The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale 2)

“We’ll train you,” said Elijah. “Praying and self-defence.” It sounded like some sort of TV skit.

“Self-defence?” I said. “Against who?”

“Remember the Pearl Girl found dead in the condo?” said Ada. “She was working for our source.”

“Mayday didn’t kill her,” said Elijah. “It was the other Pearl Girl, her partner. Adrianna must’ve been trying to block the partner’s suspicions about the whereabouts of Baby Nicole. There must’ve been a fight. Which Adrianna lost.”

“There’s a lot of people dying,” I said. “The Quakers, and Neil and Melanie, and that Pearl Girl.”

“Gilead’s not shy about killing,” said Ada. “They’re fanatics.” She said they were supposed to be dedicated to virtuous godly living, but you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder peopl

e if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people. I knew that because we’d done fanatics in school.

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I somehow agreed to go to Gilead without ever definitely agreeing. I’d said I’d think about it, and then the next morning everyone acted as if I’d said yes, and Elijah said how brave I was and what a difference I would make, and that I would bring hope to a lot of trapped people; so then I more or less couldn’t go back on it. Anyway, I felt that I owed Neil and Melanie, and the other dead people. If I was the only person the so-called source would accept, then I would have to try.

Ada and Elijah said they wanted to prepare me as much as they could in the short time they had. They set up a little gym in one of the cubicles, with a punching bag, a skipping rope, and a leather medicine ball. Garth did that part of the training. At first he didn’t talk to me much except about what we were doing: the skipping, the punching, tossing the ball back and forth. But after a while he did thaw a little. He told me he was from the Republic of Texas. They’d declared independence at the beginning of Gilead, and Gilead resented that; there had been a war, which had ended in a draw and a new border.

So right now Texas was officially neutral, and any actions against Gilead by its citizens were illegal. Not that Canada wasn’t neutral too, he said, but it was neutral in a sloppier way. Sloppier was his word, not mine, and I found it insulting until he said that Canada was sloppy in a good way. So he and some of his friends had come to Canada to join the Mayday Lincoln Brigade, for foreign freedom fighters. He’d been too young to be in the actual Gilead War with Texas, he’d only been seven. But his two older brothers had been killed in it, and a cousin of his had been grabbed and taken into Gilead, and they hadn’t heard from her since.

I was adding in my head to figure out exactly how old he was. Older than me, but not too much older. Did he think of me as more than an assignment? Why was I even spending time on that? I needed to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing.

* * *

—

At first I worked out twice a day for two hours, to build stamina. Garth said I wasn’t in bad shape, which was true—I’d been good at sports in school, a time that seemed long ago. Then he showed me some blocks and kicks, and how to knee someone in the groin, and how to throw a heartstopper punch—by making a fist, wrapping your thumb across the second knuckles of your middle and index fingers, then punching while keeping your arm straight. We practised that one a lot: you should strike first if you had the chance, he said, because you’d benefit from the surprise.

“Hit me,” he’d say. Then he would brush me aside and punch me in the stomach—not too hard, but hard enough so I could feel it. “Tighten your muscles,” he’d say. “You want a ruptured spleen?” If I cried—either in pain or in frustration—he would not be sympathetic, he would be disgusted. “You want to do this or not?” he’d say.

Ada brought in a dummy head made of moulded plastic, with gel eyes, and Garth tried to teach me how to poke somebody’s eyes out; but the idea of squishing eyeballs with my thumbs gave me the shudders. It would be like stepping on worms in your bare feet.

“Shit. That would really hurt them,” I said. “Thumbs in their eyes.”

“You need to hurt them,” said Garth. “You need to want to hurt them. They’ll be wanting to hurt you, bet on that.”

“Gross,” I said to Garth when he wanted me to practise the eye-poke. I could picture them too clearly, those eyes. Like peeled grapes.

“You want a panel discussion on whether you should be dead?” said Ada, who was sitting in on the session. “It’s not a real head. Now, stab!”

“Yuck.”

“Yuck won’t change the world. You need to get your hands dirty. Add some guts and grit. Now, try again. Like this.” She herself had no scruples.

“Don’t give up. You have potential,” said Garth.

“Thanks a bundle,” I said. I was using my sarcastic voice, but I meant it: I did want him to think I had potential. I had a crush on him, in a hopeless, puppyish way. But no matter how much I might fantasize, in the realistic part of my head I didn’t see any future in it. Once I’d gone into Gilead, I would most likely never see him again.

“How’s it going?” Ada would ask Garth every day after our workout.

“Better.”

“Can she kill with her thumbs yet?”

“She’s getting there.”

* * *