The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale #2) - Margaret Atwood Page 0,9

its character-bestowing mole on the chin, its etching of familiar lines. I was never frivolously pretty, but I was once handsome: that can no longer be said. Imposing is the best that might be ventured.

How will I end? I wondered. Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honoured statue? Or will the regime and I both topple and my stone replica along with me, to be dragged away and sold off as a curiosity, a lawn ornament, a chunk of gruesome kitsch?

Or will I be put on trial as a monster, then executed by firing squad and dangled from a lamppost for public viewing? Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers? I have inspired sufficient rage for that.

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?

Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list.

* * *

—

I am well aware of how you must be judging me, my reader; if, that is, my reputation has preceded me and you have deciphered who I am, or was.

In my own present day I am a legend, alive but more than alive, dead but more than dead. 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. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?

But perhaps it is too late for that. You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.

* * *

—

Today was the first full moon after March 21. Elsewhere in the world, lambs are being slaughtered and eaten; Easter eggs, too, are consumed, for reasons having to do with Neolithic fertility goddesses nobody chooses to remember.

Here at Ardua Hall we skip the lamb flesh but have kept the eggs. As a special treat I allow them to be dyed: baby pink and baby blue. You have no idea what delight this brings to the Aunts and Supplicants assembled in the Refectory for supper! Our diet is monotonous and a little variation is welcome, even if only a variation in colour.

After the bowls of pastel eggs had been brought in and admired but before our meagre feast began, I led the usual Prayer of Grace—Bless this food to our service and keep us on the Path, May the Lord open—and then the special Spring Equinox Grace:

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. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. May our Baby Nicole be restored to us, we pray; may Grace return her.

Per Ardua Cum Estrus. Amen.

* * *

—

It pleases me to have concocted such a slippery motto. Is Ardua “difficulty” or “female progenitive labour”? Does Estrus have to do with hormones or with pagan rites of spring? The denizens of Ardua Hall neither know nor care. They are repeating the right words in the right order, and thus are safe.

Then there is Baby Nicole. As I prayed for her return, all eyes were focused on her picture hanging on the wall behind me. So useful, Baby Nicole: she whips up the faithful, she inspires hatred against our