You think there is no perpetuum mobile? But I know. It does exist. It is our memory. One should be able to part with everything: with people, love, habits. But one may not part with one's memory. Humans have got this beautiful and strange gift: to remember. It is often thought that our life goes on after our death while somebody remembers us: our children, relatives, friends, all people around us. Their memory is a thread linking our soul to everything we loved. But there is another memory. Of a person we have never seen. We have never known his world, his attachments, his weaknesses and habits. But we will remember him all our lives. We... I mean the parents and our children from the Kidney Transplantation Department, Russian Children's Clinical Hospital, Moscow, Russia. And that stranger is the person who left this world but gave a new life to our children -- the donor kidney. May your memory life on forever, stranger.

I lived like everybody else. Loved, suffered, laughed, or wept. Thought what my daughter would be like when she grows up. What will she do in this life? I dreamed of teaching her ballroom dancing and foreign languages, dreamed of travelling with her and showing her other countries, dreamed of teaching her to listen to music. I always felt that I was in the midst of a festival. But this festival remained just a dream.

Three years ago the doctors told my daughter's verdict: chronic renal insufficiency. I had a feeling that a wide abyss opened under me, that the world stopped going round. I no longer understood how people could laugh, love, go shopping. "No! No! No!" was beating in me. This is just a nightmare! This is not true! This is not happening to us! But I didn't yet know that it was only the beginning. At night, I pressed my daughter's fragile body to mine and whispered in her ear, "Please recover, please don't go away, do you hear me, I'll die without you, you cannot do this to me." I saw my husband's lifeless eyes and understood: this is the first time when he can't help. And then began endless days at hospital. Medicines, injections, x-rays. I could no longer see the doctors' embarrassed and compassionate voices and their questions, "Is she your only child?" I could not submit to the tragedy and still hoped for a miracle.

And then the day came, and my girl was connected to a hemodialysis machine (artificial kidney). I hear her cry behind the closed door, and my heart almost stops. I look into the window and think, "God help her, oh God, don't leave us." I see the faces of mothers that sit in the lobby and understand that this is a new reference point. This is another world, an unjust one, where a child is left alone with his or her grief and pain but we cannot help. We, the parents, are now younger than our children. They are older and more courageous. They go through their pain and fear all by themselves. They understand that they are different from other children: they don't go to school, don't play football, don't visit dancing parties, don't go to the countryside, because every second day they must be connected to a machine that pours life into them. And, hearing all our "just wait a little, soon it will be better, it might be even worse," they smile with irony. They allow us to deceive them because they understand that we'll feel better this way.

One fifteen-year-old girl said to me, "You know, nobody can understand us, only another person under dialysis." I asked, "But the parents?" She firmly said, "No." My ten-year-old daughter says, "Pain is bearable.

Thirst isn't."

They may drink two glasses of water daily. She constantly smacks her dry lips even in her sleep. We visited various folk healers, even shamans, until my daughter said, "Mummy, did you see their eyes?" I was scared: "No, but what's the matter?" And I decided: enough. Don't torture her anymore. I forced myself to accept the things I cannot change, to learn to live with our tradegy. But then a miracle happened.

Again long hospital passages, again injections and pills and infusions, but now we have hope. We know that dialysis is only temporary, a transient measure before the operation and kidney transplantation. Behind us are officials, documents, and tears of parting with those who had to stay and did not go to Moscow. They embrace me: "Good luck and lots of patience!" "Same to you," I whisper, and my heart shrinks with pain. "God let you survive till Moscow."

And so we have arrived there. Everything is very comfortable. Light-colored blinds on the windows, TV set in the lobby, video tape recorder. Everything is designed so that the children would feel as if they were at home. Now the most difficult thing is to wait. Nobody knows how long. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. Somebody in the passage is whispering, "Valov, Valov is coming!" He is the head of the department, the surgeon that will operate our children. I tremble all inside. Probably I'll see a dignified, sullen man, for whom our pains, emotions, feelings are only part of his work. And the next moment I see him. Young, swift, with shining eyes and a friendly smile. You look at him and understand that he is doing what he can and must do. I will learn more about him later. He operated two children during a single night (the operation lasts about 8 hours). When he visits the just-operated patients during his holidays, when parents from all parts of Russia telephone him with their problems, he finds time for everybody. I have never heard him give a formal answer to a question. This is not just professional skill, this is also the ability to feel compassion, to understand another person's pain. And the fear, whose hairy tentacles had penetrated each cell of my body, gradually oozes away. Something new is being born, not yet quite understandable, but something that brings us back to ourselves, gives us the will to live, the will to love. This something is called hope.

We are thirty mothers. We have our own world and our own language, incomprehensible for outsiders. We discuss the "dry weight," filters, azotemia, and concentration. We are all in the same boat, but now we know where it is floating.

Evening has come. The nurse says, "Group A, no eating now, no drinking," and the children's resounding "Hurray!" echoes all over the department. This means that a kidney has arrived, now its type will be determined, and in the morning we will know the name of the lucky child whom this kidney will suit.

What must a little child feel when knowing what he or she has to go through: operation, tubes, drainages, infusions for ten hours, injections, hormones?.. And still this child shouts "Hurray!" One of our boys in not yet in the waiting list for the transplantation because he has got blood problems. When he heard that a kidney of his blood group had arrived, he prayed on his knees in front of an icon.

And our day has also come. In four months, the nurse calls my daughter's name, and she also cries "Hurray!" I drink sedatives. All children from the department congratulate my daughter. "Silly girl, why are you weeping, you are so happy!" my friend whispers. These eight hours are the longest in my life. I am walking along the narrow dark passage between the eight hospital building. The three people who brought my child back to life are walking toward me. This is the longest road in my life. I see the face of Alexei Leonidovich Valov, his tired smile, "It's OK, everything is OK, she is sleeping, do you hear me, everything is OK," he says.

No words can describe what a mother feels at such minutes.

Thank you, our good wizard, doctor Valov, for giving us hope and faith again. All the best wishes to doctors of our department, to all medical staff, who return childhood dreams to our children.

One eleven-year-old boy wrote these piercing words:

It is not a disease of the soul.
It is in our body.
Men and women of the whole world,
Help our childhood.

We have a tradition. The first toast to the donor, whose stopped life gave a second birth to the child. Rest in peace, stranger. The second toast to the doctors who brought us back this joy, the chance of growing up together with our children. And the third toast is my own: "God, don't forget those who have not arrived here."

Marina Parfenenko