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By Root 353 0

legs dangling. Nina turned her back again and began to lather her body with the liquid soap from the automat on the wall. It had a sweet and perfumed smell that felt almost too extravagant for the gray shower room, and Nina was caught up in a moment’s pleasure, enjoying the heat and the scent of it. Her skin felt warm, soft, and alive, and the steam rose about her and obscured mirrors and glass partitions. She worked up a new helping of frothy lather and washed her hair rather roughly. She had had it cut quite short again not so long ago. Morten didn’t understand why, but he wasn’t the one who had to struggle with the heavy, frizzy burden of it. It had curled nearly to her shoulders before she had it cut, and the relief had been enormous. Not least in her job, where she no longer had to wonder what would be the politically correct way of wearing it today. Many of the male inhabitants of the Coal-House Camp saw the female staff as a combination of prison wardens and service functions. They felt superior and humiliated at the same time, one of the center’s psychologists had once explained. Possibly it was true. Whatever the cause, conflict always lurked just beneath the surface, and Nina had tried to appear as sexless and neutral as possible. When she had her hair cut so short, it was an oddly mutual relief. Some of her provocative femininity seemed to have disappeared along with the hair, and Nina didn’t miss it. Morten did, but she had long ago stopped regulating her appearance in accordance with his opinions.

Nina slid a wet hand down across her navel and the rigidly defined muscles of her abdomen. Despite her two pregnancies, there was nothing much that was ripe and womanly about her body now. Poor Morten.

The boy moved impatiently on the bench. Collecting her drifting thoughts, she turned off the shower and began instead to fill one of the white plastic kiddy bathtubs that were scattered about the shower room. The boy did not resist as she pulled off his new clothes and sat him down in the tub. Crouching next to him, she carefully began to wash his shoulders, chest, back, and feet. Deliberately, she did not touch him elsewhere, but just let him sit in the tub as she used the shower to rinse away the soap. The boy took all this with surprising calm. His fingers trustingly followed the little currents of hot water tricklinging down his chest and belly, and when a frothy bubble almost miraculously released itself from the edge of the tub and fell with a wet pop aganst the tiles of the floor, he sent Nina a gleeful smile of delight and surprise—the first she had ever seen on his face since their common journey had begun yesterday afternoon.

Nina felt a new warm sense of relief spreading in her abdomen. She couldn’t positively know, and she was no expert on responses to pedophilia and child abuse, but it seemed to her that the boy was free of such hideousness. If something like that had happened to him, surely he would have acted differently? More frightened, less trustful?

The relief was almost painful in its ferocity. The boy was still whole. Rescue, in its most complete sense, was still possible.

She turned off the water and dried him gently with one of the towels. Then, silently, they began to dress, and Nina combed his hair with her fingers.

Who was he?

She watched patiently as he insisted on pulling the T-shirt over his head himself. He might have been a child smuggled into Denmark for the purpose of some sort of prostitution or abuse, but would he then be stored like luggage in a central station locker? Nina didn’t know very much about that type of crime. She certainly saw her share of human degradation and brutality in her job, but the motives there were usually unsubtle, and the methods simple enough that even the most moronic of criminals could join in. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to batter the last few pennies out of an Iraqi father who had already paid almost everything he possessed to the traffickers who had arranged his journey to the border. Nor was it especially difficult to lure Eastern Euopean girls