We used drawing ink and straight pens with metal nibs, or sometimes pencils. It depended on what had been recently allocated to Ardua Hall from the storehouses reserved for imports.
Writing materials were the prerogative of the Commanders and the Aunts. Otherwise they were not generally available in Gilead; women had no use for them, and most men didn’t either, except for reports and inventories. What else would most people be writing about?
We’d learned to embroider and paint at the Vidala School, and Becka said that writing was almost the same as that—each letter was like a picture or a row of stitching, and it was also like a musical note; you just had to learn how to form the letters, and then how to attach them together, like pearls on a string.
She herself had beautiful handwriting. She showed me how, often and with patience; then, once I could write, however awkwardly, she selected a series of Biblical mottoes for me to copy.
And now abideth Faith, Hope, Charity, these three; but the greatest of these is Charity.
Love is as strong as Death.
A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
I wrote them over and over. By comparing the different written versions of the same sentence, I could see how much I had improved, said Becka.
I wondered about the words I was writing. Was Charity really greater than Faith, and did I have either? Was Love as strong as Death? Whose was the voice that the bird was going to carry?
Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.
* * *
—
In addition to learning to read, I managed to successfully perform the other tasks assigned to me during those first months. Some of these tasks were not onerous: I enjoyed painting the skirts and sleeves and head coverings on the little girls in the Dick and Jane books, and I did not mind working in the kitchen, chopping up turnips and onions for the cooks and washing dishes. Everyone at Ardua Hall had to contribute to the general welfare, and manual labour was not to be sneered at. No Aunt was considered above it, though in practice the Supplicants did most of the heavy hauling. But why not? We were younger.
Scrubbing the toilets was not enjoyable, however, especially when you had to scrub them again even when they were perfectly clean the first time, and then again for a third time. Becka had warned me that the Aunts would demand this repetition—it wasn’t about the state of the toilets, she said. It was a test of obedience.
“But making us clean a toilet three times—that’s unreasonable,” I said. “It’s a waste of valuable national resources.”
“Toilet cleaner is not a valuable national resource,” she said. “Not like pregnant women. But unreasonable—yes, that’s why it’s a test. They want to see if you’ll obey unreasonable demands without complaining.”
To make the test harder, they would assign the most junior Aunt to supervise. To be given stupid orders by someone almost your age is a lot more irritating than having that person be old.
“I hate this!” I said after the fourth week in a row of toilet-cleaning. “I truly hate Aunt Abby! She’s so mean, and pompous, and…”
“It’s a test,” Becka reminded me. “Like Job, being tested by God.”
“Aunt Abby isn’t God. She only thinks she is,” I said.
“We must try not to be uncharitable,” said Becka. “You should pray for your hatred to go away. Just think of it as flowing out of your nose, like breath.”
Becka had a lot of these control-yourself techniques. I tried to practise them. They worked some of the time.
* * *
—
Once I’d passed my sixth-month examination and had been accepted as a permanent Supplicant, I was allowed into the Hildegard Library. It’s hard to describe the feeling this gave me. The first time I passed through its doors, I felt as if a golden key had been given to me—a key that would unlock one secret door after another, revealing to me the riches that lay within.
Initially I had access only to the outer room, but after a time I was given a pass to the Reading Room. In there I had my own desk. One of my assigned tasks was to make fair copies of the speeches—or perhaps I should call them sermons—that Aunt Lydia delivered on special occasions. She reused these speeches