They couldn’t think of anything.
Meanwhile, I carried on counting. Gradually, I managed to count automatically, while I was chatting or eating, and soon, in my sleep. I woke up with a number in my mind: at first, it seemed improbable. I was dubious, then convinced. Anthea told me I’d developed an aptitude which was perhaps not as extraordinary as all that; it was simply that no one had ever needed it before.
I counted my heartbeats one by one, and I soon found myself faced with huge numbers that defied mental calculations. At seventy-two beats a minute, an hour was equal to more than four thousand, two hundred, and by the end of the day I had reached over fifty thousand. It was no longer manageable. So I found a different technique: I counted seventy-two then I mentally chalked up one. I started again and chalked up two, but I was afraid of getting confused with these two different scales. Then a woman would come along and act as an abacus: I’d say one, she’d remember it, then I’d say two. She soon became unnecessary because I didn’t make any mistakes. I saw that I was keeping track of the figures accurately. Gradually, I no longer needed to say the numbers out loud. Something fell into place inside me that alerted me automatically every seventy beats. I became a human clock.
Our days lasted between fifteen and eighteen hours, with random variations. From the moment the lights were turned down, which we called the beginning of night, about six hours went by before we were awakened. That was how we established that we were living according to an artificial clock. We needed to understand why.
Emma put forward the craziest theory.
‘We’re not on Earth. We are on a planet that rotates every sixteen and a half hours.’
‘How would we have got here?’
‘How did we get into the bunker?’ I asked.
Nobody had the least idea, which amazed me.
I’d put my own lack of memories down to the fact that I’d been so young and to the women’s state of shock that Anthea had described to me, but the others knew no more than I did. Apparently, life had been going on as usual, when suddenly, in the middle of a night that had begun like any other, there’d been screams, flames, a stampede, things which I, who’d always lived in the quiet of the bunker, couldn’t begin to imagine.
‘There were strange drugs that affected the brain and created false memories,’ said Emma.
Anthea wasn’t convinced of this. There’d been all sorts of unconfirmed rumours, stories of brainwashing, genetic engineering or robots so sophisticated that they were mistaken for human beings.
‘The fact is that none of us seems to have any coherent memories that would enable us to piece together what happened. We don’t even know if there was a war,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can recall only vague images: I see flames, people running in all directions, and I think I’m tied up and frightened. It goes on for a very long time. I’m still frightened, but there aren’t even any images any more.’
‘Well, I can’t even tell you that much,’ said Annabel. ‘There’s my day-to-day life, and then a sort of panic which I’ve always been terrified of reliving. Then, I’m here, lying on a mattress and everything feels perfectly normal.’
‘Wars aren’t like that. There are bombs and air-raid sirens.’
‘There wasn’t a war. Not where we were, at any rate. Of course, those were troubled times, but educated people said that we hadn’t lived in peace for a very long time.’
‘We were invaded by another country.’
‘Or Martians!’
They were as ready as ever to burst out laughing and I began to understand that it wasn’t out of stupidity or hopelessness, but as a means of survival.
‘So why would they have taken us to another planet? What use could we be to them?’
‘Clearly none at all,’ chipped in another. ‘We’re still on Earth. Fifteen or twenty years ago – no, less, you can tell from looking at the child – when we were locked up, there was a purpose, they were keeping us in reserve for something. And then a file got lost, the admin workers made sure no one found out, and they carried on guarding us and keeping us alive, but no one was responsible for us. We’re the result of an administrative blunder.’
‘But sixteen hours! That doesn’t explain sixteen hours!’
‘And it’s ridiculous that we can’t find any pattern in the guards’ routine. My memories of before are fuzzy, but I’m sure we worked regular hours. We even had to clock on.’
‘Once, only once since I’ve been counting, the young guard stayed nearly eleven hours at a stretch, pacing up and down around the cage. By the end, he looked drawn and pale, but he didn’t complain. I’ve never seen him looking impatient,’ I said.
Our conversations followed these lines, going over and over the same ground. Attempts to recall the early years of imprisonment were fruitless. Apparently, the women had slowly emerged from an inner fog to find themselves accustomed to the strange life they led. There was no suggestion of a rebellion. They’d had husbands, lovers and children. As a result of being too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they’d forgotten almost everything. But they didn’t try to shut me up, because they were horrified at having lost their own history. Anthea gradually became convinced that they’d been drugged.
‘Look at us, look at how we live. We have been deprived of everything that made us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you’re human, you can’t help it. We made up new rules with what we had left, we invented a code. The eldest pours the soup into the bowls, I supervise the sewing, when there is any, Annabel reconciles those who squabble, and we have no idea how all that came about. We must have been living in a dream for a long time and when we woke up, we’d adapted to the situation.’
‘What about when Alice wanted to kill herself and Claudia stopped her?’
‘That’s one memory that stands out amid all the confusion. No one knows when that was.’
I’d been counting for four months. We’d decided no longer to worry about the anarchic routine they imposed on us – my heart would act as our clock. One evening, as the lights were being dimmed, we decided that it was eleven o’clock, and that from that moment, I would count the days as twenty-four hours, as in the past. Sometimes, when we were in the middle of lunch, joylessly eating the boiled vegetables, a woman would ask me the time and I’d reply:
‘Two o’clock in the morning.’
That rekindled a spirit of rebellion in their dulled minds. We had our own time, which had nothing in common with that of those who kept us locked up; we’d rediscovered the quality of being human. We were no longer in league with the guards. Inside the bars, my strong, regular heart fuelled by youthful anger had restored to us our own territory; we’d established an area of freedom. New jokes sprang up. When the hatch opened for the second time and we were given a few kilos of pasta, if it was eight o’clock in the morning according to my heart, there was always one woman who’d say: