Margaret Atwood - The Testaments

“They are observant, well trained, and obedient,” I said. The Pearl Girls were originally my idea—other religions had missionaries, so why not ours? And other missionaries had produced converts, so why not ours? And other missionaries had gathered information used in espionage, so why not ours?—but, being no fool or at least not that kind of fool, I’d let Commander Judd take credit for the plan. Officially, the Pearl Girls report only to me, as it would be unseemly for the Commander to involve himself in the details of what is essentially women’s work; though of course I must pass along to him anything I deem either necessary or unavoidable. Too much and I’d lose control, too little and I’d fall under suspicion. Their attractive brochures are composed by us, and designed and printed by the small Ardua Hall press located in one of our cellars.

My Pearl Girls initiative came at a crucial moment for him, just as the folly of his National Homelands fiasco was becoming undeniable. The genocide charges levied by international human rights organizations had become an embarrassment, the flow of refugee Homelanders from North Dakota across the Canadian border was an unstoppable flood, and Judd’s ridiculous Certificate of Whiteness scheme had collapsed in a welter of forgeries and bribery. The launch of the Pearl Girls saved his bacon, though I have since wondered whether it was politic of me to have saved it. He owes me, but that could prove a liability. Some people do not enjoy being indebted.

Right then, however, Commander Judd was all smiles. “Indeed, they are Pearls of Great Price. And with those two Mayday operatives out of commission, there will be less trouble for you, it is to be hoped—fewer Handmaids escaping.”

“Praise be.”

“Our feat of surgical demolition and cleansing won’t be announced by us publicly, of course.”

“We’ll be blamed for it anyway,” I said. “By the Canadian and international media. Naturally.”

“And we will deny it,” he said. “Naturally.”

There was a moment of silence as we regarded each other across his desk, 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.

“There is something that has been puzzling me, however,” he said. “Those two Mayday terrorists must have had a counterpart here in Gilead.”

“Really? Surely not!” I exclaimed.

“We’ve made an analysis of all known escapes: their high success rate cannot be explained without an element of leakage. Someone in Gilead—someone with access to our security personnel deployments—must have been informing the Underground Femaleroad. Which routes are watched, which are likely to be clear, that sort of thing. As you know, the war has meant that manpower, especially in Vermont and Maine, is thin on the ground. We’ve needed the bodies elsewhere.”

“Who in Gilead would be so treacherous?” I asked. “Betraying our future!”

“We’re working on it,” he said. “Meanwhile, if any ideas should occur to you…”

“Of course,” I said.

“There’s one other thing,” he said. “Aunt Adrianna. The Pearl Girl found dead in Toronto.”

“Yes. Devastating,” I said. “Is there any further information?”

“We’re expecting an update from the Consulate,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Anything I can do,” I said. “You know you can count on me.”

“In so many ways, dear Aunt Lydia,” he said. “Your price is above rubies, praise be.”

I like a compliment as well as anyone. “Thank you,” I said.

—

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 country that I still foolishly thought was the same as the country to which I had for so many years belonged.

Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

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.

The absence of viable remedies. The search for someone to blame.

Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we’d been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

—

My arrest came shortly after the Sons of Jacob attack that liquidated Congress. Initially we were told it was Islamic terrorists: a National Emergency was declared, but we were told that we should carry on as usual, that the Constitution would shortly be reinstated, and that the state of emergency would soon be over. That was correct, but not in the way we’d assumed.

It was a viciously hot day. The courts had been closed—temporarily, until a valid line of command and the rule of law could be reinstituted, we were told. Despite that, some of us had gone into work—the freed-up time could always be used to tackle the document backlog, or that was my excuse. Really I wanted company.

Oddly, none of our male colleagues had felt the same need. Perhaps they were finding solace among their wives and children.

As I was reading through some casework, one of my younger colleagues—Katie, recently appointed, thirty-six, and three months pregnant via sperm bank—came into my office. “We need to leave,” she said.

I stared at her. “What do you mean?” I said.

“We need to get out of the country. There’s something happening.”

“Well, of course—the state of emergency—”

“No, more than that. My bank card’s been cancelled. My credit cards—both of them. I was trying to get a plane ticket, that’s how I know. Is your car here?”

“What?” I said. “Why? They can’t simply cut off your money!”

“It seems they can,” said Katie. “If you’re a woman. That’s what the airline said. The provisional government has just passed new laws: women’s money now belongs to the male next of kin.”

“It’s worse than you think,” said Anita, a somewhat older colleague. She’d come into my office too. “Way worse.”

“I don’t have a male next of kin,” I said. I felt stunned. “This is completely unconstitutional!”

“Forget the Constitution,” said Anita. “They’ve just abolished it. I heard about that in the bank, when I tried to…” She began crying.

“Pull yourself together,” I said. “We need to think.”

“You’ll have a male relative somewhere,” said Katie. “They must have been planning this for years: they told me that my male next of kin is my twelve-year-old nephew.”

At that moment the main door was kicked in. Five men entered, two by two and then one on his own, submachine guns at the ready. Katie, Anita, and I came out of my office. The general receptionist, Tessa, screamed and ducked down behind her desk.

A couple of them were young—twenties, perhaps—but the other three were middle-aged. The younger ones were fit, the others had beer bellies. They were wearing camouflage gear direct from central casting, and if it hadn’t been for the guns I might have laughed, not yet realizing that female laughter would soon be in short supply.