At around eight o’clock in the morning, I felt wonderfully good. I went down into the bunker to fetch a few cans to replace the ones I’d used in the past few days and to see if I could find some thread, which I’d forgotten to do the day before. By the time I was ready to leave, my rucksack weighed a lot more than when I’d arrived, but it didn’t feel too heavy. I was already a lot stronger and I wanted to take the mattress with me, because I’d slept much better than on the ground, but I told myself I ought to be careful, and that there’d be plenty of time to think about that in a few days, at the next bunker, when I’d completely adjusted to my new life. Perhaps I would no longer need it.

I didn’t leave the usual signs on the ground as I no longer believed there might be any other survivors. But I discarded the mattress in front of the cabin so that if I came that way again, I’d recognise my own traces.

I think I have given an accurate account of this first bunker. I think so, but I can’t be certain. I’m sure that was the one where I found milk, but afterwards, which one was it where I found tea? The fifth? The tenth? They were all the same, with their forty mummified corpses piled up or scattered across the floor. Only once did I find thirty-eight, and only once did I find all the women lying calmly, as if they’d understood that death was inevitable and had decided to wait in silence. Another time, the keys had fallen within two metres of the bars and I thought how dreadful it must have been to see them without being able to reach them. Sometimes, a tap was running in the cage, making a little trickling sound that startled me at first, but I’d already lost all hope that the door would be open. Each time, there was the food store and the permanent light. I travelled eastwards, from one bunker to another, carrying my provisions, and in the end, I never did take a mattress. My shoes wore out, which didn’t bother me—eventually I was bound to find some boots to fit me. Then came the season when the sky is always cloudy, with the fine drizzle that I knew well, and I was glad to find a waterproof sheet in one of the guard rooms. It was folded on the table, beside a pile of new blankets which hadn’t been put away. That set me thinking again about how rare it was to find unusual objects in the bunkers, as if it had been decreed that they all had to be absolutely identical. I was about to plunge into my habitual speculation about the guards and the meaning of our imprisonment. At first, I felt like shrugging and turning my thoughts to other things. But why? How else would I occupy my mind? After our escape, Dorothy used to say: ‘Let’s organise our life, let’s not waste our thoughts.’ The fact was, I could use my thoughts as I pleased, the idea of wasting them was absurd. My survival was guaranteed, I would never exhaust all the food available, and the rare bad weather had never made me ill. I could allow my mind to wander as it pleased, it didn’t matter if the paths it took were dead ends—all I had to do was put a stop to them. It was certain that the purpose of our deportation and captivity would never be revealed to me through the abandoned objects, and the whip lying on the ground taught me nothing useful. I found the same thing in all the bunkers, even in the guards’ quarters.