First, I took out all the kit bags and lined them up a few metres from the rusty shell of the bus, then I did likewise with the corpses. Reduced as they were to skeletons, they felt incredibly light. I was especially interested in their clothing. I wondered whether the lightweight cotton trousers and the shirt with epaulettes that I’d seen the guards in the bunker wearing would be more comfortable than my dress. One of the dead men had been small and slim and I decided to keep his clothes to try on after washing them. I put the weapons in two piles: the whips that would never crack again and the big pistols that they’d never drawn in the bunker, but whose use I had been told about. I was tempted to try them out, and took one, aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and at the time, I told myself it was not loaded. Later, I remembered that those things had a safety catch and I thought that perhaps it had been on, but in any case, I wouldn’t have known how to release it. Then I began searching all the bags and I wasn’t surprised to find exactly the same in each one: a jacket, two pairs of underpants, a packet of food—one, better preserved than the others, contained little whitish fragments which crumbled at my touch. I presumed it was bread, that everyday food which I had never eaten—a blanket, a razor and a book. I didn’t even need to decipher the title to realise that they were all the same. I didn’t dwell on the matter, fearing I’d experience anew the agitation that had defeated me the previous evening. Once I’d finished sorting everything out, I wondered why we’d never found any bread in any of the bunkers. I still have no idea.

By midday, everything was in order, the twenty-three skeletons lying side by side, the shirts and underpants in neat piles, the masks and weapons in three separate heaps. I had examined the masks closely, and remembered stories told by the women: they were probably gas masks. That made me wonder what had killed these men: certainly not gas, against which they had protection. Anyway, we’d escaped just minutes after the siren had stopped and nothing had happened to us.