The Testaments / Заветы (by Margaret Atwood, 2019) - аудиокнига на английском

Margaret Atwood THE TESTAMENTS “Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.” —GEORGE ELIOT, DANIEL DERONDA “When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate—no, we’re gazing into a mirror…. Do you really not recognize yourselves in us…?” —OBERSTURMBANNF?HRER LISS TO OLD BOLSHEVIK MOSTOVSKOY, VASILY GROSSMAN, LIFE AND FATE “Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake…. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.” —URSULA K. LE GUIN, THE TOMBS OF ATUAN I Statue 1 The Ardua Hall Holograph Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified. This statue was a small token of appreciation for my many contributions, said the citation, which was read out by Aunt Vidala. She’d been assigned the task by our superiors, and was far from appreciative. I thanked her with as much modesty as I could summon, then pulled the rope that released the cloth drape shrouding me; it billowed to the ground, and there I stood. We don’t do cheering here at Ardua Hall, but there was some discreet clapping. I inclined my head in a nod. My statue is larger than life, as statues tend to be, and shows me as younger, slimmer, and in better shape than I’ve been for some time. I am standing straight, shoulders back, my lips curved into a firm but benevolent smile. My eyes are fixed on some cosmic point of reference understood to represent my idealism, my unflinching commitment to duty, my determination to move forward despite all obstacles. Not that anything in the sky would be visible to my statue, placed as it is in a morose cluster of trees and shrubs beside the footpath running in front of Ardua Hall. We Aunts must not be too presumptuous, even in stone. Clutching my left hand is a girl of seven or eight, gazing up at me with trusting eyes. My right hand rests on the head of a woman crouched at my side, her hair veiled, her eyes upturned in an expression that could be read as either craven or grateful—one of our Handmaids—and behind me is one of my Pearl Girls, ready to set out on her missionary work. Hanging from a belt around my waist is my Taser. This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement. The persuasion in my voice would have been enough. As a group of statuary it’s not a great success: too crowded. I would have preferred more emphasis on myself. But at least I look sane. It could well have been otherwise, as the elderly sculptress—a true believer since deceased—had a tendency to confer bulging eyes on her subjects as a sign of their pious fervour. Her bust of Aunt Helena looks rabid, that of Aunt Vidala is hyperthyroid, and that of Aunt Elizabeth appears ready to explode. At the unveiling the sculptress was nervous. Was her rendition of me sufficiently flattering? Did I approve of it? Would I be seen to approve? I toyed with the idea of frowning as the sheet came off, but thought better of it: I am not without compassion. “Very lifelike,” I said. That was nine years ago. Since then my statue has weathered: pigeons have decorated me, moss has sprouted in my damper crevices. Votaries have taken to leaving offerings at my feet: eggs for fertility, oranges to suggest the fullness of pregnancy, croissants to reference the moon. I ignore the breadstuffs—usually they have been rained on—but pocket the oranges. Oranges are so refreshing. — I write these words in my private sanctum within the library of Ardua Hall—one of the few libraries remaining after the enthusiastic book-burnings that have been going on across our land. The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory. But among these bloody fingerprints are those made by ourselves, and these can’t be wiped away so easily. Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again—if only for your edification, my unknown reader. If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived. Though perhaps I’m fantasizing: perhaps I will never have a reader. Perhaps I’ll only be talking to the wall, in more ways than one. That’s enough inscribing for today. My hand hurts, my back aches, and my nightly cup of hot milk awaits me. I’ll stash this screed in its hiding place, avoiding the surveillance cameras—I know where they are, having placed them myself. Despite such precautions, I’m aware of the risk I’m running: writing can be dangerous. What betrayals, and then what denunciations, might lie in store for me? There are several within Ardua Hall who would love to get their hands on these pages. Wait, I counsel them silently: it will get worse. II PRECIOUS FLOWER 2 Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A You have asked me to tell you what it was like for me when I was growing up within Gilead. You say it will be helpful, and I do wish to be helpful. I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind though fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere. I hope you will remember, too, that we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children, however bizarre the conditions of that childhood may seem to others. I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away—there is too much of wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended—but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost. — At our school, pink was for spring and summer, plum was for fall and winter, white was for special days: Sundays and celebrations. Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—of our shapely or skinny or fat legs, of our graceful or knobbly or sausage arms, of our peachy or blotchy skins, of our entwining curls of shining hair or our coarse unruly pelts or our straw-like wispy braids, it did not matter. Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The verge of what? we wondered. Was it like a cliff?—and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God. We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world. That was the kind of thing runny-nosed Aunt Vidala would tell us at school while we were doing petit-point embroidery for handkerchiefs and footstools and framed pictures: flowers in a vase, fruit in a bowl were the favoured patterns. But Aunt Est?e, the teacher we liked the best, would say Aunt Vidala was overdoing it and there was no point in frightening us out of our wits, since to instill such an aversion might have a negative influence on the happiness of our future married lives. “All men are not like that, girls,” she would say soothingly. “The better kind have superior characters. Some of them have decent self-restraint. And once you are married it will seem quite different to you, and not very fearsome at all.” Not that she would know anything about it, since the Aunts were not married; they were not allowed to be. That was why they could have writing and books. “We and your fathers and mothers will choose your husbands wisely for you when the time comes,” Aunt Est?e would say. “So you don’t need to be afraid. Just learn your lessons and trust your elders to do what is best, and everything will unfold as it should. I will pray for it.” But despite Aunt Est?e’s dimples and friendly smile, it was Aunt Vidala’s version that prevailed. It turned up in my nightmares: the shattering of the glass house, then the rending and tearing and the trampling of hooves, with pink and white and plum fragments of myself scattered over the ground. I dreaded the thought of growing older—older enough for a wedding. I had no faith in the wise choices of the Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire. — The pink, the white, and the plum dresses were the rule for special girls like us. Ordinary girls from Econofamilies wore the same thing all the time—those ugly multicoloured stripes and grey cloaks, like the clothes of their mothers. They did not even learn petit-point embroidery or crochet work, just plain sewing and the making of paper flowers and other such chores. They were not pre-chosen to be married to the very best men—to the Sons of Jacob and the other Commanders or their sons—not like us; although they might get to be chosen once they were older if they were pretty enough. Nobody said that. You were not supposed to preen yourself on your good looks, it was not modest, or take any notice of the good looks of other people. Though we girls knew the truth: that it was better to be pretty than ugly. Even the Aunts paid more attention to the pretty ones. But if you were already pre-chosen, pretty didn’t matter so much. I didn’t have a squint like Huldah or a pinchy built-in frown like Shunammite, and I didn’t have barely-there eyebrows like Becka, but I was unfinished. I had a dough face, like the cookies my favourite Martha, Zilla, made for me as a treat, with raisin eyes and pumpkin-seed teeth. But though I was not especially pretty, I was very, very chosen. Doubly chosen: not only pre-chosen to marry a Commander but chosen in the first place by Tabitha, who was my mother. That is what Tabitha used to tell me: “I went for a walk in the forest,” she would say, “and then I came to an enchanted castle, and there were a lot of little girls locked inside, and none of them had any mothers, and they were under the spell of the wicked witches. I had a magic ring that unlocked the castle, but I could only rescue one little girl. So I looked at them all very carefully, and then, out of the whole crowd, I chose you!” “What happened to the others?” I would ask. “The other little girls?” “Different mothers rescued them,” she would say. “Did they have magic rings too?” “Of course, my darling. In order to be a mother, you need to have a magic ring.” “Where’s the magic ring?” I would ask. “Where is it now?” “It’s right here on my finger,” she would say, indicating the third finger of her left hand. The heart finger, she said it was. “But my ring had only one wish in it, and I used that one up on you. So now it’s an ordinary, everyday mother ring.” At this point I was allowed to try on the ring, which was gold, with three diamonds in it: a big one, and a smaller one on either side. It did look as if it might have been magic once. “Did you lift me up and carry me?” I would ask. “Out of the forest?” I knew the story off by heart, but I liked to hear it repeated. “No, my dearest, you were already too big for that. If I had carried you I would have coughed, and then the witches would have heard us.” I could see this was true: she did cough quite a lot. “So I took you by the hand, and we crept out of the castle so the witches wouldn’t hear us. We both said Shh, shh”—here she would hold her finger up to her lips, and I would hold my finger up too and say Shh, shh delightedly—“and then we had to run very fast through the forest, to get away from the wicked witches, because one of them had seen us going out the door. We ran, and then we hid in a hollow tree. It was very dangerous!” I did have a hazy memory of running through a forest with someone holding my hand. Had I hidden in a hollow tree? It seemed to me that I had hidden somewhere. So maybe it was true. “And then what happened?” I would ask. “And then I brought you to this beautiful house. Aren’t you happy here? You are so cherished, by all of us! Aren’t we both lucky that I chose you?” I would be nestled close to her, with her arm around me and my head against her thin body, through which I could feel her bumpy ribs. My ear would be pressed to her chest, and I could hear her heart hammering away inside her—faster and faster, it seemed to me, as she waited for me to say something. I knew my answer had power: I could make her smile, or not. What could I say but yes and yes? Yes, I was happy. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true. 3 How old was I at that time? Perhaps six or seven. It’s hard for me to know, as I have no clear memories before that time. I loved Tabitha very much. She was beautiful although so thin, and she would spend hours playing with me. We had a dollhouse that was like our own house, with a living room and a dining room and a big kitchen for the Marthas, and a father’s study with a desk and bookshelves. All the little pretend books on the shelves were blank. I asked why there was nothing inside them—I had a dim feeling that there were supposed to be marks on those pages—and my mother said that books were decorations, like vases of flowers. What a lot of lies she had to tell for my sake! To keep me safe! But she was up to it. She had a very inventive mind. We had lovely big bedrooms on the second floor of the dollhouse, with curtains and wallpaper and pictures—nice pictures, fruit and flowers—and smaller bedrooms on the third floor, and five bathrooms in all, though one was a powder room—Why was it called that? What was “powder”?—and a cellar with supplies. We had all the dolls for the dollhouse that you might need: a mother doll in the blue dress of the Commanders’ Wives, a little girl doll with three dresses—pink, white, and plum, just like mine—three Martha dolls in dull green with aprons, a Guardian of the Faith with a cap to drive the car and mow the lawn, two Angels to stand at the gate with their miniature plastic guns so nobody could get in and hurt us, and a father doll in his crisp Commander’s uniform. He never said much, but he paced around a lot and sat at the end of the dining table, and the Marthas brought him things on trays, and then he would go into his study and close the door. In this, the Commander doll was like my own father, Commander Kyle, who would smile at me and ask if I had been good, and then vanish. The difference was that I could see what the Commander doll was doing inside his study, which was sitting at his desk with his Computalk and a stack of papers, but with my real-life father I couldn’t know that: going into my father’s study was forbidden. What my father was doing in there was said to be very important—the important things that men did, too important for females to meddle with because they had smaller brains that were incapable of thinking large thoughts, according to Aunt Vidala, who taught us Religion. It would be like trying to teach a cat to crochet, said Aunt Est?e, who taught us Crafts, and that would make us laugh, because how ridiculous! Cats didn’t even have fingers! So men had something in their heads that was like fingers, only a sort of fingers girls did not have. And that explained everything, said Aunt Vidala, and we will have no more questions about it. Her mouth clicked shut, locking in the other words that might have been said. I knew there must be other words, for even then the notion about the cats did not seem right. Cats did not want to crochet. And we were not cats. Forbidden things are open to the imagination. That was why Eve ate the Apple of Knowledge, said Aunt Vidala: too much imagination. So it was better not to know some things. Otherwise your petals would get scattered. — In the dollhouse boxed set, there was a Handmaid doll with a red dress and a bulgy tummy and a white hat that hid her face, though my mother said we didn’t need a Handmaid in our house because we already had me, and people shouldn’t be greedy and want more than one little girl. So we wrapped the Handmaid up in tissue paper, and Tabitha said that I could give her away later to some other little girl who didn’t have such a lovely dollhouse and could make good use of the Handmaid doll. I was happy to put the Handmaid away in the box because the real Handmaids made me nervous. We would pass them on our school outings, when we’d walk in a long double line with an Aunt at each end of it. The outings were to churches, or else to parks where we might play circle games or look at ducks in a pond. Later we would be allowed to go to Salvagings and Prayvaganzas in our white dresses and veils to see people being hanged or married, but we weren’t mature enough for that yet, said Aunt Est?e. There were swings in one of the parks, but because of our skirts, which might be blown up by the wind and then looked into, we were not to think of taking such a liberty as a swing. Only boys could taste that freedom; only they could swoop and soar; only they could be airborne. I have still never been on a swing. It remains one of my wishes. — As we marched along the street, the Handmaids would be walking two by two with their shopping baskets. They would not look at us, or not much, or not directly, and we were not supposed to look at them because it was rude to stare at them, said Aunt Est?e, just as it was rude to stare at cripples or anyone else who was different. We were not allowed to ask questions about the Handmaids either. “You’ll learn about all of that when you’re old enough,” Aunt Vidala would say. All of that: the Handmaids were part of all of that. Something bad, then; something damaging, or something damaged, which might be the same thing. Had the Handmaids once been like us, white and pink and plum? Had they been careless, had they allowed some alluring part of themselves to show? You couldn’t see very much of them now. You couldn’t even see their faces because of those white hats they wore. They all looked the same. In our dollhouse at home there was an Aunt doll, although she didn’t really belong in a house, she belonged in a school, or else at Ardua Hall, where the Aunts were said to live. When I was playing with the dollhouse by myself, I used to lock the Aunt doll in the cellar, which was not kind of me. She would pound and pound on the cellar door and scream, “Let me out,” but the little girl doll and the Martha doll who’d helped her would pay no attention, and sometimes they would laugh. I don’t feel pleased with myself while recording this cruelty, even though it was only a cruelty to a doll. It’s a vengeful side of my nature that I am sorry to say I have failed to subdue entirely. But in an account such as this, it is better to be scrupulous about your faults, as about all your other actions. Otherwise no one will understand why you made the decisions that you made. — It was Tabitha who taught me to be honest with myself, which is somewhat ironic in view of the lies she told me. To be fair, she probably was honest when it came to herself. She tried—I believe—to be as good a person as was possible, under the circumstances. Each night, after telling me a story, she would tuck me into bed with my favourite stuffed animal, which was a whale—because God made whales to play in the sea, so it was all right for a whale to be something you could play with—and then we would pray. The prayer was in the form of a song, which we would sing together: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Four angels standing round my bed, Two to feet and two to head; One to watch and one to pray, And two to carry my soul away. Tabitha had a beautiful voice, like a silver flute. Every now and then, at night when I am drifting off to sleep, I can almost hear her singing. There were a couple of things about this song that bothered me. First of all, the angels. I knew they were supposed to be the kind of angels with white nightgowns and feathers, but that was not how I pictured them. I pictured them as our kind of Angels: men in black uniforms with cloth wings sewn onto their outfits, and guns. I did not like the thought of four Angels with guns standing around my bed as I slept, because they were men after all, so what about the parts of me that might stick out from under the blankets? My feet, for instance. Wouldn’t that inflame their urges? It would, there was no way around it. So the four Angels were not a restful thought. Also, it was not encouraging to pray about dying in your sleep. I did not think I would, but what if I did? And what was my soul like—that thing the angels would carry away? Tabitha said it was the spirit part and did not die when your body did, which was supposed to be a cheerful idea. But what did it look like, my soul? I pictured it as just like me, only much smaller: as small as the little girl doll in my dollhouse. It was inside me, so maybe it was the same thing as the invaluable treasure that Aunt Vidala said we had to guard so carefully. You could lose your soul, said Aunt Vidala, blowing her nose, in which case it would topple over the verge and hurtle down and endlessly down, and catch on fire, just like the goatish men. This was a thing I very much wished to avoid. 4 At the beginning of the next period I am about to describe, I must have been eight at first, or possibly nine. I can remember these events but not my exact age. It’s hard to remember calendar dates, especially since we did not have calendars. But I will continue on in the best way I can. My name at that time was Agnes Jemima. Agnes meant “lamb,” said my mother, Tabitha. She would say a poem: Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? There was more of this, but I have forgotten it. As for Jemima, that name came from a story in the Bible. Jemima was a very special little girl because her father, Job, was sent bad luck by God as part of a test, and the worst part of it was that all Job’s children were killed. All his sons, all his daughters: killed! It sent shudders through me every time I heard about it. It must have been terrible, what Job felt when he was told that news. But Job passed the test, and God gave him some other children—several sons, and also three daughters—so then he was happy again. And Jemima was one of those daughters. “God gave her to Job, just as God gave you to me,” said my mother. “Did you have bad luck? Before you chose me?” “Yes, I did,” she said, smiling. “Did you pass the test?” “I must have,” said my mother. “Or I wouldn’t have been able to choose a wonderful daughter like you.” I was pleased with this story. It was only later that I pondered it: how could Job have allowed God to fob off a batch of new children on him and expect him to pretend that the dead ones no longer mattered? — When I wasn’t at school or with my mother—and I was with my mother less and less, because more and more she would be upstairs lying down on her bed, doing what the Marthas called “resting”—I liked to be in the kitchen, watching the Marthas make the bread and the cookies and pies and cakes and soups and stews. All the Marthas were known as Martha because that’s what they were, and they all wore the same kind of clothing, but each one of them had a first name too. Ours were Vera, Rosa, and Zilla; we had three Marthas because my father was so important. Zilla was my favourite because she spoke very softly, whereas Vera had a harsh voice and Rosa had a scowl. It wasn’t her fault though, it was just the way her face was made. She was older than the other two. “Can I help?” I would ask our Marthas. Then they would give me scraps of bread dough to play with, and I would make a man out of dough, and they would bake it in the oven with whatever else they were baking. I always made dough men, I never made dough women, because after they were baked I would eat them, and that made me feel I had a secret power over men. It was becoming clear to me that, despite the urges Aunt Vidala said I aroused in them, I had no power over them otherwise. “Can I make the bread from scratch?” I asked one day when Zilla was getting out the bowl to start mixing. I’d watched them do it so often that I was convinced I knew how. “You don’t need to bother with that,” said Rosa, scowling more than usual. “Why?” I said. Vera laughed her harsh laugh. “You’ll have Marthas to do all of that for you,” she said. “Once they’ve picked out a nice fat husband for you.” “He won’t be fat.” I didn’t want a fat husband. “Of course not. It’s just an expression,” said Zilla. “You won’t have to do the shopping either,” said Rosa. “Your Martha will do that. Or else a Handmaid, supposing you need one.” “She may not need one,” said Vera. “Considering who her mother—” “Don’t say that,” said Zilla. “What?” I said. “What about my mother?” I knew there was a secret about my mother—it had to do with the way they said resting—and it frightened me. “Just that your mother could have her own baby,” said Zilla soothingly, “so I’m sure you can too. You’d like to have a baby, wouldn’t you, dear?” “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t want a husband. I think they’re disgusting.” The three of them laughed. “Not all of them,” said Zilla. “Your father is a husband.” There was nothing I could say about that. “They’ll make sure it’s a nice one,” said Rosa. “It won’t be just any old husband.” “They have their pride to keep up,” said Vera. “They won’t marry you down, that’s for sure.” I didn’t want to think about husbands any longer. “But what if I want to?” I said. “Make the bread?” My feelings were hurt: it was as if they were closing a circle around themselves, keeping me out. “What if I want to make the bread myself?” “Well, of course, your Marthas would have to let you do that,” said Zilla. “You’d be the mistress of the household. But they’d look down on you for it. And they’d feel you were taking their rightful positions away from them. The things they know best how to do. You wouldn’t want them to feel that about you, would you, dear?” “Your husband wouldn’t like it either,” said Vera with another of her harsh laughs. “It’s bad for the hands. Look at mine!” She held them out: her fingers were knobby, the skin was rough, the nails short, with ragged cuticles—not at all like my mother’s slender and elegant hands, with their magic ring. “Rough work—it’s all bad for the hands. He won’t want you smelling of bread dough.” “Or bleach,” said Rosa. “From scrubbing.” “He’ll want you to stick to the embroidery and such,” said Vera. “The petit point,” said Rosa. There was derision in her voice. Embroidery was not my strong suit. I was always being criticized for loose and sloppy stitches. “I hate petit point. I want to make bread.” “We can’t always do what we want,” said Zilla gently. “Even you.” “And sometimes we have to do what we hate,” said Vera. “Even you.” “Don’t let me, then!” I said. “You’re being mean!” And I ran out of the kitchen. By this time I was crying. Although I’d been told not to disturb my mother, I crept upstairs and into her room. She was under her lovely white coverlet with blue flowers. Her eyes were closed but she must have heard me because she opened them. Every time I saw her, those eyes looked larger and more luminous. “What is it, my pet?” she said. I crawled under the coverlet and snuggled up against her. She was very warm. “It’s not fair,” I sobbed. “I don’t want to get married! Why do I have to?” She didn’t say Because it’s your duty, the way Aunt Vidala would have, or You’ll want to when the time comes, which was what Aunt Est?e would say. She didn’t say anything at first. Instead she hugged me and stroked my hair. “Remember how I chose you,” she said, “out of all the others.” But I was old enough now to disbelieve the choosing story: the locked castle, the magic ring, the wicked witches, the running away. “That’s only a fairy tale,” I said. “I came out of your stomach, just like other babies.” She did not affirm this. She said nothing. For some reason this was frightening to me. “I did! Didn’t I?” I asked. “Shunammite told me. At school. About stomachs.” My mother hugged me tighter. “Whatever happens,” she said after a while, “I want you to always remember that I have loved you very much.” 5 You have probably guessed what I am going to tell you next, and it is not at all happy. My mother was dying. Everyone knew, except me. I found out from Shunammite, who said she was my best friend. We weren’t supposed to have best friends. It wasn’t nice to form closed circles, said Aunt Est?e: it made other girls feel left out, and we should all be helping one another be the most perfect girls we could be. Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses. Then Becka spoke up in her mouse voice and asked, What is an adulteress? We girls were all surprised because Becka so seldom asked any questions. Her father was not a Commander like our fathers. He was only a dentist: the very best dentist, and our families all went to him, which was why Becka was allowed into our school. But it did mean the other girls looked down on her and expected her to defer to them. Becka was sitting beside me—she always tried to sit beside me if Shunammite did not shoulder her away—and I could feel her trembling. I was afraid that Aunt Vidala would punish her for being impertinent, but it would have been hard for anyone, even Aunt Vidala, to accuse her of impertinence. Shunammite whispered across me at Becka: Don’t be so stupid! Aunt Vidala smiled, as much as she ever did, and said she hoped Becka would never find that out through personal experience, since those who did become adulteresses would end up being stoned or else hanged by their neck with a sack over their heads. Aunt Est?e said there was no need to frighten the girls unduly; and then she smiled and said that we were precious flowers, and who ever heard of a rebellious flower? We looked at her, making our eyes as round as possible as a sign of our innocence, and nodding to show we agreed with her. No rebellious flowers here! — Shunammite’s house had just one Martha and mine had three, so my father was more important than hers. I realize now that this was why she wanted me as her best friend. She was a stubby girl with two long thick braids that I envied, since my own braids were skinny and shorter, and black eyebrows that made her look more grown up than she was. She was belligerent, but only behind the Aunts’ backs. In the disputes between us, she always had to be right. If you contradicted her, she would only repeat her first opinion, except louder. She was rude to many other girls, especially Becka, and I am ashamed to tell you that I was too weak to overrule her. I had a weak character when dealing with girls my own age, though at home the Marthas would say I was headstrong. “Your mother’s dying, isn’t she?” Shunammite whispered to me one lunchtime. “No she’s not,” I whispered back. “She just has a condition!” That was what the Marthas called it: your mother’s condition. Her condition was what caused her to rest so much, and to cough. Lately our Marthas had been taking trays up to her room; the trays would come back down with hardly anything eaten from the plates. I wasn’t allowed to visit her much anymore. When I did, her room would be in semi-darkness. It no longer smelled like her, a light, sweet smell like the lily-flowered hostas in our garden, but as if some stale and dirtied stranger had crept in and was hiding under the bed. I would sit beside my mother where she lay huddled under her blue-flower-embroidered bedspread and hold her thin left hand with the magic ring on it and ask when her condition would be gone, and she would say she was praying for her pain to be over soon. That would reassure me: it meant she would get better. Then she would ask me if I was being good, and if I was happy, and I would always say yes, and she would squeeze my hand and ask me to pray with her, and we would sing the song about the angels standing around her bed. And she would say thank you, and that was enough for today. “She really is dying,” Shunammite whispered. “That’s what her condition is. It’s dying!” “That’s not true,” I whispered too loudly. “She’s getting better. Her pain will be over soon. She prayed for it.” “Girls,” said Aunt Est?e. “At lunchtime our mouths are for eating, and we can’t talk and chew at the same time. Aren’t we lucky to have such lovely food?” It was egg sandwiches, which ordinarily I liked. But right then the smell of them was making me feel sick. “I heard it from my Martha,” Shunammite whispered when Aunt Est?e’s attention was elsewhere. “And your Martha told her. So it’s true.” “Which one?” I said. I couldn’t believe any of our Marthas would be so disloyal as to pretend that my mother was dying—not even scowling Rosa. “How should I know which one? They’re all just Marthas,” said Shunammite, tossing her long thick braids. — That afternoon when our Guardian had driven me home from school, I went into the kitchen. Zilla was rolling pie dough; Vera was cutting up a chicken. There was a soup pot simmering on the back of the stove: the extra chicken parts would go into it, and any vegetable scraps and bones. Our Marthas were very efficient with food, and did not waste supplies. Rosa was over at the large double sink rinsing off dishes. We had a dishwasher, but the Marthas didn’t use it except after Commanders’ dinners at our house because it took too much electricity, said Vera, and there were shortages because of the war. Sometimes the Marthas called it the watched-pot war because it never boiled, or else the Ezekiel’s Wheel war because it rolled around without getting anywhere; but they only said such things among themselves. “Shunammite said one of you told her Martha that my mother is dying,” I blurted out. “Who said that? It’s a lie!” All three of them stopped doing what they were doing. It was as if I’d waved a wand and frozen them: Zilla with the lifted rolling pin, Vera with a cleaver in one hand and a long pale chicken neck in the other, Rosa with a platter and a dishcloth. Then they looked at one another. “We thought you knew,” Zilla said gently. “We thought your mother would have told you.” “Or your father,” said Vera. That was silly, because when could he have done that? He was hardly ever at our house nowadays, and when he was, he was either eating dinner by himself in the dining room or shut inside his study doing important things. “We’re very sorry,” said Rosa. “Your mother is a good woman.” “A model Wife,” said Vera. “She has endured her suffering without complaint.” By this time I was slumped over at the kitchen table, crying into my hands. “We must all bear the afflictions that are sent to test us,” said Zilla. “We must continue to hope.” Hope for what? I thought. What was there left to hope for? All I could see in front of me was loss and darkness. — My mother died two nights later, though I didn’t find out until the morning. I was angry with her for being mortally ill and not telling me—though she had told me, in a way: she had prayed for her pain to be over soon, and her prayer was answered. Once I’d finished being angry, I felt as if a piece of me had been cut off—a piece of my heart, which was surely now dead as well. I hoped that the four angels round her bed were real after all, and that they had watched over her, and that they had carried her soul away, just as in the song. I tried to picture them lifting her up and up, into a golden cloud. But I could not really believe it. III Hymn 6 The Ardua Hall Holograph Readying myself for bed last night, I unpinned my hair, what is left of it. In one of my bracing homilies to our Aunts some years ago, I preached against vanity, which creeps in despite our strictures against it. “Life is not about hair,” I said then, only half jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away. I once had enough hair for a topknot, in the days of topknots; for a bun, in the age of buns. But now my hair is like our meals here at Ardua Hall: sparse and short. The flame of my life is subsiding, more slowly than some of those around me might like, but faster than they may realize. I regarded my reflection. The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like. It could be worse, I told myself: my face betrays no signs of weakness. It retains its leathery texture, its character-bestowing mole on the chin, its etching of familiar lines. I was never frivolously pretty, but I was once handsome: that can no longer be said. Imposing is the best that might be ventured. How will I end? I wondered. Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honoured statue? Or will the regime and I both topple and my stone replica along with me, to be dragged away and sold off as a curiosity, a lawn ornament, a chunk of gruesome kitsch? Or will I be put on trial as a monster, then executed by firing squad and dangled from a lamppost for public viewing? Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers? I have inspired sufficient rage for that. Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that freedom of a sort? Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list. — I am well aware of how you must be judging me, my reader; if, that is, my reputation has preceded me and you have deciphered who I am, or was. In my own present day I am a legend, alive but more than alive, dead but more than dead. I’m a framed head that hangs at the backs of classrooms, of the girls exalted enough to have classrooms: grimly smiling, silently admonishing. I’m a bugaboo used by the Marthas to frighten small children—If you don’t behave yourself, Aunt Lydia will come and get you! I’m also a model of moral perfection to be emulated—What would Aunt Lydia want you to do?—and a judge and arbiter in the misty inquisition of the imagination—What would Aunt Lydia have to say about that? I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman? But perhaps it is too late for that. You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet. — Today was the first full moon after March 21. Elsewhere in the world, lambs are being slaughtered and eaten; Easter eggs, too, are consumed, for reasons having to do with Neolithic fertility goddesses nobody chooses to remember. Here at Ardua Hall we skip the lamb flesh but have kept the eggs. As a special treat I allow them to be dyed: baby pink and baby blue. You have no idea what delight this brings to the Aunts and Supplicants assembled in the Refectory for supper! Our diet is monotonous and a little variation is welcome, even if only a variation in colour. After the bowls of pastel eggs had been brought in and admired but before our meagre feast began, I led the usual Prayer of Grace—Bless this food to our service and keep us on the Path, May the Lord open—and then the special Spring Equinox Grace: As the year unfolds into spring, may our hearts unfold; bless our daughters, bless our Wives, bless our Aunts and Supplicants, bless our Pearl Girls in their mission work beyond our borders, and may Fatherly Grace be poured out upon our fallen Handmaid sisters and redeem them through the sacrifice of their bodies and their labour according to His will. And bless Baby Nicole, stolen away by her treacherous Handmaid mother and hidden by the godless in Canada; and bless all the innocents she represents, doomed to be raised by the depraved. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. May our Baby Nicole be restored to us, we pray; may Grace return her. Per Ardua Cum Estrus. Amen. — It pleases me to have concocted such a slippery motto. Is Ardua “difficulty” or “female progenitive labour”? Does Estrus have to do with hormones or with pagan rites of spring? The denizens of Ardua Hall neither know nor care. They are repeating the right words in the right order, and thus are safe. Then there is Baby Nicole. As I prayed for her return, all eyes were focused on her picture hanging on the wall behind me. So useful, Baby Nicole: she whips up the faithful, she inspires hatred against our enemies, she bears witness to the possibility of betrayal within Gilead and to the deviousness and cunning of the Handmaids, who can never be trusted. Nor is her usefulness at an end, I reflected: in my hands—should she end up there—Baby Nicole would have a brilliant future. Such were my thoughts during the closing hymn, sung in harmony by a trio of our young Supplicants. Their voices were pure and clear, and the rest of us listened with rapt attention. Despite what you may have thought, my reader, there was beauty to be had in Gilead. Why would we not have wished for it? We were human after all. I see that I have spoken of us in the past tense. The music was an old psalm melody, but the words were ours: Under His Eye our beams of truth shine out, We see all sin; We shall observe you at your goings-out, Your comings-in. From every heart we wrench the secret vice, In prayers and tears decree the sacrifice. Sworn to obey, obedience we command, We shall not swerve! To duties harsh, we lend a willing hand, We pledge to serve. All idle thoughts, all pleasures we must quell, Self we renounce, in selflessness we dwell. Banal and without charm, those words: I can say that, since I wrote them myself. But such hymns are not meant to be poetry. They are meant simply to remind those singing them of the high price they would pay for deviation from the set path. We are not forgiving towards one another’s lapses, here at Ardua Hall. After the singing, the festal munching began. I noted that Aunt Elizabeth took one more egg than was her share and that Aunt Helena took one fewer, making sure that everyone noticed it. As for Aunt Vidala, snuffling into her serviette, I saw her red-rimmed eyes flicking from one of them to the other, and then to me. What is she planning? Which way will the cat jump? — After our little celebration, I made my nocturnal pilgrimage to the Hildegard Library at the far end of the Hall, along the silent moonlit walk and past my shadowy statue. I entered, I greeted the night librarian, I traversed the General section, where three of our Supplicants were grappling with their recently acquired literacy. I walked through the Reading Room, for which a higher authorization is required and where the Bibles brood in the darkness of their locked boxes, glowing with arcane energy. Then I opened a locked door and threaded my way through the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives with their classified files. It’s essential to record who is related to whom, both officially and in fact: due to the Handmaid system, a couple’s child may not be biologically related to the elite mother or even to the official father, for a desperate Handmaid is likely to seek impregnation however she may. It is our business to inform ourselves, since incest must be prevented: there are enough Unbabies already. It is also the business of Ardua Hall to guard that knowledge jealously: the Archives are the beating heart of Ardua Hall. Finally I reached my inner sanctum, deep in the Forbidden World Literature section. On my private shelves I’ve arranged my personal selection of proscribed books, off-limits to the lower ranks. Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Paradise Lost, Lives of Girls and Women—what a moral panic each one of them would cause if set loose among the Supplicants! Here I also keep another set of files, accessible only to a very few; I think of them as the secret histories of Gilead. All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognized this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it. — Once sequestered, I took my nascent manuscript out of its hiding place, a hollow rectangle cut inside one of our X-rated books: Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: A Defence of One’s Life. No one reads that weighty tome anymore, Catholicism being considered heretical and next door to voodoo, so no one is likely to peer within. Though if someone does, it will be a bullet in the head for me; a premature bullet, for I am far from ready to depart. If and when I do, I plan to go out with a far bigger bang than that. I have chosen my title advisedly, for what else am I doing here but defending my life? The life I have led. The life—I’ve told myself—I had no choice but to lead. Once, before the advent of the present regime, I gave no thought to a defence of my life. I didn’t think it was necessary. I was a family court judge, a position I’d gained through decades of hardscrabble work and arduous professional climbing, and I had been performing that function as equitably as I could. I’d acted for the betterment of the world as I saw that betterment, within the practical limits of my profession. I’d contributed to charities, I’d voted in elections both federal and municipal, I’d held worthy opinions. I’d assumed I was living virtuously; I’d assumed my virtue would be moderately applauded. Though I realized how very wrong I had been about this, and about many other things, on the day I was arrested. IV THE CLOTHES HOUND 7 Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B They say I will always have the scar, but I’m almost better; so yes, I think I’m strong enough to do this now. You’ve said that you’d like me to tell you how I got involved in this whole story, so I’ll try; though it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll start just before my birthday, or what I used to believe was my birthday. Neil and Melanie lied to me about that: they’d done it for the best of reasons and they’d meant really well, but when I first found out about it I was very angry at them. Keeping up my anger was difficult, though, because by that time they were dead. You can be angry at dead people, but you can never have a conversation about what they did; or you can only have one side of it. And I felt guilty as well as angry, because they’d been murdered, and I believed then that their murder was my fault. I was supposed to be turning sixteen. What I was most looking forward to was getting my driver’s licence. I felt too old for a birthday party, though Melanie always got me a cake and ice cream and sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,” an old song I’d loved as a child and was now finding embarrassing. I did get the cake, later—chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, my favourites—but by then I couldn’t eat it. By that time Melanie was no longer there. That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose. I was so young at that moment—just a split second ago, it seems—but I’m not young anymore. How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it. No more of that wide-eyed daydream gazing I used to do. I’ve become sharper, more focused. I’ve become narrowed. — Neil and Melanie were my parents; they ran a store called The Clothes Hound. It was basically used clothing: Melanie called it “previously loved” because she said “used” meant “exploited.” The sign outside showed a smiling pink poodle in a fluffy skirt with a pink bow on its head, carrying a shopping bag. Underneath was a slogan in italics and quotation marks: “You’d Never Know!” That meant the used clothes were so good you’d never know they were used, but that wasn’t true at all because most of the clothes were crappy. Melanie said she’d inherited The Clothes Hound from her grandmother. She also said she knew the sign was old-fashioned, but people were familiar with it and it would be disrespectful to change it now. Our store was on Queen West, in a stretch of blocks that had once all been like that, said Melanie—textiles, buttons and trims, cheap linens, dollar stores. But now it was going upmarket: caf?s with fair trade and organic were moving in, big-brand outlets, name boutiques. In response, Melanie hung a sign in the window: Wearable Art. But inside, the store was crowded with all kinds of clothes you would never call wearable art. There was one corner that was kind of designer, though anything really pricey wouldn’t be in The Clothes Hound in the first place. The rest was just everything. And all sorts of people came and went: young, old, looking for bargains or finds, or just looking. Or selling: even street people would try to get a few dollars for T-shirts they’d picked up at garage sales. Melanie worked on the main floor. She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart. She was always brisk and smiling, though on the lookout for shoplifting. After closing, she sorted and packed: this for charity, this for rags, this for Wearable Art. While doing the sorting she’d sing tunes from musicals—old ones from long ago. “Oh what a beautiful morning” was one of her favourites, and “When you walk through a storm.” I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now. Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed: there was too much fabric, it was like the ocean, waves of cloth coming in and threatening to drown her. Cashmere! Who was going to buy thirty-year-old cashmere? It didn’t improve with age, she would say—not like her. Neil had a beard that was going grey and wasn’t always trimmed, and he didn’t have much hair. He didn’t look like a businessman, but he handled what they called “the money end”: the invoices, the accounting, the taxes. He had his office on the second floor, up a flight of rubber-treaded stairs. He had a computer and a filing cabinet and a safe, but otherwise that room wasn’t much like an office: it was just as crowded and cluttered as the store because Neil liked to collect things. Wind-up music boxes, he had a number of those. Clocks, a lot of different clocks. Old adding machines that worked with a handle. Plastic toys that walked or hopped across the floor, such as bears and frogs and sets of false teeth. A slide projector for the kind of coloured slides that nobody had anymore. Cameras—he liked ancient cameras. Some of them could take better pictures than anything nowadays, he’d say. He had one whole shelf with nothing on it but cameras. One time he left the safe open and I looked inside. Instead of the wads of money I’d been expecting, there was nothing in it but a tiny metal-and-glass thing that I thought must be another toy, like the hopping false teeth. But I couldn’t see where to wind it up, and I was afraid to touch it because it was old. “Can I play with it?” I asked Neil. “Play with what?” “That toy in the safe.” “Not today,” he said, smiling. “Maybe when you’re older.” Then he shut the safe door, and I forgot about the strange little toy until it was time for me to remember it, and to understand what it was. Neil would try to repair the various items, though often he failed because he couldn’t find the parts. Then the things would just sit there, “collecting dust,” said Melanie. Neil hated throwing anything out. On the walls he had some old posters: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, from a long-ago war; a woman in overalls flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs—that was from the same olden-days war; and a red-and-black one showing a man and a flag that Neil said was from Russia before it was Russia. Those had belonged to his great-grandfather, who’d lived in Winnipeg. I knew nothing about Winnipeg except that it was cold. I loved The Clothes Hound when I was little: it was like a cave full of treasures. I wasn’t supposed to be in Neil’s office by myself because I might “touch things,” and then I might break them. But I could play with the wind-up toys and the music boxes and the adding machines, under supervision. Not the cameras though, because they were too valuable, said Neil, and anyway there was no film in them, so what would be the point? We didn’t live over the store. Our house was a long distance away, in one of those residential neighbourhoods where there were some old bungalows and also some newer, bigger houses that had been built where the bungalows had been torn down. Our house was not a bungalow—it had a second floor, where the bedrooms were—but it was not a new house either. It was made of yellow brick, and it was very ordinary. There was nothing about it that would make you look at it twice. Thinking back, I’m guessing that was their idea. 8 I was in The Clothes Hound quite a lot on Saturdays and Sundays because Melanie didn’t want me to be in our house by myself. Why not? I began to ask when I was twelve. Because what if there was a fire, said Melanie. Anyway, leaving a child in a house alone was against the law. Then I would argue that I was not a child, and she would sigh and say I didn’t really know what was and was not a child, and children were a big responsibility, and I would understand later. Then she’d say I was giving her a headache, and we would get into her car and go to the store. I was allowed to help in the store—sorting T-shirts by size, sticking the prices on them, setting aside those that needed to be either cleaned or discarded. I liked doing that: I sat at a table in the back corner, surrounded by the faint smell of mothballs, watching the people who came in. They weren’t all customers. Some of them were street people who wanted to use our staff washroom. Melanie let them do it as long as she knew them, especially in winter. There was one older man who came in quite frequently. He wore tweed overcoats that he got from Melanie and knitted vests. By the time I was thirteen, I was finding him creepy, since we’d done a module on pedophiles at school. His name was George. “You shouldn’t let George use the washroom,” I said to Melanie. “He’s a perv.” “Daisy, that’s unkind,” said Melanie. “What makes you think so?” We were at our house, in the kitchen. “He just is. He’s always hanging around. He’s bothering people for money right outside the store. Plus, he’s stalking you.” I might have said he was stalking me, which would have caused serious alarm, but that wasn’t true. George never paid any attention to me. Melanie laughed and said, “No he isn’t.” I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing. — There was another person who was in and out of the store quite a lot, but she wasn’t a street person. I guessed she was forty, or maybe closer to fifty: I couldn’t tell with older people. She usually had on a black leather jacket, black jeans, and heavy boots; she kept her long dark hair pulled back, and she didn’t wear makeup. She looked like a biker, but not a real biker—more like an ad of a biker. She wasn’t a customer—she came in through the back door to pick up clothes for charity. Melanie said the two of them were old friends so when Ada asked, it was difficult to say no. Anyway, Melanie claimed that she only gave Ada items that would be hard to sell, and it was good that people would get some use out of them. Ada