I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.
Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren’t entirely powerless?
I was simultaneously the inventor of the story, the narrator and the listener awaiting the shock of the unexpected.
They had seized some imaginary power, a power over nothing, a tacit agreement that created a meaningless hierarchy, because there were no privileges that they could grant or refuse. The fact is that we were on an absolutely equal footing.
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.
Talking is existing.
‘And you live like this, with your vegetables, with no prospects?’
‘Only death,’ she snapped. ‘We can’t commit suicide, but we will still die. We just have to wait.’
halt the appalling threat of death, always promised, never given.
What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.
‘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.’
‘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.’
for they are the birth dates of my thoughts
We’d decided no longer to worry about the anarchic routine they imposed on us – my heart would act as our clock. One evening, as the lights were being dimmed, we decided that it was eleven o’clock, and that from that moment, I would count the days as twenty-four hours, as in the past. Sometimes, when we were in the middle of lunch, joylessly eating the boiled vegetables, a woman would ask me the time and I’d reply:
‘Two o’clock in the morning.’
I’m afraid that the guards will realise and will drug us again. We’ll sink back into apathy, we’ll be half dead and we won’t even realise it. I can’t imagine anything more humiliating.
I’ll stop breathing. It must be a matter of willpower, I’m sure you can stop your heart from beating.
each time it is just as unpleasant, as if I were walking into a trap that could close any minute.
‘You’d better put your watch right,’ laughed Anthea.
Our expectations had changed: we hoped to find, one day, an open cage.
Perhaps one of the dead women I’d seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.
there’s some very nice memory stuff here
I don’t know how many I killed – I who count everything, that was one thing I didn’t count. Each time, even when they were contorted with the most violent pain, I saw their tormented faces relax as I was about to strike, and it didn’t make me cry because I sensed their haste and their relief. It was only at the moment of death that they admitted their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile plain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days. And I know that at that moment, they loved me. My hand never trembled. We became strange accomplices during their last moments, when I was the chosen companion, the one who would unravel their incomprehensible fate, closer than their forgotten lovers, dead in the bunkers or under another sky, closer than their weeping lovers waiting at the door for me to come out, the knife wrapped in a thick rag that would conceal any drops of blood, and nod my head confirming that it was all over, that the sick woman’s suffering was at an end, and that, at least for one of us, the agony was over. Then we could hum the song of death. Afterwards, we’d gaze at one another for a moment in silence, then the women would go inside and shroud the dead woman in a blanket, the newest and best one we had. At nightfall, we’d carry her to the cemetery and lower her gently into her grave. One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we’d been born.
She never protested at my decisions and, to be honest, it would have required a lot of imagination to protest against what I exaggeratedly call decisions. If I said it was time to go and fetch some meat from the nearest bunker, wash our clothes or light a fire, it was always because we were getting low on meat and our dresses were dirty. She appeared to let herself be completely guided by me, and I realised that she’d lost all interest in her life.
They’d lived together in a little house. They argued noisily and made up again with great promises: you had to do something to pass the time.
I didn’t want her to die, but how could I have wanted her to live?
I wouldn’t bother to leave a mound or sign indicating that the remains of a human being lay there. I would remember, and there was no one else to tell.
Feelings remain a mystery to me, perhaps because the sensations associated with them are foreign to me, or because they repel me as did physical contact, which seems to be so important in love. Whenever I think of Anthea’s death and the effort it took to hold her in my arms, tears come into my eyes. I try to imagine myself being warm: there’s always a point when the whip cracks.
Of course, I count. Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off – not far because the wind is never strong – where it may or may not germinate. The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?
Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.
Most likely no one will come. I shall leave the door open and my story on the table, where it will gradually gather dust. One day, the natural cataclysms that destroy planets will wipe out the plain, the shelter will collapse on top of the little pile of neatly arranged pages, they will be scattered among the debris, never read.
this whole bit is very exhalation
It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.
it is often better to call irony strange that ironic
Afterword by Sophie Mackintosh
The story and the world the novel takes place in is pared down to the point of frustration. It possesses a Daliesque surrealism; its landscape owes as much to Beckett as it does to Bradbury.