‘So men were very important?’
She nodded.
‘Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.’
‘So life gave such great pleasure?’
‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are. Look at the way we live: we know we have to behave as if it’s morning, because they make the lights brighter, then they pass us food and, at a given time, the lights are dimmed. We’re not even certain they make us live according to a twenty-four-hour pattern. How would we measure time? They’ve reduced us to utter helplessness.’
Her tone was harsh and she stared straight ahead. Once again, I felt like crying. I curled up into a ball.
‘What’s the matter?’
All of a sudden, her voice was so gentle, so lilting, that I trembled as if being caressed. At least, I suppose it could be described thus: something exquisite coursed through me, so delicious that it frightened me. I curled up even tighter.
‘I don’t want to talk any more,’ I told her. ‘I was happier when I hadn’t understood anything, when I hated you all because you kept your secrets. You don’t have any. You have nothing, and there is nothing to be had.’
‘What secrets did you think we had?’
I no longer felt humiliated by my ignorance, because I’d touched on a knowledge that was too painful to bear.
‘How you make love, with what, what happens, all that. There they are, telling each other stories from the past, making allusions and bursting out laughing, and clamming up when I approach. I thought that was what was important, but it’s all pointless.’
‘Poor child,’ she said, so tenderly and so sadly that I burst into tears.
They probably tolerated crying, as long as we sobbed quietly and didn’t cause a stir; the whip didn’t crack.
Some food arrived and there was a bit of a flurry. When we felt hungry for the second time since the morning, we said it was the evening. We cooked whatever there was, we ate, and shortly afterwards the lights dimmed. The women said that, before the disaster, people used to eat three times a day, in the morning, at noon and in the evening, but we only felt hungry twice during each waking period and we were not sure that we were living according to the same clock as before. It was one of the arguments that came up time and time again, but kept going round in circles because nothing ever changed. Was it that we needed less food since we didn’t work, and two meals a day were sufficient? Had our bodies forgotten old habits to the extent that we could sleep every eight or ten hours? But, did we know how long we slept for? Perhaps they kept us awake for eight hours and only gave us nights of four hours, or six? The guards were relieved at intervals that didn’t correspond to those of our lives – sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes at night, or twice in one day. I was watching them, mustering the little knowledge I had, when I became aware that the young guard with blue eyes must have been away: suddenly, I saw him, pacing up and down the length of the cage, and I realised that I hadn’t thought about him or told myself any stories for several days. He still looked just as handsome.
I went to fetch my plate of food and sat down next to Anthea.
‘Handsome, beautiful – I suppose they’re words from before, from when things happened?’ I asked her.
She gazed at me for a while, then looked away.
‘I was beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I still am, I’d need a mirror. My hair has gone grey, but that doesn’t mean I’m old, the women in my family go grey early. My memories are muddled, I think I was twenty-eight the year they locked us up. At first, I still took the trouble to do my hair, and I was very upset about losing my brushes.’
She spoke in a half-whisper, as if to herself, but I knew she was talking to me.
‘And then my dress wore out. It was a pretty summer frock, very fashionable, with flounces, in that delicate fabric that doesn’t last very long. I was one of the first to wear these sort of tunics we make. Now, there are no dresses from before left, not even any scraps, they’re all worn out down to the last thread. You can’t imagine what they were like.’
‘Being beautiful, was that for the men?’
I was almost sure it was, but I sometimes heard the women say otherwise.
‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’
‘Am I beautiful?’
I saw her smile, but her smile was heart-rending.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. You’d probably have been one of the prettiest girls because you wouldn’t have had that sulky, angry expression. You’d have laughed, you’d have provoked the boys.’
‘Sometimes I provoke the young guard,’ I burst out.
This I had just understood.
When I told myself stories, I always went to sit close to the bars, on the side where he paced up and down. He walked slowly, keeping a close watch on what was going on in the cage, as he always did. Crouching down, facing him, I kept still, following him with my eyes. I watched him, and because he saw everything, he couldn’t have been unaware that I was watching him. Just a girl, sitting there, wearing her shapeless tunic. My hair was long and I kept it tied back at the nape of my neck; other than that, I have no idea what I looked like. I didn’t even know what colour my eyes were until Anthea told me, later, and I had no idea what that meant, to be one of the prettiest girls. It didn’t occur to me that none of the women was beautifuclass="underline" they were clean, we kept the little soap we were given for washing our bodies and our hair, which was always clean. Most of us had long hair, because we had nothing to cut it with. Nor did we have anything for cutting our nails, which were always breaking when they were too long, and we looked sad, except when there were outbursts of nervous giggles. I don’t know what expression I wore when I looked at the guard: I was totally preoccupied, I was all eyes. He never looked at me: I was sure he knew I was staring at him continually and that it made him feel awkward.
‘I’d like to make him lose his composure.’
‘Whatever for?’ asked Anthea, in surprise.
‘I don’t know. To have power over him. They have the whip and they make us do what they want, which is almost nothing. They forbid everything. I’d like him to be upset, worried, afraid, unable to react. We’ve never been forbidden to sit and stare.’
‘Perhaps they’ll forbid it. They forbid what they like.’
‘Then they’d be acknowledging my existence. If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself.’
She was the brightest of the women, but I’d grasped something that she hadn’t thought of, so I was at least as clever as she was! A delicious thrill ran through me and I smiled at her.
‘They feed forty women, they keep us warm and give us fabric to make clothes. For them, we have no names, they treat us as if there is no difference between one woman and another. But I’m me. I’m not a fortieth of the herd, one cow among the others. I’m going to stare at him until he’s embarrassed.’
I marvelled at my own audacity. For years, we’d been here, reduced to utter helplessness, deposed, deprived even of instruments with which to kill ourselves, defecating under the full glare of the lights, in front of the others, in front of them: and I wanted to embarrass a guard and thought I had found the way to do it.