Salim

Salim scurries to the hospital where his mother was admitted last week. His bare feet beat against the pedestrian street’s pavement, scorching hot from the July sun, and he’s naked from the waist up. Sweat streams down his dark face, but he wipes it off with the back of his hand and keeps going. Any other day, he would walk in the shade, making sure his path stays underneath the linden trees, but he has urgent business today, so he cuts straight across the heat.

Salim is almost seven, but he’s been roaming the streets on his own for a long time now. For his fifth birthday, they cut off the thumb of his right hand. His thumb may be well gone but on a hot day like today it begins to itch. Salim has no idea how this is possible and, what’s worse, he doesn’t know how to scratch it. “What does he need a thumb for, anyway, it’s not like I’ll be sending him to school!” his mother said back then. “Enough of this studying. He needs to get a trade!” She taught him how to slip his hand into women’s purses and snatch their wallets.

Salim has actually been pretty lucky. His older brother had his leg cut off all the way up to the knee and now they make him beg by the main street park, rain or shine. Now, his brother is just a beggar, while Salim is a master pickpocket—that is, he got a trade early on. What’s more, stealing brings in much more loot. At times he would come across a “real treasure”—as he calls it—a pocket mirror here, a special pen there. He never shows his mother these valuables, but just squirrels them away under his bed.

His father has been nowhere to be seen for two years now, and besides Salim and his brother, his mother has to take care of two more kids, girls of three and five. His grandma lives with them, too, for she’s old and can’t sweep the streets any more, can’t do any pickpocketing either, and isn’t even fit for begging in this heat. Every Wednesday, his mother sweeps the entryway, stairs and landings of a big apartment building in a nearby neighborhood, for which they pay her a total of 48 levs, “just ‘nough for bread.” But she got sick recently, and they had to call the doctor. When he pressed his hand against her belly, she let out a scream like she was dying. They took her straight to the hospital, did a scan and stuck some needles into her, then finally said she needed a new kidney, because both of hers had stopped working.

Salim hung around his sick mother’s bed for a while, then left the hospital, deep in thought. His mother had taught him so many things, she’d trained him as a master pickpocket, but never taught him how to steal someone’s kidney. With or without a thumb, it wouldn’t be easy. On top of that, Salim didn’t even know what a kidney looked like and where to look for one. For five days he couldn’t sleep or eat. All he did was mill around and wonder how to find a kidney for his mother.

This morning he got up early and went to the neighborhood convenience store before it was even open. His mom called it “The Garage,” even though Salim had never seen cars in there. He waited for a while before the cashier appeared, looking like she was not in any hurry. While still unlocking the front door, she gave Salim a suspicious glance.

“Hey, you, what are you waiting for? Get lost!”

“Auntie, can I have a piece of cardboard?”

“A piece of cardboard? What do you need cardboard for?”

“Um, I need it to make a sign. I don’t know how to write but I can tell you what to write on it for me. Please, Auntie!”

“What kind of a sign, boy? Don’t waste my time with your nonsense!”

“Well… it should say that I’m in need of a kidney. I’ll sit with it on the street by the mall and… if anybody has an extra one, they can give it to me.”

The shop owner first looked at him suspiciously, but then must’ve figured that the gypsy boy was pulling her leg, so she decided to respond in the same spirit.

“Why beg for a kidney? Just go buy one at the butcher’s shop—over there on the corner of Botev and Green Meadow.

“They sell kidneys at the butcher’s?” Salim’s face lit up.

“Sure they do. Where else, if not at the butcher’s?”

They’d been selling kidneys just around the corner this whole time, and he’d spent the past five days wracking his brain about where to get one! Salim rushed back home. They lived in a small shack on the other side of the railroad—five minutes away if you ran fast. He’d stashed away some cash he stole on the day when they took his mother to the hospital. It should be enough for a kidney, he thought. He ran like the wind. When he got home, he grabbed the money, held it tightly in his hand, and ran back to the butcher’s. Once inside, still panting, he opened his sweaty palm and placed the crumpled bill on the counter.
“Uncle, give me some kidney, it’s for my mom, she needs it.”

