Will soon be nine. There won’t be any birthday cake. The children, at the moment there are thirteen, who live on a floor of the enchanting building in the choicest location on the park, cannot see out the window. Passersby could take notice. Drones could take films. The windows are for this understandable reason two-thirds frosted glass. One third is clear. Way high up. Unreachable by the children. Only by lying down can they sometimes look up and see the sky. Every last inch of the flat is monitored by video camera. Little blinking red lights and microphones all over the place. One doesn’t know. One doesn’t know what to do with all these goddamn child soldiers here. Because—there’s not much for the eight-year-old prostitute to do anymore. As with all the child soldiers. It’s become calm in recent weeks. It doesn’t matter to the eight-year-old prostitute. She lies on the floor, looks at the thin slice of sky and has no idea how a life can be provided that doesn’t take place here in this prison. Like all of them here. Their stories are similar, they’re so boring, the stories of their lives, and they all have to do with a lack of affection. With parents who for various reasons were too busy with their own survival or who just hadn’t survived. The previous year someone had gone to the trouble to count the number of homeless children in the country. And how exactly do you count homeless children, by waking them in the middle of the night in their gutters and then, once they’re statistically registered, clapping them on the shoulder with a back-to-sleep-you-little-rascal? It ended up being several hundred thousand, nearly a million, but who knows. Maybe they all looked very similar to each other, crusted in filth. A little boy, Ben, had for a moment been the darling of the press and an inspired public. He was five, homeless, and had the advantage of being blond and charming. Ben was unbelievably photogenic, the way he sat there with his blue eyes radiating out of the muck. He had dimples. He had fucking dimples. And after the big SAVE BEN campaign had found kindhearted, rich foster parents for him, who were primarily interested in publicity and attention for their laundry service, they subsequently barely spoke to little Ben. In his cellar room.