The Testaments: Parts I–IV

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.

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.

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.

At the unveiling the sculptress was nervous. Was her rendition of me sufficiently flattering?

Votaries have taken to leaving offerings at my feet: eggs for fertility, oranges to suggest the fullness of pregnancy, croissants to reference the moon.

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.

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.

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.

But Aunt Estée, 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.

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.

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.

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.

“The petit point,” said Rosa. There was derision in her voice.

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.

In one of my bracing homilies to our Aunts some years ago, I preached against vanity, which creeps in despite our strictures against 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.

I was never frivolously pretty, but I was once handsome: that can no longer be said.

Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honoured statue?

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 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.

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.

The denizens of Ardua Hall neither know nor care. They are repeating the right words in the right order, and thus are safe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once, before the advent of the present regime, I gave no thought to a defence of my life.

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 would never fall for that!” I said indignantly.

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.

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.

They both looked at me then. What’s the word for that look? Desolate, I think. I was baffled: why should they care?

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.