I sat still for a few seconds, registering those familiar facts that suddenly became stunning revelations, and looking Dorothy squarely in the eyes.
‘You want to hear my secrets,’ I said, ‘but all you can do is inform me of your wishes.’
I noted with interest the effect my words had on her: at first, when she saw that I was about to answer, she looked smug, she must have thought she’d won my obedience. Then she listened, and grasped the meaning of what I was saying, but she was so taken aback that she thought she hadn’t understood.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just think about it,’ I said. ‘I mean exactly what I said.’
‘You haven’t said anything!’
‘I said I wouldn’t tell you my secrets. You told me you wanted them. That’s not telling me anything new, I was already aware of that. You think you only have to tell me you want to know for me to tell you.’
That was indeed what she thought.
‘That is how things should be,’ she insisted.
‘Why?’
She was disconcerted. I saw she wasn’t thinking about my question, she was so shocked that I could have asked it. She’d inherited a tradition to which I did not belong: when an older woman asks a younger woman to reply, the younger one does so. She’d never questioned that, but I, who had grown up in the bunker, had no reason to comply. After a few moments:
‘What do you mean, “why”?’
‘Why should I answer? Why do you think it goes without saying?’
Her gaze faltered. She tried to think, but she wasn’t used to doing so. She looked confused and clutched at the first idea that came to her:
‘You are insolent,’ she said, relieved to find an explanation for the incomprehensible words I’d just uttered, certain that it would be enough to return to the habitual ways, to convention, to commonplaces.
‘You’re a fool,’ I retorted, intoxicated by my new-found certainties. ‘And this conversation is absurd. You think you have power but you’re like the rest of us, reduced to receiving your share of food from enemy hands and with no means of punishing me if I rebel against you. Seeing as they forbid any authority other than theirs, you can neither beat me nor make me go without. Why should I obey you?’
This time it was clear that she wasn’t taking in a word I was saying. I think she’d rather have gone deaf. She muttered, fidgeted a little, then signalled to two younger women to come and help her up, even though she could in fact manage unaided. She returned to her usual position at the other end of the cage. The women stared at her intently, without daring to ask any questions. She closed her eyes to give the impression she was thinking, and fell asleep.
‘It’s because she’s old,’ said the younger ones. ‘An ordeal like that is too much for a woman of her age.’
They resumed their chatter and I returned to my story. I was back in the gloomy cell where I was in solitary confinement. I wasn’t injured – the guards were always careful not to resort to blows. I was huddled in a corner, terrified, and my humiliating posture shocked me. Crouched and trembling – was that fitting for someone who’d just confronted one of the most respected women in the cage, looked her in the eyes and told her she was a fool? Dorothy had been lost for words. I felt a delicious shiver. That was, I think, my first intellectual pleasure. In my imaginary cell, I had to stand up, and now, I had to smile and defy them. It was hard to concentrate on the story, I’d enjoyed the minor battle I’d just waged, and I wanted to savour it, but it didn’t cause the eruption because the young guard wasn’t part of it, so I summoned my inner discipline to return to my private world.
If the women had had any sense, they’d have let matters rest there. It was still possible to pretend that nothing had happened and avoid an unequal battle. I’d realised that I was as strong as they were and that not confiding a secret, which is within everyone’s grasp so long as there is no torture, immediately makes the secret seem infinitely precious. Their knowledge on the subject of love had seemed to me the ultimate object of desire when they’d refused to share it with me. Now, I scorned their pettiness, I told myself that in other times I’d have got what I wanted from the first boy who came along. In asking it of the women, I was granting them a prerogative that they’d never had, and it only underscored my ignorance. But now their curiosity was aroused, it was their turn to feel excluded and scorned. I’d found the eruption to console me: they remained disgruntled and powerless, sustained only by their gnawing exasperation. They began to watch me.
Watch? There were forty of us living in that big underground room where no one could hide from the others. At five-metre intervals, columns supported the vaulted ceiling and bars separated our living area from the walls, leaving a wide passage all around for the guards’ relentless pacing up and down. No one ever escaped scrutiny and we were used to answering the call of nature in front of one another. At first – so they told me, my memories didn’t go back that far – the women were most put out, they thought of forming a human wall to screen the woman relieving herself, but the guards prohibited it, because no woman was to be shielded from view. When I went to pass water, I found it perfectly natural to go and sit on the toilet seat and carry on my conversation – on the few occasions when I was engaged in conversation. The old women cursed furiously, complaining about the indignity of being reduced to the status of animals. If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought. I never argued with the women, in fact I already found them stupid, but I hadn’t formulated it so clearly.
When I think back on it now, what a horrid little prig I was! I prided myself and revelled in having found a distraction that I thought was extraordinary. I felt as if I was being hounded by a mob, whereas we were all equally helpless prisoners. Isolated due to my young age and the constraints imposed on us, perhaps like the others I needed to create an illusion to enable me to cope with the misery. I have no idea. Now that I’m no longer able to go off hiking, I reflect a great deal, but, with no one to talk to, my thoughts soon start going round in circles. That’s why it is interesting to write them down: I recognise them when they recur and I don’t repeat them.
When Dorothy woke up and found the strength to relate our conversation to the others, she didn’t tell them I’d called her a fool. But despite her efforts not to tarnish her image, she’d learned nothing of my secret and was unable to conceal the fact.
‘A secret! A secret! What right does she have to keep a secret in a situation like this?’
Anthea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of the other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me.
‘We must force her. Make her tell us.’
‘How will you do that?’
Carol, the stupidest and the most excitable, parked herself in front of me and in a threatening tone commanded me to speak.
‘Or else!’
‘Or else what?’ I burst out laughing.
She made a violent gesture and it was obvious she was thinking of slapping me. It was so obvious that the guards, who never took their eyes off us, saw her at the same time as I did, and we heard the crack of the whip. We knew that they weren’t aiming the blows at us, and that the whips only cracked in the air of the corridor around the cage, but the noise always frightened us and Carol jumped. None of the women remembered actually being hit, but Anthea told me about it later. It must have happened in the hazy period in the early days of our captivity for such a deep fear to have taken hold of us. No one ever disobeyed the whip, and the women sometimes described the bloody marks that the thongs made on bare skin, the searing pain that lasted for days. Several of the women bore long white scars. Terrified, Carol withdrew, and I gave her a sardonic smile. I was torn between the urge to scoff at her in silence, making the guards my allies, and wanting to explain her stupidity and helplessness to her, when Anthea intervened. She came over to Carol who was shaking with rage and fear, and motioned to her to move away.