I help her to the bed and dry her with a warm towel. I begin to pare and clean her toenails; but already waves of sleepiness are running over me. I catch my head drooping, my body falling forward in a stupor. Carefully I put the scissors aside. Then, fully clothed, I lay myself down head to foot beside her. I fold her legs together in my arms, cradle my head on them, and in an instant am asleep.
I wake up in the dark. The lamp is out, there is a smell of burnt wick. I get up and open the curtains. The girl lies huddled asleep, her knees drawn up to her chest. When I touch her she groans and huddles tighter. "You are getting cold," I say, but she hears nothing. I spread a blanket over her, and a second blanket.
First comes the ritual of the washing, for which she is now naked. I wash her feet, as before, her legs, her buttocks. My soapy hand travels between her thighs, incuriously, I find. She raises her arms while I wash her armpits. I wash her belly, her breasts. I push her hair aside and wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her.
She lies on the bed and I rub her body with almond oil. I close my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the rubbing, while the fire, piled high, roars in the grate.
I feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us. I feed her, shelter her, use her body, if that is what I am doing, in this foreign way. There used to be moments when she stiffened at certain intimacies; but now her body yields when I nuzzle my face into her belly or clasp her feet between my thighs. She yields to everything. Sometimes she slips off into sleep before I am finished. She sleeps as intensely as a child.
As for me, under her blind gaze, in the close warmth of the room, I can undress without embarrassment, baring my thin shanks, my slack genitals, my paunch, my flabby old man's breasts, the turkey-skin of my throat. I find myself moving about unthinkingly in this nakedness, sometimes staying to bask in the fire after the girl has gone to sleep, or sitting in a chair reading.
But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if poleaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, blank, outside time.
One evening, rubbing her scalp with oil, massaging her temples and forehead, I notice in the corner of one eye a greyish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid, grazing.
"What is this?" I ask, tracing the caterpillar with my fingernail.
"That is where they touched me," she says, and pushes my hand away
"Does it hurt?"
She shakes her head.
"Let me look."
It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl's body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her. Between thumb and forefinger I part her eyelids. The caterpillar comes to an end, decapitated, at the pink inner rim of the eyelid. There is no other mark. The eye is whole.
I look into the eye. Am I to believe that gazing back at me she sees nothing-my feet perhaps, parts of the room, a hazy circle of light, but at the centre, where I am, only a blur, a blank? I pass my hand slowly in front of her face, watching her pupils. I cannot discern any movement. She does not blink. But she smiles: "Why do you do that? Do you think I cannot see?" Brown eyes, so brown as to be black.
I touch my lips to her forehead. "What did they do to you?" I murmur. My tongue is slow, I sway on my feet with exhaustion. "Why don't you want to tell me?"
She shakes her head. On the edge of oblivion it comes back to me that my fingers, running over her buttocks, have felt a phantom crisscross of ridges under the skin. "Nothing is worse than what we can imagine," I mumble. She gives no sign that she has even heard me. I slump on the couch, drawing her down beside me, yawning. "Tell me," I want to say, "don't make a mystery of it, pain is only pain"; but words elude me. My arm folds around her, my lips are at the hollow of her ear, I struggle to speak; then blackness falls.
I have relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid. "From the kitchen to the Magistrate's bed in sixteen easy steps"-that is how the soldiers talk of the kitchenmaids. Another of their sayings: "What is the last thing the Magistrate does when he leaves in the morning?-He shuts his latest girl in the oven." The smaller a town the more richly it hums with gossip. There are no private affairs here. Gossip is the air we breathe. For part of the day she washes dishes, peels vegetables, helps to bake bread and prepare the humdrum round of porridge, soup and stew that the soldiers are fed. There are, besides her, the old lady who has ruled over the kitchen almost as long as I have been magistrate, and two girls, the younger of whom ascended the sixteen stairs once or twice last year. At first I am afraid these two will band together against her; but no, they seem quickly to make friends. Passing the kitchen door on my way out I hear, muffled by the steamy warmth, voices, soft chatter, giggles. I am amused to detect in myself the faintest stab of jealousy.
"Do you mind the work?" I ask her.
"I like the other girls. They are nice."
"At least it's better than begging, isn't it?"
"Yes."
The three girls sleep together in a small room a few doors from the kitchen, if they do not happen to be sleeping elsewhere. It is to this room that she finds her way in the dark if I send her away in the night or the early morning. No doubt her friends have prattled about these trysts of hers, and the details are all over the marketplace. The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal. I cannot play the part of a man of iron or a saintly widower. Sniggers, jokes, knowing looks-these are part of the price I am resigned to paying.
"Do you like it, living in a town?" I ask her cautiously.
"I like it most of the time. There is more to do."
"Are there things you miss?"
"I miss my sister."
"If you really want to go back," I say, "I will have you taken."
"Taken where?" she says. She lies on her back with her hands placidly over her breasts. I lie beside her, speaking softly. This is where the break always falls. This is where my hand, caressing her belly, seems as awkward as a lobster. The erotic impulse, if that is what it has been, withers; with surprise I see myself clutched to this stolid girl, unable to remember what I ever desired in her, angry with myself for wanting and not wanting her.
She herself is oblivious of my swings of mood. Her days have begun to settle into a routine with which she seems content. In the morning after I have left she comes to sweep and dust the apartment.
Then she helps in the kitchen with the midday meal. Her afternoons are mainly her own. After the evening meal, after all the pots and pans have been scoured, the floor washed, the fire damped, she leaves her fellows and picks her way up the stairs to me. She undresses and lies down, waiting for my inexplicable attentions. Perhaps I sit beside her stroking her body, waiting for a flush of blood that never truly comes. Perhaps I simply blow out the lamp and settle down with her. In the dark she soon forgets me and falls asleep. So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits itself in sleep into ever sturdier health, working in silence even at the points of irremediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again.
I cast my mind back, trying to recover an image of her as she was before. I must believe that I saw her on the day she was brought in by the soldiers roped neck to neck with the other barbarian prisoners. I know that my gaze must have passed over her when, together with the others, she sat in the barracks yard waiting for whatever was to happen next. My eye passed over her; but I have no memory of that passage. On that day she was still unmarked; but I must believe she was unmarked as I must believe she was once a child, a little girl in pigtails running after her pet lamb in a universe where somewhere far away I strode in the pride of my life. Strain as I will, my first image remains of the kneeling beggar-girl.