‘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 trolley, 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.
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.