“Never. Do you hear me? Never. I won’t tell anyone. That’s a promise.”
Nadia releases a long deep breath. Maggie waits, gives her a little space.
“They gave me a totally new identity. Nadia isn’t my real name.”
“What is your name?” Maggie asks.
She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you. I might trust you, but that doesn’t mean my family has to.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m Nadia Strauss now. That’s all that matters. Please. I want you to call me that.”
“Okay, sure, no problem.”
“And I do have a thirty-one-year-old brother. And a mother. I had three other siblings and a father, but they’re long dead. We were poor.Not poor like Americans. You Americans don’t really know poor. You have no idea what poor is. We wouldn’t eat for days, until it feels like your stomach is stuck to your spine. We literally had nothing but each other.”
“Where was this, Nadia?”
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes stare past Maggie. It’s a look Maggie sometimes saw in combat. The thousand-yard stare. Nadia’s voice is distant now, detached.
“I was sixteen years old. My mother loved me. No one forced me. You do what you do to survive. You in the West think you have problems. I see it on social media now. People seeking”—she spits out the next words with pure contempt—“self-help, whatever that means.Self-care. Searching for, ugh,fulfillment. Whining, complaining, not feeling satisfied with their perfect lives.” Nadia shakes her head in disgust. “How come starving people never need self-help or self-care? If you really want to cure your sleep anxiety over… over I don’t know what… try not eating for five days in a row. Try sleeping on a dirt floor in the winter with no heat. Then let’s see how much you worry about ‘fulfillment’ in your big house with two cars in the driveway.”
Nadia turns her gaze back toward Maggie. Maggie stays still.
“You can figure out the rest, can’t you, Doctor McCabe?”
Maggie probably can. “Tell me anyway.”
“My mother woke me up one morning. She took me into the concrete building. No warning. No time to think or prepare myself. Probably for the best. They’d already run blood tests on everyone in my village. I was a match. They flew us out. They laid me down on a table. My mother took my hand. I had two kidneys when they put me to sleep. When I woke up, I only had one. Don’t look at me like that.”
Maggie tries to keep the horror off her face, but she doubts she’s successful.
“You think my mother forced me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“She didn’t. I understood. Even if they’d given me a choice, I would have done it.”
Maggie swallows. “Your family sold your kidney.” She doesn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but if she offended Nadia, she can’t see it from her expression.
“You don’t understand,” Nadia says. “We had nothing. Our family was mostly dead. That was our fate too. Starvation probably. Maybe slaughtered in war. My brother, my mother, maybe me. Or maybe my fate would have been worse. I don’t know. So we made a choice. I gave up something I didn’t need. In return, we were saved. We were given a new life. Money. New identities. They sent us… I won’t tell you where exactly. But look at my life. Look where I am now. My mother and brother, they live in an American city. In the Midwest. I won’t tell you which. My brother is in law school. My mother has her own apartment. Can you imagine? A real apartment with electricity and running water. She has a refrigerator and freezer. Do you know what she does every day?”
Maggie shakes her head no.
“She keeps a chicken in the freezer, and every night before she goes to bed she opens the freezer and just stares at the chicken. She can’t believe it’s real. She’s worried one day she’ll go to sleep and wake up and it will all have just been a dream. So you see? All of you who live in comfort can afford your ethics and morals. You want to judge me by them. How, you wonder, could I sell my own kidney? And I am here to tell you that it was the best thing that ever happened to me—and my family. My kidney is in someone else now. It probably saved a person’s life—who knows?—but I know selling it saved three other lives. So don’t you dare judge us.”
“I don’t judge,” Maggie says softly.
But of course, it isn’t that simple. Maggie knows that. You don’t buy and sell human organs. It’s immoral. It’s exploitive. Selling organscommodifies human bodies, reducing individuals to their monetary value. It leads to trafficking and corruption and kidnapping and abuse.
And yet.
“I’m going to bed,” Nadia says.
“Why are you here, Nadia?”
“What?”
