Voices in Time

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Dear Bankrupt Person,

I have obtained your name from court documents. Your bankruptcy is a matter of public record, as is the fact that no one should do business with you, that no one can grant you credit, that the police probably have a file on you, and, finally, that anyone who associates with you places himself under suspicion.

In our country the situation is much like it was in the Middle Ages, if perhaps more subtle and refined. In the eyes of the law, you are a leper. Though you are not physically ill, legally it is as if you have AIDS. The sophistication of our information and data systems enables everyone to be checked thoroughly for legal leprosy and insures that you, the leper, will be shunned.

Therefore, the most hideous carrion vultures will pursue you now more than ever. The hungriest extortionists will entice you to borrow money and then will try to collect on this new debt. No one will protect you.

We are altogether different. If you don’t want to get an illegal line of credit at a Spanish bank, if you do not want to embark on a life of crime, if you lack the courage for a burglary, bank robbery, or life abroad, then we have another solution for you to consider.

Join our association and we will open a bank account for you. Then, as soon as you donate a kidney to another member of the association, money will flow into your account, allowing you to pay yourself a modest salary or buy a car. You will again have a financial basis on which you can legally exist, unassailed.

There are people who have ruined both their kidneys at once through illness or the use of pills or alcohol. They can no longer live. Let’s not mince words about this. Here we make a transfusion: money for your preservation, a kidney transplant for the preservation of Croesus. You donate a kidney for the preservation of Croesus, Croesus pays a sum for your preservation. This simple deal, this simple reciprocity between two unacquainted people who become comrades in the war against death, can save two human lives, or, at the very least, your own. Because even if the kidney recipient does not survive, you survive, medically and economically.

Our members have already deposited the money to buy a kidney. So, regardless of your blood type or rhesus factor, as soon as you donate your kidney you will receive the money from the association treasury. (You can also donate a kidney belonging to your wife or your relatives.) You will be able to work again at once. Your life will be saved, and the loss of a kidney is consolable. As I have said, it in no way shortens your life! You receive the money necessary to establish a new business.

You don’t have many options. Therefore I ask you to examine our offer impartially, even if it does appear somewhat unusual.

Surely it is a good thing to help save a life and at the same time receive a great reward.

—Count Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden

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