I stood up and stretched. My back ached from bending over for so long, and I spent a long time examining my possessions before heating up my meal. Suddenly I was the owner of a vast number of goods, whereas I was used to owning nothing. I felt overwhelmed. I ate gazing at my skeletons. They’d been custodians of the absurd, carrying out orders whose purpose they were unaware of, themselves having to submit to incomprehensible rules, and perhaps they had no more idea of our identity than we did of theirs. Death had caught them unawares, sitting in the bus: but had they known where they were going? Since the siren, we’d never found any trace of the guards, and we imagined that they’d all been taken off somewhere else: why were these guards still here? The only possible explanations occurred to me much later: they were on a routine trip between two bunkers, they were on their way to sleep, or they might have been new arrivals being driven to their post, oblivious of the danger. The gas masks showed that this land was not safe, but whatever it was that killed them had been unforeseen. Ours was the only prison where the siren had sounded just as the cage door was opened, and that is what had saved us: they were the only ones who were exposed, and that had killed them. This symmetry preoccupied me for a long time. For some reason I found in it a sort of obscure beauty. Did something, someone, somewhere understand the meaning of all this? Were things still going on? And on this planet of which I will only ever see a fraction, however long I keep walking, was there a place where the bunkers were still operational? Where men and women obeyed the whip, slept and ate at random times, and where a rebellious girl was beginning to count her heartbeats? Was I the only one? Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?

I decided to bury the skeletons, because I wanted to show that whatever had happened to us, we belonged to the same kind, to those who honour the dead. I dug twenty-three shallow graves and laid the skeletons in them, then I covered them with earth and made a little mound on top of each one, on which I placed the masks and the weapons. I arranged them in a circle, I don’t know why, I felt that was best, their heads in the centre and their feet pointing towards the distance. It took me three days, because the ground was dry and I found it tiring. I rested by trying to decipher my books.

They were all carrying the same book: A Condensed Gardening Handbook. It explained how to plant, sow, thin out, hoe and weed, and what to do in which season and what to plant where. I read the entire book carefully and became an expert on grafting roses, which made me laugh. There were lots of illustrations which showed me what a hoe looked like, a tulip bulb and plenty of other things that I’d never seen and never would.