The Night the Entire Bunker Ended Up in an Orgy

The shot didn’t surprise me.

We had been waiting for that sound for two days. It was inevitable. I had seen the Marshal’s widow wandering the corridors in a bathrobe, looking at the young soldiers with a mixture of tenderness and pity. She knew there would be no tomorrow. We all knew it, even if no one dared say it out loud.

When the echo of the shot died away against the concrete walls, I felt something inside me let go. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t fear. It was relief. As if a rope pulled too tight had finally snapped.

I was in the bunker’s small kitchen when it happened. One of the nurses, a girl named Lara who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, dropped a cup that shattered on the floor. We looked at each other. Neither of us said a word. There was no need.

Colonel Renze came down a few minutes later. His face was a mask of forced solemnity.

—It’s all over —he announced, his voice trembling despite his effort to stay composed—. The body will be incinerated in the courtyard, just as he ordered.

I didn’t cry. No one did. Some crossed themselves. Others stood in silence, as if they didn’t know what to do with their hands. I simply sat down by the table and took another sip of coffee.

In theory, this was the moment to begin preparations for evacuation. But evacuate to where? Outside, the capital was a city in ruins. Bombs were falling every ten minutes and the enemy army was already just a few blocks from the ministry. The reports contradicted one another: some said the northern troops had already entered the central gardens; others, that a few pockets of resistance were still holding near the old bridge. But they all agreed on one thing: this was the end.

—They’re going to rape us, kill us, or both —said Mira, another of the secretaries, with the macabre humor that no longer shocked anyone.

Around six in the evening, someone put on music on the first level. I think it was one of the communications officers. Someone else uncorked a bottle of cognac. The special rations were opened as if they were delicacies at a banquet: cans of meat, chocolates, real coffee. No one said it out loud, but we all understood what was happening.

It was a party. The last one.

***

I stayed seated a little longer, alone. I was afraid to go. Not afraid of what awaited me downstairs, but of myself. Of what I might end up doing just to stop thinking. To stop remembering the smell of gunpowder that still hung in the enclosed air.

But in the end I got up and followed the sound of music and uproar.

The room was lit by candles and emergency lights. Someone had hung a white sheet on the wall, as if that turned the place into a ballroom. Uniforms were unbuttoned, boots unlaced. And there was laughter. Real laughter, of people clutching their stomachs and leaning back, cackling as if they had just heard the best joke in the world. A nurse was dancing alone with a broom, pretending it was her partner.

I stayed in the doorway, too afraid to go in.

It was Tobías, a young lieutenant with a frightened child’s eyes, who saw me and waved me over.

—Come on, Nadia! If we’re going to die tomorrow, at least let’s do it hungover —he shouted. Those nearby applauded, and someone pressed a bottle into my hand.

I drank. First a sip. Then two. The liquor burned my throat and warmed my stomach.

The music didn’t stop. Tangos, waltzes, marches, and even an old recording of a cabaret singer someone had brought in. The laughter got louder and more desperate. Someone began telling dirty jokes about the ministers. Even a secretary who never spoke to anyone climbed onto a table to recite an absurd poem about the Marshal and his dog.

And I laughed. I laughed so hard my face hurt. I drank more. I danced with strangers. With Tobías, with Lara, even with the cook who always smelled of grease.

For a few hours, death ceased to exist.

***

I don’t know the exact moment it happened. The line between festive and obscene blurred like the smoke beginning to seep through the cracks in the floor. The music kept playing —the needle of a weary gramophone dancing over scratched vinyl— and the bodies kept dancing too, but no longer as before.

Tobías was kissing Lara against a table. It wasn’t a romantic kiss. It was a desperate sucking, as if time were slipping out of them through their mouths. Beside them, Sergeant Halden was lifting the skirt of another nurse sitting on his lap, while she laughed without moving away and let him pull down her panties. No one pretended to be discreet. It was as if modesty had shot itself along with the Marshal.

I leaned against the wall, the bottle still in my hand. Someone passed me a cigarette and I took it. I didn’t smoke, but that night I did. The smoke scraped my throat and for a moment I thought I would vomit. I didn’t.

A couple was undressing in the opposite corner, with the haste of people who no longer fear being discovered. He still had his boots on. She still wore the nurse’s cap, askew on her forehead, naked from the waist down. No one looked straight on, but we all knew what was happening. And no one cared. It was as if the bunker no longer belonged to this world. As if the tanks, the screams and the gunpowder outside were part of another planet.

And I kept drinking.

I went into the kitchen to look for more alcohol. Mira was there, crying silently while nibbling on a stale biscuit.

—Why are you crying? —I asked her. My own voice surprised me: rough, hoarse, as if it belonged to another woman.

—Because I just went to bed with a man whose name I don’t know —she said—. And I don’t feel bad about it. I feel bad about not feeling anything.

I didn’t know what to say. I handed her the bottle and sat down beside her. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. We listened to the muffled music, the sporadic moans, the laughter that sounded like it was coming from an insane asylum. The world was ending and the only thing we could do was try to forget we were still breathing.

Mira broke the silence before heading back to the party.

—Will you sleep with someone tonight? —she asked.

—I don’t know —I said.

