He places a hand on her shoulder, fixes her with a long gaze and goes out, returning before the duty shift changes and says:

“They’re taking out the stitches tomorrow. You can leave on Friday. I’ve arranged for you to go on a refugee boat.”

4

Eva Sofie takes out the stitches and, using two mirrors, allows Ingrid to see her own back, small pink crosses over white skin and her shaven head which, together, they manage to conceal beneath a new plait, or two, which they tie together, and Eva Sofie says that Ingrid should start wearing a brassiere, at any rate when men are present, such as on this trip south, she has seen these boats, they’re not nice places to be.

It is her daily duties in the shower room that have put this idea into Eva Sofie’s head. Every morning Ingrid and two elderly women from the same ward, Ada and Signy, both with long, grey hair like straw, are led three floors down and have to undress in a cold, white changing room with echoing walls and then stand between some serpentine steel pipes in a tiled room and be rinsed down from all directions with water that is too hot. It also comes from above, like rain. Eva Sofie calls it a shower, and says how important it is for them to stay there for four minutes, gyrating like ballet dancers, even though the water comes from all sides and they could just as well have stood still, whilst Eva Sofie rests her hands on a red and a blue tap, controlling the flow of water like a driver with two steering wheels, and checks that they do what they have been told with regard to soap and rinsing, and groin and armpits and hair, and that afterwards they dry themselves on rough, newly washed towels, which make their skin burn and become nubbly. Ada and Signy are more self-conscious than Ingrid, and that helps, they get accustomed to neither the changing room nor the cold water, but they are in here together and giggle and laugh like schoolgirls.

And Ingrid, who used to think she was a clean person, now she hasn’t been aware of the smell of her own body since her island was struck by death; the spurting jets of water caress and prickle her skin and inspire her to stretch her arms above her head and spread her fingers into the metallic chandelier releasing the shower of water like a cloud; she spins around and performs more pirouettes than Eva Sofie cares to see, so she wrenches hard at the red tap, causing Ingrid to rush out of the ice-cold water with a howl, which is not without an element of pleasure, the four minutes are now up.

It is here in the shower that Eva Sofie has noticed that Ingrid’s breasts are larger than her own.