Underneath, there were several items. I began with a smaller packet, made of thick paper. Obviously, I didn’t know it was paper, because I’d never seen any, but I shan’t go into the difficulties I had in identifying and naming all these things because that would be too tedious and I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d have to repeat myself over and over again. I undid the packet carefully, it was fragile and threatened to fall apart. It only contained a brownish dust, odourless and tasteless, probably some sort of food that had dried up. Then, from a small soft leather pouch, I took out a strange instrument that I had to examine closely to find a very thin blade sandwiched between two metal plates, all mounted on a handle that was very easy to hold. You couldn’t use it for cutting unless you removed the blade: it took me a long time to guess that it was a razor. The third item was a glass bottle, which I put to one side as I was much more intrigued by two pieces of carefully folded, big white rectangles of thick, supple fabric. I thought they must be those towels made of terry cloth that the women missed so badly and which I’d learned to manage without. But I could use them to make myself something to replace my tattered dress. There were also two pairs of knickers. I remembered later that for men, the word underpants was used.
And underneath, a book.
Anthea had taught me the alphabet and the rudiments of reading by drawing the letters in the sand. At the time, it bored her, because she couldn’t see what I would do with such knowledge, but I had insisted: there was too little to learn for me not to grasp at everything I could. I had words in my head for things I’d never seen, let alone touched, as I was now doing. I recognised the book at once and I was so overwhelmed that I felt almost giddy. I think that if I’d been standing, I’d have collapsed. I had in my hands the most precious of treasures, a spring from which to drink the knowledge of that world to which I would never have access. As always when I was overcome by emotion, I began to count. The title, written large, had twenty-three letters divided into four words, all beginning with capitals. I looked, without trying to decipher – excitement, impatience and tiredness were a bad mixture which made me tense and dulled my mind. I no longer knew which way to turn, whether to satisfy my curiosity and search the bags or to find out what the book was about, and I had to make an enormous effort to control myself. As the sun was already very low and soon I wouldn’t be able to see enough, I decided to save the book for later, but my excitement made me clumsy and I dropped the bottle that had been in my lap. It was sheer luck that it didn’t break, as it had landed on the jacket and I was able to catch it before it rolled onto the stones. That calmed me down and I resolutely put the book to one side. I returned to the bag and was disappointed: the only other thing it contained was a blanket like the ones in the bunkers. So I picked up the bottle, which wasn’t big, probably half a litre, full of a colourless liquid, like water, and had never been opened. I examined the cork at length and put off finding a way to open it until later. I was absolutely exhausted. The regular existence I led, walking for eight to ten hours every day in the wilderness, hadn’t prepared me for this emotional upheaval. I was trembling with fatigue and I didn’t even have the strength to make myself something to eat. I unfolded the blanket from the bag, stretched it out on the ground to air it and wrapped myself up in my own. I didn’t even realise that I was falling asleep, and was amazed, on waking abruptly, to find it was three o’clock in the morning. I lit the fire and heated up some food. At sunrise, I was back in the bus.
First, I took out all the kit bags and lined them up a few metres from the rusty shell of the bus, then I did likewise with the corpses. Reduced as they were to skeletons, they felt incredibly light. I was especially interested in their clothing. I wondered whether the lightweight cotton trousers and the shirt with epaulettes that I’d seen the guards in the bunker wearing would be more comfortable than my dress. One of the dead men had been small and slim and I decided to keep his clothes to try on after washing them. I put the weapons in two piles: the whips that would never crack again and the big pistols that they’d never drawn in the bunker, but whose use I had been told about. I was tempted to try them out, and took one, aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and at the time, I told myself it was not loaded. Later, I remembered that those things had a safety catch and I thought that perhaps it had been on, but in any case, I wouldn’t have known how to release it. Then I began searching all the bags and I wasn’t surprised to find exactly the same in each one: a jacket, two pairs of underpants, a packet of food – one, better preserved than the others, contained little whitish fragments which crumbled at my touch. I presumed it was bread, that everyday food which I had never eaten – a blanket, a razor and a book. I didn’t even need to decipher the title to realise that they were all the same. I didn’t dwell on the matter, fearing I’d experience anew the agitation that had defeated me the previous evening. Once I’d finished sorting everything out, I wondered why we’d never found any bread in any of the bunkers. I still have no idea.
By midday, everything was in order, the twenty-three skeletons lying side by side, the shirts and underpants in neat piles, the masks and weapons in three separate heaps. I had examined the masks closely, and remembered stories told by the women: they were probably gas masks. That made me wonder what had killed these men: certainly not gas, against which they had protection. Anyway, we’d escaped just minutes after the siren had stopped and nothing had happened to us.
I stood up and stretched. My back ached from bending over for so long, and I spent a long time examining my possessions before heating up my meal. Suddenly I was the owner of a vast number of goods, whereas I was used to owning nothing. I felt overwhelmed. I ate gazing at my skeletons. They’d been custodians of the absurd, carrying out orders whose purpose they were unaware of, themselves having to submit to incomprehensible rules, and perhaps they had no more idea of our identity than we did of theirs. Death had caught them unawares, sitting in the bus: but had they known where they were going? Since the siren, we’d never found any trace of the guards, and we imagined that they’d all been taken off somewhere else: why were these guards still here? The only possible explanations occurred to me much later: they were on a routine trip between two bunkers, they were on their way to sleep, or they might have been new arrivals being driven to their post, oblivious of the danger. The gas masks showed that this land was not safe, but whatever it was that killed them had been unforeseen. Ours was the only prison where the siren had sounded just as the cage door was opened, and that is what had saved us: they were the only ones who were exposed, and that had killed them. This symmetry preoccupied me for a long time. For some reason I found in it a sort of obscure beauty. Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this? Were things still going on? And on this planet of which I will only ever see a fraction, however long I keep walking, was there a place where the bunkers were still operational? Where men and women obeyed the whip, slept and ate at random times, and where a rebellious girl was beginning to count her heartbeats? Was I the only one? Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?
I decided to bury the skeletons, because I wanted to show that whatever had happened to us, we belonged to the same kind, to those who honour the dead. I dug twenty-three shallow graves and laid the skeletons in them, then I covered them with earth and made a little mound on top of each one, on which I placed the masks and the weapons. I arranged them in a circle, I don’t know why, I felt that was best, their heads in the centre and their feet pointing towards the distance. It took me three days, because the ground was dry and I found it tiring. I rested by trying to decipher my books.