Translated by Dritan Kiçi
I met Ramiz Beka near the National Theatre building, which no longer exists. Before we sat down at a café along the pedestrian street, he asked me in great detail about my parents’ health. When I was a student, he worked as a sergeant in the prison’s hospital. We come from the same town. Though we hadn’t met for years, we had followed each other’s journey from afar.
“People are abandoning their parents like stray dogs nowadays!”
“Not everyone,” I responded, “only the sons of dogs.”
He praised my sense of humour.
“You’ve always been like this: a witty, good man.”
He, on the other hand, was always the same: irritating, clingy, and I felt I couldn’t bear staying with him for long.
“Can I help you with something?”, I asked and joked: “The living with the living and the dead with the dead,” distorting the old saying.
“You can’t help me with my dead,” he lamented, and the dark shade of his suit engulfed his gaze, his lips, and then his entire face.
In the early 2000s, through a bank loan, he bought a refrigerated room with twenty cadaver drawers and built a sort of private morgue. Then he hired a retired nurse, a refrigeration specialist, and occasionally two young men to clean and maintain the corpses. Thanks to connections and acquaintances, the new business did well. His entire “stock” consisted of elderly parents of emigrant children. The deal was that he would keep the dead until the relatives could return and organise the funeral. Expenses were high, so he charged by the day for cold preservation and storage. In those moments of emotional crisis, most of the clients didn’t even bother to ask how much twenty-four-hour storage costed in his morgue.
“Parents die only once! So, whatever it costs…”
I learned all of this from a mutual friend, whose father had spent three months in Ramiz’s “fridge,” because he couldn’t legally leave England. Paperwork problems – as my compatriots call residing illegally in a foreign country. The same guy told me that, along with the morgue days, our friend billed people for phone calls and additional service expenses, which, when settling the bill, he would deduct as a friendly gesture, a sign of human sensitivity and solidarity with his clients’ grief. If the bill was one thousand seven hundred and sixty-three euros, he would round it down to one thousand seven hundred and fifty. In the end, he didn’t even take the fifty, hopping this kind of generosity would improve his image. People talked about his services as a market-driven necessity.
But lately his “success” had run out.
“I’ve heard that medical schools in Europe need human cadavers for anatomy lessons and they pay well. So, if I could sell just half of my stock, I’d get out of this crisis!”
He finished his coffee, and a drop of it, like a black and filthy tear, hung at the corner of his mouth. I thought to ask how much “stock” he had, but I bit my tongue. All that cynicism seemed excessive. “Live stock” is what Americans call the living animals sold at markets or showcased at agricultural fairs. The person in front of me had the wealth of “dead stock”: parents abandoned in death by their offspring.
From afar, I thought I saw the handsome beard of Ismet D., a friend and well-known comedian. Yes, it was him coming towards me. We hugged. I introduced Ismet to Ramiz and his work. At first, the newcomer thought I was joking, but when he saw Ramiz’s solemn approval, he dared to ask:
“Do you really have twenty dead people in your morgue?”
“Yes, well-preserved! Clean…!”
Ramiz would have continued to enthusiastically talk about his “goods” and their quality if Ismet hadn’t interrupted:
“Can you rent them to me for two weeks?”
The silence fell heavy and I felt my skin crawling. I must have looked worse than the new ruins of the old theatre. Ramiz was quickly calculating how much he could ask from the lease, but first, he wanted to know what Ismet needed the dead for and how much he would profit from the affair.
“I’ll put them on an air-conditioned bus and set off in search of their children across Europe!” declared Ismet.
A group of youngsters passed by, laughing. Behind them, an elderly couple, slender and clean, were holding hands, seemingly more alive than Ramiz’s stock.
