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.’