Sitting with his arm around the little girl, sometimes he felt he loved her because of the mark on her cheek. It was a large red mark near her left ear, and a priest would say that God had pinched her underneath the ear before releasing her into the world, to mark her with His curse. They had said something like that about his leg, though her case was much more serious because she was born like that, and because her family was poor. He wondered how she had escaped growing up in prison, but by the time he and Jenny had become close enough to sit like that, side by side, he no longer spoke to her parents much. At first they had been eager to please. They had accepted his gifts with a humility that had made him wonder whether he was doing the right thing. They kept the house clean for his visits. But after Jenny was well and he kept coming, they changed. The woman became surly and uncommunicative, the man increasingly nervous. Gradually the dirt started to come back, as if cleanliness were just a whim of his which they no longer wanted to indulge. Thanakar didn’t care. Even though he understood how they were beginning to fear him, to wish their poverty didn’t oblige them to accept his gifts, still they did accept them. As long as they did, the doctor felt that he could come when he pleased. Their nervousness and sullenness made him impatient. Surely they could see how clean his motives were. They thought he was trying to steal her. But her poverty was part of what he loved, her stupid parents and her filthy house. But if he didn’t feel capable of explaining this to them, it was because in another sense he realized that their fears were justified, that every smile she gave him took her farther away.

He loved the way they loved her. Other parents would have given her up to the judicial system and forgotten her, but these had become outlaws for her sake. He thought about his own parents. For a long time he had felt as if he owed them nothing, because of the pain of those operations on his leg. But yet, how unfair children are. He had been so eager. Perhaps, if he had not been so eager, his parents would have desisted after the first few failures. They could not have been expected to understand that his eagerness was a way of gathering up justifications to use against them in his heart. It was the way he had found to overwhelm his spontaneous feelings for them—the natural love of the miserable for the magnificent. In Jenny’s parents he had seen at first some of that same love in the way they had treated him, and now he saw some of the work it took to bury it. They were unfair to him, like children.

* * *

“I’m worried about your health,” he told Jenny’s father. The man was sitting alone in his consulting room with his head in his hands, his snuffpots around him on the floor. The doctor stood in the doorway, and as he spoke the man raised his face, handsome, with his daughter’s pale skin and perfect features. He blinked, as if unable to recognize his guest, and then got wearily to his feet to make the gestures of respect. He was very thin.