Bolla: A Novel

by Pajtim Statovci, David Hackston

Genres: LGBT Lesbian; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the author of National Book Award finalist Crossing comes an unlikely love story in Kosovo with unpredictable consequences that reverberates throughout a young man's life—a dazzling tale full of fury, tenderness, longing, and lust.
 
April 1995. Arsim is a twenty-four-year-old, recently married student at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo, keeping his head down to gain a university degree in a time and place deeply hostile to Albanians. In a café he meets a young man named Miloš, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsim's married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy and he begins a life in secret.
 
After these fevered beginnings, Arsim and Miloš's unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of war, which sends Arsim's fledgling family abroad and timid Miloš spiraling down a dark path, as depicted through chaotic journal entries. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison and now alone and hopeless, Arsim finds himself in a broken reality that makes him completely question his past. What happened to him, to them, exactly? How much can you endure, and forgive?
 
Entwined with their story is a re-created legend of a demonic serpent, Bolla; it's an unearthly tale that gives Arsim and Miloš a language through which to reflect on what they once had. With luminous prose and a delicate eye, Pajtim Statovci delivers a relentless novel of desire, destruction, intimacy, and the different fronts of war.

Release date: July 6, 2021

Publisher: Pantheon

Print pages: 240

Sample

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, ...