Bolla Read online

  Also by Pajtim Statovci

  My Cat Yugoslavia

  Crossing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  English translation copyright © 2021 by David Hackston

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Finland by Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava, Keuruu, in 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Pajtim Statovci and Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This translation has been published with the financial support of the Finnish Literature Exchange.

  The drawing on this page is © Pajtim Statovci and Mirella Mäkilä.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Statovci, Pajtim, [date] author. Hackston, David, translator.

  Title: Bolla / Pajtim Statovci; translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.

  Other titles: Bolla. English.

  Description: First American edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020052280 (print). LCCN 2020052281 (ebook). ISBN 9781524749200 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524749217 (ebook).

  Classification: LCC PH356.S838 B65 2021 (print) | LCC PH356.S838 (ebook) | DDC 894/.54134—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020052280

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020052281

  Ebook ISBN 9781524749217

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover art by William De Morgan. Courtesy of the De Morgan Foundation / Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Pajtim Statovci

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  [Having made the world...]

  22 JANUARY 2000

  Chapter 1

  27 FEBRUARY 2000

  Chapter 2

  14 MAY 2000

  Chapter 3

  10 SEPTEMBER 2000

  Chapter 4

  5 NOVEMBER 2000

  Chapter 5

  8 NOVEMBER 2000

  Part II

  [The following day...]

  Chapter 6

  13 NOVEMBER 2000

  15 NOVEMBER 2000

  Chapter 7

  29 NOVEMBER 2000

  Chapter 8

  1 DECEMBER 2000

  Chapter 9

  6 DECEMBER 2000

  Chapter 10

  12 DECEMBER 2000

  Part III

  [The Devil locked...]

  Chapter 11

  15 DECEMBER 2000

  Chapter 12

  4 DECEMBER 2001

  Chapter 13

  2 DECEMBER 1999—DR. SELMANI, ARBËR

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  17 MARCH 2002

  Chapter 16

  1 APRIL 2002

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  bolla

  1. ghost, beast, fiend

  2. unknown animal species, snakelike creature

  3. alien, invisible

  I

  Having made the world, God began to regret his creation. He went to meet the Devil, who asked him, “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s a snake in my Paradise,” said God.

  “Well, well,” the Devil replied, barely concealing his unctuous smile. He smacked his lips and waited for God to lower his head and ask a favor, which he did next.

  “Give me a child of yours and I will do as you wish, I will remove my snake from your Paradise,” the Devil said, and in front of him, God was now kneeling.

  “A child of mine,” God repeated.

  “Yes, a child of God,” said the Devil, then God started thinking.

  “Very well,” God said eventually, forlorn. “For that, I will give you my child.”

  22 JANUARY 2000

  I have seen a man die, I have seen a soldier’s severed hand lying in the road, it looked like a pike dug up from the earth, I have seen brothers separated at birth, houses burned to the ground and collapsed buildings, broken windows smashed crockery stolen goods, so much stuff, you’d never believe how much wreckage is left behind when life is thrashed from around it, objects die, too, when their owners are taken from them.

  I’ve seen terrible things, terrible things after terrible things and terrible things before terrible things, bodies washed up on the shores like driftwood, horrific, sick deeds, unforgivable sins, rows of gunmen and their victims, a village of children and their parents on their knees on the ground, and I knew that soon not one of them would be alive, I see it like a poster in my mind, the expression that each of them bore, the sense of impending end made their faces look empty and stiff like the heads of porcelain dolls, they wet themselves and prayed for us not to shoot them, and though they supported one another and gripped one another, they touched one another as though they were strangers, men and their wives, mothers and their children, as they pressed against one another they pushed one another farther away, though you’d think the opposite would happen. It surprised me that living at a moment like that was the exact opposite of love, such a lucid awareness of death.

  I have held a friend’s heart in the palm of my hand, I have thrust my hand into a chest ripped apart by bullets, grabbed a torn aorta, slippery as an eel, felt the vertebrae of the spine like teeth against my knuckles, rested my fingers on the lungs like wet pillows.

  I have lain next to a man shot in the forest I lay next to him I couldn’t leave him, believe me all I could do was make sure he stayed alive, and I wrapped my arms around him and pressed down on his bandages and felt every attempt his body made to function in its familiar rhythm, felt the murmur of his insides, his stomach hardening as it filled with blood, felt every confused movement of every organ like the sound of a strange animal.

