In the middle of the third day, I saw that there was a cabin on the next slope. I hadn’t expected to come across one so soon. I stopped, sat down in the sparse, dry grass to contemplate my goal from afar. I knew only too well what I’d find there—the eternal procession of despair. At the top, the rusty locks, the lights permanently on, and, down below, the locked prison, the cage and its population of corpses. I’d go down and look at everything very closely. That was the only tribute I was able to pay the victims. And then I’d close the main door. I don’t know if I still hoped to find an open cage one day, or come across the traces of another group of women or men who’d escaped and settled outside, as we had done—only the traces because, as the last survivor from my bunker, I didn’t imagine that others would have lived any longer than my companions. I thought about it because I was in the habit of considering every angle of a question, and I’d never had any form of entertainment other than thinking.

The sun was going down when I set off again. The rest had done me good and my aches were gone. I’d reckoned the bunker was half an hour away, and was pleased to find that I wasn’t mistaken: I reached it in twenty-eight minutes. I put my rucksack down inside the cabin and made my way down the stairs without hurrying. There was almost no smell, but I still tried to breathe cautiously. The women had compared the stench with that of a sewer, of insalubrious marshes or a cesspool—none of which I had known. For me, it was simply the faint smell of corpses. Down below, in the narrow corridor, the doors were open to reveal the usual layout: the guards’ room, the cupboard at the back, the big double doors of the prison. I saw a chair had been knocked over and a saucepan overturned, spilling its contents which had dried leaving a brown stain. This slight disorder was rare and aroused my curiosity, but first of all, I had to go and see the cage. We had always felt this was an obligation, even when we’d become certain that we would never find the door open. We had to pay our respects to the dead, to those contorted bodies that lived there, piled haphazardly, perpetual inhabitants of horror and silence.

They were women. I stared at them for a long time, then I walked around the cage taking in everything: there was nothing new. The knives, forks and plates were still in the cage, revealing that here, when the alarm had sounded, they’d been eating. A whip was lying on the floor of the area where the guards had paced up and down. One of them must have been rather more jumpy than was customary and had dropped his weapon. Perhaps he was the one who’d knocked over the chair as he fled. The whip was lying against the wall, out of reach of the prisoners who’d tried to grab it to the very end. One was slumped against the bars, her arm still outstretched, overcome by death during her final attempt.