They didn’t know what to choose. In the previous world, people used to sign their own names, but forty names written in the dust? Thirty-nine, in fact, because we’d never known what my name was, and the women called me the child. What should we choose? A circle? A triangle? Two parallel lines? In the end, Anthea suggested a cross with a circle above it.
‘That will let them know that we’re women. What else do we need?’
‘There might be other women,’ said Greta. ‘Let’s add something, and, since we don’t know anything, not where we are, or why, or where we’re going, let’s add a question mark.’
This took us an entire day each time. Several of us returned to the bunker where the men were and drew big symbols on the ground. Our bunker and the first bunker of dead women were not marked, but many others were – not all, because I didn’t carry on writing the signature on the ground once I was alone. I’d given up believing that any living beings would come.
We walked for two years, advancing in small stages, and then we decided we’d have to stop: Dorothy was growing frail. She was aware of it, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. We could see that she was becoming slower and slower. Attempting to get up one morning, she stumbled and at once it was clear that she couldn’t stand up. Anthea put her ear to her chest: her heart was beating very feebly. We decided to wait until she was better, but after two days, she grew agitated.
‘There’s no point waiting,’ she said. ‘I’m old, I must be over seventy-five, my heart won’t get any stronger. We must go on.’
Thanks to the tools that we’d kept with us all this time, we were able to build a kind of stretcher. We felled two trees that were nice and straight, trimmed the trunks and bound the chair to them, using tightly plaited strips of fabric. Dorothy was very weak and felt cold all the time, so we wrapped her in blankets, then we strapped her to the back of the chair and four of us carried her, taking care to walk in step so as not to jolt her. But we only kept it up for a few days because she found even that tiring, and then it became painful for her to stay sitting. We nailed branches across the two wooden poles so that we could carry her lying down. She thanked us profusely, and told us that she felt better, but we could see she was short of breath, and while we moved, she kept her eyes shut most of the time. At first, she slept, and the slightest thing awoke her, then we realised that she no longer reacted when we stopped to change bearers. Anthea said that she’d fallen into a light coma. Some of the women wanted us to stop, but Dorothy woke up and wouldn’t hear of it:
‘If you stop, I’ll say to myself that half an hour later we might have found something, and I’ll die angry. I want to keep going until my last breath.’
And that was how Dorothy died, gently rocked by the women while Anthea walked beside her holding her hand. After a while, she could no longer feel her pulse. I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.
‘It’s over,’ she said.
The others caught up with us and we walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void, alongside the stubborn woman whose wish had been to die without stopping.
We buried her during the night. There was a fine drizzle. Rose’s funeral lament hung in the air above the plain.
We stayed by the tomb for several days, as if loath to abandon Dorothy and as if we no longer had any reason to continue. I don’t think any one of us still believed in those cities that would be our salvation, or in a bunker where the cage would be open. Almost every evening, Anthea gazed at the sky, wondering where we were. She said that on Earth, we’d have noticed the changing of the seasons, but here, over several months, the days had barely become shorter, and the weather was not noticeably cooler. There’d have been snowstorms or heatwaves, not this unchanging weather, with hardly any rain and this sparse vegetation. Why move on? We wouldn’t be any the wiser as to our whereabouts, she said, we’ll always be near a bunker and we’ll die one by one.
From that time on, I was fully aware that one day I would be the last.
But while we didn’t know where to go, we didn’t have any better reason for staying, and we set off afresh. So far, we’d walked southwards, and now we changed direction. There were still cabins, bunkers and corpses. When Mary-Jane fell ill, we decided to stop. Until she was better, we said, but we knew it was until she died.
I hadn’t had much to do with Mary-Jane, a fairly selfeffacing woman who followed without protest and never made any suggestions. She collected firewood when it was time to build a fire, carried her load without getting out of breath, and was neither among the last nor the first when we walked. In fact, she didn’t stand out in any way. I suppose that’s what is meant by easy-going. She was one of the women who didn’t sleep alone, and she was often seen with Emma, the first woman who thought that this planet wasn’t Earth. True there were so few of us that we all knew one another, but certain affinities had created loose groups. I wasn’t in the same group as Mary-Jane, but was with Anthea, Greta and Frances, in other words, the group that had formed around Dorothy and which took the decisions. Perhaps that’s what they meant by friendship, but in any case, illness brought us all together.
Mary-Jane had stomach pains. One day, she lost a lot of blood, whereas she thought she’d reached the menopause a long time ago, and then the pains started. That night, she slept little, a spasm of pain woke her and its suddenness made her cry out. We all went rushing to her side. She immediately got a grip on herself and we heard her groan, her fists in her mouth, her forehead wet with perspiration. We stood beside her, helpless and desperate. At first, she told us to go back to bed, that there was nothing we could do, but none of us was able to and she eventually accepted our presence.
Emma gently dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, Anthea placed a hot compress on her stomach which Mary-Jane said was soothing. The attack slowly subsided and she fell asleep, exhausted by the pain. Then we lay down on the ground around her and allowed ourselves to go back to sleep. One morning, on waking up, we saw she was no longer with us.
We’d stopped quite close to a cabin so as to have easy access to supplies. We sat there looking at one another in surprise, seeking her among the others, when it occurred to me to go down into the bunker. There she was. She’d torn her blanket into strips which she’d tied together, then she’d hanged herself from the bars, alongside the forty male corpses. We decided to leave her there. We just cut the rope, laid her out on the floor, carefully wrapped in another blanket, the newest one we had, her hands crossed over her stomach that had hurt her so much, and, for once, Rose agreed to come down and sing in a bunker. Then, we shut the door behind us as we always did. We drew our symbols on the ground and left.
But this time, it was to seek a place to settle down. It was as if these two deaths had convinced us that there was nothing on this planet that was perhaps not Earth. We wanted a river not too far from a bunker that would fulfil our needs: just like the spot we were leaving, but, of course, we didn’t want to stay so close to the place where one of us had had to kill herself to end her suffering. Dorothy’s death had saddened those who loved her, but she’d been old and it had been a very gentle end. Mary-Jane’s death had been a shock, it frightened us. The older women didn’t want to talk about it. That was no doubt why we left almost at once.
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.