By Perparim Kapllani  » I unburied my father, I cremated his remains and I put his ashes in a wooden urn in the shape of a bottle. I had him under my armpit, and then I placed him in my suitcase, as a part of my luggage.

My name is Mark Shkoza. I am 41 years old. I left my country 3 years ago, forever. I still don't speak English very well and I was working double shifts at that time. I had nobody and I was on the run to lose my mind, that's why I took with me my dead father. Address of the destination was Canada. My father kept talking to me from inside of the bottle.

“Mark, why did you do this?” my father asked.

“Because I missed you,” I said.

“Death doesn’t mean anything,” he answered.

“I felt alone. I had no body to talk to. I worked most of the time and the rest of the day I stayed at home. My evenings were becoming part of a torture. I didn’t know what to do.”

“If your life sucked, I can’t help you, my son. The dead have nothing to do with the humans up there.”

It was silent. His voice rumbled again from the dust inside the bottle.

“Couldn’t you get married, man?”

I was shivering. His ashes rolled circles inside of the wooden bottle, like the sand in the seashore by the wind. The seashore was dried of thirst. Dead and burned, my ashy father spoke to me loudly. He wanted to be heard. He said some lovely words to me, my father in ashes.

“I don’t want to get married for now. I have got to work for some time. You left me nothing,” I pointed my finger toward him and I touched him with the tip of my finger.

“You should ask me for permission before throwing me like this in Canada. That handful of Earth, yes, you had the right to bring it there, at the end of the world. Do you hear me, you bastard? How dare you? You burned me? It’s not in our tradition! Where is Shkumbin’s river of my hometown? Where is the strong wind that blows on top of the Krasta’s hill? I'll miss the tiles that my brother laid on me and I’ll miss my sisters, who cut the grass away every single Sunday.”

“Toronto is beautiful. You are going to like it,” I justified myself. “I am not going to place you in a public cemetery. I’ll bring you home, into my home."

"Keep Toronto for yourself, bastard! Take me back, now!" he replied from inside the urn. My ashy father kept quiet for a while. My father passed away very young. I was ten years old, when an investigator came to my elementary school and told me that my father was found killed on the street. I didn't remember many details of that day on February 1977.

Now I was afraid of my father getting bored inside the bottle.

"Don't pick on me, father!"

"I had bones yesterday. I had a grave, some flowers around my skull. Now I am the forgotten ashes thrown in this bottle. You better throw my ashes into the wind, so I can go back to Mother Nature, where I belong to. You hear me?"

"I am an immigrant now! Who else do I have to talk to? Do I have to talk to the walls?"

"You have changed, son! You are so selfish! You are thinking just for yourself."

"Dad, please don't start!" I said to him with my rumbled voice.

A beautiful stewardess gave me a sweet smile. She had marvelous eyes and blond hair, terribly attractive. She offered me a glass of red wine, as I looked through the window. I wished I could smoke.

“Oh, yeah, you want to smoke? You put me inside this bottle and you don’t care what I say to you anymore. I can’t swear like “go to hell”, but I can imagine that you hardly will find out where to go. You will get lost soon. You are so egoistic and so selfish and nothing else. Only you could do that, to change my grave and my last destiny. I can’t believe it that I took care of such a monster.”

“Dad, shut up!”

I was so nervous, as I thinking to throw him out of the window. Oh, man! I couldn’t do that either. My father was my father; I loved him even beyond his death; even after death. What was the meaning of the death anyway? Death was the cytoplasm of the new reality. Death was the nervous breakdown that I had, a mental sickness of the patients, who were going to hospital for the first time, after they got hit by trauma.

“Keep swearing at me, dad! Did you finish?”

“Damn You!”

“Hey, you are so poor in your vocabulary!”

“I hope you get killed in a car accident!” he screamed.

I didn’t feel good after that, but I still kept smiling. I didn’t really know what I smoked. No wonder that I was not impressed, what ever he had said. I was willing even to drink that…bottle, willing to become his killer! The killer of my father!

“Who killed you, dad? Tell me, who killed you, so I can take revenge. I want to face your killer now!”

I took his urn in my hands, as I was ready to burst into tears.

“You killed me! I knew I couldn’t afford to take care of you, so I committed suicide. You pushed me to kill myself with my bare hands.”

I couldn’t cry. I was not that type of the guy who was scared of the dead.

“You have put my ashes in a bottle without my permission and brought me here, so you killed me for the second time.”

I was feeling guilty. I saw myself behind bars: a little guy, handcuffed. The judge was reading the verdict with his strong voice.

“Stay in the bottle, father, please!” I replied desperately. I was impressed. I wanted to open the urn and throw his ashes all over the space, from this terrible height, between the clouds, where the angels take shelter.

