For a moment I can’t seem to breathe properly. I should give her two euros, I think, but I know that she knows I haven’t got any extra money, so it would be strange.
“Thank you,” I manage to say, coughing, and I almost feel like adding that this is very inappropriate, that women don’t pick up the check, to say it so loud that the waiters hear me, so that they don’t think I’m a certain way, but I lose control of my body; my head feels heavy, my eyes moisten, my face starts to tremble like when, as a child, I was so nervous about something that I almost wet myself, and then the tears start to flow, and they are stubborn, force themselves out, run down the folds of my cheeks, drip onto the jacket in my lap, my trousers, the table, then Ajshe reaches into her bag and hands me a tissue, which in an instant is soaked through.
“I’m sorry,” I hear her say, and as I look up at her I notice her eyes turning glassy too. “I regret writing to you when I was mad, because when you’re upset you end up saying and doing all kinds of things,” she adds and blows her nose, then pauses, glances up at the waiters, who are staring at us, and her gaze is so cold that they understand to look away. “Sometimes I still wish things had turned out differently…that you and…Well,” she continues, takes a deep breath, again reaches into her bag, and pulls out an envelope, which she slides toward me across the table.
“This is for you,” she says, clears her throat, and adjusts her scarf across her ears, and as she does so I see she is wearing the golden heart-shaped earrings, the ones I gave her on our wedding day.
Things are exactly as she said in her text message: we are nothing anymore, we barely know each other.
“Well, take care of yourself,” she says eventually, like she would to a stranger who has fallen over in the street, who has staggered to their feet by themselves and assured her many times over that it was nothing.
Ajshe stands up and leaves in the direction she arrived, and her walking away from me—it is war. That’s where we are, the two of us; every step she takes is a bullet, each one fired from farther away, and though we are no longer near each other, ever again, we are always connected, blasted together.
17 MARCH 2002
you know I once wrote to that whore of yours I followed you home I slipped a piece of paper under the door do you know where your husband is I wrote on it, do you know he spends his nights at my place, in another man’s bed, a MAN’s bed, he doesn’t want you the same way he wants me, he doesn’t love you and will never love you the same way he loves me
you fucking whore
16
PRISTINA, 2004–
In the envelope Ajshe gave me there is two thousand euros. I use it to buy a decent bed and some sheets, a secondhand computer, and a new television and coffee maker, and there’s even a little to spare. Money makes me feel good, safe; I constantly put some aside, though I don’t know what for.
I manage to come up with a study plan, and by sticking to it I should be able to graduate from the university in a year and a half, assuming the courses I completed years ago will still be accepted. I am happy and proud of this, because having a university education is no small accomplishment. I eagerly await the start of the new academic year, though sometimes I wonder whether I’m too old for school. But as I agree to reduce my working hours with my boss, who is approaching retirement, he simply says it’s fantastic news that I will be able to complete my degree. He even congratulates me. “Imagine, a future writer driving my buses,” he says with a chuckle. To many people, a little over thirty is still considered young.
I read a lot of books, and I know that one day I will start writing my own, there will come a day when I will tell the world my story, there will come a time when people will want to hear me, perhaps after I’ve gotten over the shame. It’s this belief that keeps me alive.
Shortly before I graduate, I send a student magazine a story I have written bearing the title “The Girl and It.” Soon afterward, the magazine’s editor contacts me to express interest in my manuscript, but they want me to modify it first, quite a lot actually, they want me to delete sections that I think are vitally important. At first I am skeptical of their suggestions but eventually I agree to the changes they ask for because the desire to have my text published is greater than the need to hold on to things that others find superfluous.
After publication, a few of my classmates come up to me and tell me they liked my story. Eventually I cut the spread out of the magazine and frame it, and as I hang it on the wall, I realize I’ve never hung anything up before. It brings me pleasure every time I look at it. At the end of the text there is a short biography and a photograph of me, I don’t look all that bad in it. On occasion I pick it up and hold it in my hands; it is something concrete, and nobody can take that away from me.
* * *
—
After graduating, I get a job at the post office. My job description involves compiling content for the post office’s website, writing various instructions for the employees and customers, even some amount of customer service. The wages are good, about four hundred euros per month, and that’s plenty for me, I have even been able to travel to the coast once or twice, to Ulcinj and Budva.
For the first few years, my landlord and his family visit every summer, staying a month or two at a time. Their children speak Swedish to one another, and though they appear to trust me—they even laugh at my jokes and sometimes call me axhë, uncle—it always feels as though they are speaking ill of me, as if they can see through me, all my flaws and imperfections, as if they know things about me that even I don’t know.
They have lots of guests, whom they generally entertain on the patio. At those times I prefer not to keep the lights on or go to the bathroom, I pretend I’m not really there, because if they noticed me, I would have to look up to them, to wait for the landlord’s permission to walk up the stairs and shake hands with strangers. There’s something demeaning about it, I think. It’s probably only in my mind, because some mornings the mother and father ask me to eat with them, they tell me stories about their life, their children and relatives, and they always finish by saying how much they appreciate my help looking after the house. Then I thank them and say it’s no trouble at all, though at times it truly is a burden. Whenever it rains or snows, for instance, mud builds up behind the house and I have to wash it away. Although I’m glad to do physical work to balance out my own job, it’s hard labor.
