He gave her all these things, for he went into her room once every day.

When he gave her the sanitary towels, Ruth's face crushed itself down. She marched into the bathroom and hid them. When she came out, she said, "You shouldn't have done that."

"How else would you manage?"

"It isn't nice," said Ruth. She was not prim but cold.

"I'm your jailor," he said.

She had accepted that. After the first time, she had never beaten again on the locked door, except to knock and call to him that she was hungry, or thirsty.

When he came into the room she did not protest.

But now she said, "It's wrong."

"Why? You menstruate."

"You should pretend not to know."

"Very well."

It was apparently his return for her obedience, this acquiescence of his. When next he brought her the towels, he folded them in the bath sheet. The same, too, with the nightshirts and underthings, the deodorant, even the shampoo.

She no longer wore makeup. From the third day she had begun to do her hair in two long plaits.

Sometimes she asked if she could see the dogs again, and sometimes he allowed this, bringing Enki and Oskar into the room on his next visit, but never allowing them to remain more than five minutes.

She was always docile, although occasionally she made polite passionless objections.

When she was alone, she took up one of the drawing pads and the paints or pencils, and drew and painted.

She created rooms and stairways, and endless variations of colored stained-glass windows, some with pictures of knights and women with birds. She painted nothing burning, and no dead, no blood. Then her architecture expanded as the time of her incarceration did. She drew pillared porticoes and soaring tiered towers. She drew archways which gave on archways, receding to vast distances.

She did not make landscapes.

Malach would look at all her work when he came. If she was at work on something when he entered, she would set it aside.

She sat on the plushy green carpet, a different shade from that of the living room which she had only briefly seen. She looked up at Malach sitting in one of the armchairs, like a pupil at a teacher. He had not told her to do this.

Once she had cut her finger on some paper, and it bled. She hid this from him like the evidence of the other bleeding.

She never referred to their meeting in the warehouse lobby, his killing of the men, how she had subsequently told him of the Reeveses, and that they had gone there together, and Malach had killed the man. The blood and flames.