A day passes. I stare out over the square where the wind chases flurries of dust. Two little boys are playing with a hoop. They bowl it into the wind. It rolls forward, slows, teeters, rides back, falls. The boys lift their faces and run after it, the hair whipped back from their clean brows.

I find the girl and stand before her. She sits with her back against the trunk of one of the great walnut trees: it is hard to see whether she is even awake. "Come," I say, and touch her shoulder. She shakes her head. "Come," I say, "everyone is indoors." I beat the dust from her cap and hand it to her, help her to her feet, walk slowly beside her across the square, empty now save for the gatekeeper, who shades his eyes to stare at us.

The fire is lit. I draw the curtains, light the lamp. She refuses the stool, but yields up her sticks and kneels in the centre of the carpet.

"This is not what you think it is," I say. The words come reluctantly. Can I really be about to excuse myself? Her lips are clenched shut, her ears too no doubt, she wants nothing of old men and their bleating consciences. I prowl around her, talking about our vagrancy ordinances, sick at myself. Her skin begins to glow in the warmth of the closed room. She tugs at her coat, opens her throat to the fire. The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible; I shudder.

"Show me your feet," I say in the new thick voice that seems to be mine. "Show me what they have done to your feet."

She neither helps nor hinders me. I work at the thongs and eyelets of the coat, throw it open, pull the boots off. They are a man's boots, far too large for her. Inside them her feet are swaddled, shapeless.

"Let me see," I say.

She begins to unwrap the dirty bandages. I leave the room, go downstairs to the kitchen, come back with a basin and a pitcher of warm water. She sits waiting on the carpet, her feet bare. They are broad, the toes stubby, the nails crusted with dirt.

She runs a finger across the outside of her ankle. "That is where it was broken. The other one too." She leans back on her hands and stretches her legs.

"Does it hurt?" I say. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing.

"Not any more. It has healed. But perhaps when the cold comes."

"You should sit," I say. I help her off with the coat, seat her on the stool, pour the water into the basin, and begin to wash her feet. For a while her legs remain tense; then they relax.

I wash slowly, working up a lather, gripping her firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons of her feet, running my fingers between her toes. I change my position to kneel not in front of her but beside her, so that, holding a leg between elbow and side, I can caress the foot with both hands.

I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present. When I come to, my fingers have slackened, the foot rests in the basin, my head droops.

I dry the right foot, shuffle to the other side, lift the leg of the wide drawers above her knee, and, fighting against drowsiness, begin to wash the left foot. "Sometimes this room gets very hot," I say. The pressure of her leg against my side does not lessen. I go on. "I will find clean bandages for your feet," I say, "but not now." I push the basin aside and dry the foot. I am aware of the girl struggling to stand up; but now, I think, she must take care of herself. My eyes close. It becomes an intense pleasure to keep them closed, to savour the blissful giddiness. I stretch out on the carpet. In an instant I am asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up cold and stiff. The fire is out, the girl is gone.

I watch her eat. She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch. She has a good appetite, the appetite of a robust young countrywoman.

"I don't believe you can see," I say.

"Yes, I can see. When I look straight there is nothing, there is-" (she rubs the air in front of her like someone cleaning a window).

"A blur," I say.

"There is a blur. But I can see out of the sides of my eyes. The left eye is better than the right. How could I find my way if I didn't see?"

"Did they do it to you?"

"Yes."

"What did they do?"

She shrugs and is silent. Her plate is empty. I dish up more of the bean stew she seems to like so much. She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles. "Beans make you fart," she says. The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock and drawers. When she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably on the periphery of her vision. When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy that one day falls asleep washing her feet and the next day feeds her bean stew and the next day-she does not know.

I seat her, fill the basin, roll the drawers above her knees. Now that the two feet are together in the water I can see that the left is turned further inward than the right, that when she stands she must stand on the outer edges of her feet. Her ankles are large, puffy, shapeless, the skin scarred purple.

I begin to wash her. She raises her feet for me in turn. I knead and massage the lax toes through the soft milky soap. Soon my eyes close, my head droops. It is rapture, of a kind.

When I have washed her feet I begin to wash her legs. For this she has to stand in the basin and lean on my shoulder. My hands run up and down her legs from ankle to knee, back and forth, squeezing, stroking, moulding. Her legs are short and sturdy, her calves strong. Sometimes my fingers run behind her knees, tracing the tendons, pressing into the hollows between them. Light as feathers they stray up the backs of her thighs.

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.