They were all carrying the same book: A Condensed Gardening Handbook. It explained how to plant, sow, thin out, hoe and weed, and what to do in which season and what to plant where. I read the entire book carefully and became an expert on grafting roses, which made me laugh. There were lots of illustrations which showed me what a hoe looked like, a tulip bulb and plenty of other things that I’d never seen and never would.
I read and reread the book. I acquired a perfectly useless knowledge, but I enjoyed it. I felt as if I had embellished my mind and that made me think of jewels, those objects which women used to adorn their beauty, in the days when beauty had a purpose.
By the fifth day, everything was in order. I’d chosen two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a jacket, several pairs of underpants, taken as many towels as possible and replaced the rest, neatly folded and wrapped in the blankets, on the seats of the bus. I repacked my rucksack, which was only a little heavier because I’d eaten the contents of many of the cans, when suddenly I spotted the bottles which I’d completely forgotten. Had I become so rich that I could neglect some of my possessions? I had to move on because my water supply was getting low and I needed to find a river or a bunker soon to replenish it, but I could take a little time to find out what was in the bottles. I had no implement to open them with, so I began digging out the cork with the tip of my knife, which was difficult and took a long time. At last, I was able to pour a little of the liquid into my cup. It smelled funny, very strong and not very pleasant to the nostrils. I dipped my finger in and licked it: I didn’t like it. I took a tiny sip, which I swallowed gingerly, but even so it burnt my throat and made me want to cough. So it was alcohol, as I’d been expecting. At first, I was vexed, then I remembered that alcohol has medicinal qualities. In the past it had been used especially for cleaning wounds and numbing the senses when someone was in a great deal of pain. My wounds, nothing more serious than scratches on my legs when I brushed past thorn bushes, never became infected. All the same, it seemed like a good idea to take one bottle. I put the others back inside the bus.
Before departing, I gazed at the scene I was leaving behind: the rust-eaten bus, a shell in the middle of the plain, which, over the centuries, would slowly disintegrate where it stood, the tombs in a circle decorated with the masks and weapons, the silence barely disturbed by the constant whispering of the wind. It all seemed incredibly strange, sinister and moving. I felt the burden of the inexplicable, of my life, of that world to which I was the sole witness. I had nothing else to do in it but continue my journey. One day, I would die here. Like the guards.
I followed the road.
It hadn’t been used for twenty years and, in places, despite the sparse vegetation, it was so overgrown that it disappeared and I had to climb a little hill to make out the bare strip. It took me in a south-west direction. I wondered whether it would lead to something. That would be logical, if there was any logic in this world. In the bus, two seats had remained empty: was the driver on his way to pick up three more guards, one of whom would have to stand, or was he driving the others to their final destination?
For three days, ten hours a day, I walked, once again spurred on by impatience. I’d stayed in one place for a long time and was reaching the end of my supplies when I saw a cabin. I went in, feeling no emotion, certain that I would only find, as usual, the lights on, the main doors open and the cage locked. In the cold store, I was glad to see a fairly small piece of lamb that would defrost and cook quite fast. Back at the top, I realised that I hadn’t even glanced at the cage and its occupants. That made my heart sink, and I promised to go and pay my respects the next day.
That night, I had a dream that I remembered. In it, I was sitting inside the bus amid the guards, who were alive. I couldn’t make out their faces because of the masks, but I could hear them talking among themselves. I had never actually heard the sound of a man’s voice, but that didn’t occur to me in my dream. The bus was moving. My situation felt completely natural, I didn’t wonder where I was going, or what I was doing among the guards. This seemed to go on for ages and I was perfectly relaxed, surrounded by the men, when suddenly I rediscovered the exquisite eruption of before, when I used to make up stories that I kept to myself.
That woke me. I was alone, under my blanket, lying in the middle of the plain, a few paces from the cabin. I felt an immense sadness on thinking that there had been men and their closeness could trigger that delicious tremor, but I was reduced, poor me! to encountering it by chance in a dream. For a few moments I wondered what gave me my determination to live. I thought of all those women who had been killed by despair well before they reached old age, of Laura who grew tired of keeping her soul tethered to her body, and I felt a sort of vague temptation, a gnawing urge to admit defeat, which terrified me. I got up and took a few steps. It was a clear night, the sky was vast, hill after hill, I had thousands of kilometres to cover. My curiosity, momentarily dampened, was reawakened.
The next day, I went back down the stairs and sat outside the cage. It was one of the few bunkers where the occupants had maintained their dignity to the end. There were no gruesome piles of twisted bodies, they were lying down, each on his own mattress, as if asleep. Perhaps one of them had had a powerful influence over the others and had convinced them that shouting and resistance would achieve nothing, that they had to resign themselves to dying and embrace their fate without putting up a futile struggle. Everything was in order, but, apart from bodies lying everywhere, how can you create disarray when you have nothing? I felt a sort of serenity looking at those corpses: they had died calmly and would spend eternity in tranquil postures. It set me wondering how I would die, whether it would be at night, in my sleep, and I would lie on the plain for ever, exposed to the constant gentle wind, or whether I would fall ill and have to endure pain. I remembered the guns, and then I remembered the safety catch, and told myself I should have persevered, I’d have been bound to find out how to use it, because I might end up wanting to die. I could have gone back to the bus, but I was extremely reluctant to retrace my steps when there was so much new ground ahead. I was young and healthy, and I had plenty of time to worry about that kind of precaution. Besides, I expected to make new discoveries. There had to be more than just cabins on that plain!
I filled one of the big cooking pots with water and boiled my washing for a long time on the guards’ cooker. When it looked clean, I took it up and laid it out on the grass to dry in the sun. That took me the whole day.
I set off again. Now that I had a book and could learn to read, I was sorry not to have a pencil or anything else to write with, to make a note of my route. In the evening, before going to sleep, I practised writing letters in the dirt, copying the sentences and words from the book. I had used a lot of them in speech, so I recognised them, and I thought about how to construct those that were not in there. The first one I tried to spell was ‘cabin’: I had ‘ca’ from ‘can’ and ‘bin’ from ‘compost bin’ – I just had to put the two together to make ‘cabin’. Then I spelled ‘cage’. The magic ‘e’ made the ‘a’ say its own name, unlike the short ‘a’ in ‘cabin’. I felt very pleased with myself for working this out and it looked as though I remembered everything I’d been taught.