  Like this I lay next to a man with gunshot wounds, and many hours passed before we were found, there in the middle of the darkened forest they stumbled upon us, as if by a freak of nature, and they took us to a field hospital where I operated on him, sewed up his ruptured bowels and amputated his infected leg below the knee, and when he finally woke up I told him what had happened in the forest and he could hardly believe he was still alive, and he gripped my hand and kissed it, and cried and said he remembered me from the forest, thank you, he said eventually, I’m eternally grateful to you, do you hear, eternally grateful for this life.

  * * *

  —

  A few months later I received a letter. I had been transferred and had already forgotten about him. The letter read, You kissed me, there in the forest, didn’t you, isn’t that right, you kissed me on the lips, and on my neck and cheeks and forehead, you kissed me, and you touched me when you thought I was unconscious, didn’t you, when you thought I was dying? Because I was so cold that your lips were fire. Isn’t that right? That these memories are not dreams?


  I read his letter dozens of times, but only rarely did I manage to get to the end, to the bit where he thanked me for saving his life, then said the same thing again: I am eternally grateful to you, grateful for every sunrise, for every night that I am alive in this world. And then he wrote, maybe, maybe we could meet again, do the same thing again, or something like that, I don’t know, with both of us awake this time, I liked it

  no

  I’m sorry for

  writing to you this way

  I live in Belgrade

  in case you want to visit sometime

  * * *

  —

  I’ll wait for you at the foot of the Mihailo Monument, for the next few weeks I’ll sit on the white steps every Wednesday and every Saturday at noon, I’ll be wearing a white shirt and black trousers, you’ll surely recognize me by the empty trouser leg flapping in the wind, where once there was the leg you took from me.

  * * *

  —

  That’s what he wrote to me, and I never went to visit him—once I almost did because I was near Belgrade for a while, but I didn’t because I couldn’t

  kiss him again, of course not, a one-legged man, who would do such a thing, touch a broken man

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks after his letter, the man’s father wrote to me and told me his son had shot himself in the mouth with a pistol, and in the envelope was an invitation to the man’s funeral. I stared at it for many days, took it from my pocket in the evenings and sometimes in the mornings, read a word or two. It smelled of smoke, and its sour aroma, a mixture of wet cardboard and burned plastic, became ingrained in my fingertips and made its way along my arms and from there into my mouth when I brushed my teeth, to my clothes from which I couldn’t get rid of it, not even by rinsing them in vinegar water, and eventually I threw the letter away like a note from the devil, and I said to myself that I am a doctor, I am a doctor I am a surgeon I help people

  * * *

  —

  After the funeral the man’s father wrote to me again, and the letter read, “I know everything, you know what I mean, not even an Albanian would do that.”

  It was written on the same notepaper and its smell started following me everywhere, remained on my skin even after I had bathed and changed all the textiles in my apartment, it floated with me to the bakery, the operating gurney, on the journey from Belgrade via Gradnja to Kamenica. There, it turned into rain that fell torrentially for days: water filled the drains and gutters and streaked its way along the edges of the roads, drowning the flowers, the grass and moss, uprooting the traffic signs and cattle fences as it went, even cracking the asphalt, and eventually crept into the houses, burning and angry, rising

  up to the knee

  * * *

  —

  “I will end what my son did not: an eye for an eye, I am coming for you, you faggot.”

  the letter ended with these words can you believe how close I was to going

  1

  PRISTINA, 1995

  The first time I see him, he is crossing the street. What catches my eye is his sunken head, which hardly turns though the intersection is busy, then I notice his skinny body, which his string-like legs seem to pull behind them. His hair, parted down the center, looks like a pair of little wings, and he holds a pile of books against his chest; sometimes his other hand droops to the side, every once in a while he stuffs it in his pocket and pulls up his tight dark red velvet jeans.

  I sit in the shade outside a café, and he walks toward me, the sun on his shoulders. I can make out the flicker in his eyes as he passes, the items in his pants pockets, the soft fuzz on his neck, his shaved arms. Then he walks onto the terrace and stands for a moment by a table at the other end of the nearly empty café. My cigarette burns down to the filter. He looks confused, as though he knows someone is observing him, and he yawns with his entire body, a deep inhalation that soon drowns like a faint puff of air behind the shyest fist I have ever seen, the palm lifted in front of his mouth opens out toward the road, like a slowly burgeoning flower, and only then does he place his books on the table and sit down.

