Reluctantly, I bade him goodbye. Back at the village, I boiled my meat. Because I had to keep stoking the fire, I couldn’t go to bed. Dawn was about to break, and I still didn’t feel sleepy. In the prison, sleeping had been compulsory, and I later discovered that it was necessary for one’s well-being and also that it was advisable to keep to the same pattern as everybody else. But I was alone. Nobody was dependent on me any more, and my habits would not disturb anyone. I had complete trust in my body, which would demand sleep when it needed it, so there was no reason for me to go to bed if I didn’t feel like it. I could leave. I put on my shoes, slung on my rucksack and went out. I didn’t even need to put out the fire, lock up the house, or tidy away the few things I was leaving behind. All I had to do was decide which way to go.
I walked towards the rising sun because the sky ahead was magnificent. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and I loved watching the day unfold. I set out at a relaxed, unhurried pace, which I’d be able to keep up for a long time. I took my bearings from the landscape and began the trek which I intended to continue as long as I lived, even if I didn’t know what I expected from it. I walked up the long, gentle slope towards the east, and turned round when I reached the top. I gazed at the ten houses in the village which I’d so enjoyed building. Behind the biggest one was the cemetery where I’d buried Anthea. Only now, I tell myself that what I’d felt for her, the trust that slowly built up, the constant preference for her company and the joy each time I was reunited with her after an expedition were probably what the women called love. Now, I had nobody left to love.
From the start, I counted my steps. My heartbeats had been my unit of time, my steps would be my unit of length. I’d been told that an average step was seventy centimetres, and that there were a hundred centimetres in a metre. When the women spoke of lengths or distances, it was always in metres or kilometres, so I tended to use the same concepts. I soon realised that was completely ridiculous – those terms had meaning for them, but not for me, and I no longer needed to use a shared language. An hour’s walk – that meant something to me. I didn’t need to go to the trouble of converting my steps to kilometres. I would evaluate distances in hours’ walking. I always relied on my confidence in my inner clock and, during that first day, I decided to count the number of steps I took in one hour and to choose a unit that would be my equivalent of the kilometre. So I had to walk at a very regular pace. The ground wasn’t very hilly, alternating between gentle descents and moderate inclines which probably made little difference to my speed. My first stop was after five hours. I’d counted thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-two steps. I embarked on a division operation that I now found less difficult since Anthea had shown me how to do it by writing the numbers in the dirt, but all the same it required an enormous effort of concentration. That came out at seven thousand, one hundred and fifty steps an hour. I decided to check by counting hour by hour, and then by fractions of ten minutes, and ended up, by the evening, with the discovery that I walked regularly at a pace of a hundred and nineteen to a hundred and twenty-two steps a minute.
At the same time, I tried to evaluate in advance how far it was to a particular point, so as to give myself a sense of distance. The monotonous landscape didn’t help, and I had to be content with a bush, a small rock or some other little landmark. Sometimes I was unsure whether the bush I was walking past was the one I’d selected ten or fifteen minutes earlier or not. But I measured the distance I covered and I could feel myself acquiring a sense of distance, as I had once felt myself acquiring a sense of time.
That first day, in spite of my sleepless night, I walked for ten hours, at my even pace which could take me a long way, and decided to stop as soon as I felt that tiredness was slowing me down. I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone. I was satisfied by this first answer: I wanted to create an internal distance meter, and so it was my plan and my determination to carry it out under the right conditions that governed my decisions. I sat down at the spot where I had felt my pace slacken. I could have gathered a few twigs and branches from the nearest shrubs and lit a fire, but as soon as I’d put my rucksack down on the ground, I realised I was exhausted and decided to eat my boiled meat without heating it up. True, it wasn’t a very appetising meal, but it was pleasantly seasoned with the feeling of having complete freedom at last. I was able to gauge just how much I’d resented having to give in to the other women’s wish to settle down, and I smiled to myself as I thought of the immense journey awaiting me. I flattened the ground, stretched out on a blanket folded in half, rolled myself up in the other one and fell asleep at once. After six hours, I woke up, starving, ate again and fell asleep until sunrise. Before setting off again, I scattered some earth over the hole where I’d relieved myself, then I noticed that I was stiff all over. My ankles, thighs and back ached. I had certainly never walked for such a long time at a stretch. I didn’t know what to do about it. Should I wait and rest, or carry on in the hope that the exercise would relax my muscles? The prospect of spending a day sitting in the middle of that boring plain seemed ridiculous and my impatience got the better of me. But, since I couldn’t rely on the regularity of my speed, I wouldn’t try to perfect my distance meter that day.
In the afternoon, the landscape changed slightly. The long undulations became more marked, there were slopes that measured a good ten thousand steps. It would be exaggerating to describe them as hills, but I was very excited at the idea that this variation could be the beginning of a hilly area. I wanted to speed up my pace, which seemed even more unreasonable given that, although my aches and pains had grown no worse, they hadn’t gone away either, and I suspected that I shouldn’t be reckless and risk being unable to walk at all. Besides, tiredness got the better of me earlier than the previous day and I didn’t want to overstretch myself. I was certain that you don’t build endurance by pushing yourself beyond your limits. I stopped just before six o’clock in the evening and made a fire. I ate a lot, as much and for as long as I could. Before going to sleep, I rubbed my feet with fat because they were hot. One of the cans contained what the women called bean and bacon casserole, with a layer of lard on top which I removed before heating the rest in my saucepan. I’d noticed that when I got this fat on my hands, it softened my skin, and that’s what gave me the idea of using it on my feet, and I also put some on my face. I didn’t fall asleep as quickly as I had done the night before, and I watched the sun set and the first stars come out in the pale, smooth sky.
In the middle of the third day, I saw that there was a cabin on the next slope. I hadn’t expected to come across one so soon. I stopped, sat down in the sparse, dry grass to contemplate my goal from afar. I knew only too well what I’d find there – the eternal procession of despair. At the top, the rusty locks, the lights permanently on, and, down below, the locked prison, the cage and its population of corpses. I’d go down and look at everything very closely. That was the only tribute I was able to pay the victims. And then I’d close the main door. I don’t know if I still hoped to find an open cage one day, or come across the traces of another group of women or men who’d escaped and settled outside, as we had done – only the traces because, as the last survivor from my bunker, I didn’t imagine that others would have lived any longer than my companions. I thought about it because I was in the habit of considering every angle of a question, and I’d never had any form of entertainment other than thinking.