Four Minutes

1

That child was me.

But my mother wasn’t there, I made it all up: my mother, the conversation, the ice cream. I wanted nothing more in the world than to walk beside a smiling mother, my little hand squeezed inside hers, happy in the knowledge that no matter what I did or said, or how much I begged her for ice cream, she would love me unconditionally, simply because I was hers. It wasn’t even the stupid ice cream that I so desperately craved. I just wanted to walk down the street with my mom, pleading and pestering her for something, just as I’d seen all the other kids do.

I ached to leap into this glorified painting in my imagination, filled with whiny little kids always begging their seemingly strict yet inevitably relenting mothers for something, walking along streets that led to parks filled with mountains of ice cream, with yapping little Maltese dogs, their leashes rhythmically tugged by their silver-haired, bouncy-coiffed lady owners, with guys selling colorful Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh helium balloons. I wanted it so badly, all that cotton candy and all those endless rows of park benches filled with young mothers bouncing and rocking their shrieking newborns with a mystifying calm, forcing you to taste their absolute love for the snotty babies tearing up the Saturday afternoon. But that painting was mounted high up, out of reach; it hung from a rusty old nail, beguiling and unattainable and I was not part of it. So instead, I dreamt her up, imagining her smiling and angry, vibrant and tired, reproachful and soothing. My mother. Summoned by my fragile, seven-year-old imagination. But what I could never quite grasp was how a mother’s love, so boundless and unconditional, could exist simply because a child did.

I do have a birth mother, like everyone else. She exists somewhere. She must, I’m sure of it: in some foreign painting that someone else carefully takes down from the wall, along with all that is contained within—all those children and ice cream and permed Maltese and balloons and cotton candy—and they all come alive. Every Saturday afternoon. Or maybe every other. My mother, despite her boundless and unconditional love for me, somehow found it in herself to omit me from that future watercolor. Then she had left. Left me alone inside an incubator, where I took my first breaths, cutting the sterile hospital quiet with my immature lungs and painfully inhaling the abandonment that would come to define me. I somehow sensed, even then, that my mother had vanished as soon as I’d appeared. She’d melted away like ice cream on a hot summer day.

So I imagined her instead.

2

My first conscious memory: I am three, maybe four. I am sitting on the floor of a dark room inside the Home. The room is neither big, nor small, and it reeks of dust and mold. Around me are children my age and some who are older. They pull at each other, shoving and screaming. I crawl into a corner and coil up like a snail, pressing my chin over my knees. I close my eyes and imagine that I disappear, that I become invisible to the others in the room, that I am able to observe the ruckus completely unnoticed. In that moment, I wish for something that, unbeknownst to me, is inevitable. For years afterward, I was certain that I alone willed my life to unfold as it did.

3

Sometimes, new moms arrived to choose one of us. Those were special days. For the moms, and for us. For the Matrons, too. They woke us up at dawn and bathed us, dressed us in clean clothes, changed the diapers of the littlest ones, mopped the floor of our playroom, and carefully arranged the scattered toys. It had the air of a holiday, like an International Children’s Day that arrived several times a year. Lucky devils we were.

We strained our necks impatiently toward the director’s office where our towering files mounted precariously on her gargantuan desk. But big as it was, the desk still couldn’t fit us all.

Then came the moms and dads. They swung open the doors to our dark corner permeated by the smell of mold and soiled diapers, and summer came rushing onto our toys: smiling, dusty, breathless, sticky. When the stale heat settled back, each of us was torn between the urge to run over to a mother and beg her through tears to pick one, any one of us, and the urge to simply stand there, to demonstrate good manners so as to be liked, just as the Matrons taught us. Inevitably, we froze in place like stone crosses in an old cemetery, and waited. Everything slowed. Only a pair of flies buzzing over a child’s toilet bowl in the corner embroidered the air.

It was always the mom who stepped forward first; the dad stood against the wall, wringing sweaty hands. The mother. She would choose. The woman unable to bear children of her own had come to take one of us back into her world. It was the law of the matryoshka—the Russian nesting doll—out of each, a girl is born; the girl grows up and produces a girl who one day becomes a mother by giving birth to yet another girl who eventually bears one, too. The infinite thread of life renewing the kinfolk. I wondered if the moms came here to save one of us or to find salvation for themselves.

It was always the mother who first braved to meet our pleading eyes and hers always dissolved in water. She approached us cautiously, tiptoeing around each one of us, reaching out to caress someone’s disheveled head and with it generating a gust of life that broke the stale air. We got our dose of affection: from a stranger, someone else’s mother. And we devoured it like caramel-frosted cake.

Then we looked on as the mother and the director discussed things back in the office, leafing through the dusty binders piled on that titanic desk, and the weight of it fell on us and crushed our heads like hollowed walnuts.

Salim

Salim hustles to the hospital. His mother’s been there since last week. Shirtless and barefoot, he strides on the scorching July pavement, and his soles burn. Beads of sweat roll down his brown skin, but he brushes them off with the back of his hand and scurries on. Any other day he’d be walking in the shade, mapping his path underneath the linden trees, but today he cuts straight through the blistering heat.

Salim’s not yet seven but he’s been roaming the streets for years. For his fifth birthday, his parents cut off his right thumb. His thumbless hand is now the tool of his vocation. He fishes women’s purses with it. The thumb may be gone, but on scorching days like these the phantom digit itches. Salim isn’t quite sure how such a thing is possible and what’s worse, he can’t scratch it. What does he need a thumb for, he won’t be holding pens, his mother had said. We’ve got enough professors in the world, the boy needs a trade! And she’d taught him to pickpocket.

Salim’s lucky. They cut off his older brother’s leg at the knee and now he begs, rain or shine, in the garden by the main street. His batko is a beggar, but Salim’s a young professional. Stealing is way more lucrative, anyway. Some days he snatched real treasures—that’s what he called them—things like pocket mirrors and fancy pens that he didn’t show his mother, stashing them under his bed instead.

His father hasn’t come by in two years and his mother is raising him and his brother, plus two other girls—three and five—all by herself. There’s his grandmother, too. She lives with them because she’s too old to steal or sweep the streets, and in this heat can’t beg, either. Every Wednesday, his mother mops both stairwells in an apartment building near the Mahala neighborhood, for which she’s paid 48 leva in all so she don’t starve. But three days ago, she got ill, so they called a doctor. When the doctor pressed on her belly, she howled like a dying animal. They took her to the hospital, scanned her, poked her with needles, and finally declared she needed an emergency kidney transplant because both of hers had stopped working.

Salim hung at the foot of his mother’s sickbed, then left, deep in thought. His mother had done so much for him, turned him into a skilled thief, a pickpocketing master, but she’d somehow failed to teach him how to steal a kidney. Thumb or no thumb, this would be no easy feat. Salim has no idea what a kidney even looks like, let alone where to find one. Five straight nights he can’t eat or sleep, tortured over this kidney.

Today he gets up early and goes to wait outside the local grocer, which his mother calls the garage, although Salim’s never seen any cars parked inside. Finally, the saleswoman appears. She reaches to undo the big padlock and throws him a sideways glance.

What are you sitting here for? Run along.

"Lelche, do you have some cardboard?"

Cardboard? What do you need cardboard for?

"I need to make a sign. I can’t write, but if I tell you what to write, could you, lelche?"

What are you talking about? Get out of here.

I need a sign that says I’m looking for a kidney. I’ll go sit by the mall and if someone has an extra one, maybe they’ll give it to me.

The woman eyes him dubiously,