  It is early April, and I cannot take my eyes off him. He looks skittish and lost, as though he were living out an unpleasant dream, as though he keeps a different rhythm, different laws from those around him, and in his posture and gestures—the way he opens his books so gingerly, as though he is afraid of creasing their covers, the way he holds the pen he has taken from his pocket like a shard of broken crystal, how from time to time he presses his fingers against his temple and closes his eyes as if to give the impression of concentration, though I strongly suspect he is merely trying to refrain from looking around—there is something bare and untamed, something that speaks volumes yet remains unspoken.

  I stand up and begin walking toward his table. I don’t understand how I even dare talk to a Serb, but somehow I feel compelled to make better acquaintance with him.

  “Zdravo,” I say in Serbian.

  “Hi,” he says in a bright voice, almost like that of my wife, his eyes fixed on the book lying open on the table, the text of which is so small and tightly typeset that I can’t make out what language it’s in.

  “May I sit down?” I ask, and pull a chair from beneath the table.

  “Sure,” he replies, glances around, then nods at the chair and looks me in the eye, and I think what an extraordinarily, magnificently beautiful man he is, his irises look like a sky preparing for a storm and his trimmed stubble combines with his reddish hair, neatly combed and groomed, his torso long like a horse’s, and his face perfectly proportioned, delicate and sweet. I can’t remember how much time has passed since his answer, how long I have been staring at him or he at me like friends who have been separated for decades.

  “I’m Arsim,” I say and reach out a hand.

  “Miloš,” he says and grips my hand in his cold, bony fingers. “Nice to meet you.” I release his hand and slide into his sad eyes, languid beneath his heavy, wrinkled eyelids.

  The next hour feels more comfortable than any I have ever experienced. We order coffee, lower our voices, and when I see that his books are in English we switch languages. Though improbable, random even, it feels natural, because by speaking English we can be different people, we are no longer ourselves, we are free of this place, pages torn from a novel.

  I discover that he is twenty-five, a year older than me, that he studies medicine at the University of Pristina, and that he will probably specialize in surgery, that he is from a small town called Kuršumlija on the other side of the border, thirty kilometers northeast of my hometown, Podujevo, which in turn is thirty kilometers northeast of Pristina, that in addition to his native language and English he speaks fluent German and even a smattering of Albanian.

  I tell him perfectly normal things about myself too, the kind of things you would tell a new acquaintance: I tell him my age and where I come from, tell him that my father taught English and got me interested in languages and that one day I hope to work as a teacher of literature or a proofreader for a newspaper, and as I speak I can feel the glue of his eyes against my cheek, the way he scrutinizes my every movement, his back hunched, his head to one side, listening intently as though he were trying to memorize everything I said.

  I tell him I study at the university too, literature, history, and English, or that I used to study there, I don’t know, and telling him this feels awkward and shameful as the university in which I enrolled years ago is no longer the same as the one where he studies, the place where we began our studies at around the same time.

  After finishing our coffee, we look at each other for a while, and it feels right and real, unlike everything that Pristina has become, its streets filled with Serbian troops carrying assault rifles, tanks, and lines of military vehicles that look as though they have descended from space. />
  He smiles and I smile, and what we might look like right now doesn’t frighten us, at all, because we were meant to meet, I think, and maybe he thinks it too, there’s a reason the two of us happened upon this café at the same time.

  At some point he asks the waiter for the bill, pays for my coffee, and says he has to visit the library before his next lecture.

  “Do you want to come along?” he asks.

  I don’t need anything at the library right now, but I say of course I’ll join him. We walk the short way, cross the street, and arrive at the university campus, step on the grass, whole chunks of which the years have gobbled up with gray, damp, worn stone slabs, and we climb the few steps up to the entrance to the library, which looks like it has been wrapped in a fishing net, and walk into the large, bright lobby as though into the inflamed jaws of an ancient monster. The floors are a grand marble mosaic and along the walls are round metallic roses that look on with a watchful gaze, like the eyes of the gods.

  He walks slightly in front of me, and suddenly I grip him by the shoulder, as if I were a madman, a schizophrenic, there in the middle of the lobby, just like that, wholly out of character, without giving it a thought, right in the midst of the crowds of people filing out of the building, in the heart of the close, humid afternoon I really grab him, and he stops and only after a moment turns his head, looks first at my hand on his shoulder, the tips of my fingers resting on the arc of his collarbone, and then at me, and for that brief moment I am a completely different man—so alive, I say to myself, so much more alive than I have ever been before.