It’s true I know nothing of all that and have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.

I don’t remember their accounts very well, probably because there were too many things that I hadn’t experienced and couldn’t picture. They’d say: ‘We went dancing.’ What was dancing? They explained, they formed couples, facing each other. Denise placed her left hand on Frances’s waist and held her right hand up in the air, then they spun around. Yes, but what about the music? The sound of an accordion or a violin? They spelled out waltzes, one, two, three, one, two, three. Having counted my own heartbeats for so long, I could understand a repetitive rhythm, but I could never imagine the sound of the band, nor the laughter of those boys who made them lovesick, nor the rustle of chiffon or silk dresses swirling around them and making them look so beautiful. They spoke of creeping home at dawn, angry parents who scolded them, kisses, jilted lovers, men they were in love with but who didn’t love them, and it was all a muddle in my head. Gradually, I stopped asking them to tell me about their world, and I gave up trying to imagine it. I knew very well that I came from it. I’d had a father and a mother who probably went dancing and got married or left each other, and were torn apart by the disaster like Frances and Lawrence. 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.

Such thoughts ought to make me weep. But tears never come to my eyes except when I think about Anthea, a woman I actually knew. I cannot mourn for what I have not known.

Every evening we’d collect a huge pile of dead wood and make a fire. We grilled sausages coated with mustard, of which we’d found a few jars, and we ate them with flour cakes baked over the embers. We were relaxed and tired, and I think that for a while, my companions’ nostalgia was allayed as they experienced the vast silence of the plain, the continual rustle of the grass. We were in no hurry to sleep, we listened to the breeze which always whistled the same soft note. Apart from Rose’s powerful soprano, it was the only music I’d ever heard.