Perhaps it is still standing.
We brought up chairs and tables from the nearby bunker and, accompanied by four of the strongest women, I went to fetch furniture from the others. We also took mattresses. We often found some along the sides of the cages, which we simply pulled through the bars. We never took mattresses that couldn’t be moved without disturbing the dead. When the mattresses had been aired for a while, the smell vanished and they were perfectly usable. Sometimes we made a discovery: a piece of fabric, a store of thread and a bag of sandals which came in handy because, even though we now all had a pair of boots thanks to our pillaging, when we stopped walking we preferred to wear shoes that didn’t encase our feet. We’d ditched the trolley because we knew there was one in all the bunkers and that there were lots of bunkers. We found a new one, dismantled it, brought it back and used it to carry our construction materials from one place to another. Altogether we built five houses, and the first became the kitchen. We installed a chimney because we’d managed to make a sort of stove: we hammered empty cans flat, then we bent over the edges with pincers to fit them together and then hammered them down again, thus making a big metal hotplate which we supported on stone walls. We lit the fire underneath and were able to heat several saucepans over a single hearth. I became skilled at sawing and could make planks for building shelves to store our food, as well as benches.
I had very much enjoyed building, and I would gladly have carried on, but the other women didn’t want to: after living forty in a cage, they were happy to be nine or ten to a house. They spoke of the facilities in their previous homes, such as running water and baths: those were things of the past that we would have to forget. I had the impression that they found it easier to adapt to our sedentary life than I did. Sometimes, I’d climb a hill and gaze at the plain. I wanted to move on and I became restless. Then I’d think up something to do, an extra table or a bench; the cleverest was a mobile plank system that made it possible to sit on the toilet. I assembled tree trunks sawn in half lengthways to make mobile partitions that could easily be transported, which meant we could do away with the bushes and blankets. It was a long and complicated task which I wanted to accomplish alone. It would have spoilt my fun to have help. When I could think of nothing to build, I’d say that the saws were blunt, that we needed nails or pliers, and I’d convince one of the women to come with me on an excursion of several weeks. On our return, I’d come up with a new idea that would keep me busy for a while, and it always involved making something or other. But we had so few needs that in the end I could think of nothing new. The years passed by. Life was quite monotonous, but one day, a chance conversation with Anthea aroused my desire to learn.
There were only thirty-eight of us now, living in groups in the four houses. We’d made what Anthea called bunk beds, so that the mattresses didn’t take up all the floor space. I lived with Anthea, Greta, Rose, Annabel, Margaret, one of the oldest women, and Denise, Laura and Frances. We were all easy-going, realistic and seldom argued. The groups that had formed through natural affinity became more defined when we moved into the houses, which I understood all too well because I wouldn’t have wanted to be too close to Carol, who was always excited, or Mary, a sullen woman who was difficult to talk to. I was still puzzled by the couples. Sometimes there were violent arguments, with shouting and crying, and I wondered what could cause so much upset. I had a horror of asking questions, a hangover from my early years, but Anthea realised that I didn’t understand and she explained to me what women can do together. I found that strange, for I hated anyone touching me, which she put down to the memory of the whip.
‘In that case, what were men for?’ I asked.
She was surprised at my ignorance.
‘How can I know if no one tells me? In the bunkers where there were dead men, some of them were naked and I could see that they are made differently from us. I suppose that’s got something to do with love. You used to talk about it but we haven’t discussed it for ages, and I’m still none the wiser.’
Then she repeated what I’d heard so many times before:
‘What’s the use of telling you? There are no more men.’
Anger flared up inside me, but I was no longer a little girl among women: however old I’d been at the start, we’d been out for seven years now and I was certainly over twenty. I was one of the women who thought, who organised our communal life. I’d become skilled, I could saw, nail, sew and weave, and I didn’t want to be treated like a child.
‘Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.’
Then she told me everything – men, the penis, erections, sperm and children. It took some time, because there were so many things to learn, I forgot details and she had to go back over them. I had a very good memory, but Anthea said that not even the best memory in the world can remember everything at once. She also explained my own body to me. Since I didn’t have periods, I didn’t know I had a vagina. She was surprised.
‘But you must have realised, felt something, even if it was when you were washing?’
Then she surmised that, having started life as I had done, always surrounded by others, I hadn’t been able to become intimately acquainted with my own body. Of course, I’d soaped myself carefully, from my anus to my vulva, as the women had told me to do after each visit to the toilet, but those washing movements hadn’t taught me that those parts of my body had special qualities. I didn’t tell her about the eruption, which I had in fact long forgotten, and it was only much later that I made the connection between that brief thrill and the pleasures of love.
Our conversations were fairly haphazard because often Anthea was so amazed at my ignorance that she lost the thread of her explanations. I imagined my insides. Sometimes she cleared a patch of ground and drew in the dirt. She told me about the stomach, the intestine, and then the heart, the blood vessels and circulation. I was interested in everything and I asked her more than she knew.
‘When I was training to be a nurse, I learned lots of things that I’ve forgotten because I never used them after the exams. Besides, I think that years of being drugged made me forget some of the rest. Dorothy probably died from heart failure. While it was happening, I tried to remember: the weakness of the heart affects the circulatory system, the kidneys and the lungs, it’s all part of a perfectly logical system that I used to find so beautiful, but I couldn’t recall how it worked.’