“She’ll die anyway, won’t she, sir?”

“Probably. Up here.”

“Then don’t be selfish, sir. Give her what she wants.”

* * *

Charity Starbridge switched on the light in her bedroom in the commissar’s tower far below. At the moment when the doctor was making the first gestures of his art, had lit the incense and made a row of chalkmarks along the antinomial’s forearm, representative of the Angkhdtian symbols for cleanliness and health, as well as chemical diagrams of the nine principal causes of infection—at that moment Charity was thinking about him as she lay in bed. Though not as he appeared then, stripped to his undershirt, his long face dripping sweat, but in his dark blue Starbridge uniform, as he looked that night when her husband had invited him to dinner. He was not handsome, but that didn’t matter. Her life had been so sheltered, she had never formed an image of the word. Except for Abu and the commissar, she had not seen another man of legal breeding age since before the time she found them interesting. Not even a servant, not even at a distance. Her bedroom had no windows. It contained nothing but one enormous bed.

According to scripture and commentary and tradition, she was not supposed to let a single outside interest diffuse the energy of holy love. According to scripture; but her parents had married her to a man three times her age, who had already been burned to a cinder on the altar of matrimony by three dedicated wives. She had inherited their bed and their library, but the devotional literature disturbed her rest, so that sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath from dreaming.

Awake, her natural modesty, her simplicity, her ignorance all filled her mind with such a mist that the figures of her dreams were lost in it. They capered just beyond the limits of her imagination. And though in her dreams they had no faces, when she was awake that’s all they had, or rather, one face only, the doctor’s, the only face she knew. She saw it now, rising from the mist, huge, disembodied like a god, his high pale forehead, his long hair, his short black beard. That afternoon, she had fallen asleep over a book, and in the evening when she turned on the electric light beside her bed, his face was all that she had left, even though she knew her dream had not been about him.

For months she had been suffering from a kind of lethargy. She lost weight, slept twelve hours out of the day, had no interest in anything. She barely spoke. It was against law and tradition for her to have unpleasant and unhappy thoughts. That was impossible to police, but lately she found it hard to think of anything acceptable to say. She had forgotten all of the charm, all of the manners that she had learned in school. The commissar had noticed it. He was a gentle old man; too gentle. When the doctor came to see her, he stood behind her and stroked her neck, and the commissar was so kind, he didn’t even stay in the same room. She had everything to make her happy, she reflected sadly.