Crossing

Crossing

Pajtim Statovci

Translated by David Hackston

Pantheon Books, New York, 2019

I like to think of myself as a fairly astute and close reader: I literally did not see the ending of this book coming.

But once I read it I understood and wanted to immediately begin reading it again.

Let me start at the beginning: Albania, a place so foreign and exotic that there is no category for it. It is a land that has been trampled over and over by foreign invaders and then largely left alone. Their language is quite like nowhere else. We traveled to Albania via a tourist bus from the small country of Montenegro. In Tirana we slipped away from the tour group. We had a contact of a diplomat, an attaché staying in the capital. Little did we know the little we knew.

Albania had just emerged from a repressive regime on the scale of North Korea. Under their version of Kim Jong-un, Enver Hoxha erected a series of bunkers—in case the West invaded. They only wished. Albania was a small forgotten place.

What finally it pushed it into the forefront of media and the Western attention was the problem of Kosovo, a mainly Muslim republic occupied by Albanians, Serbs, and ethnic Kosovars. In the late 90s Serbian forces attacked Kosovo. During the two-year conflict 13,500 people were killed or went missing. The Yugoslav and Serb forces caused the displacement of between 1.2 million to 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians.

After the death of Hoxha in 1985 different schemes initiated by Italian developers/businessmen defrauded man Albanians of their savings. When I visited in 2007and stayed with the diplomat at his apartment it was still a chaotic country. Every evening at about 7 pm the entire capital of Tirana lost power, plunged into sudden darkness and a weird pause. For the split second before the generators kicked in there was a soylent-green/apocalyptic atmosphere of a breakdown in society. All over the neighborhood you could voices, the howls of dogs. But it also felt joyful and spontaneous—as if by ingenuity anything could happen; they were remaking their history.

Even their stories spring from their own local sources—and are particular to that area. For example we heard a couple times while in the country the story of brothers building a wall to keep out invaders. They could only finish the wall or hope for it to withstand an army if they inserted into the wall a woman. They flipped a coin as it were to see whose wife would be encased into the brick wall. I remember upon hearing this story that it sounded misogynous—why a woman? The spirit of the woman haunted the brothers, the castle walls. There was an addendum to the story that she only asked for a breast to be bared so she could continue to nurse who son until she died of starvation/asphyxiation/thirst. Again, there is something terribly wrong here.

I remember as we were about to leave for the bus station. Our acquaintance called a taxi. The driver had pulled up and was cleaning the windows with newspaper. The curbs and sidewalks were full of litter. People drove as if they’d never had a lesson—which is exactly the case. There was no appreciation for road rules. As we were about to take off the driver tossed the wet newspaper into the street and opened the doors for us. This, I thought, is Albania.

In Statovci’s novel we are introduced to 2 boys, Bujar and Agim, both a bit outside of their family and society. Bujar has grown up listening to the stories of his father about the origins of Albania and the Skanderbeg Monument in the main square of Tirana. At the same time the country is weakening and growing sick and impoverished, so also Bujar’s father is dying of cancer. None of this feels good. Just as the stories carry a dysfunctionality to them, so also the parallel story of the country of Albania. The novel is a hall of mirrors. One part speaking to another—even as Bujar travels, leaving Albania for Italy. In fact, the book opens in Rome. From Rome to Madrid to New York, then to Finland. In each place Bujar takes on a new persona.

The idea of crossing is analogous to both an internal and external narrative. Agim and Bujar are both somewhat fluid characters sexually. Throughout the scope of the novel Bujar traverses different sexual and relational boundaries. Through relationships and moving to a new place he is looking for connection. Ultimately he has become separated from his home/heart and must return in order to find forgiveness.

Crossing is a complex and layered novel exploring identity, immigration, homeland, and how story factors into our own story. No matter how we react to the main protagonist and his choices, we will be brought into a deeper level of understand and compassion for those crossing over.