“Pardon?” She looked puzzled.
“I mean that whoever it was, his behaviour will be punished in time. Put it out of your mind. You will be safe with us here. You will never be troubled by him again.” We Aunts do not work openly in such cases, but we work. “Now, I hope you’ll prove that you are deserving of the trust I have placed in you,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I will be deserving!” These girls are all like that at the beginning: limp with relief, abject, prostrate. That can change over time, of course: we’ve had renegades, we’ve had backdoor sneakings to meet ill-advised Romeos, we’ve had disobedient flights. The endings of such stories have not usually been happy.
“Aunt Lise will take you to get your uniform,” I said. “Tomorrow you will have your initial reading lesson, and you will begin to learn our rules. But now you should select your new name. There is a list of suitable names available. Off you go. Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” I said as cheerfully as I could.
“I can’t thank you enough, Aunt Lydia!” said Becka. Her eyes were shining. “I’m so grateful!”
I smiled my wintry smile. “I’m pleased to hear that,” I said, and I was indeed pleased. Gratitude is valuable to me: I like to bank it for a rainy day. You never know when it may come in handy.
Many are called but few are chosen, I thought. Though that was not true at Ardua Hall: only a handful of the called have had to be discarded. Surely the girl Becka would be one of our keepers. She was a damaged houseplant, but cared for properly she would bloom.
“Close the door after you,” I said. She almost skipped out of the room. How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.
XIV
ARDUA HALL
Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A
35
After Becka cut her wrist with the secateurs and bled on the Shasta daisies and was taken to the hospital, I was very worried about her: would she recover, would she be punished? But as the autumn and then the winter seasons came and went, there was still no news. Even our Marthas did not hear anything about what might have happened to her.
Shunammite said Becka was just trying to get attention. I disagreed, and I am afraid there was a coolness between us for the remainder of the classes.
As the spring weather set in, Aunt Gabbana announced that the Aunts had come up with three candidates for Paula and Commander Kyle to consider. She visited us at our house and showed us their photographs and recited their biographies and qualifications, reading from her notebook, and Paula and Commander Kyle listened and nodded. I was expected to look at the pictures and listen to the recital, but not to say anything at present. I could have a week to consider. My own inclinations would naturally be taken into account, said Aunt Gabbana. Paula smiled at this.
“Of course,” she said. I said nothing.
The first candidate was a full Commander, and was even older than Commander Kyle. He was red-nosed, with slightly bulbous eyes—the mark, said Aunt Gabbana, of a strong personality, one who would be a reliable defender and sustainer of his Wife. He had a white beard and what looked like jowls underneath it, or possibly wattles: skin folds drooping down. He was one of the first Sons of Jacob and so was exceptionally godly, and had been essential in the early struggle to establish the Republic of Gilead. In fact, it was rumoured that he had been part of the group that had masterminded the attack on the morally bankrupt Congress of the former United States. He’d already had several Wives—dead, unhappily—and had been assigned five Handmaids but had not yet been gifted with children.
His name was Commander Judd, though I’m not sure this information is of much use if you are attempting to establish his true identity, since the leading Sons of Jacob had changed their names frequently when they were in the secret planning stages of Gilead. I knew nothing of these name changes at the time: I learned about them later, thanks to my excursions through the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives at Ardua Hall. But even there, Judd’s original name had been obliterated.
The second candidate was younger and thinner. His head was pointed at the top and he had oddly large ears. He was good with numbers, said Aunt Gabbana, and intellectual, not always a desirable thing—especially not for women—but in a husband it could be tolerated. He had managed to have one child by his former Wife, who had died in an asylum for mental sufferers, but the poor infant had expired before the age of one.
No, said Aunt Gabbana, it had not been an Unbaby. There was nothing wrong with it at birth. The cause was juvenile cancer, alarmingly on the rise.
The third man, the younger son of a lower-ranking Commander, was only twenty-five. He had a lot of hair but a thick neck, and eyes that were close together. Not as excellent a prospect as the other two, said Aunt Gabbana, but the family was highly enthusiastic about the match, which meant I would be properly appreciated by the in-laws. This was not to be discounted, since hostile in-laws could make a girl’s life miserable: they would criticize, and always side with the husband.
“Don’t jump to any conclusions yet, Agnes,” Aunt Gabbana said. “Take your time. Your parents want you to be happy.” This was a kind thought, but a lie: they didn’t want me to be happy, they wanted me to be elsewhere.
I lay in bed that night with the three photographs of the eligible men floating in the darkness before my eyes. 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.
36
I considered running away from home, but how would I do that and where could I go? I had no notion of geography: we did not study it in school, since our own neighbourhood should be enough for us, and what Wife needed more? I did not even know how big Gilead was. How far did it go, where did it end? More practically, how would I travel, what would I eat, where would I sleep? And if I did run away, would God hate me? Surely I would be pursued? Would I cause a lot of suffering to others, like the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces?
The world was infested with men who were certain to be tempted by girls who’d strayed out of bounds: such girls would be viewed as loose in their morals. I might not get any farther than the next block before being ripped to shreds, polluted, and reduced to a pile of wilting green petals.
The week I’d been granted in which to choose my husband wore on. Paula and Commander Kyle favoured Commander Judd: he had the most power. They put on a show of persuading me, since it was better if the bride was willing. There had been gossip about high-level weddings that had gone off badly—wailing, fainting, slaps administered by the mother of the bride. I’d overheard the Marthas saying that before some weddings tranquilizing drugs had been administered, with needles. They had to be careful with the dose: mild staggering and slurred speech could be put down to emotion, a wedding being a hugely important moment in a girl’s life, but a ceremony at which the bride was unconscious did not count.
It was clear that I would be married to Commander Judd whether I liked it or not. Whether I hated it or not. But I kept my aversion to myself and pretended to be deciding. As I say, I had learned how to act.
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