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“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…?”
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.
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.
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.
I’ll stash this screed in its hiding place, avoiding the surveillance cameras—I know where they are, having placed them myself.
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.
we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children,
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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,
she smiled and said that we were precious flowers, and who ever heard of a rebellious flower?
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?
They are repeating the right words in the right order, and thus are safe.
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.
I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.
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.
discretion is the better part of valour,
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.
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.
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
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.
You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.
underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it.
“Men must make sacrifices in war, and women must make sacrifices in other ways.
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.
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.
“Those women need to do their duty to the Divine Plan like the rest of us,” said Aunt Vidala. “Life is not a vacation.”
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.
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.
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.
“Most likely it is minor, or perhaps even imaginary, as so many of these female complaints prove to be.”
“Least said, soonest mended.
Think of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker.
During my daydreams—and we all daydreamed, as enforced stasis with no events produces daydreams and the brain must busy itself with something—I
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.
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.
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.
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.
Far back in history, Hearts were once Chalices. Perhaps that is why the Handmaids were Hearts: they were precious containers.
But I didn’t want to ask her: another girl’s disgrace could rub off on you if you got too close to it.
Everyone had a place in Gilead, everyone served in her own way, and all were equal in the sight of God, but some had gifts that were different from the gifts of others, said Aunt Lise. If the various gifts were confused and everyone tried to be everything, only chaos and harm could result. No one should expect a cow to be a bird!
Becka slashed her left wrist with the secateurs and had to be taken to the hospital. The cut wasn’t fatally deep, but a lot of blood came out nonetheless. It ruined the white Shasta daisies. I’d been watching when she did it. I could not forget her expression: it had a ferocity I had never seen in her before, and which I found very disturbing. It was as if she’d turned into a different person—a
“Under us, every virtuous woman may have a child, one way or another, as God intended.
We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.
Some might call the overthrowing of an illegitimate government an act of treason; without a doubt, many have had this thought about me. Now that you have joined us, it is the same thought that others will have about you. But loyalty to a higher truth is not treason,
