this? Were things still going on? And on this planet of which I will only ever see a fraction, however long I keep walking, was there a place where the bunkers were still operational? Where men and women obeyed the whip, slept and ate at random times, and where a rebellious girl was beginning to count her heartbeats? Was I the only one? Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?