I Who Have Never Known Men

I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

You’ve never seen a child, you don’t know what it means – their vulnerability, their trust, the love you feel for them, the anxiety, being ready to lay down your life to save them, and it’s unbearable to imagine a child’s pain.’

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 weren’t allowed to touch one another, nobody could pick you up and cuddle you or try and comfort you, or even make you eat.

‘You’d have been very bright! You’d have had a great future, you would!’

But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity

Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey, and I didn’t notice the change. When I was certain it was all over, I lay there for a long time, holding her to me, as she had wanted.

I’d put my own lack of memories down to the fact that I’d been so young and to the women’s state of shock that Anthea had described to me, but the others knew no more than I did. Apparently, life had been going on as usual, when suddenly, in the middle of a night that had begun like any other, there’d been screams, flames, a stampede, things which I, who’d always lived in the quiet of the bunker, couldn’t begin to imagine.

The old women didn’t change any more than the old guards, their hair had turned white, but it happened so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry.

‘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.’