As the years pass, they visit Kosovo less and less. The children’s Albanian deteriorates, and each time I see them the parents look more exhausted and seem less at home in their own house. They don’t bother to fix broken tiles, floors, faucets, and doors, they let the insulation hang loose, they don’t even seem to care about the rising damp in the building. As summer arrives, I notice that I actually hope they will visit, because I am so keen to see how they have changed again, what their children look like now, though I’m not particularly sad if they don’t come.
* * *
—
I sometimes walk past my former rented room, though only rarely these days. I have seen him hunched outside the house, a cardboard cup and a scale on the pavement next to him—or at least, I think it’s him, I can’t say for sure. He is always wearing the same clothes, and sometimes Behxhet is with him, explaining something to him, sitting him down on an empty bottle crate or wrapping an old coat around him or lifting up the sign by the wall advertising five cents to weigh yourself. I’ve always wondered what kind of person ends up on the streets, what kind of person can live like that, from other people’s pity. His kind.
I walk past on the other side of the street and look away. I don’t know why I even go there, because I can’t say I feel much guilt or a duty to help. In fact, I feel I have the right not to take responsibility. I can’t say I know that man, merely that I know the man he might once have been, and even him I knew only superficially, for one brief summer. And I don’
t know the man who once knew a thing or two about that man, because he too no longer exists. Neither does what once happened between those two men, what they once had.
I’m not sad and I’m not afraid of anything, and life has ceased to be only waiting for catastrophe, a message that, when it arrives, destroys everything you have managed to put together between disasters. That is surely something.
1 APRIL 2002
I fought in Prekaz and Drenica and Rahovec and Račak, I was everywhere and I remember all of it, all the details, the way the cattle howled as they suffocated in the smoke, the way the ground shook from the explosions, how long our ears rang afterward, which terrain we laid with mines…how we pillaged and destroyed…and…hunted and separated…who was raped and murdered…mercilessly.
I was in Belgrade during the air strikes, I was needed there all through March and April and May and even into June, planes flew across the sky like dazzling flashes, their missiles falling indiscriminately like lightning, blindly hurtling on top of people, they were slaughtering us…godless, for months…and there was this blown-up factory, nothing has smelled like the stench of the chemicals that rose up from there, it wasn’t from the world of the living…
When a comrade asked me what else they will do to us in this hell, I remembered the night you read me the story you’d written about the snake and the girl, the night we talked about paradise and the devil who turned the baby girl into a bolla that would eventually turn into something even more magnificent, do you remember that night that creature?
I couldn’t get that snake out of my mind for a long time, it lived in my thoughts all through the war and when we surrendered and when Milošević pulled the troops out of Kosovo, when I stepped through the rubble in Belgrade, like crossing a lava field, and even after the war when I returned to school in Mitrovica, where every day I walked along the banks of the Ibër, a river that had carried countless fallen. The sad bridge across the river separated the Serbs in the north and the Albanians in the south, they were still killing one another, can you believe it, death after all that death.
I thought about it and I thought about you as I walked there, always, I looked at the waters thick with ash, waters that had extinguished eternal fires, and I cried and asked myself whether you were happy with your wife and children, and one day I said yes, yes you are, it’s a good thing you got away from here, I said again and let go, sent us flying like two birds that have crashed into the window, threw two smooth stones into the current
and I did not say sorry I said thank you
* * *
—
I don’t think of those fables with fear anymore but as expressions of happiness, for one day every year it can flare, liberated and carefree, for a single day…it can fly unshackled above the waters and the forests, intone its grand melody in peace, stretch out its frame across the fields, the hills, and the mountainsides, hide above the clouds or with its wings cast enormous strips of shadow like starless nights, moisten its dazzling, shiny velvet skin in the lakes and rivers, fall asleep on stones and boulders parched by the sun, in the searing sunshine it can wrap itself around the trunks of trees or shelter from the rain by hiding beneath the leafy armor of age-old oak trees, and at nightfall it can slither back into its cave where it will lie, exhausted by that speck of freedom—one happy day is enough for it,
because the land it then inhabits, you see, it is the land of kings
Acknowledgments
To my trusted friends Merdiana Beqiri, Johannes Id, Päivi Isosaari, Jarno Kettunen, Aura Pursiainen, and Sanni Surkka. Thank you for all the insightful comments.
Sarah Chalfant, Sarah Watling, and Jacqueline Ko, who work so tirelessly on behalf of my novels. Thank you.
Thank you to my family for your support, wisdom, understanding, and the stories that inspire me to this day.
Thank you, Paavo Kääriäinen.
Thank you, David Hackston, for translating my work with such passion and commitment. Thank you to my wonderful editor, Tim O’Connell at Pantheon Books, for publishing my work in English, for the effort and dedication you have put into this novel. Thank you to all the fantastic people at Pantheon Books: publisher Lisa Lucas, publicist Rose Cronin-Jackman, and graphic designer Emily Mahon, as well as Catherine Courtade, Altie Karper, Anna Knighton, Zachary Lutz, Rita Madrigal, Matthew Sciarappa, and Rob Shapiro, for the care you have given this book.
I would like to thank my home publisher Otava in Finland for bringing this novel to the readers. Jenni Heiti, Leenastiina Kakko, Mirella Mäkilä, Maija Norvasto, Silka Raatikainen, Kirsi Tähjänjoki—thank you. Once again, the greatest thanks go to my editors. Thank you Antti Kasper, Salla Pulli, and Lotta Sonninen.
Pajtim Statovci
April 2019
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990 and moved with his family to Finland when he was two years old. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. His first book, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel; Crossing won the Toisinkoinen Literature Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Bolla has already won the Finlandia Prize. He received the 2018 Helsinki Writer of the Year Award.
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