didn’t look to me like the charitable type. She wasn’t soft and smiling, she was angular, and when she walked she strode. She never stayed long, and she never left without a couple of cardboard boxes of castoffs, which she stowed in whatever car she’d parked in the alleyway behind the store. I could see these cars from where I sat. They were never the same. — There was a third kind of person who came into The Clothes Hound without buying anything. These were the young women in long silvery dresses and white hats who called themselves Pearl Girls and said they were missionaries doing God’s work for Gilead. They were a lot creepier than George. They worked the downtown, talking to street people and going into shops and making pests of themselves. Some people were rude to them, but Melanie never was because she said it served no purpose. They always appeared in twos. They had white pearl necklaces and smiled a lot, but not real smiling. They would offer Melanie their printed brochures with pictures of tidy streets, happy children, and sunrises, and titles that were supposed to lure you to Gilead: “Fallen? God Can Still Forgive You!” “Homeless? There Is a Home for You in Gilead.” There was always at least one brochure about Baby Nicole. “Give Back Baby Nicole!” “Baby Nicole Belongs in Gilead!” We’d been shown a documentary about Baby Nicole at school: her mother was a Handmaid, and she’d smuggled Baby Nicole out of Gilead. Baby Nicole’s father was a top-brass super-nasty Gilead Commander, so there had been a huge uproar, and Gilead had demanded her return, so she could be reunited with her legal parents. Canada had dragged its feet and then caved in and said they would make every effort, but by that time Baby Nicole had disappeared and had never been found. Now Baby Nicole was the poster child for Gilead. On every Pearl Girls brochure there was the same picture of her. She looked like a baby, nothing special, but she was practically a saint in Gilead, said our teacher. She was an icon for us too: every time there was an anti-Gilead protest in Canada, there would be the picture, and slogans like BABY NICOLE! SYMBOL OF FREEDOM! Or BABY NICOLE! LEADING THE WAY! As if a baby could lead the way on anything, I would think to myself. I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her. I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back. The teacher had said I was callous and should learn to respect other people’s rights and feelings, and I’d said people in Gilead were people, and shouldn’t their rights and feelings be respected too? She’d lost her temper and said I needed to grow up, which was maybe true: I’d been aggravating on purpose. But I was angry about the C. Every time the Pearl Girls came, Melanie would accept the brochures and promise to keep a pile of them at point of sale. Sometimes she would even give some of the old brochures back to them: they collected the leftover ones for use in other countries. “Why do you do that?” I asked her when I was fourteen and taking a greater interest in politics. “Neil says we’re atheists. You’re just encouraging them.” We’d had three modules in school on Gilead: it was a terrible, terrible place, where women couldn’t have jobs or drive cars, and where the Handmaids were forced to get pregnant like cows, except that cows had a better deal. What sort of people could be on the side of Gilead and not be some kind of monsters? Especially female people. “Why don’t you tell them they’re evil?” “There’s no point arguing with them,” said Melanie. “They’re fanatics.” “Then I’ll tell them.” I thought I knew what was wrong with people then, especially adult people. I thought I could set them straight. The Pearl Girls were older than me, it isn’t as if they were children: how could they believe all that crap? “No,” said Melanie quite sharply. “Stay in the back. I don’t want you talking to them.” “Why not? I can deal—” “They try to con girls your age into going to Gilead with them. They’ll say the Pearl Girls are helping women and girls. They’ll appeal to your idealism.” “I would never fall for that!” I said indignantly. “I’m not fucking brain-dead.” I didn’t usually swear around Melanie and Neil, but sometimes those words just slipped out. “Watch the potty mouth,” said Melanie. “It makes a bad impression.” “Sorry. But I’m not.” “Of course not,” said Melanie. “But just leave them alone. If I take the brochures, they go away.” “Are their pearls real?” “Fake,” said Melanie. “Everything about them is fake.” 9 Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting. What I mean is, she didn’t smell to me like my mother. One of my favourite books at the school library when I was younger was about a man who got himself into a wolf pack. This man could never take a bath because the wolf pack scent would wash off and then the wolves would reject him. With Melanie and me, it was more like we needed to add on that layer of pack-scent, the thing that would tag us as us—us-together. But that never happened. We were never very snuggly. Also, Neil and Melanie weren’t like the parents of the kids I knew. They were too careful around me, as if I was breakable. It was like I was a prize cat they were cat-sitting: you’d take your own cat for granted, you’d be casual about it, but someone else’s cat would be another story because if you lost that cat you would feel guilty about it in a completely different way. Another thing: the kids from school had pictures of themselves—a lot of pictures. Their parents documented every minute of their lives. Some of the kids even had photos of themselves being born, which they’d brought to Show and Tell. I used to think that was gross—blood and great big legs, with a little head coming out from between them. And they had baby pictures of themselves, hundreds of them. These kids could hardly burp without some adult pointing a camera at them and telling them to do it again—as if they lived their lives twice, once in reality and the second time for the photo. That didn’t happen to me. Neil’s collection of antique cameras was cool, but cameras that actually worked were non-existent in our house. Melanie told me that all the early pictures of me had been burnt up in a fire. Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did. — Now I’m going to tell you about the stupid thing I did, and the consequences of it. I’m not proud of how I behaved: looking back, I realize how dumb it was. But I couldn’t see that at the time. A week before my birthday, there was going to be a protest march about Gilead. Footage of a new batch of executions had been smuggled out of Gilead and broadcast on the news: women being hanged for heresy and apostasy and also for trying to take babies out of Gilead, which was treason under their laws. The two oldest grades in our school had been given time off so we could go to the protest as part of World Social Awareness. We’d made signs: NO TRADE WITH GILEAD! JUSTICE FOR GILIBAD WOMEN! BABY NICOLE, GUIDING STAR! Some kids had added green signs: GILEAD, CLIMATE SCIENCE DE-LIAR! GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!, with pictures of forest fires and dead birds and fish and people. Several teachers and some volunteer parents were going to come with us to make sure nothing violent happened to us. I was excited because it would be my first-ever protest march. But then Neil and Melanie said I couldn’t go. “Why not?” I said. “Everyone else is going!” “Absolutely not,” said Neil. “You’re always saying how we should defend our principles,” I said. “This is different. It’s not safe, Daisy,” said Neil. “Life isn’t safe, you say that yourself. Anyway lots of teachers are coming. And it’s part of school—if I don’t go, I’ll lose marks!” This last part wasn’t exactly true, but Neil and Melanie liked me to have good grades. “Maybe she could go,” said Melanie. “If we ask Ada to go with her?” “I’m not a baby, I don’t need a babysitter,” I said. “Are you hallucinating?” Neil said to Melanie. “That thing will be crawling with press! It’ll be on the news!” He was tugging at his hair, what was left of it—a sign that he was worried. “That is the point,” I said. I’d made one of the posters we’d be carrying—big red letters and a black skull. GILEAD=DEATH OF THE MIND. “The whole idea is to be on the news!” Melanie put her hands over her ears. “I’m getting a headache. Neil is right. No. I’m saying no. You will spend the afternoon at the store helping me out, period.” “Fine, lock me up,” I said. I stomped off to my room and slammed the door. They couldn’t make me. — The school I went to was called the Wyle School. It was named after Florence Wyle, a sculptor of olden times whose picture was in the main entrance hall. The school was supposed to encourage creativity, said Melanie, and understanding democratic freedom and thinking for yourself, said Neil. They said that was why they’d sent me there, though they didn’t agree with private schools in general; but the standards of the public schools were so low, and of course we should all work to improve the system, but meanwhile they did not want me getting knifed by some junior drug pusher. I think now they chose the Wyle School for another reason. Wyle took strict attendance: it was impossible to skip school. So Melanie and Neil could always know where I was. I didn’t love the Wyle School, but I didn’t hate it either. It was something to get through on my way to real life, the shape of which would become clear to me soon. Not long before, I’d wanted to be a small-animal vet, but that dream came to seem childish to me. After that I’d decided to be a surgeon, but then I saw a video of a surgery at school and it made me nauseous. Some of the other Wyle School students wanted to be singers or designers or other creative things, but I was too tone-deaf and clunky for that. I had some friends at school: gossiping friends, girls; homework-trading friends, some of each. I made sure that my marks were stupider than I was—I didn’t want to stand out—so my own homework didn’t have a high trading value. Gym and sports, though—it was all right to be good at those, and I was, especially any sports favouring height and speed, such as basketball. That made me popular when it came to teams. But outside of school I led a constricted life, since Neil and Melanie were so jumpy. I wasn’t allowed to stroll around in shopping malls because they were infested by crack addicts, said Melanie, or hang out in parks, said Neil, because of the strange men lurking there. So my social life was pretty much a zero: it consisted entirely of things I would be allowed to do when I was older. Neil’s magic word in our house was No. This time, though, I wasn’t going to back down: I was going to that protest march no matter what. The school had hired a couple of buses to take us. Melanie and Neil had tried to head me off by phoning the principal and denying permission, and the principal had asked me to stay behind, and I’d assured her that of course I understood, no problem, and I would wait for Melanie to come and pick me up in her car. But it was only the bus driver checking off the kids’ names and he didn’t know who was who, and everyone was milling around, and the parents and teachers weren’t paying attention and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to come, so I switched identity cards with a member of my basketball team who didn’t want to go and made it onto the bus, feeling very pleased with myself. 10 The protest march was thrilling at first. It was downtown, near the Legislature Building, though it wasn’t really a march because nobody marched anywhere, they were too jammed together. People made speeches. A Canadian relative of a woman who’d died in the Gilead Colonies cleaning up deadly radiation talked about slave labour. The leader of the Survivors of Gilead National Homelands Genocide told about the forced marches to North Dakota, where people had been crowded like sheep into fenced-in ghost towns with no food and water, and how thousands had died, and how people were risking their lives walking north to the Canadian border in winter, and he held up a hand with missing fingers and said, Frostbite. Then a speaker from SanctuCare—the refugee organization for escaped Gilead women—spoke about those whose babies had been taken away from them, and how cruel that was, and how if you tried to get your baby back they would accuse you of disrespecting God. I couldn’t hear all the speeches because sometimes the sound system cut out, but the meaning was clear enough. There were a lot of Baby Nicole posters: ALL GILEAD BABIES ARE BABY NICOLE! Then our school group shouted things and held up our signs, and other people had different signs: DOWN WITH GILIBAD FASCISTS! SANCTUARY NOW! Right then some counter-marchers turned up with different signs: CLOSE THE BORDER! GILEAD KEEP YOUR OWN SLUTS AND BRATS, WE GOT ENOUGH HERE! STOP THE INVASION! HANDJOBS GO HOME! Among them there was a group of those Pearl Girls in their silvery dresses and pearls—with signs saying DEATH TO BABY STEALERS and GIVE BACK BABY NICOLE. People on our side were throwing eggs at them and cheering when one hit, but the Pearl Girls just kept smiling in their glassy way. Scuffles broke out. A group of people dressed in black with their faces covered started smashing store windows. Suddenly there were a lot of police in riot gear. They seemed to come out of nowhere. They were banging their shields and moving forward, and hitting kids and other people with their batons. Up to that time I’d been elated, but now I was scared. I wanted to get out of there, but it was so jam-packed I could hardly move. I couldn’t find the rest of my class, and the crowd was panicking. People surged this way and that, screaming and shouting. Something hit me in the stomach: an elbow, I think. I was breathing fast and I could feel tears coming out of my eyes. “This way,” said a gravelly voice behind me. It was Ada. She grabbed me by the collar and dragged me behind her. I’m not sure how she cleared a path: I’m guessing she kicked legs. Then we were in a street behind the riot, as they called it later on TV. When I saw the footage I thought, Now I know what it feels like to be in a riot: it feels like drowning. Not that I’d ever drowned. “Melanie said you might be here,” said Ada. “I’m taking you home.” “No, but—” I said. I didn’t want to admit that I was scared. “Right now. Toot sweet. No ifs and buts.” — I saw myself on the news that night: I was holding up a sign and shouting. I thought Neil and Melanie would be furious with me, but they weren’t. Instead they were anxious. “Why did you do that?” said Neil. “Didn’t you hear us?” “You always said a person should stand up against injustice,” I said. “The school says that too.” I knew I’d crossed a line, but I wasn’t about to apologize. “What’s our next move?” said Melanie, not to me but to Neil. “Daisy, could you get me a water? There’s some ice in the fridge.” “It might not be so bad,” said Neil. “We can’t take the chance,” I heard Melanie saying. “We need to get moving, like yesterday. I’m calling Ada, she can arrange a van.” “There’s no fallback ready,” said Neil. “We can’t…” I came back into the room with the glass of water. “What’s going on?” I said. “Don’t you have homework?” said Neil. 11 Three days later there was a break-in at The Clothes Hound. The store had an alarm, but the burglars were in and out before anyone could get there, which was the problem with alarms, said Melanie. They didn’t find any money because Melanie never kept cash there, but they took some of the Wearable Art, and they trashed Neil’s office—his files were scattered over the floor. They also took some of his collectibles—a few clocks and old cameras, an antique wind-up clown. They set a fire, but in an amateur way, said Neil, so the fire was quickly put out. The police came around and asked if Neil and Melanie had any enemies. They said that no they didn’t, and everything was okay—probably it was only some street people after drug money—but I could tell they were upset because they were talking in that way they had when they didn’t want me to hear. “They got the camera,” Neil was saying to Melanie as I was coming into the kitchen. “What camera?” I said. “Oh, just an old camera,” Neil said. More hair-tugging. “A rare one, though.” From then on, Neil and Melanie got more and more jittery. Neil ordered a new alarm system for the store. Melanie said we might be moving to a different house, but when I started asking questions she said it was just an idea. Neil said No harm done about the break-in. He said it several times, which left me wondering what sort of harm actually had been done, besides the disappearance of his favourite camera. The night after the break-in, I found Melanie and Neil watching TV. They didn’t usually really watch it—it was just always on—but this time they were intent. A Pearl Girl identified only as “Aunt Adrianna” had been found dead in a condo that she and her Pearl Girls companion had rented. She’d been tied to a doorknob with her own silvery belt around her neck. She’d been dead for a number of days, said the forensic expert. It was another condo owner who’d detected the smell and alerted the police. The police said it was a suicide, self-strangulation in this manner being a common method. There was a picture of the dead Pearl Girl. I studied it carefully: sometimes it was hard to tell Pearl Girls apart because of their outfits, but I remembered she’d been in The Clothes Hound recently, handing out brochures. So had her partner, identified as “Aunt Sally,” who—said the news anchor—was nowhere to be found. There was a picture of her too: police were asking that sightings be reported. The Gilead Consulate had made no comment as yet. “This is terrible,” said Neil to Melanie. “The poor girl. What a catastrophe.” “Why?” I said. “The Pearl Girls work for Gilead. They hate us. Everyone knows that.” They both looked at me then. What’s the word for that look? Desolate, I think. I was baffled: why should they care? — The really bad thing happened on my birthday. The morning started as if things were normal. I got up, I put on my green plaid Wyle School uniform—did I say we had a uniform? I added my black lace-up shoes to my green-socked feet, pulled my hair back into the ponytail that was among the prescribed school looks—no dangling locks—and headed downstairs. Melanie was in the kitchen, which had a granite island. What I would have liked instead was one of the resin-and-recycled tops like those in our school cafeteria—you could see down through the resin to the objects inside, which in one counter included a raccoon skeleton, so there was always something to focus on. The kitchen island was where we ate most of our meals. We did have a living-dining area with a table. That was supposed to be for dinner parties, but Melanie and Neil didn’t throw dinner parties; instead they threw meetings, which had to do with various causes of theirs. The night before, some people had come over: there were still several coffee cups on the table, and a plate with cracker crumbs and a few wizened grapes. I hadn’t seen who these people were because I was upstairs in my room, avoiding the fallout from whatever it was I had done. That thing was evidently bigger than simple disobedience. I went into the kitchen and sat down at the island. Melanie’s back was to me; she was looking out the window. From that window you could see our yard—round cement planters with rosemary bushes in them, a patio with an outdoor table and chairs, and a corner of the street at the front. “Morning,” I said. Melanie whipped around. “Oh! Daisy!” she said. “I didn’t hear you! Happy birthday! Sweet sixteen!” — Neil didn’t turn up for breakfast before it was time for me to leave for school. He was upstairs talking on his phone. I was slightly hurt, but not very: he was very absent-minded. Melanie drove me, as she usually did: she didn’t like me going to school by myself on the bus, even though the stop was right near our house. She said—as she always said—that she was on her way to The Clothes Hound and she might as well drop me off. “Tonight we’ll have your birthday cake, with ice cream,” she said, her voice rising at the end as if it was a question. “I’ll pick you up after school. There are some things Neil and I want to tell you, now that you’re old enough.” “Okay,” I said. I thought this was going to be about boys and what consent meant, which I’d heard enough about at school. It was bound to be awkward, but I would have to get through it. I wanted to say I was sorry for having gone to the protest march, but then we were at the school and I hadn’t said it. I got out of the car silently; Melanie waited until I was at the entrance. I waved at her, and she waved back. I don’t know why I did that—I didn’t usually. I guess it was a sort of apology. I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I? It was normal. Normal is like looking out a car window. Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance. You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth. A few of my homework friends sang “Happy Birthday” to me in the cafeteria while we were having lunch. Some of the others clapped. Then it was the afternoon. The air was stale, the clock slowed down. I sat in French class, where we were supposed to be reading a page from a novella by Colette—Mitsou, about a music-hall star hiding a couple of men in her wardrobe. As well as being French, it was supposed to be about how terrible life used to be for women, but Mitsou’s life didn’t seem so terrible to me. Hiding a handsome man in her closet—I wished I could do that. But even if I knew such a man, where could I stash him? Not in my own bedroom closet: Melanie would catch on right away, and if not, I’d have to feed him. I gave that some thought: What sort of food could I sneak without Melanie noticing? Cheese and crackers? Sex with him would be out of the question: it would be too risky to let him out of the closet, and there wasn’t room for me to cram myself in there with him. This was the kind of daydreaming I often did in school: it passed the time. Still, it was a problem in my life. I’d never gone out with anyone because I’d never met anyone I might want to go out with. There seemed to be no way that could happen. Boys from the Wyle School were not possible: I’d gone through grade school with them, I’d seen them pick their noses, and some of them had been pants-wetters. You can’t feel romantic with those images in your mind. By this time I was feeling glum, which is one of the effects a birthday can have: you’re expecting a magic transformation but then it doesn’t happen. To keep myself awake I pulled hairs out of my head, in behind my right ear, just two or three hairs at a time. I knew that if I pulled out that same hair too often I risked creating a bald spot, but I had only begun this habit a few weeks before. Finally the time was up and I could go home. I walked along the polished hall towards the front door of the school and stepped outside. There was a light drizzle; I didn’t have my raincoat. I scanned the street: Melanie wasn’t waiting in her car. All of a sudden Ada appeared beside me, in her black leather jacket. “Come on. Let’s get in the car,” she said. “What?” I said. “Why?” “It’s about Neil and Melanie.” I looked at her face, and I could tell: something really bad must have happened. If I’d been older I would’ve asked what it was right away, but I didn’t because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I’d read, I’d come across the words nameless dread. They’d just been words then, but now that’s exactly what I felt. Once we were in the car and she’d started driving, I said, “Did someone have a heart attack?” It was all I could think of. “No,” Ada said. “Listen carefully and don’t freak out on me. You can’t go back to your house.” The awful feeling in my stomach got worse. “What is it? Was there a fire?” “There’s been an explosion,” she said. “It was a car bomb. Outside The Clothes Hound.” “Shit. Is the store wrecked?” I said. First the break-in, and now this. “It was Melanie’s car. She and Neil were both in it.” I sat there for a minute without speaking; I couldn’t make sense of this. What kind of maniac would want to kill Neil and Melanie? They were so ordinary. “So they’re dead?” I said finally. I was shivering. I tried to picture the explosion, but all I could see was a blank. A black square. V Van 12 The Ardua Hall Holograph Who are you, my reader? And when are you? Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps never. Possibly you are one of our Aunts from Ardua Hall, stumbling across this account by chance. After a moment of horror at my sinfulness, will you burn these pages to preserve my pious image intact? Or will you succumb to the universal thirst for power and scuttle off to the Eyes to snitch on me? Or will you be a snoop from outside our borders, rooting through the archives of Ardua Hall once this regime has fallen? In which case, the stash of incriminating documents I’ve been hoarding for so many years will have featured not only at my own trial—should fate prove malicious, and should I live to feature at such a trial—but at the trials of many others. I’ve made it my business to know where the bodies are buried. — By now you may be wondering how I’ve avoided being purged by those higher up—if not in the earlier days of Gilead, at least as it settled into its dog-eat-dog maturity. By then a number of erstwhile notables had been hung on the Wall, since those on the topmost pinnacle took care that no ambitious challengers would displace them. You might assume that, being a woman, I would be especially vulnerable to this kind of winnowing, but you would be wrong. Simply by being female I was excluded from the lists of potential usurpers, since no woman could ever sit on the Council of the Commanders; so on that front, ironically, I was safe. But there are three other reasons for my political longevity. First, the regime needs me. I control the women’s side of their enterprise with an iron fist in a leather glove in a woollen mitten, and I keep things orderly: like a harem eunuch, I am uniquely placed to do so. Second, I know too much about the leaders—too much dirt—and they are uncertain as to what I may have done with it in the way of documentation. If they string me up, will that dirt somehow be leaked? They might well suspect I’ve taken backup precautions, and they would be right. Third, I’m discreet. Each one of the top men has always felt that his secrets are safe with me; but—as I’ve made obliquely clear—only so long as I myself am safe. I have long been a believer in checks and balances. Despite these security measures, I do not allow myself to be lulled. Gilead is a slippery place: accidents happen frequently. Someone has already written my funeral eulogy, it goes without saying. I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That’s all I need. — Yesterday I received an unexpected invitation to a private meeting with Commander Judd. It’s not the first such invitation I’ve received. Some of the earlier encounters were unpleasant; others, of a more recent date, have been mutually profitable. As I set out across the swatch of feeble grass that covers the ground between Ardua Hall and the headquarters of the Eyes, and climbed—somewhat laboriously—the hillside of imposing white stairs that leads to the many-pillared main entrance, I was wondering which kind this meeting would prove to be. I must admit that my heart was beating faster than usual, and not only from the stairs: not everyone who has gone in through that particular doorway has come out again. The Eyes hold sway in a former grand library. It now shelters no books but their own, the original contents having been either burned or, if valuable, added to the private collections of various sticky-fingered Commanders. Being now thoroughly instructed in Scripture, I can quote chapter and verse on the hazards of snatching loot forbidden by the Lord, but discretion is the better part of valour, so I do not. I am pleased to relate that no one has erased the murals on either side of this building’s interior staircase: since they depict dead soldiers, angels, and wreaths of victory, they are pious enough to have been deemed acceptable, although the flag of the erstwhile United States of America in the right-hand one has been painted over with that of Gilead. Commander Judd has risen in the world since I first knew him. Straightening out Gilead’s women offered little real scope for his ego and garnered insufficient respect. But as the Commander in charge of the Eyes, he is now universally feared. His office is at the back of the building, in a space once consecrated to book storage and research cubicles. A large Eye with a real crystal in the pupil is centred on the door. That way he can see who is about to knock. “Come in,” he said as I was raising my hand. The two junior Eyes who’d been escorting me took this as their signal to depart. “Dear Aunt Lydia,” he said, beaming from behind his enormous desk. “Thank you for gracing my humble office. You are well, I hope?” He did not hope that, but I let it pass. “Praise be,” I said. “And you? And your Wife?” This Wife has lasted longer than usual. His Wives have a habit of dying: Commander Judd is a great believer in the restorative powers of young women, as were King David and assorted Central American drug lords. After each respectable period of mourning, he has let it be known that he is in the market for another child bride. To be clear: he has let it be known to me. “I and my Wife are both well, thanks be,” he said. “I have wonderful news for you. Please sit down.” I did so, and prepared to listen attentively. “Our agents in Canada have succeeded in identifying and eliminating two of the most active Mayday operatives. Their cover was a used clothing store in a seedy area of Toronto. A preliminary search of the premises suggested that they’d been playing a key role in aiding and abetting the Underground Femaleroad.” “Providence has blessed us,” I said. “Our enthusiastic young Canadian agents carried out the operation, but your Pearl Girls pointed the way. So useful of you to share their intuitive female gleanings.” “They are observant, well trained, and obedient,” I said. The Pearl Girls were originally my idea—other religions had missionaries, so why not ours? And other missionaries had produced converts, so why not ours? And other missionaries had gathered information used in espionage, so why not ours?—but, being no fool or at least not that kind of fool, I’d let Commander Judd take credit for the plan. Officially, the Pearl Girls report only to me, as it would be unseemly for the Commander to involve himself in the details of what is essentially women’s work; though of course I must pass along to him anything I deem either necessary or unavoidable. Too much and I’d lose control, too little and I’d fall under suspicion. Their attractive brochures are composed by us, and designed and printed by the small Ardua Hall press located in one of our cellars. My Pearl Girls initiative came at a crucial moment for him, just as the folly of his National Homelands fiasco was becoming undeniable. The genocide charges levied by international human rights organizations had become an embarrassment, the flow of refugee Homelanders from North Dakota across the Canadian border was an unstoppable flood, and Judd’s ridiculous Certificate of Whiteness scheme had collapsed in a welter of forgeries and bribery. The launch of the Pearl Girls saved his bacon, though I have since wondered whether it was politic of me to have saved it. He owes me, but that could prove a liability. Some people do not enjoy being indebted. Right then, however, Commander Judd was all smiles. “Indeed, they are Pearls of Great Price. And with those two Mayday operatives out of commission, there will be less trouble for you, it is to be hoped—fewer Handmaids escaping.” “Praise be.” “Our feat of surgical demolition and cleansing won’t be announced by us publicly, of course.” “We’ll be blamed for it anyway,” I said. “By the Canadian and international media. Naturally.” “And we will deny it,” he said. “Naturally.” There was a moment of silence as we regarded each other across his desk, like two chess players, possibly; or like two old comrades—for both of us had survived three waves of purges. That fact alone had created a bond of sorts. “There is something that has been puzzling me, however,” he said. “Those two Mayday terrorists must have had a counterpart here in Gilead.” “Really? Surely not!” I exclaimed. “We’ve made an analysis of all known escapes: their high success rate cannot be explained without an element of leakage. Someone in Gilead—someone with access to our security personnel deployments—must have been informing the Underground Femaleroad. Which routes are watched, which are likely to be clear, that sort of thing. As you know, the war has meant that manpower, especially in Vermont and Maine, is thin on the ground. We’ve needed the bodies elsewhere.” “Who in Gilead would be so treacherous?” I asked. “Betraying our future!” “We’re working on it,” he said. “Meanwhile, if any ideas should occur to you…” “Of course,” I said. “There’s one other thing,” he said. “Aunt Adrianna. The Pearl Girl found dead in Toronto.” “Yes. Devastating,” I said. “Is there any further information?” “We’re expecting an update from the Consulate,” he said. “I’ll let you know.” “Anything I can do,” I said. “You know you can count on me.” “In so many ways, dear Aunt Lydia,” he said. “Your price is above rubies, praise be.” I like a compliment as well as anyone. “Thank you,” I said. — My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country—the country that I still foolishly thought was the same as the country to which I had for so many years belonged. Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them. In that vanished country of mine, things had been on a downward spiral for years. The floods, the fires, the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the droughts, the water shortages, the earthquakes. Too much of this, too little of that. The decaying infrastructure—why hadn’t someone decommissioned those atomic reactors before it was too late? The tanking economy, the joblessness, the falling birth rate. People became frightened. Then they became angry. The absence of viable remedies. The search for someone to blame. Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we’d been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you. — My arrest came shortly after the Sons of Jacob attack that liquidated Congress. Initially we were told it was Islamic terrorists: a National Emergency was declared, but we were told that we should carry on as usual, that the Constitution would shortly be reinstated, and that the state of emergency would soon be over. That was correct, but not in the way we’d assumed. It was a viciously hot day. The courts had been closed—temporarily, until a valid line of command and the rule of law could be reinstituted, we were told. Despite that, some of us had gone into work—the freed-up time could always be used to tackle the document backlog, or that was my excuse. Really I wanted company. Oddly, none of our male colleagues had felt the same need. Perhaps they were finding solace among their wives and children. As I was reading through some casework, one of my younger colleagues—Katie, recently appointed, thirty-six, and three months pregnant via sperm bank—came into my office. “We need to leave,” she said. I stared at her. “What do you mean?” I said. “We need to get out of the country. There’s something happening.” “Well, of course—the state of emergency—” “No, more than that. My bank card’s been cancelled. My credit cards—both of them. I was trying to get a plane ticket, that’s how I know. Is your car here?” “What?” I said. “Why? They can’t simply cut off your money!” “It seems they can,” said Katie. “If you’re a woman. That’s what the airline said. The provisional government has just passed new laws: women’s money now belongs to the male next of kin.” “It’s worse than you think,” said Anita, a somewhat older colleague. She’d come into my office too. “Way worse.” “I don’t have a male next of kin,” I said. I felt stunned. “This is completely unconstitutional!” “Forget the Constitution,” said Anita. “They’ve just abolished it. I heard about that in the bank, when I tried to…” She began crying. “Pull yourself together,” I said. “We need to think.” “You’ll have a male relative somewhere,” said Katie. “They must have been planning this for years: they told me that my male next of kin is my twelve-year-old nephew.” At that moment the main door was kicked in. Five men entered, two by two and then one on his own, submachine guns at the ready. Katie, Anita, and I came out of my office. The general receptionist, Tessa, screamed and ducked down behind her desk. A couple of them were young—twenties, perhaps—but the other three were middle-aged. The younger ones were fit, the others had beer bellies. They were wearing camouflage gear direct from central casting, and if it hadn’t been for the guns I might have laughed, not yet realizing that female laughter would soon be in short supply. “What’s this about?” I said. “You could have knocked! The door was open!” The men ignored me. One of them—the leader, I suppose—said to his companion, “Got the list?” I tried a more outraged tone. “Who is responsible for this damage?” Shock was beginning to hit me: I felt cold. Was this a robbery? A hostage-taking? “What do you want? We don’t keep any money here.” Anita nudged me with her elbow to get me to keep quiet: she already had a better grasp of the situation than I did. The second-in-command held up a sheet of paper. “Who’s the pregnant one?” he said. The three of us looked at one another. Katie stepped forward. “I am,” she said. “No husband, right?” “No, I…” Katie was holding her hands protectively in front of her stomach. She’d chosen single motherhood, as many women did in those days. “The high school,” the leader said. The two younger men stepped forward. “Come with us, ma’am,” said the first. “Why?” said Katie. “You can’t just barge in here and—” “Come with us,” said the second younger man. They grabbed her by her arms, hauled. She screamed, but out she went through the door nonetheless. “Stop that!” I said. We could hear her voice outside in the hall, diminishing. “I’m giving the orders,” said the leader. He had eyeglasses and a handlebar moustache, but these did not render him avuncular. I’ve had cause to notice over the course of what you might call my Gilead career that underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it. “Don’t worry, she won’t be hurt,” said the second-in-command. “She’s going to a place of safety.” He read our names off the list. There was no point in denying who we were: they already knew. “Where’s the receptionist?” said the leader. “This Tessa.” Poor Tessa emerged from behind her desk. She was shivering with terror. “What d’you think?” said the man with the list. “Box store, high school, or stadium?” “How old are you?” said the leader. “Never mind, it’s here. Twenty-seven.” “Let’s give her a chance. Box store. Maybe some guy might marry her.” “Stand over there,” said the leader to Tessa. “Christ, she’s wet herself,” said the third older man. “Don’t swear,” said the leader. “Good. A fearful one, maybe she’ll do as she’s told.” “Fat chance any of them will,” said the third man. “They’re women.” I think he was making a joke. The two young men who had disappeared with Katie now came back through the door. “She’s in the van,” said one. “Where’s the other two so-called lady judges?” said the leader. “This Loretta? This Davida?” “They’re on lunch,” said Anita. “We’ll take these two. Wait here with her until they come back,” said the leader, indicating Tessa. “Then lock her in the box-store van. Then bring the two lunch ones.” “Box store or stadium? For these two here?” “Stadium,” said the leader. “One of them’s overage, they’ve both got law degrees, they’re lady judges. You heard the orders.” “It’s a waste though, in some cases,” said the second one, nodding towards Anita. “Providence will decide,” said the leader. Anita and I were taken down the stairs, five flights. Was the elevator running? I don’t know. Then we were cuffed with our hands in front of us and inserted into a black van, with a solid panel between us and the driver and mesh inside the darkened glass windows. The two of us had been mute all this time, because what was there to say? It was clear that cries for help would go unanswered. There was no point in shouting or flinging ourselves against the walls of the van: it would simply have been a futile expense of energy. And so we waited. At least there was air conditioning. And seats to sit down on. “What will they do?” Anita whispered. We couldn’t see out the windows. Nor could we see each other, except as dim shapes. “I don’t know,” I said. — The van paused—at a checkpoint, I suppose—then moved, then halted. “Final stop,” said a voice. “Out!” The back doors of the van were opened. Anita clambered out first. “Move it,” said a different voice. It was hard to get down from the van with my hands cuffed; someone took my arm and pulled, and I lurched onto the ground. As the van pulled away, I stood unsteadily and gazed around. I was in an open space in which there were many groups of other people—other women, I should say—and a large number of men with guns. I was in a stadium. But it was no longer that. Now it was a prison. VI SIX FOR DEAD 13 Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A It has been very difficult for me to tell you about the events surrounding my mother’s death. Tabitha had loved me without question, and now she was gone, and everything around me felt wavering and uncertain. Our house, the garden, even my own room—they seemed no longer real—as if they would dissolve into a mist and vanish. I kept thinking of a Bible verse Aunt Vidala had made us learn by heart: For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. Withereth, withereth. It was like lisping—as if God did not know how to speak clearly. A lot of us had stumbled over that word while reciting it. — For my mother’s funeral I was given a black dress. Some of the other Commanders and their Wives were in attendance, and our Marthas. There was a closed coffin with the earthly husk of my mother inside it, and my father made a short speech about what a fine Wife she had been, forever thinking of others ahead of herself, an example for all the women of Gilead, and then he said a prayer, thanking God for freeing her from pain, and everyone said Amen. They didn’t make a big fuss over the funerals of women in Gilead, even high-ranking ones. The important people came back to our house from the cemetery, and there was a small reception. Zilla had made cheese puffs for it, one of her specialties, and she’d let me help her. That was some comfort: to be allowed to put on an apron, and to grate the cheese, and to squeeze the dough out of the pastry tube onto the baking sheet, and then to watch through the glass window of the oven as it puffed up. We baked these at the last minute, once the people had come. Then I took off the apron and went in to the reception in my black dress, as my father had requested, and was silent, as he had also requested. Most of the guests ignored me, except for one of the Wives, whose name was Paula. She was a widow, and somewhat famous because her husband, Commander Saunders, had been killed in his study by their Handmaid, using a kitchen skewer—a scandal that had been much whispered about at school the year before. What was the Handmaid doing in the study? How had she got in? Paula’s version was that the girl was insane, and had crept downstairs at night and stolen the skewer from the kitchen, and when poor Commander Saunders had opened his study door she had taken him by surprise—killed a man who had always been respectful to her and to her position. The Handmaid had run away, but they’d caught her and hanged her, and displayed her on the Wall. The other version was Shunammite’s, via her Martha, via the main Martha at the Saunders house. It involved violent urges and a sinful connection. The Handmaid must have enticed Commander Saunders in some way, and then he’d ordered her to creep downstairs during the nights when everyone was supposed to be asleep. Then she would slither into the study, where the Commander would be waiting for her, and his eyes would light up like flashlights. Who knows what lustful demands he must have made? Demands that had been unnatural, and had driven the Handmaid mad, not that it would take that much with some of them, because they were borderline as it was, but this one must have been worse than most. It did not bear thinking about, said the Marthas, who could think of little else. When her husband hadn’t turned up for breakfast, Paula had gone looking for him and had discovered him lying on the floor without his trousers. Paula had put the trousers back on him before calling the Angels. She’d had to order one of her own Marthas to help her: dead people were either stiff or floppy, and Commander Saunders was a large and clumsily shaped man. Shunammite said the Martha said that Paula had got a lot of blood on herself while wrestling the clothes onto the dead body, and must have nerves of steel because she’d done what was right to save appearances. I preferred Shunammite’s version to Paula’s. I thought about it at the funeral reception when my father was introducing me to Paula. She was eating a cheese puff; she gave me a measuring look. I’d seen a look like that on Vera when she was poking a straw into a cake to see if it was done. Then she smiled and said, “Agnes Jemima. How lovely,” and patted me on the head as if I was five, and said it must be nice to have a new dress. I felt like biting her: was the new dress supposed to make up for my mother being dead? But it was better to hold my tongue than to show my true thoughts. I did not always succeed in that, but I succeeded on this occasion. “Thank you,” I said. I pictured her kneeling on the floor in a pool of blood, trying to put a pair of trousers on a dead man. This put her in an awkward position in my mind, and made me feel better. — Several months after my mother’s death, my father married the widow Paula. On her finger appeared my mother’s magic ring. I suppose my father didn’t want to waste it, and why buy another ring when such a beautiful and expensive one was already available? The Marthas grumbled about it. “Your mother wanted that ring to go to you,” Rosa said. But of course there was nothing they could do. I was enraged, but there was nothing I could do either. I brooded and sulked, but neither my father nor Paula paid any attention to that. They had taken to doing something they called “humouring me,” which in practice meant ignoring any displays of mood so I would learn that I could not influence them by stubborn silences. They would even discuss this pedagogical technique in front of me while speaking about me in the third person. I see Agnes is in one of her moods. Yes, it is like the weather, it will soon pass. Young girls are like that. 14 Shortly after my father’s wedding to Paula, something very disturbing occurred at school. I am recounting it here not because I wish to be gruesome, but because it made a deep impression on me, and may help to explain why some of us from that time and place acted as we did. This event took place in the Religion class, which, as I have mentioned, was taught to us by Aunt Vidala. She was in charge of our school, and indeed of the other schools like ours—the Vidala Schools, they were called—but the picture of her that hung at the back of every classroom was smaller than the picture of Aunt Lydia. There were five of these pictures: Baby Nicole at the top, because we had to pray for her safe return every day. Then Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Helena, then Aunt Lydia, then Aunt Vidala. Baby Nicole and Aunt Lydia had gold frames, whereas the other three only had silver frames. Of course we all knew who the four women were: they were the Founders. But the founders of what we were not sure, nor did we dare to ask: we did not want to offend Aunt Vidala by calling attention to her smaller picture. Shunammite said that the eyes of the Aunt Lydia picture could follow you around the room and that it could hear what you said, but she exaggerated and made things up. Aunt Vidala sat on top of her big desk. She liked to have a good view of us. She told us to move our desks forward and closer together. Then she said we were now old enough to hear one of the most important stories in the Bible—important because it was a message from God especially for girls and women, so we must listen carefully. This was the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces. Shunammite, sitting beside me, whispered, “I already know this.” Becka, on the other side, inched her hand over to mine beneath the desktop. “Shunammite, be silent,” said Aunt Vidala. After blowing her nose, she told us the following story. A man’s concubine—which was a sort of Handmaid—ran away from her owner, back to her father’s abode. That was very disobedient of her. The man went to collect her, and being a kind and forgiving man, all he asked was to have her back. The father, knowing the rules, said yes—he was disappointed in his daughter for being so disobedient—and the two men had a dinner to celebrate their accord. But this meant that the man and his concubine were late setting out, and when it got dark they took refuge in a town where the man didn’t know anyone. But a generous citizen said they could stay overnight in his house. But some other citizens, being filled with sinful urges, came to the house and demanded that the traveller be handed over to them. They wanted to do shameful things to him. Lustful and sinful things. But that would have been especially wicked between men, so the generous man and the traveller put the concubine outside the door instead. “Well, she deserved it, don’t you think?” said Aunt Vidala. “She shouldn’t have run away. Think of all the suffering she caused to other people!” But when it was morning, said Aunt Vidala, the traveller opened the door, and the concubine was lying on the threshold. “Get up,” the man said to her. But she did not get up because she was dead. The sinful men had killed her. “How?” Becka asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper; she was squeezing my hand hard. “How did they kill her?” Two tears were running down her cheeks. “Many men doing lustful things all at once will kill a girl,” said Aunt Vidala. “This story is God’s way of telling us that we should be content with our lot and not rebel against it.” The man in charge should be honoured by the woman, she said. If not, this was the result. God always made the punishment fit the crime. I learned the rest of the story later—how the traveller cut the concubine’s body into twelve pieces and sent one to each of the Tribes of Israel, calling on them to avenge the misuse of his concubine by executing the murderers, and how the Tribe of Benjamin refused because the killers were Benjaminites. In the war of vengeance that followed, the Tribe of Benjamin was almost obliterated and their wives and children were all killed. Then the other eleven tribes reasoned that to obliterate the twelfth would be bad, so they stopped killing. The remaining Benjaminites couldn’t marry any other women officially to make more children, since the rest of the tribes had taken an oath against that, but they were told they could steal some girls and marry them unofficially, which is what they did. But we didn’t hear the rest of the story at the time because Becka had burst into tears. “That is horrible, that is horrible!” she said. The rest of us sat very still. “Control yourself, Becka,” said Aunt Vidala. But Becka couldn’t. She was crying so hard I thought she would stop breathing. “May I give her a hug, Aunt Vidala?” I asked at last. We were encouraged to pray for other girls but not to touch one another. “I suppose so,” said Aunt Vidala grudgingly. I put my arms around Becka, and she wept against my shoulder. Aunt Vidala was annoyed by the state Becka was in, but she was also concerned. Becka’s father was not a Commander, only a dentist, but he was an important dentist, and Aunt Vidala had bad teeth. She got up and left the room. After several minutes, Aunt Est?e arrived. She was the one called in when we needed calming down. “It’s all right, Becka,” she said. “Aunt Vidala didn’t mean to frighten you.” This was not exactly true, but Becka stopped crying and began to hiccup. “There’s another way of looking at the story. The concubine was sorry for what she had done, and she wanted to make amends, so she sacrificed herself to keep the kind traveller from being killed by those wicked men.” Becka turned her head slightly to the side: she was listening. “That was brave and noble of the concubine, don’t you think?” A small nod from Becka. Aunt Est?e sighed. “We must all make sacrifices in order to help other people,” she said in a soothing tone. “Men must make sacrifices in war, and women must make sacrifices in other ways. That is how things are divided. Now we may all have a little treat to cheer us up. I have brought us some oatmeal cookies. Girls, you may socialize.” We sat there eating the oatmeal cookies. “Don’t be such a baby,” Shunammite whispered across at Becka. “It’s only a story.” Becka did not seem to hear her. “I will never, ever get married,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Yes you will,” said Shunammite. “Everyone does.” “No they don’t,” said Becka, but only to me. 15 A few months after the wedding of Paula and my father, our household received a Handmaid. Her name was Ofkyle, since my father’s name was Commander Kyle. “Her name would have been something else earlier,” said Shunammite. “Some other man’s. They get passed around until they have a baby. They’re all sluts anyway, they don’t need real names.” Shunammite said a slut was a woman who’d gone with more men than her husband. Though we did not really know what “gone with” meant. And Handmaids must be double sluts, said Shunammite, because they didn’t even have husbands. But you weren’t supposed to be rude to the Handmaids or call them sluts, said Aunt Vidala, wiping her nose, because they were performing a service to the community by way of atonement, and we should all be grateful to them for that. “I don’t see why being a slut is performing a service,” Shunammite whispered. “It’s because of the babies,” I whispered back. “The Handmaids can make babies.” “So can some other women too,” said Shunammite, “and they aren’t sluts.” It was true, some of the Wives could, and some of the Econowives: we’d seen them with their bulging stomachs. But a lot of women couldn’t. Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Est?e. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha. Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby? What the arrival of this Handmaid meant was that my new stepmother, Paula, wanted to have a baby because she did not count me as her child: Tabitha was my mother. But what about Commander Kyle? I didn’t seem to count as a child for him either. It was as if I had become invisible to both of them. They looked at me, and through me, and saw the wall. — When the Handmaid entered our household, I was almost of womanly age, as Gilead counted. I was taller, my face was longer in shape, and my nose had grown. I had darker eyebrows, not furry caterpillar ones like Shunammite’s or wispy ones like Becka’s, but curved into half-circles, and dark eyelashes. My hair had thickened and changed from a mousey brown to chestnut. All of that was pleasing to me, and I would look at my new face in the mirror, turning to take it in from all angles despite warnings against vanity. More alarmingly, my breasts were swelling, and I had begun to sprout hair on areas of my body that we were not supposed to dwell on: legs, armpits, and the shameful part of many elusive names. Once that happened to a girl, she was no longer a precious flower but a much more dangerous creature. We’d been prepared for such things at school—Aunt Vidala had presented a series of embarrassing illustrated lectures that were supposed to inform us about a woman’s role and duty in regard to her body—a married woman’s role—but they had not been very informative or reassuring. When Aunt Vidala asked if there were any questions, there weren’t any, because where would you begin? I wanted to ask why it had to be like this, but I already knew the answer: because it was God’s plan. That was how the Aunts got out of everything. Soon I could expect blood to come out from between my legs: that had already happened to many of the girls at school. Why couldn’t God have arranged it otherwise? But he had a special interest in blood, which we knew about from Scripture verses that had been read out to us: blood, purification, more blood, more purification, blood shed to purify the impure, though you weren’t supposed to get it on your hands. Blood was polluting, especially when it came out of girls, but God once liked having it spilled on his altars. Though he had given that up—said Aunt Est?e—in favour of fruits, vegetables, silent suffering, and good deeds. The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it. I considered shrinking myself by not eating, and I did try that for a day, but I got so hungry I couldn’t stick to my resolution, and went to the kitchen in the middle of the night and ate chicken scraps out of the soup pot. — My effervescent body was not my only worry: my status at school had become noticeably lower. I was no longer deferred to by the others, I was no longer courted. Girls would break off their conversations as I approached and would eye me strangely. Some would even turn their backs. Becka did not do that—she still contrived to sit beside me—but she looked straight ahead and did not slip her hand under the desk to hold mine. Shunammite was still claiming to be my friend, partly I am sure because she was not popular among the others, but now she was doing me the favour of friendship instead of the other way around. I was hurt by all of this, though I didn’t yet understand why the atmosphere had changed. The others knew, however. Word must have been going around, from mouth to ear to mouth—from my stepmother, Paula, through our Marthas, who noticed everything, and then from them to the other Marthas they would encounter when doing errands, and then from those Marthas to their Wives, and from the Wives to their daughters, my schoolmates. What was the word? In part, that I was out of favour with my powerful father. My mother, Tabitha, had been my protectress; but now she was gone, and my stepmother did not wish me well. At home she would ignore me, or she would bark at me—Pick that up! Don’t slouch! I tried to keep out of her sight as much as possible, but even my closed door must have been an affront to her. She would have known that I was concealed behind it thinking acid thoughts. But my fall in value went beyond the loss of my father’s favour. There was a new piece of information circulating, one that was very harmful to me. — Whenever there was a secret to tell—especially a shocking one—Shunammite loved to be the messenger. “Guess what I found out?” she said one day while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches. It was a sunny noon: we were being allowed to have a picnic outside on the school lawn. The grounds were enclosed by a high fence topped with razor wire and there were two Angels at the gate, which was locked except when the Aunts’ cars went in and out, so we were perfectly safe. “What?” I said. The sandwiches were an artificial cheese mixture that had replaced real cheese in our school sandwiches because the real cheese was needed by our soldiers. The sunlight was warm, the grass was soft, I had made it out of the house that day without Paula seeing me, and for the moment I was feeling marginally content with my life. “Your mother wasn’t your real mother,” said Shunammite. “They took you away from your real mother because she was a slut. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault, because you were too young to know that.” My stomach clenched. I spat a mouthful of sandwich onto the grass. “That’s not true!” I almost shouted. “Calm down,” said Shunammite. “Like I said, it’s not your fault.” “I don’t believe you,” I said. Shunammite gave me a pitying, relishing smile. “It’s the truth. My Martha heard the whole story from your Martha, and she heard it from your new stepmother. The Wives know about things like that—some of them got their own kids that way. Not me, though, I was born properly.” I really hated her at that moment. “Then where’s my real mother?” I demanded. “If you know everything!” You are really, really mean, I wanted to say. It was dawning on me that she must have betrayed me: before telling me, she’d already told the other girls. That’s why they’d become so cool: I was tainted. “I don’t know, maybe she’s dead,” Shunammite said. “She was stealing you from Gilead, she was trying to run away through a forest, she was going to take you across the border. But they caught up with her and rescued you. Lucky for you!” “Who did?” I asked faintly. While telling me this story, Shunammite was continuing to chew. I watched her mouth, out of which my doom was emerging. There was orange cheese substitute between her teeth. “You know, them. The Angels and Eyes and them. They rescued you and gave you to Tabitha because she couldn’t have a baby. They were doing you a favour. You have a much better home now than with that slut.” I felt belief creeping up through my body like a paralysis. The story Tabitha used to tell, about rescuing me and running away from the evil witches—it was partly true. But it hadn’t been Tabitha’s hand I’d been holding, it had been the hand of my real mother—my real mother, the slut. And it wasn’t witches chasing us, it was men. They would’ve had guns, because such men always did. Tabitha did choose me though. She chose me from among all the other children pried loose from their mothers and fathers. She chose me, and she cherished me. She loved me. That part was real. But now I was motherless, because where was my real mother? I was fatherless as well—Commander Kyle was no more related to me than the man in the moon. He’d only tolerated me because I was Tabitha’s project, her plaything, her pet. No wonder Paula and Commander Kyle wanted a Handmaid: they wanted a real child instead of me. I was nobody’s child. — Shunammite continued to chew, watching with satisfaction as her message sank in. “I’ll stick up for you,” she said in her most pious and insincere voice. “It doesn’t make any difference to your soul. Aunt Est?e says all souls are equal in heaven.” Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place of snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped against the Tree of Life, now I’ve slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall! No wonder Shunammite could not resist spreading such baleful and pleasing news. Already I could hear the snickering behind my back: Slut, slut, daughter of a slut. Aunt Vidala and Aunt Est?e must know as well. The two of them must always have known. It was the kind of secret the Aunts knew. That was how they got their power, according to the Marthas: from knowing secrets. And Aunt Lydia—whose frown-smiling gold-framed picture with the ugly brown uniform hung at the backs of our schoolrooms—must know the most secrets of all because she had the most power. What would Aunt Lydia have to say about my plight? Would she help me? Would she understand my unhappiness, would she save me? But was Aunt Lydia even a real person? I had never seen her. Maybe she was like God—real but unreal at the same time. What if I were to pray to Aunt Lydia at night, instead of to God? I did try, later in the week. But the idea was too unthinkable—praying to a woman—so I stopped. 16 I went through the rest of that terrible afternoon as if sleepwalking. We were embroidering sets of petit-point handkerchiefs for the Aunts, with flowers on them to go with their names—echinacea for Elizabeth, hyacinths for Helena, violets for Vidala. I was doing lilacs for Lydia, and I stuck a needle halfway into my finger without noticing it until Shunammite said, “There’s blood on your petit point.” Gabriela—a scrawny, smart-mouthed girl who was now as popular as I had once been because her father had been promoted to three Marthas—whispered, “Maybe she’s finally getting her period, out her finger,” and everyone laughed because most of them already had theirs, even Becka. Aunt Vidala heard the laughing and looked up from her book and said, “That’s enough of that.” Aunt Est?e took me to the washroom and we rinsed off the blood on my hand, and she put a bandage on my finger, but the petit-point handkerchief had to be soaked in cold water, which is the way we’d been taught that you got out blood, especially from white cloth. Getting out blood was something we would have to know as Wives, said Aunt Vidala, as it would be part of our duties: we would have to supervise our Marthas to make sure they did it right. Cleaning up things such as blood and other substances that came out of bodies was part of women’s duty of caring for other people, especially little children and the elderly, said Aunt Est?e, who always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? She didn’t finish the sentence. Like mud in the sun, I thought. That’s what was inside my head: warmed-up mud. — “Is anything wrong, Agnes?” Aunt Est?e asked after my finger had been cleaned up. I said no. “Then why are you crying, my dear?” It seemed that I was: tears were coming out of my eyes, out of my damp and muddy head, despite my effort to control them. “Because it hurts!” I said, sobbing now. She didn’t ask what hurt, though she must have known it wasn’t really my needled finger. She put her arm around me and gave me a little squeeze. “So many things hurt,” she said. “But we must try to be cheerful. God likes cheerfulness. He likes us to appreciate the nice things in the world.” We heard a lot about the likes and dislikes of God from the Aunts who taught us, especially Aunt Vidala, who seemed to be on very close terms. Shunammite once said she was going to ask Aunt Vidala what God liked for breakfast, which scandalized the more timid girls, but she never actually did it. I wondered what God thought about mothers, both real and unreal. But I knew there was no point in questioning Aunt Est?e about my real mother and how Tabitha had chosen me, or even how old I’d been at the time. The Aunts at school avoided talking to us about our parents. — When I got home that day, I cornered Zilla in the kitchen, where she was making biscuits, and repeated everything that Shunammite had told me at lunchtime. “Your friend has a big mouth,” was what she said. “She should keep it shut more often.” Unusually harsh words, coming from her. “But is it true?” I said. I still half-hoped, then, that she would deny the whole story. She sighed. “How’d you like to help me make the biscuits?” But I was too old to be bribed with simple gifts like that. “Just tell me,” I said. “Please.” “Well,” she said. “According to your new stepmother, yes. That story is true. Or something like it.” “So Tabitha wasn’t my mother,” I said, holding back the fresh tears that were coming, keeping my voice steady. “It depends what you mean by a mother,” said Zilla. “Is your mother the one who gives birth to you or the one who loves you the most?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the one who loves you the most?” “Then Tabitha was your mother,” said Zilla, cutting out the biscuits. “And we Marthas are your mothers too, because we love you as well. Though it may not always seem so to you.” She lifted each round biscuit with the pancake flipper and placed it onto the baking sheet. “We all have your best interests at heart.” This made me distrust her a little because Aunt Vidala said similar things about our best interests, usually before doling out a punishment. She liked to switch us on the legs where it wouldn’t show, and sometimes higher up, making us bend over and raise our skirts. Sometimes she would do that to a girl in front of the whole class. “What happened to her?” I asked. “My other mother? The one who was running through the forest? After they took me away?” “I don’t truly know,” said Zilla, not looking at me, sliding the biscuits into the hot oven. I wanted to ask if I could have one when they came out—I craved warm biscuits—but this seemed like a childish request to make in the middle of such a serious conversation. “Did they shoot her? Did they kill her?” “Oh no,” said Zilla. “They wouldn’t have done that.” “Why?” “Because she could have babies. She had you, didn’t she? That was proof she could. They would never kill a valuable woman like that unless they really couldn’t help it.” She paused to let this sink in. “Most likely they would see if she could be…The Aunts at the Rachel and Leah Centre would pray with her; they would talk to her at first, to see if it was possible to change her mind about things.” There were rumours about the Rachel and Leah Centre at school, but they were vague: none of us knew what went on inside it. Still, just being prayed over by a bunch of Aunts would be scary. Not all of them were as gentle as Aunt Est?e. “And what if they couldn’t change her mind?” I asked. “Would they kill her then? Is she dead?” “Oh, I’m sure they changed her mind,” said Zilla. “They’re good at that. Hearts and minds—they change them.” “Where is she now, then?” I asked. “My mother—the real—the other one?” I wondered if that mother remembered me. She must remember me. She must have loved me or she wouldn’t have tried to take me with her when she was running away. “None of us know that, dear,” said Zilla. “Once they become Handmaids they don’t have their old names anymore, and in those outfits they wear you can hardly see their faces. They all look the same.” “She’s a Handmaid?” I asked. It was true, then, what Shunammite had said. “My mother?” “That’s what they do, over at the Centre,” said Zilla. “They make them into Handmaids, one way or another. The ones they catch. Now, how about a nice hot biscuit? I don’t have any butter right now, but I can put a little honey on it for you.” I thanked her. I ate the biscuit. My mother was a Handmaid. That’s why Shunammite insisted she was a slut. It was common knowledge that all the Handmaids had been sluts, once upon a time. And they still were, although in a different way. — From then on, our new Handmaid fascinated me. I’d ignored her when she’d first come, as instructed—it was the kindest thing for them, said Rosa, because either she would have a baby and then be moved somewhere else, or she wouldn’t have a baby and would be moved somewhere else anyway, but in any case she wouldn’t be in our house for long. So it was bad for them to form attachments, especially with any young people in the household, because they would only have to give those attachments up, and think how upsetting that would be for them. So I’d turned away from Ofkyle and had pretended not to notice her when she’d glide into the kitchen in her red dress to pick up the shopping basket and then go for her walk. The Handmaids all went for a walk every day two by two; you could see them on the sidewalks. Nobody bothered them or spoke to them or touched them, because they were—in a sense—untouchable. But now I gazed at Ofkyle from the sides of my eyes at every chance I got. She had a pale oval face, blank, like a gloved thumbprint. I knew how to make a blank face myself, so I didn’t believe she was really blank underneath. She’d had a whole other life. What had she looked like when she’d been a slut? Sluts went with more than one man. How many men had she gone with? What did that mean exactly, going with men, and what sort of men? Had she allowed parts of her body to stick out of her clothing? Had she worn trousers, like a man? That was so unholy it was almost unimaginable! But if she’d done that, how daring! She must have been very different from the way she was now. She must have had a lot more energy. I would go to the window to watch her from behind as she went out for her walk, through our garden and down the path to our front gate. Then I would take off my shoes, tiptoe along the hall, and creep into her room, which was at the back of the house, on the third floor. It was a medium-sized room with its own bathroom attached. It had a braided rug; on the wall there was a picture of blue flowers in a vase that used to belong to Tabitha. My stepmother had put the picture in there to get it out of sight, I suppose, because she was purging the visible parts of the house of anything that might remind her new husband of his first Wife. Paula wasn’t doing it openly, she was more subtle than that—she was moving or discarding one thing at a time—but I knew what she was up to. It was one more reason for me to dislike her. Why mince words? I don’t need to do that anymore. I didn’t just dislike her, I hated her. Hatred is a very bad emotion because it curdles the soul—Aunt Est?e taught us that—but, although I’m not proud to admit it and I used to pray to be forgiven for it, hatred is indeed what I felt. Once I was inside our Handmaid’s room and had closed the door softly, I would poke around in there. Who was she really? And what if she was my missing mother? I knew this was make-believe, but I was so lonely; I liked to think of how things would be if it were true. We would fling ourselves into each other’s arms, we would hug each other, we would be so happy to have found each other again…. But then what? I had no version of what might happen after that, though I had a dim idea that it would be trouble. There was nothing in Ofkyle’s room that provided any clue about her. Her red dresses were hanging in the closet in an orderly row, her plain white underthings and her sack-like nightgowns were folded neatly on the shelves. She had a second pair of walking shoes and an extra cloak and a spare white bonnet. She had a toothbrush with a red handle. There was a suitcase she’d brought these things in, but it was empty. 17 Finally our Handmaid managed to get pregnant. I knew this before I was told, because instead of treating her as if she were a stray dog they were putting up with out of pity, the Marthas began fussing over her and giving her bigger meals, and placing flowers in little vases on her breakfast trays. Because of my obsession with her, I kept track of details like that as much as I could. I would listen to the Marthas talking excitedly in the kitchen when they thought I wasn’t there, though I couldn’t always hear what they said. When I was with them Zilla smiled to herself a lot, and Vera lowered her harsh voice as if she was in church. Even Rosa had a smug expression, as if she’d eaten a particularly delicious orange but was not telling anyone about it. As for Paula, my stepmother, she was glowing. She was nicer to me on those occasions when we were together in the same room, which were not frequent if I could help it. I snatched breakfast in the kitchen before being driven to school, and I left the dinner table as quickly as I could, pleading homework: some piece of petit point or knitting or sewing, a drawing I had to finish, a watercolour I needed to paint. Paula never objected: she didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see her. “Ofkyle’s pregnant, isn’t she?” I asked Zilla one morning. I tried to be casual about it in case I was wrong. Zilla was caught off guard. “How did you know?” she asked. “I’m not blind,” I said in a superior voice that must have been irritating. I was at that age. “We aren’t supposed to say anything about it,” said Zilla, “until after the third month. The first three months are the danger time.” “Why?” I said. I didn’t really know much after all, despite Aunt Vidala’s runny-nosed slideshow about fetuses. “Because if it’s an Unbaby, that’s when it might…that’s when it might get born too early,” said Zilla. “And it would die.” I knew about Unbabies: they were not taught, but they were whispered about. There were said to be a lot of them. Becka’s Handmaid had given birth to a baby girl: it didn’t have a brain. Poor Becka had been very upset because she’d wanted a sister. “We’re praying for it. For her,” Zilla had said then. I’d noticed the it. Paula must have dropped a hint among the other Wives about Ofkyle being pregnant, though, because my status at school suddenly shot upwards again. Shunammite and Becka competed for my attention, as before, and the other girls deferred to me as if I had an invisible aura. A coming baby shed lustre on everyone connected with it. It was as if a golden haze had enveloped our house, and the haze got brighter and more golden as time passed. When the three-month mark was reached, there was an unofficial party in the kitchen and Zilla made a cake. As for Ofkyle, her expression was not so much joyful as relieved, from what I could glimpse of her face. In the midst of this repressed jubilation, I myself was a dark cloud. This unknown baby inside Ofkyle was taking up all the love: there seemed to be none left anywhere for me. I was all alone. And I was jealous: that baby would have a mother, and I would never have one. Even the Marthas were turning away from me towards the light shining out of Ofkyle’s belly. I am ashamed to admit it—jealous of a baby!—but that was the truth. — It was at this time that an event took place that I should pass over because it’s better forgotten, but it had a bearing on the choice I was soon to make. Now that I am older and have seen more of the outside world, I can see that it might not seem that significant to some, but I was a young girl from Gilead, and I had not been exposed to these kinds of situations, so this event was not trivial to me. Instead it was horrifying. It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied. The prelude was minor: I needed to go to the dentist for my yearly checkup. The dentist was Becka’s father, and his name was Dr. Grove. He was the best dentist, said Vera: all the top Commanders and their families went to him. His office was in the Blessings of Health Building, which was for doctors and dentists. It had a picture of a smiling heart and a smiling tooth on the outside. One of the Marthas always used to go with me to the doctor or the dentist and sit in the waiting room, as it was more proper that way, Tabitha used to say without explaining why, but Paula said the Guardian could just drive me there, since there was too much work to be done in the house considering the changes that had to be prepared for—by which she meant the baby—and it would be a waste of time to send a Martha. I did not mind. In fact, going by myself made me feel very grown up. I sat up straight in the back seat of the car behind our Guardian. Then I went into the building and pressed the elevator button that had three teeth on it, and found the right floor and the right door, and sat in the waiting room looking at the pictures of transparent teeth on the wall. When it was my turn I went into the inner room, as the assistant, Mr. William, asked me to do, and sat down in the dentist chair. Dr. Grove came in and Mr. William brought my chart and then went out and closed the door, and Dr. Grove looked at my chart, and asked if I had any problems with my teeth, and I said no. He poked around in my mouth with his picks and probes and his little mirror, as usual. As usual, I saw his eyes up close, magnified by his glasses—blue and bloodshot, with elephant-knee eyelids—and tried not to breathe in when he was breathing out because his breath smelled—as usual—of onions. He was a middle-aged man with no distinguishing features. He snapped off his white stretchy sanitary gloves and washed his hands at the sink, which was behind my back. He said, “Perfect teeth. Perfect.” Then he said, “You’re getting to be a big girl, Agnes.” Then he put his hand on my small but growing breast. It was summer, so I was wearing the summer school uniform, which was pink and made of light cotton. I froze, in shock. So it was all true then, about men and their rampaging, fiery urges, and merely by sitting in the dentist chair I was the cause. I was horribly embarrassed—what was I supposed to say? I didn’t know, so I simply pretended it wasn’t happening. Dr. Grove was standing behind me, so it was his left hand on my left breast. I couldn’t see the rest of him, only his hand, which was large and had reddish hairs on the back. It was warm. It sat there on my breast like a large hot crab. I didn’t know what to do. Should I take hold of his hand and move it off my breast? Would that cause even more burning lust to break forth? Should I try to get away? Then the hand squeezed my breast. The fingers found my nipple and pinched. It was like having a thumbtack stuck into me. I moved the upper part of my body forward—I needed to get out of that dentist chair as fast as I could—but the hand was locking me in. Suddenly it lifted, and then some of the rest of Dr. Grove moved into sight. “About time you saw one of these,” he said in the normal voice in which he said everything. “You’ll have one of them inside you soon enough.” He took hold of my right hand and positioned it on this part of himself. I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next. He had a towel handy. He wiped himself off and tucked his appendage back into his trousers. “There,” he said. “Good girl. I didn’t hurt you.” He gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t forget to brush twice a day, and floss afterwards. Mr. William will give you a new toothbrush.” I walked out of the room, feeling sick to my stomach. Mr. William was in the waiting room, his unobtrusive thirty-year-old face impassive. He held out a bowl with new pink and blue toothbrushes in it. I knew enough to take a pink one. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” said Mr. William. “Any cavities?” “No,” I said. “Not this time.” “Good,” said Mr. William. “Keep away from the sweet things and maybe you’ll never have any. Any decay. Are you all right?” “Yes,” I said. Where was the door? “You look pale. Some people have a fear of dentists.” Was that a smirk? Did he know what had just happened? “I’m not pale,” I said stupidly—how could I tell I wasn’t pale? I found the door handle and blundered out, reached the elevator, pressed the down button. Was this now going to happen every time I went to the dentist? I couldn’t say I didn’t want to go back to Dr. Grove without saying why, and if I said why I knew I would be in trouble. The Aunts at school taught us that you should tell someone in authority—meaning them—if any man touched you inappropriately, but we knew not to be so dumb as to make a fuss, especially if it was a well-respected man like Dr. Grove. Also, what would it do to Becka if I said that about her father? She would be humiliated, she would be devastated. It would be a terrible betrayal. Some girls had reported such things. One had claimed their Guardian had run his hands over her legs. Another had said that an Econo trash collector had unzipped his trousers in front of her. The first girl had had the backs of her legs whipped for lying, the second had been told that nice girls did not notice the minor antics of men, they simply looked the other way. But I could not have looked the other way. There had been no other way to look. “I don’t want any dinner,” I said to Zilla in the kitchen. She gave me a sharp glance. “Did your dentist appointment go all right, dear?” she said. “Any cavities?” “No,” I said. I tried a wan smile. “I have perfect teeth.” “Are you ill?” “Maybe I’m catching a cold,” I said. “I just need to lie down.” Zilla made me a hot drink with lemon and honey in it and brought it up to my room on a tray. “I should have gone with you,” she said. “But he’s the best dentist. Everyone agrees.” She knew. Or she suspected. She was warning me not to say anything. That was the kind of coded language they used. Or I should say: that we all used. Did Paula know too? Did she foresee that such a thing would happen to me at Dr. Grove’s? Is that why she sent me by myself? It must have been so, I decided. She’d done it on purpose so I would have my breast pinched and that polluting item thrust in front of me. She’d wanted me to be defiled. That was a word from the Bible: defiled. She was probably having a malicious laugh about it—about the nasty joke she’d played on me, for I could see that in her eyes it would be viewed as a joke. After that I stopped praying for forgiveness about the hatred I felt towards her. I was right to hate her. I was prepared to think the very worst of her, and I did. 18 The months passed; my life of tiptoeing and eavesdropping continued. I worked hard at seeing without being seen and hearing without being heard. I discovered the cracks between doorframes and nearly closed doors, the listening posts in hallways and on stairs, the thin places in walls. Most of what I heard came in fragments and even silences, but I was becoming good at fitting these fragments together and filling in the unsaid parts of sentences. Ofkyle, our Handmaid, got bigger and bigger—or her stomach did—and the bigger she got, the more ecstatic our household became. I mean the women became ecstatic. As for Commander Kyle, it was hard to tell what he felt. He’d always had a wooden face, and anyway men were not supposed to display emotions in such ways as crying or even laughing out loud; though a certain amount of laughing did go on behind the closed dining-room doors when he’d have his groups of Commanders over for dinner, with wine and one of the party desserts involving whipped cream, when obtainable, that Zilla made so well. But I suppose even he was at least moderately thrilled about the ballooning of Ofkyle. Sometimes I wondered what my own father might have felt about me. I had some notions about my mother—she’d run away with me, she’d been turned into a Handmaid by the Aunts—but none at all about my father. I must have had one, everyone did. You’d think I’d have filled up the blank with idealized pictures of him, but I didn’t: the blank remained blank. Ofkyle was now quite a celebrity. Wives would send their Handmaids over with some excuse—borrowing an egg, returning a bowl—but really to ask how she was doing. They would be allowed inside the house; then she would be called down so they could put their hands on her round belly and feel the baby kicking. It was amazing to see the expression on their faces while they were performing this ritual: Wonder, as if they were witnessing a miracle. Hope, because if Ofkyle could do it, so could they. Envy, because they weren’t doing it yet. Longing, because they really wanted to do it. Despair, because it might never happen for them. I did not yet know what might become of a Handmaid who, despite having been judged viable, came up barren through all her allotted postings, but I already guessed it would not be good. Paula threw numerous tea parties for the other Wives. They would congratulate her and admire her and envy her, and she would smile graciously and accept their congratulations modestly, and say all blessings came from above, and then she would order Ofkyle to appear in the living room so the Wives could see for themselves and exclaim over her and make a fuss. They might even call Ofkyle “Dear,” which they never did for an ordinary Handmaid, one with a flat stomach. Then they would ask Paula what she was going to name her baby. Her baby. Not Ofkyle’s baby. I wondered what Ofkyle thought about that. But none of them were interested in what was going on in her head, they were only interested in her belly. They would be patting her stomach and sometimes even listening to it, whereas I would be standing behind the open living-room door looking at her through the crack so I could watch her face. I saw her trying to keep that face as still as marble, but she didn’t always succeed. Her face was rounder than it had been when she’d first arrived—it was almost swollen—and it seemed to me that this was because of all the tears she was not allowing herself to cry. Did she cry them in secret? Although I would lurk outside her closed door with my ear to it, I never heard her. At these moments of lurking I would become angry. I’d had a mother once, and I’d been snatched away from that mother and given to Tabitha, just as this baby was going to be snatched away from Ofkyle and given to Paula. It was the way things were done, it was how things were, it was how they had to be for the good of the future of Gilead: the few must make sacrifices for the sake of the many. The Aunts were agreed on that; they taught it; but still I knew this part of it wasn’t right. But I couldn’t condemn Tabitha, even though she’d accepted a stolen child. She didn’t make the world the way it was, and she had been my mother, and I had loved her and she had loved me. I still loved her, and perhaps she still loved me. Who could tell? Perhaps her silvery spirit was with me, hovering over me, keeping watch. I liked to think so. I needed to think so. — At last the Birth Day came. I was home from school because I’d finally got my first period and I was having bad cramps. Zilla had made a hot water bottle for me and had rubbed on some painkilling salve and had made me a cup of analgesic tea, and I was huddled in my bed feeling sorry for myself when I heard the Birthmobile siren coming along our street. I hauled myself out of bed and went to the window: yes, the red van was inside our gates now and the Handmaids were climbing down out of it, a dozen of them or more. I couldn’t see their faces, but just from the way they moved—faster than they usually did—I could tell they were excited. Then the cars of the Wives began to arrive, and they too hurried into our house in their identical blue cloaks. Two Aunts’ cars also drove up, and the Aunts got out. They weren’t ones I recognized. Both were older, and one was carrying a black bag with the red wings and the knotted snake and the moon on it that meant it was a Medical Services First Responder bag, female division. A number of the Aunts were trained in first response and midwifery, though they could not be real doctors. I was not supposed to witness a Birth. Girls and marriageable young women—such as I’d just become by having my period—were not allowed to see or know what went on, because such sights and sounds were not suitable for us and might be harmful to us—might disgust us or frighten us. That thick red knowledge was for married women and Handmaids, and for the Aunts, of course, so they could teach it to the midwife Aunts in training. But naturally I repressed my own cramping pain and put on my dressing gown and slippers, and crept halfway up the stairs that led to the third floor, where I would be out of sight. The Wives were downstairs having a tea party in the living room and waiting for the important moment. I did not know what moment exactly, but I could hear them laughing and chattering. They were drinking champagne along with their tea, as I knew from the bottles and empty glasses I saw in the kitchen later. The Handmaids and the designated Aunts were with Ofkyle. She wasn’t in her own room—that room wouldn’t have been big enough for everyone—but in the master bedroom on the second floor. I could hear a groaning sound that was like an animal, and the Handmaids chanting—Push, push, push, breathe, breathe, breathe—and at intervals an anguished voice I didn’t recognize—but it must have been Ofkyle’s—saying Oh God, Oh God, deep and dark as if it was coming out of a well. It was terrifying. Sitting on the stairs hugging myself, I began to shiver. What was happening? What torturing, what inflicting? What was being done? These sounds went on for what seemed a long time. I heard footsteps hurrying along the hallway—the Marthas, bringing whatever had been requested, carrying things away. From snooping in the laundry later in the evening I saw that some of these things were bloody sheets and towels. Then one of the Aunts came out into the hall and started barking into her Computalk. “Right now! As fast as you can! Her pressure’s way down! She’s losing too much blood!” There was a scream, and another. One of the Aunts called down the stairs to the Wives: “Get in here now!” The Aunts didn’t usually yell like that. A crowd of footsteps, hurrying up the stairs, and a voice saying, “Oh, Paula!” Then there was another siren, a different kind. I checked the hallway—nobody—and scuttled to my own room to peer out the window. A black car, the red wings and the snake, but a tall gold triangle: a real doctor. He almost leapt out of the car, slamming the door, and ran up the steps. I heard what he was saying: Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit of a God! This in itself was electrifying: I had never heard a man say anything like that before. — It was a boy, a healthy son for Paula and Commander Kyle. He was named Mark. But Ofkyle died. I sat with the Marthas in the kitchen after the Wives and the Handmaids and everyone had gone away. The Marthas were eating the leftover party food: sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cake, real coffee. They offered me some of the treats, but I said I wasn’t hungry. They asked about my cramps; I would feel better tomorrow, they said, and after a while it wouldn’t be so bad, and anyway you got used to it. But that wasn’t why I had no appetite. There would have to be a wet nurse, they said: it would be one of the Handmaids who’d lost a baby. That, or formula, though everyone knew formula wasn’t as good. Still, it would keep life in the little mite. “The poor girl,” Zilla said. “To go through all of that for nothing.” “At least the baby was saved,” said Vera. “It was one or the other,” said Rosa. “They had to cut her open.” “I’m going to bed now,” I said. — Ofkyle hadn’t yet been taken out of our house. She was in her own room, wrapped in a sheet, as I discovered when I went softly up the back stairs. I uncovered her face. It was flat white: she must have had no blood left in her. Her eyebrows were blond, soft and fine, upcurved as if surprised. Her eyes were open, looking at me. Maybe that was the first time she had ever seen me. I kissed her on the forehead. “I won’t ever forget you,” I said to her. “The others will, but I promise I won’t.” Melodramatic, I know: I was still a child really. But as you can see, I have kept my word: I never have forgotten her. Her, Ofkyle, the nameless one, buried under a little square stone that might as well have been blank. I found it in the Handmaid graveyard, some years later. And when I had the power to do so, I searched for her in the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives, and I found her. I found her original name. Meaningless, I know, except for those who must have loved her and then been torn apart from her. But for me it was like finding a handprint in a cave: it was a sign, it was a message. I was here. I existed. I was real. What was her name? Of course you will want to know. It was Crystal. And that is how I remember her now. I remember her as Crystal. — They had a small funeral for Crystal. I was allowed to come to it: having had my first period, I was now officially a woman. The Handmaids who’d been present at the Birth were allowed to come too, and our entire household went as well. Even Commander Kyle was there, as a token of respect. We sang two hymns—“Uplift the Lowly” and “Blessed Be the Fruit”—and the legendary Aunt Lydia gave a speech. I looked at her with wonder, as if she was her own picture come to life: she existed after all. She looked older than her picture, though, and not quite as scary. She said that our sister in service, Handmaid Ofkyle, had made the ultimate sacrifice, and had died with noble womanly honour, and had redeemed herself from her previous life of sin, and she was a shining example to the other Handmaids. Aunt Lydia’s voice trembled a little as she was saying this. Paula and Commander Kyle looked solemn and devout, nodding from time to time, and some of the Handmaids cried. I did not cry. I’d already done my crying. The truth was that they’d cut Crystal open to get the baby out, and they’d killed her by doing that. It wasn’t something she chose. She hadn’t volunteered to die with noble womanly honour or be a shining example, but nobody mentioned that. 19 At school my position was now worse than it had ever been. I had become a taboo object: our Handmaid had died, which was believed among the girls to be a sign of bad fate. They were a superstitious group. At the Vidala School there were two religions: the official one taught by the Aunts, about God and the special sphere of women, and the unofficial one, which was passed from girl to girl by means of games and songs. The younger girls had a number of counting rhymes, such as Knit one, purl two, Here’s a husband just for you; Knit two, purl one, He got killed, here’s another one. For the small girls, husbands were not real people. They were furniture and therefore replaceable, as in my childhood dollhouse. The most popular singing game among the younger girls was called “Hanging.” It went like this: Who’s that hanging on the Wall? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh! It’s a Handmaid, what’s she called? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh! She was (here we would put in the name of one of us), now she’s not. Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh! She had a baby in the pot (here we would slap our little flat stomachs). Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh! The girls would file under the uplifted hands of two other girls while everyone chanted: One for murder, Two for kissing, Three for a baby, Four gone missing, Five for alive and Six for dead, And Seven we caught you, Red Red Red! And the seventh girl would be caught by the two counters, and paraded around in a circle before being given a slap on the head. Now she was “dead,” and was allowed to choose the next two executioners. I realize this sounds both sinister and frivolous, but children will make games out of whatever is available to them. The Aunts probably thought this game contained a beneficial amount of warning and threat. Why was it “One for murder,” though? Why did murder have to come before kissing? Why not after, which would seem more natural? I have often thought about that since, but I have never found any answer. We were allowed other games inside school hours. We played Snakes and Ladders—if you landed on a Prayer you went up a ladder on the Tree of Life, but if you landed on a Sin you went down a Satanic snake. We were given colouring books, and we coloured in the signs of the shops—ALL FLESH, LOAVES AND FISHES—as a way of learning them. We coloured the clothing of people too—blue for the Wives, stripes for the Econowives, red for the Handmaids. Becka once got in trouble with Aunt Vidala for colouring a Handmaid purple. Among the older girls the superstitions were whispered rather than sung, and they were not games. They were taken seriously. One of them went like this: If your Handmaid dies in your bed, Then her blood is on your head. If your Handmaid’s baby dies, Then your life is tears and sighs. If your Handmaid dies in Birth, The curse will follow you over the earth. Ofkyle had died during a Birth, so I was viewed by the other girls as accursed; but also, since little baby Mark was alive and well and my brother, I was also viewed as unusually blessed. The other girls did not taunt me openly, but they avoided me. Huldah would squint up at the ceiling when she saw me coming; Becka would turn away, though she would slip me portions of her lunch when no one was looking. Shunammite fell away from me, whether out of fear because of the death or envy because of the Birth, or a combination of both. At home all attention was on the baby, who demanded it. He had a loud voice. And although Paula enjoyed the prestige of having a baby—and a male one at that—she was not the motherly type at heart. Little Mark would be produced and exhibited for her friends, but a short time of that went a long way with Paula and he would soon be handed over to the wet nurse, a plump, lugubrious Handmaid who had recently been Oftucker but was now, of course, Ofkyle. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping or being shown off, Mark passed his time in the kitchen, where he was a great favourite among the Marthas. They loved to give him his bath and exclaim over his tiny fingers, his tiny toes, his tiny dimples, and his tiny male organ, out of which he could project a truly astonishing fountain of pee. What a strong little man! I was expected to join in the worship, and when I didn’t show enough zeal I was told to stop sulking, because soon enough I would have a baby of my own, and then I would be happy. I doubted that very much—not the baby so much as the happiness. I spent as much time in my room as possible, avoiding the cheerfulness in the kitchen and brooding on the unfairness of the universe. VII Stadium 20 The Ardua Hall Holograph The crocuses have melted, the daffodils have shrivelled to paper, the tulips have performed their enticing dance, flipping their petal skirts inside out before dropping them completely. The herbs nurtured in the Ardua Hall borders by Aunt Clover and her posse of semi-vegetarian trowel-wielders are in their prime. But, Aunt Lydia, you must drink this mint tea, it will do wonders for your digestion! Keep your nose out of my digestion, I want to snap at them; but they mean well, I remind myself. Is that ever a convincing excuse when there’s blood on the carpet? I meant well too, I sometimes mumble silently. I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. Still, think how much worse it could have been if not for me. Bullshit, I reply on some days. Though on other days I pat myself on the back. Whoever said consistency is a virtue? What’s next in the waltz of the flowers? Lilacs. So dependable. So frilly. So aromatic. Soon my old enemy, Aunt Vidala, will be sneezing. Maybe her eyes will swell up and she won’t be able to peer at me out of their corners, hoping to detect some slippage, some weakness, some lapse in theological correctness that can be leveraged into my downfall. Hope on, I whisper to her. I pride myself on the fact that I can keep one jump ahead of you. But why only one? Several. Topple me and I’ll pull down the temple. — Gilead has a long-standing problem, my reader: for God’s kingdom on earth, it’s had an embarrassingly high emigration rate. The seepage of our Handmaids, for instance: too many have been slipping away. As Commander Judd’s analysis of escapes has revealed, no sooner is an exit route discovered by us and blocked than another opens up. Our buffer zones are too permeable. The wilder patches of Maine and Vermont are a liminal space not fully controlled by us, where the natives are, if not overtly hostile, prone to heresies. They are also, as I know from my own experience, densely interconnected by a network of marriages that resembles a piece of surreal knitting, and they are prone to vendettas if crossed. For this reason it’s difficult to get them to betray one another. It’s been suspected for some time there are guides among them, acting either from a desire to outsmart Gilead or from simple cupidity, for Mayday has been known to pay. One Vermonter who fell into our hands told us they have a saying: “Mayday is Payday.” The hills and swamps, the winding rivers, the long rock-strewn bays that lead to the sea with its high tides—all aid the clandestine. In the subhistory of the region, there are rum-runners, there are cigarette profiteers, there are drug smugglers, there are illicit peddlers of all kinds. Borders mean nothing to them: they slip in and out, they thumb their noses, money changes hands. One of my uncles was active in that way. Our family having been what it was—trailer-park dwellers, sneerers at the police, consorters with the flip side of the criminal justice system—my father was proud of that. Though not of me: I was a girl and, worse, a smarty-pants girl. Nothing for it but to wallop those pretensions out of me, with fists or boots or whatever else was to hand. He got his throat cut before the triumph of Gilead, or I would have arranged to have it done for him. But enough of such folk memories. — Quite recently, Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Helena, and Aunt Vidala came up with a detailed plan for better control. Operation Dead End, it was called. A Plan to Eliminate the Female Emigrant Problem in the North-Eastern Seaboard Territories. It outlined the steps necessary for the trapping of fugitive Handmaids en route to Canada, and called for the declaration of a National Emergency, plus a doubling of tracker dogs and a more efficient system of interrogation. I detected Aunt Vidala’s hand in this last: it is her secret sorrow that fingernail ripping and evisceration are not on our list of chastisements. “Well done,” I said. “This seems very thorough. I will read it with great care, and I can assure you that your concerns are shared by Commander Judd, who is taking action, although I am not free to share the details with you at this time.” “Praise be,” said Aunt Elizabeth, though she did not sound overjoyed. “This escape business must be crushed once and for all,” Aunt Helena declared, glancing at Aunt Vidala for reassurance. She stamped her foot for emphasis, which must have been painful considering her fallen arches: she ruined her feet in youth by wearing five-inch Blahnik stilettos. The shoes alone would get her denounced nowadays. “Indeed,” I said suavely. “And it does appear to be a business, at least in part.” “We should clear-cut the entire area!” said Aunt Elizabeth. “They’re hand in glove with Mayday in Canada.” “That is what Commander Judd believes as well,” I said. “Those women need to do their duty to the Divine Plan like the rest of us,” said Aunt Vidala. “Life is not a vacation.” Although they’d concocted their plan without getting authorization from me first—an act of insubordination—I felt duty-bound to pass it along to Commander Judd; especially in view of the fact that if I did not, he would be certain to hear of it and take note of my recalcitrance. — This afternoon, the three of them paid me another visit. They were in high spirits: raids in Upstate New York had just produced a mixed haul of seven Quakers, four back-to-the-landers, two Canadian moose-hunting guides, and a lemon smuggler, each of whom was a suspected link in the Underground Femaleroad chain. Once any additional information they might possess had been wrung from them, they would be disposed of, unless they were found to have trading value: hostage exchanges between Mayday and Gilead were not unknown. I was of course aware of these developments. “Congratulations,” I said. “You must each take some credit, if only under the table. Commander Judd will take centre