I Who Have Never Known Men

The narrator buries Laura near the other graves and goes to bed, but she is too excited about her departure to sleep much. She begins packing at three o’clock. She returns to the nearby bunker for supplies and looks at the prison’s male corpses again. She is used to seeing tortured poses and chaotic gestures among the bodies in the various cages, but here she sees one man seated upright, apart from the others. She wonders if he died last, perhaps after mercifully killing some of his companions, as she has done. She thinks he looks proud, “with an air of self-respect and defiance” (154). The narrator says that she will die like that, upright and proud.

She leaves before dawn, not feeling the need to sleep and realizing her schedule only matters to her now. She heads toward the rising sun because of its beauty. As she passes the cemetery, she thinks of Anthea. Reflecting, the elderly narrator says that the trust they shared and the joy of their togetherness “were probably what the women called love” (157).

As she treks, the narrator encounters many bunkers. She always views the corpses out of respect and then closes the main door as a tribute.