—Do it —she replied—. Even if it’s just to stop feeling like you’re waiting.

***

When I went back into the hall, everything had changed completely. It was no longer just two couples having indifferent encounters in the corners. It was a full-blown orgy.

Vera, the Marshal’s family’s personal nurse, was naked with her wrists tied to the bars of a bunk bed while a captain who had lost his shirt was whipping her reddened ass with a riding crop. With every blow, Vera moaned with pleasure. I would never have imagined she liked punishment, but I wasn’t shocked, nor did I care in the slightest.

Tobías was dancing completely naked with another secretary, a round-faced blonde I didn’t remember having seen before. She was on her knees, determined not to let Colonel Renze’s cock slip out of her mouth, sucking him hard while Tobías didn’t know whether to stand still and enjoy it or keep moving to the rhythm of the music.

Beside him, Mauro, a cameraman’s assistant, was fucking Dasha, one of the nurses, from behind. She moaned on all fours while her small breasts swayed in time with each thrust. Farther on, another of the communications secretaries was being double-penetrated by two young soldiers while giving oral to an older officer who stood braced on the bunk.

A lamp had been knocked over and the floor had turned sticky with wine and vomit. The music kept going. There was always music. A march turned into the soundtrack of a directionless orgy.

I slumped against a wall. I rested the back of my head on the cold concrete and closed my eyes. The moans were constant; they almost drowned out the music.

Then I felt someone sit down beside me.

It was Leon, one of the telegraph operators. He had never spoken to me, but that night nothing mattered. He offered me a piece of chocolate and I took it. Then he handed me a drink. I took that too.

—I don’t want to die alone —he said suddenly, almost in a whisper.

—We’re already dead —I answered without thinking.

We kissed. Not out of desire, but out of need. Our bodies were unloaded weapons that only knew how to seek warmth. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t passionate. It was a way of not being alone. I let it happen. I closed my eyes and allowed his body to cover mine while around us the shadows danced, shouted and, above all, fornicated.

***

It didn’t take long before I, too, was naked. Leon took me on all fours. Another cock came to my mouth and, like an automaton, I opened it and tasted it without thinking. It didn’t disgust me at all. It was exactly what I wanted to do. Several soldiers fucked me without pause; I sucked three or four cocks, and even a woman’s wet sex. Mira, already less regretful about her first encounter, had lain down in front of me so that, for the first time in her life, another woman would eat her pussy.

It was astonishing how more than thirty people surrendered like that, indifferent to the drama unfolding on the other side of three meters of concrete. Outside, brave boys were giving their lives for a war long lost, defending nothing with it.

We fucked almost everyone with everyone. Men, women, it didn’t matter. I don’t know how many times I came, I don’t know how many spurts of semen fell over my skin. Between hard, fleeting encounters, all I remember is that Leon came back to where it started and this time fucked me from behind, until he emptied himself inside me.

***

I woke with a brutal headache. It took me a while to know whether it was dawn or already noon. The bunker had no windows. There was no sense of time. Everything smelled of sweat, alcohol, fear and bodies.

Leon was asleep beside me, naked, his mouth slightly open. I got up without waking him. The floor was covered with bodies: some sleeping, others still fucking as if the end of the world wasn’t enough to stop flesh.

I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were two gray smudges. My hair was dirty, stuck to my face. I washed up, but the water came out lukewarm and smelling of metal.

In the hallway I saw a nurse walking with torn stockings, her panties in one hand and an empty bottle dangling from the other. She smiled as she passed, as if we were lifelong friends.

I went back to the kitchen. Mira was still there, sitting in the same chair, her breasts bare and her face exhausted.

—Colonel Renze has gone —she told me without turning her head—. And I think the minister has too. They slipped out through the subway tunnel. I can’t find either my underwear or my tunic.

—And us? —I asked.

—We’re nobody —she answered—. They have exits. We only have concrete ceilings.

The bombing started again.

The ceiling vibrated. Dust fell from the lamps. Some people screamed by reflex, as if that could save them. Others cowered under threadbare blankets. A nurse lost her nerve and ran naked through the corridors, shrieking that the enemy was coming with knives. No one went after her. Not out of cruelty, but resignation.

I crawled under a table, like a little girl playing hide-and-seek. There, among broken bottles and forgotten shoes, I felt that everything was already over. That we were in the end credits, when the audience has left and only the janitors remain, collecting what the show left behind.

Leon came looking for me later. He told me there was a way out. That we could still run.

—There’s nowhere to go —I answered—. Out there there are tanks. In here there’s madness. Choose your death.

He left. I never saw him again.

That night there was more partying. More bodies. More broken songs. More sweat. More orgasms. I didn’t dance. I only wanted to fuck and ignore the immediate future. There came a point, I don’t know whether night or day, when I had no legs left either to run or to spin to the rhythm of the dead.

I sat in the kitchen with Mira. We shared a can of peaches in syrup that someone had salvaged from the pantry. It was sweet. So sweet it hurt.

—Do you think anyone will tell this someday? —she asked me.

—Not the way it was —I said—. They’ll clean it up. They’ll make it more dignified. They’ll remove the bodies. They’ll silence the moans. No one will say that when the Marshal blew his brains out, we danced and fucked as if the world had never existed.