“Yes, Aunt Lydia, praise be,” I said. Becka echoed me. Jade smiled at us, a smile that managed to be both tremulous and stubborn. She was not like the average new convert from abroad: these were likely to be either abject or filled with zeal.
“Welcome,” I said to Jade. “Please come in.”
“Okay,” she said. She crossed our threshold. My heart felclass="underline" already I knew that the outwardly placid life Becka and I had been leading at Ardua Hall for the past nine years was at an end—change had come—but I did not yet grasp how wrenching that change would be.
I have said our life was placid, but perhaps that is not the right word. It was at any rate orderly, albeit somewhat monotonous. Our time was filled, but in a strange way it did not seem to pass. I’d been fourteen when I’d been admitted as a Supplicant, and although I was now grown up, I did not appear to myself to have grown much older. It was the same with Becka: we seemed to be frozen in some way; preserved, as if in ice.
The Founders and the older Aunts had edges to them. They’d been moulded in an age before Gilead, they’d had struggles we had been spared, and these struggles had ground off the softness that might once have been there. But we hadn’t been forced to undergo such ordeals. We’d been protected, we hadn’t needed to deal with the harshness of the world at large. We were the beneficiaries of the sacrifices made by our forebears. We were constantly reminded of this, and ordered to be grateful. But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity. I’m afraid we did not fully appreciate the extent to which those of Aunt Lydia’s generation had been hardened in the fire. They had a ruthlessness about them that we lacked.
48
Despite this feeling of time standing still, I had in fact changed. I was no longer the same person I’d been when I’d entered Ardua Hall. Now I was a woman, even if an inexperienced one; then I had been a child.
“I’m very glad the Aunts let you stay,” Becka had said on that first day. She’d turned her shy gaze full upon me.
“I’m glad too,” I said.
“I always looked up to you at school. Not just because of your three Marthas and your Commander family,” she said. “You lied less than the others. And you were nice to me.”
“I wasn’t all that nice.”
“You were nicer than the rest of them,” she said.
Aunt Lydia had given permission for me to live in the same residence unit as Becka. Ardua Hall was divided into many apartments; ours was marked with the letter C and the Ardua Hall motto: Per Ardua Cum Estrus.
“It means, Through childbirth labour with the female reproductive cycle,” Becka said.
“It means all that?”
“It’s in Latin. It sounds better in Latin.”
I said, “What is Latin?”
Becka said it was a language of long ago that nobody spoke anymore, but people wrote mottoes in it. For instance, the motto of everything inside the Wall used to be Veritas, which was the Latin for “truth.” But they’d chiselled that word off and painted it over.
“How did you find that out?” I asked. “If the word is gone?”
“In the Hildegard Library,” she said. “It’s only for us Aunts.”
“What’s a library?”
“It’s where they keep the books. There are rooms and rooms full of them.”
“Are they wicked?” I asked. “Those books?” I imagined all that explosive material packed inside a room.
“Not those I’ve been reading. The more dangerous ones are kept in the Reading Room. You have to get special permission to go in there. But you can read the other books.”
“They let you?” I was amazed. “You can just go in there and read?”
“If you get permission. Except for the Reading Room. If you did that without permission, there would be a Correction, down in one of the cellars.” Each Ardua Hall apartment had a soundproofed cellar, she said, which used to be for things like piano practising. But now the R cellar was where Aunt Vidala did the Corrections. Corrections were a kind of punishment, for straying beyond the rules.
“But punishments are done in public,” I said. “For criminals. You know, the Particicutions, and hanging people and displaying them on the Wall.”
“Yes, I know,” said Becka. “I wish they wouldn’t leave them up so long. The smell gets into our bedrooms, it makes me feel sick. But the Corrections in the cellar are different, they’re for our own good. Now, let’s get you an outfit, and then you can choose your name.”
There was an approved list of names, put together by Aunt Lydia and the other senior Aunts. Becka said the names were made from the names of products women had liked once and would be reassured by, but she herself did not know what those products were. Nobody our age knew, she said.
She read the list of names out to me, since I could not yet read. “What about Maybelline?” she said. “That sounds pretty. Aunt Maybelline.”
“No,” I said. “It’s too frilly.”
“How about Aunt Ivory?”
“Too cold,” I said.
“Here’s one: Victoria. I think there was a Queen Victoria. You’d be called Aunt Victoria: even at the Supplicant level we’re allowed the title of Aunt. But once we finish our Pearl Girls missionary work in other countries outside Gilead, we’ll graduate to full Aunts.” At the Vidala School we hadn’t been told much about the Pearl Girls—only that they were courageous, and took risks and made sacrifices for Gilead, and we should respect them.
“We go outside Gilead? Isn’t it scary to be that far away? Isn’t Gilead really big?” It would be like falling out of the world, for surely Gilead had no edges.
“Gilead is smaller than you think,” said Becka. “It has other countries around it. I’ll show you on the map.”
I must have looked confused because she smiled. “A map is like a picture. We learn to read maps here.”
“Read a picture?” I said. “How can you do that? Pictures aren’t writing.”
“You’ll see. I couldn’t do it at first either.” She smiled again. “With you here, I won’t feel so alone.”
What would happen to me after six months? I worried. Would I be allowed to stay? It was unnerving to have the Aunts looking at me as if inspecting a vegetable. It was hard to direct my gaze at the floor, which was what was required: any higher and I might be staring at their torsos, which was impolite, or into their eyes, which was presumptuous. It was difficult never to speak unless one of the senior Aunts spoke to me first. Obedience, subservience, docility: these were the virtues required.
Then there was the reading, which I found frustrating. Maybe I was too old to ever learn it, I thought. Maybe it was like fine embroidery: you had to start young; otherwise you would always be clumsy. But little by little I picked it up. “You have a knack,” said Becka. “You’re way better than I was when I began!”
The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.
The most astonishing thing about these books was that Dick and Jane and Baby Sally lived in a house with nothing around it but a white wooden fence, so flimsy and low that anyone at all could climb over it. There were no Angels, there were no Guardians. Dick and Jane and Baby Sally played outside in full view of everyone. Baby Sally could have been abducted by terrorists at any moment and smuggled to Canada, like Baby Nicole and the other stolen innocents. Jane’s bare knees could have aroused evil urges in any man passing by, despite the fact that everything but her face had been covered over with paint. Becka said that painting the pictures in such books was a task that I’d be asked to perform, as it was assigned to the Supplicants. She herself had painted a lot of books.