‘What use would it have been to you?’

‘None, you’re right, because I didn’t have any medicines. I tried, knowing that it was pointless, just because I needed to know. Like you.’

I could feel my intestine, there were rumbles, flatulence and, regularly, stools. My genitals were cloaked in silence. Out of curiosity, sometimes, when I went to the river to wash, I would seek out my vagina: I could barely insert the tip of my finger because of the hymen that sealed it like a door closing off a corridor. I imagined it to be long and narrow, closed at each end, like the corridors in the bunkers: at the entrance, that barrier that only a man can break with his penis, further, the neck of the womb that only the baby about to be born can pass through on its way out of the great room inside. I imagined smooth, soft, dark-red walls, and at the very end, the furthest entrances, the tiny orifices of the oviducts along which, in my body, no egg had ever travelled. Then there was the great fringed foliage of the fallopian tubes which enveloped the ovaries where the most important work should have taken place, the slow and regular maturing of the egg. But my eggs were sterile, perhaps shrivelled, dried up, in this world where they had no purpose. My brain knew that there were no men, and it ordered my pituitary gland not to worry about gonads, it was busy enough with the liver, spleen, pancreas, thyroid gland, bone marrow and all the other tasks that were vital to my survival. There was no point devoting itself to a job that served no purpose. It had not permitted any of my eggs to mature. It had barely allowed my breasts and pubic hair to grow, then it had given up. When I was undernourished in the bunker, my body would have had to compensate for the loss of blood, and it had decided that, with no sperm available, there was no need for the eggs to be released to migrate down towards the uterus. My endometrium was flat. I had never seen a ploughed field because we had no seeds; we had nothing to plant, and my womb would never have to expand to hold a baby, so it wouldn’t matter if it shrank or shrivelled up.

While on the subject of couples, Anthea had also explained that there was a way of doing it by oneself, and during my explorations of my body, I wanted to find out what I could get out of it. I allowed my fingers to roam at length over the regions that are supposed to give pleasure: my mucous membranes felt my fingers and my fingers felt my mucous membranes, but that was it. I wasn’t surprised, because I’d always suspected I wasn’t like the others.

When we were completely settled in what we now called ‘the village’, I sometimes felt discontented and impatient. I would have liked to carry on looking, but of course, I didn’t even know what for, and I tried hard to control my irritability. Anthea had taught me everything she knew: talking with her, I gradually realised that I often made linguistic mistakes which she automatically corrected. She explained what grammar was and I was delighted to discover something new to be learned.