This filled her, for no reason she clearly understood, with incredible pride.
She had stood well revealed, captive, before a man, and had been pronounced beautiful. But suddenly she felt very helpless, very vulnerable.
To her terror she saw William’s hand reach out and touch her shoulder.
“No!” she hissed. She backed away. “Don’t touch met” she cried.
William looked at her with fury. He did not advance toward her.
“I have come to tell you,” he said, “that we are encountering difficulties in completing the second series of experiments. There will be some delay.”
“I demand to speak to Herjellsen!” said Brenda Hamilton.
But the door had shut.
She heard the hasps strike the staple plates, the locking of the heavy padlocks.
Brenda turned away, agonized. She had wanted William to stay. He seemed the only link with the outside. Herjellsen had not so much as seen her since she had left in the Land Rover with William and Gunther. Gunther had not visited her since her first night in captivity. There had been only the blacks and, from time to time, William.
Brenda Hamilton regarded herself in the mirror, in the light of the single light bulb under the tin roof.
Tonight, she knew, she had attracted a man. She lay down on the cot, twisting in the heat, unable to sleep. She got up and walked about the room. She drank water. She desperately wanted a cigarette, but William would not allow her any. “Tobacco must not be smelled on your breath,” he had told her. “A keenly sensed organism can detect such an odor, even days afterward.”
Brenda Hamilton had understood nothing of this. But she had not been given tobacco.
Fitfully, in the heat, she slept.
Once she awakened, startled. She had dreamed that Gunther had taken her in his arms, as she was, as she had been when William had seen her, and forced her back on the cot, his hands thrusting up the thin dress, over her breasts, freeing her arms of it, until it was about her neck and that he had then, with one hand, twisted it, sometimes loosening it, sometimes tightening it, controlling her by it, making her do what he wished, while his other hand had forced her to undergo delights of which she had not dreamed. How she had writhed and struggled to kiss him as he had then, when her body uncontrollably begged for him, deigned to enter her. But then she screamed and awakened, the light of a flashlight in her eyes.
“Go to sleep,” said a voice from the window, on the other side of the bars, the netting. It was one of the blacks, making his rounds, checking the prisoner.
She lay terrified on the cot.
She lay awake. She waited. In what she surmised might be an hour, the flashlight again illuminated her body on the cot. She pretended she was asleep.
When it was gone, she groaned. She had not dreamed they would be so thorough.
Then she understood, too, the order of entries into her room, during the day, their timing, when the broom was given to her, the water, the wastes emptied, the food brought, the late checking.
She was under almost constant surveillance.
She had no tool. She was helpless in the room. She could not pick the lock for the locks were on the outside. She did not even have a fork, or spoon. With her fingernails and teeth she could not splinter through the floor, nor dig through the wall.
And, even should she gain the outside, there were the blacks, at least one on guard, and the fence.
And outside the fence there was the bush, the heat, the lack of water, the dryness, animals, the distance.
Gunther, she knew, was a superb hunter. Tracks, in the sand and dirt, soft, powdery, dry, would leave a trail which she supposed even she, a woman, might follow.
She lay on the cot looking up at the dark ceiling. I would leave a trail, she told herself, that even I could follow, even a woman.
She feared Gunther.
Then she noted that she had thought of herself not simply as Doctor Hamilton, but as a woman. No, no, she wept to herself. I do not wish to be a woman. I will not be a woman! I will not be a woman!
She twisted desirably, deliciously, in the brief dress, and thought of Gunther.
Suddenly she said to herself, startling herself, I want to be a woman!
Yes, I want to be a womanl
I am a woman!
No, she cried, I will not be a woman! Never!
She realized, though she could not understand the motivations, that it was no accident that she had been dressed as she had, that there had been a mirror placed in the room so that she would be forced to see herself so clad, that she had been ordered to adorn herself with cosmetics, and, indeed, most brutally, most unfairly of all, that she had been forced to kneel in the presence of males, and could not rise until their permission had been given.
“I hate them!” she cried. “I hate men! I hate all of them! I do not want to be a woman! I will never be a woman! Never!”
But a voice within her seemed to say, be quiet, little fool, little female.
She rolled on her stomach and wept, and pounded the mattress. Suddenly she realized she had not removed the earrings, the makeup. She removed them, and, too, from her body, washed the perfume. Then she lay again on the cot. She was almost frightened to go to sleep. There was no sheet, no cover. She knew the blacks would, from time to time, during the night, check with the flashlight. Then she laughed to herself. “I am only a prisoner,” she said, “what do I care if they see my legs?” It seemed to her somehow amusing that a prisoner might attempt to conceal her legs from her jailers. Every inch of her, she knew, was at their disposal, if they so much as wished.
She lay on her stomach on the cot, on the striped mattress, her head turned to one side. The mattress, she sensed, was wet with her tears. Her fists, beside her head, on each side, were clenched.
As she lay there, helpless, locked in the room, she knew that the men had won, that whatever might be their reasons, their plans or motivations, their intentions with respect to her, that they had conquered.
She knew that it was a woman who lay on the striped mattress on the small iron cot, in the hot, tin-roofed building in a compound in Rhodesia.
“I know that I am a female,” she said to herself. “I am a female.”
In her heart, in her deepest nature, for the first time in her life, Doctor Brenda Hamilton-the prisoner Brenda-the woman-acknowledged her sex.
She did not know for what reason the men had done what they had done, but she knew that they had accomplished at least one of their goals.
They had forced her, cruelly and incontrovertibly, in the very roots of her being, to accept the truth of her reality, that she was a woman.
Brenda wondered what might be their further goals.
They had succeeded quite well in their first. They had taught her that she was a woman.
Brenda no longer had doubt about this. She was tired. Brazenly she took what position she was comfortable with on the cot. She no longer cared about the blacks and their flashlights. She was a female prisoner. Her entire body, she knew, each curvacious, luscious inch of it should her jailers wish it, lay at their disposal. She stretched like a cat on the cot, in the heat, and. fell asleep. She was mildly scandalized, as she fell asleep, to discover that she was not displeased to be a woman, that she was quite satisfied with the luscious, curved, sexy body which was she.
On the fourth night, at 10 P.M., Brenda Hamilton heard the keys turn in the padlocks outside the door, heard them lifted out of the staples and, on their short chains, fall against the door; then she heard the hasps flung back.
The door opened.
“Gunther,” she whispered.
She fell to her knees, and looked up at him.
This was the first time since the first night of her captivity that he had entered the room.
She had adorned herself beautifully, even to the earrings and perfume.