stage, naturally.” “Naturally,” said Aunt Vidala. “We are happy to serve,” said Aunt Helena. “I have some news to share with you in my turn, from Commander Judd himself. But it must not go beyond us.” They leaned in: we all love a secret. “Two of the top Mayday operatives in Canada have been erased by our agents.” “Under His Eye,” said Aunt Vidala. “Our Pearl Girls were pivotal,” I added. “Praise be!” said Aunt Helena. “One of them was a casualty,” I said. “Aunt Adrianna.” “What happened to her?” Aunt Elizabeth asked. “We are waiting for clarification.” “We will pray for her soul,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “And Aunt Sally?” “I believe she is safe.” “Praise be.” “Indeed,” I said. “The bad news, however, is that we have uncovered a breach in our defences. The two Mayday agents must have been getting help from traitors inside Gilead itself. Someone was passing messages to them, from here to there—informing them about our security operations, and even about our agents and volunteers within Canada.” “Who would do that?” said Aunt Vidala. “It’s apostasy!” “The Eyes are trying to find out,” I said. “So if you notice anything suspicious—anything, by anyone, even anyone at Ardua Hall—do let me know.” There was a pause while they looked at one another. Anyone at Ardua Hall included the three of them. “Oh, surely not,” said Aunt Helena. “Think of the shame it would bring upon us!” “Ardua Hall is spotless,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “But the human heart is devious,” said Aunt Vidala. “We must try for heightened awareness,” I said. “Meanwhile, well done. Let me know how you make out with the Quakers and so forth.” — I record, I record; though to no end, I often fear. The black drawing ink I’ve been using is running out: soon I will switch to blue. Requisitioning a bottle from the Vidala School supplies should not be difficult: they teach drawing there. We Aunts used to be able to obtain ballpoint pens through the grey market, but no longer: our New Brunswick–based supplier has been arrested, having snuck under the radar once too often. But I was telling you about the van with darkened windows—no, looking back a page, I see we’d arrived at the stadium. Once on the ground, Anita and I were prodded to the right. We joined a herd of other women: I describe it as a herd because we were being herded. This collection was funnelled into a section of the bleachers marked off by the kind of yellow tape typical of crime scenes. There must have been about forty of us. Once installed, we had our handcuffs removed. I assumed they were needed for others. Anita and I sat beside each other. To my left was a woman I didn’t know who said she was a lawyer; to the right of Anita was another lawyer. Behind us, four judges; in front of us, four more. All of us judges or lawyers. “They must be sorting us by profession,” said Anita. And so it was. In a moment of inattention by the guards, the woman at the end of our row managed to communicate across the aisle with a woman in the section next to us. Over there, all were doctors. — We hadn’t had lunch, and we weren’t given any. Throughout the following hours, vans continued to arrive and discharge their unwilling female passengers. None of them was what you would call young. Middle-aged professional women, in suits and good haircuts. No handbags, though: we had not been allowed to bring those. So no combs, no lipsticks, no mirrors, no little packets of throat lozenges, no disposable tissues. It’s amazing how naked you feel without those things. Or felt, once. The sun beat down: we were without hats or sunblock, and I could picture the shade of blistering red I would be by sundown. At least the seats had backs to them. They would not have been uncomfortable if we’d been there for recreational purposes. But entertainment was not being provided, and we could not get up to stretch: attempts to do so produced shouts. Sitting without moving necessarily becomes tedious and a strain on the buttock, back, and thigh muscles. It was minor pain, but it was pain. To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that, as if on a magic charm. You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated. You’re a judge, so you are the educated, like it or not. They won’t want you around. I’d spent my earlier years doing things I’d been told would be impossible for me. No one in my family had ever been to college, they’d despised me for going, I’d done it with scholarships and working nights at crappy jobs. It toughens you. You get stubborn. I did not intend to be eliminated if I could help it. But none of my college-acquired polish was of any use to me here. I needed to revert to the mulish underclass child, the determined drudge, the brainy overachiever, the strategic ladder-climber who’d got me to the social perch from which I’d just been deposed. I needed to work the angles, once I could find out what the angles were. I’d been in tight corners before. I had prevailed. That was my story to myself. — Mid-afternoon produced bottles of water, handed out by trios of men: one to carry the bottles, one to pass them out, and one to cover us with his weapon in case we began to leap, thrash about, and snap, like the crocodiles we were. “You can’t keep us here!” one woman said. “We haven’t done anything wrong!” “We’re not allowed to talk to you,” said the bottle-passer. None of us was allowed to go to the bathroom. Trickles of pee appeared, running down the bleachers towards the playing field. This treatment was supposed to humiliate us, break down our resistance, I thought; but resistance to what? We weren’t spies, we had no secret information we were holding back, we weren’t the soldiers of an enemy army. Or were we? If I looked deep into the eyes of one of these men, would there be a human being looking back out at me? And if not, then what? I tried to place myself in the position of those who had corralled us. What were they thinking? What was their goal? How did they hope to accomplish it? — At four o’clock we were treated to a spectacle. Twenty women, of various sizes and ages, but all in business attire, were led into the centre of the field. I say led because they were blindfolded. Their hands were cuffed in front. They were arranged in two rows, ten and ten. The front row was forced to kneel down, as if for a group photo. A man in a black uniform orated into a microphone about how sinners were always visible to the Divine Eye and their sin would find them out. An undertone of assent, like a vibration, came from the guards and attendants. Mmmmmm…like a motor revving up. “God will prevail,” concluded the speaker. There was a chorus of baritone Amens. Then the men who’d escorted the blindfolded women raised their guns and shot them. Their aim was good: the women keeled over. There was a collective groan from all of us who were seated in the bleachers. I heard screams and sobbing. Some of the women leapt to their feet, shouting—I could not make out the words—but were quickly silenced by being hit on the backs of their heads with the butts of guns. There were no repeated blows: one sufficed. Again, the aim was good: these men were trained. We were to see but not speak: the message was clear. But why? If they were going to kill us all, why this display? — Sundown brought sandwiches, one each. Mine was egg salad. I am ashamed to say I gobbled it up with relish. There were a few distant sounds of retching, but, under the circumstances, surprisingly few. After that we were instructed to stand up. Then we filed out, row by row—the process was eerily silent, and very orderly—and were ushered down into the locker rooms and the corridors leading to them. That is where we spent the night. There were no amenities, no mattresses or pillows, but at least there were bathrooms, filthy as they had already become. No guards were present to stop us from talking, though why we supposed no one was listening escapes me now. But by that time, none of us was thinking clearly. The lights were left on, which was a mercy. No, it was not a mercy. It was a convenience for those in charge. Mercy was a quality that did not operate in that place. VIII CARNARVON 21 Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B I was sitting in Ada’s car, trying to absorb what she’d told me. Melanie and Neil. Blown up by a bomb. Outside The Clothes Hound. It wasn’t possible. “Where are we going?” I said. It was a limp thing to say, it sounded so normal; but nothing was normal. Why wasn’t I screaming? “I’m thinking,” Ada said. She looked into the rear-view mirror, then pulled into a driveway. The house had a sign that said ALTERNA RENOVATIONS. Every house in our area was always being renovated; then someone would buy it and renovate it again, which drove Neil and Melanie crazy. Why spend all that money on tearing the guts out of perfectly good houses? Neil would say. It was hiking up the prices and shutting poor people out of the market. “Are we going in here?” I was suddenly very tired. It would be nice to go into a house and lie down. “Nope,” said Ada. She took out a small wrench from her leather backpack and destroyed her phone. I watched as it cracked and slivered: the case shattered, the metal innards warped and fell apart. “Why are you wrecking your phone?” I said. “Because you can never be too careful.” She put the remains into a small plastic bag. “Wait’ll this car goes past, then get out and toss it into that trash bin.” Drug dealers did this—they used burner phones. I was having second thoughts about having come with her. She wasn’t just severe, she was scary. “Thanks for the lift,” I said, “but I should go back to my school now. I can tell them about the explosion, they’ll know what to do.” “You’re in shock. It’s no wonder,” she said. “I’m okay,” I said, though it wasn’t true. “I can just get out here.” “Suit yourself,” she said, “but they’ll have to report you to Social Services, and those folks will put you into foster care, and who knows how that’ll turn out?” I hadn’t thought about that. “So once you’ve ditched my phone,” she continued, “you can either get back in the car or keep on walking. Your choice. Just don’t go home. That’s not a command, it’s advice.” I did as she’d asked. Now that she’d laid out my options, what choice did I have? Back in the car I began to sniffle, but except for handing me a tissue, Ada didn’t react. She made a U-turn and headed south. She was a fast and efficient driver. “I know you don’t trust me,” she said after a while, “but you have to trust me. The same people who set that car bomb could be looking for you right now. I’m not saying they are, I just don’t know, but you’re at risk.” At risk—that’s what they said on the news about children who’d been found battered to death despite multiple warnings by the neighbours, or women who’d hitchhiked because there was no bus and were found by someone’s dog in a shallow grave with their necks broken. My teeth were chattering, though the air was hot and sticky. I didn’t quite believe her, but I didn’t disbelieve her either. “We could tell the police,” I said timidly. “They’d be useless.” I’d heard about the uselessness of the police—Neil and Melanie regularly expressed that opinion. She turned the car radio on: soothing music with harps in it. “Don’t think about anything yet,” she said. “Are you a cop?” I asked her. “Nope,” she said. “Then what are you?” “Least said, soonest mended,” she said. — We stopped in front of a large, square-shaped building. The sign said MEETING HOUSE and RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS (QUAKERS). Ada parked the car at the back beside a grey van. “That’s our next ride,” she said. We went in through the side door. Ada nodded at the man sitting at a small desk there. “Elijah,” she said. “We’ve got errands.” I didn’t really look at him. I followed her through the Meeting House proper, with its empty hush and its echoes and its slightly chilly smell, then into a larger room, which was brighter and had air conditioning. There was a row of beds—more like cots—with women lying down on some of them, covered with blankets, all different colours. In another corner there were five armchairs and a coffee table. Several women sitting there were talking in low voices. “Don’t stare,” said Ada to me. “It’s not a zoo.” “What is this place?” I said. “SanctuCare, the Gilead refugee organization. Melanie worked with it, and so did Neil in a different way. Now, I want you to sit in that chair and be a fly on the wall. Don’t move and don’t say boo. You’ll be safe here. I need to make some arrangements for you. I’ll be back in maybe an hour. They’ll make sure you get some sugar into you, you need it.” She went over and spoke to one of the women in charge, then walked quickly out of the room. After a while, the woman brought me a cup of hot sweet tea and a chocolate-chip cookie, and asked if I was all right and if I needed anything else, and I said no. But she came back anyway with one of the blankets, a green-and-blue one, and tucked it around me. I managed to drink some of the tea, and my teeth stopped chattering. I sat there and watched the foot traffic, the way I used to watch it in The Clothes Hound. Several women came in, one of them with a baby. They looked really wrecked, and also scared. The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, “You’re here now, it’s all right,” and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that’s happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you’re safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn’t waste time crying before. Words came out of the women in snatches and gasps: If they say I have to go back… I had to leave my boy behind, isn’t there any way to… I lost the baby. There was no one… The women in charge handed them tissues. They said calm things like You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong. That’s another thing I’ve learned. — After an hour or so, Ada came back. “You’re still alive,” she said. If it was a joke, it was a bad one. I just stared at her. “You have to dump the plaid.” “What?” I said. It was like she was speaking some other language. “I know this is tough for you,” she said, “but we don’t have time for that right now, we need to get moving fast. Not to be alarmist, but there’s trouble. Now let’s get some other clothes.” She took hold of my arm and lifted me up out of the chair: she was surprisingly strong. We went past all the women, into a back room where there was a table with T-shirts and sweaters and a couple of racks with hangers. I recognized some of the items: this was where the donations from The Clothes Hound ended up. “Pick something you’d never wear in real life,” said Ada. “You need to look like a totally different person.” I found a black T-shirt with a white skull, and a pair of leggings, black with white skulls. I added high-tops, black and white, and some socks. Everything was used. I did think about lice and bedbugs: Melanie always asked whether the stuff people tried to sell her had been cleaned. We got bedbugs in the store once and it was a nightmare. “I’ll turn my back,” said Ada. There was no change room. I wriggled out of my school uniform and put on my new used clothes. My movements felt very slowed down. What if she was abducting me? I thought groggily. Abducting. It was what happened to girls who were smuggled and made into sex slaves—we’d learned about that at school. But girls like me didn’t get abducted, except sometimes by men posing as real estate salesmen who kept them locked in the basement. Sometimes men like that had women helping them. Was Ada one of those? What if her story about Melanie and Neil being blown up was a trick? Right now the two of them might be frantic because I hadn’t turned up. They might be calling the school or even the police, useless though they considered them. Ada still had her back to me, but I sensed that if I even thought about making a break for it—out the side door of the Meeting House, for instance—she would know about it in advance. And supposing I ran, where could I go? The only place I wanted to go was home, but if Ada was telling the truth I shouldn’t go there. Anyway, if Ada was telling the truth it would no longer be my home because Melanie and Neil wouldn’t be in it. What would I do all by myself in an empty house? “I’m done,” I said. Ada turned around. “Not bad,” she said. She took off her black jacket and stuffed it into a carry bag, then put on a green jacket that was on the rack. Then she pinned up her hair and added sunglasses. “Hair down,” she told me, so I pulled off my scrunchie and shook my hair out. She found a pair of sunglasses for me: orange mirror ones. She handed me a lipstick, and I made myself a new red mouth. “Look like a thug,” she said. I didn’t know how, but I tried. I scowled, and pouted my lips that were covered in red wax. “There,” she said. “You’d never know. Our secret is safe with us.” What was our secret? That I no longer officially existed? Something like that. 22 We got into the grey van and drove for a while, with Ada paying close attention to the traffic behind us. Then we threaded through a maze of side streets, and pulled into a drive in front of a big old brownstone mansion. In the semicircle that might once have been a flower garden and even now had the remains of some tulips among the uncut grass and dandelions, there was a sign with a picture of a condo building. “Where is this?” I said. “Parkdale,” said Ada. I’d never been to Parkdale before, but I’d heard about it: some of the drug-head kids at school thought it was cool, which was what they said about decaying urban areas that were now re-gentrifying. There were a couple of trendy nightclubs in it, for those who wanted to lie about their age. The mansion sat on a large scruffy lot with a couple of huge trees. Nobody had cleaned up the fallen leaves for a long time; a few stray rags of coloured plastic, red and silver, shone out from the drift of mulch. Ada headed towards the house, glancing back to make sure I was following. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. I felt a little dizzy. I walked behind her over the uneven paving; it felt spongy, as if my foot could go through it at any moment. The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we’d studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal. Heavy stone steps led up to the front porch. It was framed by a stone archway with a name carved into it in the Celtic lettering you sometimes see on older buildings in Toronto—CARNARVON—surrounded by stone leaves and elvish faces; they were probably meant to be mischievous, but I found them malignant. Everything seemed malignant to me right then. The porch smelled of cat piss. The door was wide and heavy, studded with black nailheads. The graffiti artists had been at work on it in red paint: that pointy writing they do, and another more legible word that might have been BARF. Despite the slummy look of the door, the lock worked with a magnetic key fob. Inside was an old maroon hall carpet and a flight of broad stairs winding upwards, with beautiful curved banisters. “It was a rooming house for a while,” said Ada. “Now it’s furnished apartments.” “What was it at first?” I was leaning against the wall. “A summer house,” said Ada. “Rich people. Let’s get you upstairs, you need to lie down.” “What’s ‘Carnarvon’?” I was having a little trouble getting up the stairs. “Welsh place,” said Ada. “Somebody must’ve been homesick.” She took my arm. “Come on, count the steps.” Home, I thought. I was going to start sniffling again. I tried not to. We got to the top of the stairs. There was another heavy door, another fob lock. Inside was a front room with a sofa and two easy chairs and a coffee table and a dining table. “There’s a bedroom for you,” said Ada, but I had no urge to see it. I fell onto the sofa. All of a sudden I had no strength; I didn’t think I could get up. “You’re shivering again,” said Ada. “I’ll turn down the AC.” She brought a duvet from one of the bedrooms, a new one, white. Everything in the room was realer than real. There was some kind of houseplant on the table, though it might have been plastic; it had rubbery, shiny leaves. The walls were covered with rose-coloured paper, with a darker design of trees. There were nail holes where there must have been pictures once. These details were so vivid they were almost shimmering, as if they were lit from behind. I closed my eyes to shut out the light. I must have dozed off because suddenly it was evening, and Ada was turning on the flatscreen. I guess that was for my benefit—so I would know she’d been telling the truth—but it was brutal. The wreckage of The Clothes Hound—the windows shattered, the door gaping open. Scraps of fabric scattered over the sidewalk. In front, the shell of Melanie’s car, crumpled like a burnt-out marshmallow. Two police cars visible, and the yellow tape they put around disaster areas. No sign of Neil or Melanie, and I was glad: I had a horror of seeing their blackened flesh, the ash of their hair, their singed bones. The remote was on an end table beside the sofa. I turned off the sound: I didn’t want to hear the anchor’s level voice talking as if this event was the same as a politician getting onto a plane. When the car and the store vanished and the newsman’s head bobbed into view like a joke balloon, I switched the TV off. Ada came in from the kitchen. She brought me a sandwich on a plate: chicken salad. I said I wasn’t hungry. “There’s an apple,” she said. “Want that?” “No thank you.” “I know this is bizarre,” she said. I said nothing. She went out and came in again. “I got you some birthday cake. It’s chocolate. Vanilla ice cream. Your favourites.” It was on a white plate; there was a plastic fork. How did she know what my favourites were? Melanie must have told her. They must have talked about me. The white plate was dazzling. There was a single candle stuck into the piece of cake. When I was younger I would have made a wish. What would my wish be now? That time would move backwards? That it would be yesterday? I wonder how many people have ever wished that. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked. She told me, and I went into it and was sick. Then I lay down on the sofa again and shivered. After a while she brought me some ginger ale. “You need to get your blood sugar up,” she said. She went out of the room, turning off the lights. It was like being home from school when you had the flu. Other people would cover you up and bring you things to drink; they would be the ones dealing with real life so you didn’t have to. It would be nice to stay like this forever: then I would never have to think about anything again. In the distance there were the noises of the city: traffic, sirens, a plane overhead. From the kitchen came the sound of Ada rustling around; she had a brisk, light way of moving, as if she walked on her toes. I heard the murmur of her voice, talking on the phone. She was in charge, though what she was in charge of I couldn’t guess; nonetheless I felt lulled and held. Behind my closed eyes I heard the apartment door open, and then pause, and then shut. 23 When I woke up again, it was morning. I didn’t know what time it was. Had I slept in, was I late for school? Then I remembered: school was done. I would never be going back there, or to anywhere else I knew. I was in one of the Carnarvon bedrooms, with the white duvet covering me, still wearing the T-shirt and leggings, though I didn’t have the socks or shoes on. There was a window, with a roller shade pulled down. I sat up carefully. I saw some red on the pillowcase, but it was only lipstick from yesterday’s red mouth. I was no longer nauseous and dizzy, but I was fuzzy. I scratched my head all over and gave my hair a tug. Once when I had a headache I’d been told by Melanie that pulling your hair increased the circulation to the brain. She said that’s why Neil did it. After I stood up, I felt more awake. I studied myself in the big wall mirror. I wasn’t the same person as the day before, although I looked similar. I opened the door and went along the hall to the kitchen in my bare feet. Ada wasn’t there. She was in the living room, sitting in one of the easy chairs with a mug of coffee. On the sofa was the man we’d passed when going in through the side door at SanctuCare. “You woke up,” said Ada. Adults were in the habit of stating the obvious—You woke up was something Melanie might have said to me, as if it was an accomplishment—and I was disappointed to find that Ada was no exception in this way. I looked at the man and he looked at me. He was wearing black jeans and sandals and a grey T-shirt that said TWO WORDS, ONE FINGER and a Blue Jays baseball cap. I wondered if he knew what his T-shirt actually meant. He must have been fifty, but his hair was dark and thick, so maybe he was younger. His face was like creased leather, and he had a scar up the side of his cheek. He smiled at me, showing white teeth with a molar missing on the left. A tooth missing like that makes a person look illegal. Ada nodded her chin over at the man: “You remember Elijah, from SanctuCare. Friend of Neil’s. He’s here to help. There’s cereal in the kitchen.” “Then we can talk,” said Elijah. The cereal was the kind I liked, round Os made from beans. I brought the bowl into the living area and sat down in the other easy chair, and waited for them to speak. Neither of them said anything. They glanced at each other. I ate two spoonfuls, tentatively, in case my stomach was still unsettled. In my ears I could hear the crunching of the Os. “Which end first?” said Elijah. “The deep end,” said Ada. “Okay,” he said and looked directly at me. “Yesterday was not your birthday.” I was surprised. “Yes it was,” I said. “The first of May. I turned sixteen.” “In reality you’re about four months younger,” said Elijah. How do you prove your birth date? There must have been a birth certificate, but where did Melanie keep it? “It’s on my health card. My birthday,” I said. “Try again,” said Ada to Elijah. He looked down at the carpet. “Melanie and Neil were not your parents,” he said. “Yes they were!” I said. “Why are you saying that?” I felt tears building in my eyes. There was another void opening in reality: Neil and Melanie were fading, changing shape. I realized I didn’t know much about them really, or about their past. They hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t asked. Nobody ever asks their parents much about themselves, do they? “I know this is distressing for you,” said Elijah, “but it’s important, so I’ll say it again. Neil and Melanie were not your parents. Sorry to be so blunt, but we don’t have much time.” “Then who were they?” I said. I was blinking. One of the tears made it out; I wiped it away. “No relation,” he said. “You were placed with them for safekeeping when you were a baby.” “That can’t be true,” I said. But I was less convinced. “You should’ve been told earlier,” said Ada. “They wanted to spare you the worry. They were going to tell you on the day they…” She trailed off, clamped her lips shut. She’d been so silent about Melanie dying, as if they hadn’t been friends at all, but now I could see that she was truly upset. It made me like her more. “Part of their job was to protect you and keep you safe,” said Elijah. “I’m sorry to be the messenger.” On top of the new-furniture smell of the room, I could smell Elijah: a sweaty, solid, practical-laundry-soap smell. Organic laundry soap. It was the kind Melanie used. Had used. “Then who were they?” I whispered. “Neil and Melanie were very valued and experienced members of the—” “No,” I said. “My other parents. My real ones. Who were they? Are they dead too?” “I’ll make more coffee,” said Ada. She got up and went into the kitchen. “They’re still alive,” said Elijah. “Or they were yesterday.” I stared at him. I wondered if he was lying, but why would he have done that? If he’d wanted to make things up, he could have made up better things. “I don’t believe any of this,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re even saying it.” Ada came back into the room with a mug of coffee and said did anyone else want one, help yourself, and maybe I should have some time to myself to think things over. Think what over? What was there to think? My parents had been murdered, but they weren’t my real parents, and a different set of parents had appeared in their place. “What things?” I said. “I don’t know enough to think anything.” “What would you like to know?” said Elijah in a kind but tired voice. “How did it happen?” I said. “Where are my real…my other mother and father?” “Do you know much about Gilead?” Elijah asked. “Of course. I watch the news. We took it in school,” I said sullenly. “I went to that protest march.” Right then I wanted Gilead to evaporate and leave us all alone. “That’s where you were born,” he said. “In Gilead.” “You’re joking,” I said. “You were smuggled out by your mother and Mayday. They’d risked their lives. Gilead made a big fuss about it; they wanted you back. They said your so-called legal parents had the right to claim you. Mayday hid you; there were a lot of people looking for you, plus a media blitz.” “Like Baby Nicole,” I said. “I wrote an essay about her at school.” Elijah looked down at the floor again. Then he looked straight at me. “You are Baby Nicole.” IX Thank Tank 24 The Ardua Hall Holograph This afternoon I had another summons from Commander Judd, brought to me in person by a junior Eye. Commander Judd could have picked up the phone himself and discussed his business that way—there is an internal hotline between his office and mine, with a red telephone—but, like me, he can’t be sure who else might be listening. In addition, I believe he enjoys our little t?te-?