I didn’t take my eyes off the guards. They always went in threes, pacing up and down the corridor. They were silent. When they passed one another, their eyes didn’t meet but I had the impression that they watched each other as closely as they watched us. The authorities must have been afraid that they’d disobey orders, or that they’d speak to us. Once again, I had a sudden insight, I understood why they had to be in threes: it prevented any complicity. They weren’t permitted to have private conversations, which might have conveyed something to us; they had to maintain the role of suspicious jailers all the time.

The two men on duty with the young guard had been there for ages. During the early years, the women had tried to talk to the guards, to make demands or move them to pity, but nothing could break down their cruel indifference. Then, they gave up and behaved as if they couldn’t see the guards, as if they’d banished their presence from their minds—or as if they themselves were bars that the women had become so used to that they no longer bumped into them. Nobody imagined that they felt in the least humiliated, but the prisoners’ pride was preserved intact. They no longer complained to the guards or took their imperturbability as an insult. And that made the gaze of this girl, sitting absolutely still, all the more powerful.

I’d stopped telling myself stories: watching the guard, I was creating one. I needed patience, I had nothing else to give. I don’t know how many waking periods I spent in this way. I thought a lot, and it occurred to me that we should stop speaking in terms of day and night, but of waking and sleeping periods. My certainty grew stronger: we were not living according to a twenty-four-hour cycle. When the lights were turned down, no one was tired: the women said it was because they had nothing to do. Perhaps they were right, but I didn’t know what it was like to work. My conviction came from continually watching the young guard. The relief guards didn’t come when we awoke, at mealtimes, when we went to bed or when we were moving around, but in between, at irregular intervals. The main door would open a fraction, the three men pacing up and down around the cage would converge, and sometimes they’d all leave the room as the next shift entered; at other times, only one or two were replaced. Was there any connection between their timetable and ours? How could I measure the passage of time? The only indicators I had were my body rhythms.

Anthea taught me that the heart always beats at the same rate, between seventy and seventy-four times a minute in a healthy person.

I began to count.

I had learned very little. Thirty, forty, fifty, seventy, eighty, I had to sort out the tens in my mind, but then I realised I didn’t know my tables and I barely knew how to do division. If, between the time when they turned the lights full on and the time when the guards changed shift, when the young guard came on duty, my heart had beaten seven thousand, two hundred times, that would have made a hundred minutes. It was just a question of multiplying Anthea’s seventy-two by a hundred, but what I had was three thousand, two hundred and twenty, or five thousand and twelve! I was incapable of performing the necessary operations. It was all very well concentrating and counting, but I couldn’t make use of the figures I obtained.