The Testaments

20

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.