The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.

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

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.

“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.”

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.

Hope for what? I thought. What was there left to hope for? All I could see in front of me was loss and darkness.

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.

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?

I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere:

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.

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.

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, 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’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.

It was something to get through on my way to real life, the shape of which would become clear to me soon.

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.

Who are you, my reader? And when are you? Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps never.

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.

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.

The tanking economy, the joblessness, the falling birth rate. People became frightened. Then they became angry.

You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

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.

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.

Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estée. 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?

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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

“Least said, soonest mended. I know you meant well,” I’d told her soothingly.

Chewing and swallowing distracts from abstract mental wheel-spinning. Also it passes the time.

Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.

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.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.

All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.

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.

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.

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.

During my legal career my body had been merely a vehicle for propelling me from one achievement to the next, but now I had a newfound tenderness for it.

We were not supposed to go in there except to attend funerals: the names of the dead were on the stones, and that might lead to reading, and then to depravity. Reading was not for girls: only men were strong enough to deal with the force of it; and the Aunts, of course, because they weren’t like us.

You must understand that I was not anybody in my own right—although of the privileged class, I was just a young girl about to be confined to wedlock.

As someone once said, We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.

some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.

“Letting them run their own affairs to that extent. Women are weak vessels. Even the strongest of them should not be allowed to—” Commander Judd cut her off. “Men have better things to do than to concern themselves with the petty details of the female sphere. There must be women competent enough for that.”

Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.

“To err is human, to forgive divine. As someone once remarked.”

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.

“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”

I pictured each one of them on top of me—for that is where they would be—trying to shove his loathsome appendage into my stone-cold body. Why was I thinking of my body as stone cold? I wondered. Then I saw: it would be stone cold because I would be dead. I would be as wan and bloodless as poor Ofkyle had been—cut open to get her baby out, then lying still, wrapped in a sheet, staring at me with her silent eyes. There was a certain power in it, silence and stillness.