The butcher, a sturdy man with strong arms, bent his head toward the gipsy boy and smirked, but then he weighed half a kilo of lamb kidneys, packed them, and even gave him some change.

Now Salim is running to the hospital, plastic bag in hand—he is carrying half a kilo of lamb kidneys neatly wrapped in butcher paper. He reaches the entrance and rushes up the stairs, climbing two at a time. The hospital is packed, but nobody can stop him. His mother has taught him how to snake his way through crowds, without being noticed. “C’mon boy, put on your invisible hat and off you go to make us some money,” she used to tell him.

Salim finally gets to the third floor and storms into the room. Inside it, a nurse is taking the blood pressure of some old woman. She’s in the same bed where his mother was lying only yesterday.

Elina

He knocks on the door and I know I have to answer it. If I don’t, things will get ugly. I turn off the shower, the water stops. I don’t even bother to put on a towel, so water drips and leaves traces all over the floor behind me. I’m wet, barefoot, shivering.

I stand there, crushed between the cold wall and his burning body. His fingers move and slowly slide up the inside of my thighs. I can feel my heartbeat in my temples, in my stomach. His blood is rushing around his veins; mine has frozen. A light breeze makes its way through the cracked bathroom window and finds a hideout in my hair. I get goose bumps. My whole body shivers. I feel him throbbing inside me. His thrusts resonate deep inside my head. Memories from my childhood reverberate in my mind, as if caught in a trap in there.

I can sense the arrogant smell of power, the scent of dominance creeping up my neck, going down my shoulders, enveloping my small breasts. I need to find a way to detach myself from the present moment, to tear my thoughts away from my body, thoughts that suck on it like suction cups, like nasty oozing pus.

The water from the tap slowly drips onto the tiled floor… drip, drip, drip…

I look out the window: in the distance a sharp mountain top penetrates the sun and tears it open, a red glow spills all over the ridge, leaving painful marks. The long minutes stretch like bubble gum. I close my eyes and forget who I am, where I am… I forget everything.

He’s already finished. He will be back again tomorrow at dusk, when the darkness thickens intimately. He will knock on the bathroom door while I’m in the shower. It’ll be the same story, over and over again, every single evening, right before she comes home from work. In the shower, slowly, secretly, painfully, dreadfully… again and again, since I was seven. I’m thirteen now. He calls me “sweetheart.” I call him “Dad.”

12

People sometimes ask me what I learned from living at the orphanage. In the past I would try to come up with a palatable answer, something to make them feel good for having shown any interest. Lately, though, I’ve been telling the following story: Stoycho was six years old when the ambulance took him to the hospital, and we never saw him again. We were told that he had broken ribs, a fractured skull, and a brain hemorrhage, and that he died two days later. Earlier that day we’d gone to the graveyard on top of the hill and were already coming down. We used to go there secretly to steal the food people left at the graves of their deceased relatives as a kind of blessing. The most common thing we’d find was barley sprinkled with powdered sugar, in small plastic cups. Sometimes there would also be cookies and Turkish delight. We were supposed to take them back to the older kids. We knew we weren’t allowed to have any of it, but it was so hard to resist. We were starving, our bellies were rumbling, and yet we had to carry the found food back to the orphanage, untouched. Some of us couldn’t resist and secretly snuck a few small spoonfuls from the barley. If they got lucky, nobody noticed and they got away with it, and kept chewing on the sweet barley for a long time afterward into their dreams.

But one of the kids saw Stoycho take a bite and told the older children. Reporting to the older kids always got you a cookie as a reward. They beat up Stoycho like a dirty little mutt. The teachers watched through the window but pretended that they saw nothing. They let him lie there in a puddle of his blood. They eventually called the ambulance but it was already too late.

Stoycho had always been quite a ravenous eater. People told stories about how he used to hide in the roadside shrubs at dusk and wait for the goats to come home from grazing so he could suck milk from a passing mother goat. Why the goat didn’t run away and how she let him drink her milk, nobody knew. Living at the orphanage taught me how to survive. That’s all that mattered.