‘What use would it have been to you?’
‘None, you’re right, because I didn’t have any medicines. I tried, knowing that it was pointless, just because I needed to know. Like you.’
I could feel my intestine, there were rumbles, flatulence and, regularly, stools. My genitals were cloaked in silence. Out of curiosity, sometimes, when I went to the river to wash, I would seek out my vagina: I could barely insert the tip of my finger because of the hymen that sealed it like a door closing off a corridor. I imagined it to be long and narrow, closed at each end, like the corridors in the bunkers: at the entrance, that barrier that only a man can break with his penis, further, the neck of the womb that only the baby about to be born can pass through on its way out of the great room inside. I imagined smooth, soft, dark-red walls, and at the very end, the furthest entrances, the tiny orifices of the oviducts along which, in my body, no egg had ever travelled. Then there was the great fringed foliage of the fallopian tubes which enveloped the ovaries where the most important work should have taken place, the slow and regular maturing of the egg. But my eggs were sterile, perhaps shrivelled, dried up, in this world where they had no purpose. My brain knew that there were no men, and it ordered my pituitary gland not to worry about gonads, it was busy enough with the liver, spleen, pancreas, thyroid gland, bone marrow and all the other tasks that were vital to my survival. There was no point devoting itself to a job that served no purpose. It had not permitted any of my eggs to mature. It had barely allowed my breasts and pubic hair to grow, then it had given up. When I was undernourished in the bunker, my body would have had to compensate for the loss of blood, and it had decided that, with no sperm available, there was no need for the eggs to be released to migrate down towards the uterus. My endometrium was flat. I had never seen a ploughed field because we had no seeds; we had nothing to plant, and my womb would never have to expand to hold a baby, so it wouldn’t matter if it shrank or shrivelled up.
While on the subject of couples, Anthea had also explained that there was a way of doing it by oneself, and during my explorations of my body, I wanted to find out what I could get out of it. I allowed my fingers to roam at length over the regions that are supposed to give pleasure: my mucous membranes felt my fingers and my fingers felt my mucous membranes, but that was it. I wasn’t surprised, because I’d always suspected I wasn’t like the others.
When we were completely settled in what we now called ‘the village’, I sometimes felt discontented and impatient. I would have liked to carry on looking, but of course, I didn’t even know what for, and I tried hard to control my irritability. Anthea had taught me everything she knew: talking with her, I gradually realised that I often made linguistic mistakes which she automatically corrected. She explained what grammar was and I was delighted to discover something new to be learned.
‘But none of us is capable of teaching you grammar!’ she told me. ‘There doesn’t even happen to be a primary-school teacher among us.’
‘But when you correct me, what do you base that on?’
She thought.
‘On habit. And vague memories, rules that I once knew and that I would find it very hard to recall.’
‘Couldn’t you tell me one, any one?’
I saw her concentrate, as in the past, the first time she had tried to do mental arithmetic. She smiled at me.
‘A relative clause is a clause introduced by a relative pronoun and used to qualify a preceding noun or pronoun.’
‘Oh! What’s a clause? And a noun? And a pronoun?’
I wasn’t familiar with any of these terms because, of course, I hadn’t learned to speak in a systematic way, but by parroting what I heard. Anthea launched into some rather confused explanations, and called Margaret to the rescue, and then Helen, who’d once tried, with Isabel, to teach me the multiplication tables, and soon there were several of them, arguing heatedly and mustering the little they remembered. They were not averse to the idea of resuming my incomplete education, and they discovered that they too could learn from it. Why didn’t they try to speak better? they said. Rose could sing and thus provide us with some precious pleasure, but everybody could speak and find it enjoyable. I was a hardworking pupil. For the others, it was a sort of game which they enjoyed for a while: we didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, and we never said no to anything that was on offer.
The idea of cultivating the few pleasures to which we had access developed. Several of the women took a renewed interest in their appearance and, now we had scissors and combs – Greta had found two in the bunkers – we started looking after our hair. We twisted wire to make hairpins, and Alice, who’d been a hairdresser, made chignons for those who wanted to keep their hair long. But that didn’t last, because the combs lost their teeth and we had no way of replacing them.
We also played draughts: that had been Angela’s idea. She’d asked me to saw some planks and nail them together. Then she drew boxes using charred sticks and we had to cut small rounds of wood and blacken half of them. They taught me the rules, but I never became a good player because I couldn’t see the point of winning a game.
‘But it’s the satisfaction of being the best, and of using your brain!’ said Anthea.
I understood the pleasure of using my brain well enough, but I found it ridiculous to make so much effort just to end up putting the pieces away in an empty box, or arranging them on the board and starting all over again.
We didn’t find much else. We would happily have made ourselves clothes, but fabric and thread were still hard to come by. We lived a peaceful existence and, eventually, the lovers’ quarrels stopped. The older women were ageing visibly, and they forgot the little passion that had drawn them together. Death made a sudden reappearance: one morning, Bernadette failed to wake up. Like Mary-Jane, she’d been a discreet person, and had remained so right up until her abrupt end, which came completely out of the blue. Then Margaret grew very weak, she lost her memory, could no longer recognise us and was unable to stand. She refused all food except liquids and she became incontinent. Following Anthea’s instructions, I built what she called a rack and we made a hole in the mattress, covered with leaves, which we changed regularly, but even so, there was an unpleasant smell in our house, where her life was drawing to a close. Elizabeth, who’d been her lover at the beginning of our wanderings, came and stayed with us, as if her affection had been revived by Margaret’s predicament. It lasted for two months, then it suddenly worsened, she became distraught, at night she had bad dreams which made her scream. Then she’d find the strength to get up and run outside, or she’d be seized by terrible rages. That was how she died, shrieking curses. All of a sudden, while she was struggling against the women who were trying to help her, she went rigid staring at Elizabeth, flung out her arm as if to hit her and was wracked by a spasm. She drew herself up to her full height and stated very clearly:
‘No, it is out of the question!’
And fell down dead.
We chose a clearing in the middle of the wood as a burial spot, first for Bernadette and then for Margaret. For each of them we made a little monument with a mound of stones and a wooden cross on which we wrote their names. The women carved them as best they could with old knives, after which they burnt in the letters with glowing brands from the fire. The second tomb was dug beside the first, and the women called this place the cemetery. Rose sang. A great sorrow reigned over the village.