Her fever and the pains in her chest yielded to antibiotics, and her infections dried. After two weeks she would smile when he came into the room, and after two weeks more she would wait for him by the window and run to greet him as he limped up the path. Then she would take him by the hand, and they would go for walks, or she would rub her cheek along the sleeve of his coat when they sat together on the bed. He would put his arm around her shoulder, and she would snuggle up against the soft material, sucking her thumb, peering at the picture book that he was holding in his lap.

As he watched the absorption with which she studied the illustrations, he felt a mixture of emotions. He had brought her all his own books, the ones he had loved when he was a child—stories of magic and fantasy, boys turned into eagles, adventures at the bottom of the sea. Some of the margins were marked in his own childish handwriting, and some of the pictures were torn in a way that brought back some urgent, long-forgotten memory. At such times, looking at her serious pale face, the way her legs dangled without touching the floor, he felt himself transported back to his own miserable childhood, the days of studying those same picture books while the endless winter howled outside. Then, reading, he had not been looking into the past, but to the future, a magic time when he would be a man and all wrongs would be righted, all insults savagely avenged. Now, looking back, he could remember a whole scene—some burning humiliation, and in the end he had run into his room, slamming the door, pulling the book violently from the shelf, so that the picture tore just so. Then, kneeling over it, he had put his finger on the tear, studying the picture without seeing it, as he was doing now. And in an instant, the boy raised his face to stare into the future just as Thanakar looked back into the past, their eyes meeting as if through a sequence of mirrors.

He, too, had been an only child, though the bedroom in his father’s house was not like this. His own room had been unusually luxurious, as if his parents had tried to expiate through luxury the guilt they felt at hating him for something that was not his fault. No, not hate, surely, but disappointment, and it amounted to the same thing, for he had hated himself loyally for their sakes. He remembered his mother holding her arms out, and he had limped into her arms. And all the way, across acres and acres of polished floor, he was studying her face, convinced that it was only through the most muscular exertions of her will that she was able to keep that mask of love over her face. Later he had come to realize how his own sensitivity was cheating him, but it didn’t help, because the cause was real: he really was a cripple, and he was their only child. In those days his limping had been worse. Every phase of winter, every phase of spring had brought with it a new therapy, a new series of operations, something that might show some progress and squeeze some dispensation from the priests. Each one had aggravated his condition, until he could barely walk. And even though he knew instinctively that he couldn’t begin to heal until they left him alone, still he submitted to every cure with masochistic glee. He took pleasure in the incompetence of surgeons. He had decided to become a doctor.