“I just wanted to have you right beside me, physically. I wanted to hug you and you to hug me. I wanted your ashes all over my chest!” I whispered and closed my eyes.

Things were going crazy. As I was trying to keep the bottle tight, my father broke it out and his soul run away in space. I was totally scared, as I was feeling that Big Bang just happened. I was totally disarmed and stood up in front of a giant penguin that showed up, as it was sticking his feet on the ice and playing a drum with his arms. His purple eyes were penetrating me, as I was still holding a bag of nothing in my hands.

"Bum bu bu bum, bum bu bu bum, bu bum!"

My mouth was wide opened instinctively and my breath almost stopped. I felt the surface of my tongue dried and my spit got stuck, as a harmful ball in my throat. I have tried to breath, but the emptiness of my chest was burning me so bad, like a desert. My sweaty fingers left the nylon bag to fall on the ground, as my eyes kept staring toward the icy mirage, who was talking and playing the drum, as a human could do.

I just came back from Albania, my homeland, a small country located in the Balkan Peninsula. I got only one week off and went into a special mission and very important: bringing my dead father into Canada. I don’t really know why I took that decision, to unbury my father and bring him over here, close to where I live. Maybe I was afraid of the fact that nobody was taking care of him.

...

I found him covered by the grass and the blueberries. His porcelain picture was cracked and the marble tiles were taken away. I have read in a daily newspaper that a prime suspect was arrested for violating the graveyard. Police found some grave tiles lay on the washroom floor. When I read that news I started to vomit all day and night long, because of my anger and pain, even I didn’t eat at all. I imagined those marbled tiles which covered my dead father for a long time, laid under the feet of those monsters, while peeing in the washroom. I felt that I was the one who was lying on the floor under those dirty slippers, which were smashing me with their indifference.

I was going to washroom time after time to throw up, as I was sticking my fingers onto my throat to keep vomiting, in order to escape from the unprecedented nausea, but in vain.

Sarah Mckonky, my girlfriend, tried to help me by giving me cold water, lemon juice, giving me a nice massage with her delicate and skinny fingers, but it seemed I couldn’t feel better at all. The feeling that something could happen to the last destination of my father made me nervous and paralyzed me.

..And now here I am with my father inside a bag, in front of this giant penguin, which was playing the drum.

"Bum bu bu bum, bum bu bu bum , bu bum! I am angel Israfil! This is the end of the world,’ the penguin said, as I was wiping my tired eyes with the sweaty palm of the back of my hand. I thought that I was dreaming. I looked around: The Mount Pleasant Cemetery was covered by the icy snow. Even it was March; pieces of ice were falling down from the sky straight over my head and the shoulders of the workers, who were opening the grave slowly. I know how much I suffered ‘til I brought my father here, in this foreign country, between these people he never knew. Now I have the chance to see him at least once a week and I will sleep well, without being scared of some stupid guys who could steal his marbled tiles.

"You are wrong!-the angel Israfil said all of the sudden. Your father will show up in your dreams and he will ask you to take him back, where he belongs to, close to his own father.

I started to shake. My rough hair, pure black became like a bunch of pricks because of the emotions. Angel Israfil was predicting that I just underestimated an important detail: I took my father away from his own father, who was left behind, far away, in Albania. That didn’t mean that I cared less for my grandpa, whose grave was located 20 cm away from my dad’s grave.

I remember my lovely grandpa when he was coughing so hard and spitting in a dirty glass. His long stories, those beautiful tales filled with characters, such as Nastradin and the Bald Man made my days. I felt pain for the loss of my grandpa, in the same way I was missing my father, but he was lesser exposed in front of the eyes of the thieves and other random guys, than my dead father. My grandpa’s grave was much older and not covered by the marble. The grave of my poor grandpa was deep in the ground and a wooden label was stuck close to his head, damaged by the rain and exposed by the sun and the wind. He was forgotten even by the troublemakers. They couldn’t harm him more than that. They could only hurt him by stepping mistakenly on him, over the dried and cracked soil.

My own father looked still alive and young. His close relatives put a picture of him on his grave, which belonged to the time, when he was a student in Soviet Union, when he fell in love with a beautiful Russian girl, called Valentine, in Leningrad.

The penguin played the drum harder, as I had some more time to have a look at the sky of that cloudy afternoon.

The undertakers took the bag of bones away, as I was seeing him for the last time. Something moved inside that bag and after that nothing. I turned to the angel Israfil to get an answer. He was not playing his drum anymore, as I stood before my father’s grave without speaking any word for hours.

...then I decided to take him back and leave him over there, where he was buried, so in that way I could have someone to come back for, more often.