The Handmaid's Tale(33)

“Tell me,” he says. Distanced, but more alert, or am I imagining it?

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” I say.

“What?” he says.

I haven’t pronounced it properly. I don’t know how. “I could spell it,” I say. “Write it down.”

He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn’t remember I can. I’ve never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can’t add, he said once, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don’t make four.

What do they make? I said, expecting five or three.

Just one and one and one and one, he said.

But now he says, “All right,” and thrusts his roller-tip pen across the desk at me almost defiantly, as if taking a dare. I look around for something to write on and he hands me the score pad, a desk-top notepad with a little smile-button face printed at the top of the page. They still make those things.

I print the phrase carefully, copying it down from inside my head, from inside my closet. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Here, in this context, it’s neither prayer nor command, but a sad graffiti, scrawled once, abandoned. The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Centre motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal.

The Commander takes the smile-button page from me and looks at it. Then he begins to laugh, and is he blushing? “That’s not real Latin,” he says. “That’s just a joke.”

“A joke?” I say, bewildered now. It can’t be only a joke. Have I risked this, made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke? “What sort of a joke?”

“You know how schoolboys are,” he says. His laughter is nostalgic, I see now, the laughter of indulgence towards his former self. He gets up, crosses to the bookshelves, takes down a book from his trove; not the dictionary though. It’s an old book, a textbook it looks like, dog-eared and inky. Before showing it to me he thumbs through it, contemplative, reminiscent; then, “Here,” he says, laying it open on the desk in front of me.

What I see first is a picture: the Venus de Milo, in a black-and-white photo, with a moustache and a black brassiere and armpit hair drawn clumsily on her. On the opposite page is the Coliseum in Rome, labelled in English, and below a conjugation: sum es est, sumus estis sunt. “There,” he says, pointing, and in the margin I see it, written in the same ink as the hair on the Venus. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

“It’s sort of hard to explain why it’s funny unless you know Latin,” he says. “We used to write all kinds of things like that. I don’t know where we got them, from older boys perhaps.” Forgetful of me and of himself, he’s turning the pages. “Look at this,” he says. The picture is called The Sabine Women, and in the margin is scrawled: pim pis pit, pimus pistis pants. “There was another one,” he says. “Cim, cis, cit …” He stops, returning to the present, embarrassed. Again he smiles; this time you could call it a grin. I imagine freckles on him, a cowlick. Right now I almost like him.

“But what did it mean?” I say.

“Which?” he says. “Oh. It meant, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I guess we thought we were pretty smart, back then.”

I force a smile, but it’s all before me now. I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it, here, in this room. Where else? She was never a schoolboy. With him, during some previous period of boyhood reminiscence, of confidences exchanged. I have not been the first then. To enter his silence, play children’s word games with him.

“What happened to her?” I say.

He hardly misses a beat. “Did you know her somehow?”

“Somehow,” I say.

“She hanged herself,” he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. “That’s why we had the light fixture removed. In your room.” He pauses. “Serena found out,” he says, as if this explains it. And it does.

If your dog dies, get another.

“What with?” I say.

He doesn’t want to give me any ideas. “Does it matter?” he says. Torn bedsheet, I figure. I’ve considered the possibilities.

“I suppose it was Cora who found her,” I say. That’s why she screamed.

“Yes,” he says. “Poor girl.” He means Cora.

“Maybe I shouldn’t come here any more,” I say.

“I thought you were enjoying it,” he says lightly, watching me, however, with intent bright eyes. If I didn’t know better I would think it was fear. “I wish you would.”

“You want my life to be bearable to me,” I say. It comes out not as a question but as a flat statement; flat and without dimension. If my life is bearable, maybe what they’re doing is all right after all.

“Yes,” he says. “I do. I would prefer it.”

“Well then,” I say. Things have changed. I have something on him, now. What I have on him is the possibility of my own death. What I have on him is his guilt. At last.

“What would you like?” he says, still with that lightness, as if it’s a money transaction merely, and a minor one at that: candy, cigarettes.

“Besides hand lotion, you mean,” I say.

“Besides hand lotion,” he agrees.

“I would like …” I say. “I would like to know.” It sounds indecisive, stupid even, I say it without thinking.

“Know what?” he says.

“Whatever there is to know,” I say; but that’s too flippant. “What’s going on.”





XI

NIGHT





CHAPTER THIRTY


Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloudcover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket. I wish I could see in the dark, better than I do.

Night has fallen, then. I feel it pressing down on me like a stone. No breeze. I sit by the partly open window, curtains tucked back because there’s no one out there, no need for modesty, in my nightgown, long-sleeved even in summer, to keep us from the temptations of our own flesh, to keep us from hugging ourselves, bare-armed. Nothing moves in the searchlight moonlight. The scent from the garden rises like heat from a body, there must be night-blooming flowers, it’s so strong. I can almost see it, red radiation, wavering upwards like the shimmer above highway tarmac at noon.

Down there on the lawn, someone emerges from the spill of darkness under the willow, steps across the light, his long shadow attached sharply to his heels. Is it Nick, or is it someone else, someone of no importance? He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. Nick. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it’s the same kind of hunger.

Which I can’t indulge. I pull the left-hand curtain so that it falls between us, across my face, and after a moment he walks on, into the invisibility around the corner.

What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. Should does not apply.

You can’t help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.

Which is all very well.

Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other.


The night before we left the house, that last time, I was walking through the rooms. Nothing was packed up, because we weren’t taking much with us and we couldn’t afford even then to give the least appearance of leaving. So I was just walking through, here and there, looking at things, at the arrangement we had made together, for our life. I had some idea that I would be able to remember, afterwards, what it had looked like.

Luke was in the living room. He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

The cat, is what he said.

Cat? I said, against the wool of his sweater.

We can’t just leave her here.

I hadn’t thought about the cat. Neither of us had. Our decision had been sudden, and then there had been the planning to do. I must have thought she was coming with us. But she couldn’t, you don’t take a cat on a day trip across the border.

Why not outside? I said. We could just leave her.

She’d hang around and mew at the door. Someone would notice we were gone.

We could give her away, I said. One of the neighbours. Even as I said this, I saw how foolish that would be.

I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.