-t?tes, for reasons that are complex and perverse. He thinks of me as his handiwork: I am the embodiment of his will. “I trust you are well, Aunt Lydia,” he said as I sat down across from him. “Flourishing, praise be. And you?” “I myself am in good health, but I fear my Wife is ailing. It weighs upon my soul.” I was not surprised. The last time I saw her, Judd’s current Wife was looking shopworn. “That is sad news,” I said. “What seems to be the malady?” “It is not clear,” he said. It never is. “An affliction of the inner organs.” “Would you like someone at our Calm and Balm Clinic to consult?” “Perhaps not just yet,” he said. “Most likely it is minor, or perhaps even imaginary, as so many of these female complaints prove to be.” There was a pause while we regarded each other. Soon, I feared, he would again be a widower, and in the market for another child bride. “Whatever I can do to help,” I said. “Thank you, Aunt Lydia. You understand me so well,” he said, smiling. “But that isn’t the reason I asked you here. We have taken a position on the death of the Pearl Girl we lost in Canada.” “What in fact transpired?” I already knew the answer, but had no intention of sharing it. “The official Canadian account of the matter is suicide,” he said. “I am devastated to hear this,” I replied. “Aunt Adrianna was one of the most faithful and efficient…I placed much trust in her. She was exceptionally courageous.” “Our own version is that the Canadians are covering up, and the depraved Mayday terrorists enabled by Canada’s lax toleration of their illegal presence killed Aunt Adrianna. Though between you and me, we are baffled. Who can tell? It may even have been one of those random drug-related killings so prevalent in that decadent society. Aunt Sally was just around the corner purchasing some eggs. When she returned and discovered the tragedy, she wisely decided that a swift return to Gilead was her best option.” “Very wisely,” I said. — Upon her sudden return, a shaken Aunt Sally had come straight to me. Then she’d described how Adrianna had met her end. “She attacked me. Out of nowhere, just before we were leaving for the Consulate. I don’t know why! She leapt on me and tried to choke me, and I fought back. It was self-defence,” she’d sobbed. “A momentary psychotic break,” I’d said. “The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect. You did the right thing. You had no choice. I see no reason for anyone else to know about this, do you?” “Oh, thank you, Aunt Lydia. I’m so sorry it happened.” “Pray for Adrianna’s soul, then put it out of your mind,” I’d said. “Do you have anything else to tell me?” “Well, you asked us to be on the lookout for Baby Nicole. The couple running The Clothes Hound had a daughter who would be about the right age.” “That is an interesting speculation,” I’d said. “You intended to send a report, via the Consulate? Instead of waiting to speak directly with me upon return?” “Well, I thought you should know immediately. Aunt Adrianna said it would be premature—she was strongly against it. We had words about it. I insisted that it was important,” Aunt Sally had said defensively. “Indeed,” I’d said. “It was. But risky. Such a report might well have started an unfounded rumour, with dire consequences. We have had so many false alarms, and everyone in the Consulate is potentially an Eye. The Eyes can be so blunt; they lack finesse. There is always a reason for my instructions. My orders. It is not for the Pearl Girls to take unauthorized initiatives.” “Oh, I didn’t realize—I didn’t think. But still, Aunt Adrianna shouldn’t have—” “Least said, soonest mended. I know you meant well,” I’d told her soothingly. Aunt Sally had started to cry. “I did, I really did.” Hell was paved with good intentions, I’d been tempted to say. But refrained. “Where is the girl in question now?” I’d asked. “She must have gone somewhere after her parents were removed from the scene.” “I don’t know. Maybe they shouldn’t have blown up The Clothes Hound so soon. Then we would have been able to—” “I concur. I did advise against hastiness. Unfortunately the agents run by the Eyes in Canada are young and enthusiastic, and they do admire explosions. But how were they to know?” I’d paused, fixed her with my best penetrating gaze. “And you have not communicated your suspicions about this potential Baby Nicole to anyone else?” “No. Only to you, Aunt Lydia. And to Aunt Adrianna, before she…” “Let’s keep this to ourselves, shall we?” I’d said. “There need not be a trial. Now, I think you need some rest and recuperation. I’ll arrange a stay for you at our lovely Margery Kempe Retreat House in Walden. You’ll be a different woman soon. The car will take you there in half an hour. And if Canada agitates about the unfortunate condo occurrence—if they wish to interview you or even charge you with some crime—we’ll simply say you have disappeared.” I did not wish Aunt Sally dead: I simply wished her incoherent; and so it has been. The Margery Kempe Retreat House has a discreet staff. More tearful thanks from Aunt Sally. “Don’t thank me,” I’d said. “It is I who should be thanking you.” — “Aunt Adrianna did not give her life in vain,” Commander Judd was saying. “Your Pearl Girls set us on a profitable course of action: we have made yet other discoveries.” My heart contracted. “I am happy that my girls were of use.” “As always, thank you for your initiative. Since our operation involving the used clothing store indicated by your Pearl Girls, we’ve become certain of the means by which information has been exchanged in recent years between Mayday and their unknown contact here in Gilead.” “And what is that means?” “Via the burglary—via the special operation—we recovered a microdot camera. We’ve been doing tests with it.” “Microdot?” I asked. “What is that?” “An old technology that has fallen into disuse, but that is still perfectly viable. Documents are photographed with a miniature camera that reduces them to microscopic size. Then they are printed on minute plastic dots, which can be applied to almost any surface and read by the recipient with a custom viewer small enough to be concealed in, for instance, a pen.” “Astonishing,” I exclaimed. “Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say ‘Pen Is Envy.’?” He laughed. “Indeed,” he said. “We pen-wielders must take care to avoid reproach. But it is intelligent of Mayday to have resorted to this method: not many people today would be aware of it. As they say: if you aren’t looking, you don’t see.” “Ingenious,” I said. “It’s only one end of the string—the Mayday end. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a Gilead end—those who are receiving the microdots here and reciprocating with messages of their own. We have still not identified that individual, or individuals.” “I’ve asked my colleagues at Ardua Hall to keep their eyes and ears open,” I said. “And who better placed to do that than the Aunts?” he said. “You have access to any house you choose to enter, and with your finer women’s intuition you hear things we dull men are too deaf to register.” “We’ll outfox Mayday yet,” I said, clenching my fists, thrusting out my jaw. “I like your spirit, Aunt Lydia,” he said. “We make a great team!” “The truth shall prevail,” I said. I was quivering with what I hoped would pass as righteous indignation. “Under His Eye,” he replied. — After this, my reader, I was in need of a restorative. I made my way to the Schlafly Caf? for a cup of hot milk. Then I came here to the Hildegard Library to continue my journey with you. Think of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker. On the last page where we met, I’d brought you as far as the stadium, and there I will resume. As time crept by, things fell into a pattern. Sleep at night, if you could. Endure the days. Hug the weepers, though I have to say the weeping became tedious. So did the howling. There was an attempt at music on the first evenings—a couple of the more optimistic and energetic women styled themselves singsong leaders, and attempted versions of “We Shall Overcome” and similar archaic chestnuts recalled from vanished summer camp experiences. There were problems remembering the words, but at least it added variety. No guards put a stop to these efforts. However, by day three the perkiness was fading and few were joining in, and there were mutterings—“Quiet, please!” “For God’s sake, shut up!”—so the Girl Scout leaders, after a few hurt protests—“I was only trying to help”—ceased and desisted. I was not one of the singers. Why waste your energy? My mood was not melodious. It was rather one of a rat in a maze. Was there a way out? What was that way? Why was I here? Was it a test? What were they trying to find out? Some women had nightmares, as you’d assume. They would groan and thrash about during them, or sit bolt upright with modified shouts. I’m not criticizing: I had nightmares myself. Shall I describe one for you? No, I will not. I’m fully aware of how easily one can become fatigued by other people’s nightmares, having heard a number of recitals of these by now. When push comes to shove, only one’s own nightmares are of any interest or significance. In the mornings, wakeup was perpetrated by a siren. Those whose watches had not been taken away—watch removal had been spotty—reported that this happened at 6 a.m. Bread and water for breakfast. How superlatively good that bread tasted! Some wolfed and guzzled, but I made my portion last as long as possible. Chewing and swallowing distracts from abstract mental wheel-spinning. Also it passes the time. Then, lineups for the foul toilets, and good luck to you if yours was clogged, since no one would come to unclog it. My theory? The guards went around at night stuffing various materials down the toilets as a further aggravation. Some of the more tidy-minded tried to clean up the washrooms, but once they saw how hopeless it was they gave up. Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching. Did I say there was no toilet paper? What then? Use your hand, attempt to clean your sullied fingers under the dribble of water that sometimes came out of the taps and sometimes did not. I’m sure they arranged that on purpose also, to raise us up and hurl us down at random intervals. I could picture the glee on the face of whatever kitten-torturing cretin was assigned this task as he flipped the power switch on the water flow system back and forth. We had been told not to drink the water from those taps, but some unwisely did. Retching and diarrhea followed, to contribute to the general joy. There were no paper towels. There were no towels of any kind. We wiped our hands on our skirts, whether those hands had been washed or not. I am sorry to dwell so much on the facilities, but you would be amazed at how important such things become—basics that you’ve taken for granted, that you’ve barely thought about until they’re removed from you. During my daydreams—and we all daydreamed, as enforced stasis with no events produces daydreams and the brain must busy itself with something—I frequently pictured a beautiful, clean, white toilet. Oh, and a sink to go with it, with an ample flow of pure clear water. Naturally we began to stink. In addition to the ordeal by toilet, we’d been sleeping in our business attire, with no change of underwear. Some of us were past menopause, but others were not, so the smell of clotting blood was added to the sweat and tears and shit and puke. To breathe was to be nauseated. They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman. The rest of each day would unfurl like a toxic flower, petal by petal, agonizingly slow. We were sometimes handcuffed again, though sometimes not, then marched out in a line and slotted into the bleachers to sit under the blazing sun, and on one occasion—blissfully—in a cool drizzle. We reeked of wet clothing that night, but less of ourselves. Hour by hour we watched vans arrive, discharge their quota of women, depart empty. The same wailings from the new arrivals, the same barking and shouts from the guards. How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot. Lunch was the sandwiches again, and on one day—the drizzle day—some carrot sticks. “Nothing like a balanced meal,” said Anita. We had contrived to sit next to each other most days, and to sleep in proximity. She had not been a personal friend before this time, merely a professional colleague, but it gave me comfort simply to be with someone I knew; someone who personified my previous achievements, my previous life. You might say we bonded. “You were a damn fine judge,” she whispered to me on the third day. “Thank you. So were you,” I whispered back. Were was chilling. — Of the others in our section I learned little. Their names, sometimes. The names of their firms. Some firms had specialized in domestic work—divorces, child custody, and so forth—so if women were now the enemy I could see why they might have been targeted; but being in real estate or litigation or estate law or corporate law appeared to offer no protection. All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination. — The afternoons were chosen for the executions. The same parade out to the middle of the field, with the blinded condemned ones. I noticed more details as time went on: how some could hardly walk, how some seemed barely conscious. What had been happening to them? And why had they been selected to die? The same man in a black uniform exhorting into a microphone: God will prevail! Then the shots, the toppling, the limp bodies. Then the cleanup. There was a truck for the corpses. Were they buried? Were they burned? Or was that too much trouble? Perhaps they were simply taken to a dumpsite and left for crows. On the fourth day there was a variation: three of the shooters were women. They weren’t in business suits, but in long brown garments like bathrobes, with scarves tied under their chins. That got our attention. “Monsters!” I whispered to Anita. “How could they?” she whispered back. On the fifth day there were six women in brown among the shooters. There was also an uproar, as one of them, instead of aiming at the blindfolded ones, pivoted and shot one of the men in black uniforms. She was immediately bludgeoned to the ground and riddled with bullets. There was a collective gasp from the bleachers. So, I thought. That’s one way out. — During the days new women would be added to our group of lawyers and judges. It stayed the same size, however, since every night some were removed. They left singly, between two guards. We did not know where they were being taken, or why. None came back. On the sixth night Anita was spirited away. It happened very quietly. Sometimes the targeted ones would shout and resist, but Anita did not, and I am ashamed to say that I was asleep when she was deleted. I woke up when the morning siren went off and she was simply not there. “I’m sorry about your friend,” one kind soul whispered to me as we stood in line for the pullulating toilets. “I’m sorry too,” I whispered back. But I was already hardening myself for what was almost surely to come. Sorry solves nothing, I told myself. Over the years—the many years—how true I have found that to be. — On the seventh night, it was me. Anita had been noiselessly abstracted—that silence had had a demoralizing effect all its own, since one could vanish, it seemed, with nobody noticing and not even a ripple of sound—but it was not intended that I should go quietly. I was wakened by a boot applied to the hip. “Shut up and get up,” said one of the barking voices. Before I was properly awake I was being yanked upright and set in motion. All around there were murmurs, and one voice said, “No,” and another said, “Fuck,” and another said, “God bless,” and another said, “Cu?date mucho.” “I can walk by myself!” I said, but this made no difference to the hands on my upper arms, one on either side. This is it, I thought: they’re going to shoot me. But no, I corrected myself: that’s an afternoon thing. Idiot, I countered: shooting can happen anywhere at any time, and anyway shooting is not the only method. All this time I was quite calm, which seems hard to believe, and in fact I no longer believe it: I was not quite calm, I was dead calm. As long as I thought of myself as already dead, untroubled by future cares, things would go easier for me. I was steered through the corridors, then out of a back entrance and into a car. It was not a van this time but a Volvo. The back-seat upholstery was soft but firm, the air conditioning was like a breath of paradise. Unfortunately the freshness of the air reminded me of my own accumulated odours. Nevertheless I relished the luxury, despite the fact that I was squashed in between my two guards, both of them bulky. Neither said anything. I was simply a bundle to be transported. The car stopped outside a police station. It was no longer a police station, however: the lettering had been covered over, and on the front door there was an image: an eye with wings. The logo of the Eyes, though I did not yet know that. Up the front steps we went, my two companions striding, me stumbling. My feet hurt: I realized how out of practice they had become, and also how wrecked and filthy my shoes were, after the drenching, the baking, and the various substances to which they had been subjected. We went along the corridor. Baritone rumblings came from behind doors; men in outfits like the ones beside me hurried past, their eyes gleaming with purpose, their voices staccato. There’s something spine-stiffening about uniforms, about insignia, about shiny lapel pins. No slouchers here! We turned into one of the rooms. There, behind a large desk, sat a man who looked faintly like Santa Claus: plump, white beard, rosy cheeks, cherry nose. He beamed at me. “You may sit down,” he said. “Thank you,” I replied. Not that I had a choice: my two travel buddies were inserting me into a chair and attaching me to it with plastic straps, arms to arms. Then they left the room, closing the door softly behind them. I had the impression that they went out backwards as if in the presence of some ancient god-king, but I couldn’t see behind me. “I should introduce myself,” he said. “I am Commander Judd, of the Sons of Jacob.” This was our first meeting. “I suppose you know who I am,” I replied. “That is correct,” he said, smiling blandly. “I apologize for the inconveniences you have been exposed to.” “It was nothing,” I said, straight-faced. It’s foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you. They don’t like it; they think you don’t appreciate the full extent of their power. Now that I have power myself, I do not encourage flippancy among subordinates. But I was careless back then. I have learned better. His smile vanished. “Are you thankful to be alive?” he said. “Well, yes,” I said. “Are you thankful that God made you in a woman’s body?” “I suppose so,” I said. “I’ve never thought about it.” “I am not sure you are thankful enough,” he said. “What would thankful enough be like?” I said. “Thankful enough to co-operate with us,” he said. Have I mentioned that he had little oblong half-glasses? He took these off now and contemplated them. His eyes without the glasses were less twinkly. “What do you mean by ‘co-operate’?” I said. “It’s a yes or a no.” “I was trained as a lawyer,” I said. “I’m a judge. I don’t sign blank contracts.” “You are not a judge,” he said, “anymore.” He pressed a button on an intercom. “Thank Tank,” he said. Then, to me: “Let us hope you will learn to be more thankful. I will pray for that result.” — And that is how I found myself in the Thank Tank. It was a repurposed police-station isolation cell, approximately four paces by four. It had a bed shelf, though there was no mattress. It had a bucket, which I swiftly concluded was for human food by-products, as there were still some of those in it, as witnessed by the smell. It had once had a light, but no more: now it had only a socket, and this was not live. (Of course I stuck my finger into it after a while. You would have too.) Any light I had would come from the corridor outside, through the slot by which the inevitable sandwiches would shortly arrive. Gnawing in the dark, that was the plan for me. I groped around in the dusk, found the bed slab, sat down on it. I can do this, I thought. I can get through. I was right, but only just. You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person. I was in the Thank Tank for some time. I don’t know how long. Every once in a while an eye would view me through the sliding shutter that was there for viewing purposes. Every once in a while there would be a scream or a series of shrieks from nearby: brutalization on parade. Sometimes there would be a prolonged moaning; sometimes a series of grunts and breathy gasps that sounded sexual, and probably were. The powerless are so tempting. I had no way of knowing whether or not these noises were real or merely recordings, intended to shatter my nerves and wear away my resolve. Whatever my resolve might be: after some days I lost track of that plotline. The plotline of my resolve. — I was parked inside my twilit cell for an unknown length of time, but it couldn’t really have been that long judging from the length of my fingernails when I was brought out of it. Time, however, is different when you’re shut up in the dark alone. It’s longer. Nor do you know when you’re asleep and when awake. Were there insects? Yes, there were insects. They did not bite me, so I expect they were cockroaches. I could feel their tiny feet tiptoeing across my face, tenderly, tentatively, as if my skin were thin ice. I did not slap them. After a while you welcome any kind of touch. One day, if it was a day, three men came into my cell without warning, shone a glaring light into my blinking purblind eyes, threw me onto the floor, and administered a precise kicking, and other attentions. The noises I emitted were familiar to me: I had heard them nearby. I won’t go into any further details, except to say that Tasers were also involved. No, I was not raped. I suppose I was already too old and tough for the purpose. Or it may be that they were priding themselves on their high moral standards, but I doubt this very much. This kicking and tasing procedure was repeated two more times. Three is a magic number. Did I weep? Yes: tears came out of my two visible eyes, my moist weeping human eyes. But I had a third eye, in the middle of my forehead. I could feel it: it was cold, like a stone. It did not weep: it saw. And behind it someone was thinking: I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it. — Then, after an indefinite period and without warning, the door to my Thank Tank cell clanged open, light flooded in, and two black uniforms hauled me out. No words were spoken. I—by this time a shambling wreck, and even smellier than before—was marched or dragged down the corridor by which I had arrived, and out the front door by which I had entered, and into an air-conditioned van. Next thing I knew I was in a hotel—yes, a hotel! It was not one of the grand hotels, more like a Holiday Inn, if that name will mean anything to you, though I suppose it will not. Where are the brands of yesteryear? Gone with the wind. Or rather gone with the paintbrush and the demolition team, because as I was being hauled into the lobby there were workmen overhead, obliterating the lettering. In the lobby there was no sweetly smiling reception staff to welcome me. Instead there was a man with a list. A conversation took place between him and my two tour guides, and I was propelled into an elevator, then along a carpeted corridor that was only beginning to show signs of an absence of maids. A couple more months and they’ll have a serious mildew issue, I thought with my mushy brain as a door was carded open. “Enjoy your stay,” said one of my minders. I don’t believe he was being ironic. “Three days R