Crossing by Pajtim Statovci (translated by David Hackston) is the second novel I have read by this author, following My Cat Yugoslavia. Its original title in Finnish is Tiranan sydän, which means The Heart of Tirana or Tirana’s Heart. I wonder why such a dramatic change in title was made for the English translation. Did the publisher think that the name of the Albanian capital city wouldn’t sell the book? The double-headed eagle, a symbol of Albania, however, adorns the front cover. In my opinion, Crossing seems way too vague and gives me no idea what the book might be like. Maybe that was the intention. Now that I have read the novel I can see possible reasons for using that word as there are themes of crossing borders to seek a new and better life outside of Albania, and also a theme where one of the characters is a young man who from boyhood liked to wear traditionally female clothing, so “crossing” could mean in this context “cross-dressing”.
Bujar and Agim are two young men who leave post-Hoxha Albania to try to make a better life for themselves. Agim enjoys dressing in his mother’s clothes and acts on his homosexual urges. Bujar just goes along with it, explaining to his friend:
“But I’m not. You know that, don’t you? Though we sometimes do…those things in the evenings.”
The friends develop various schemes to make money and they are always on the move to find a new place to live. Bujar finds a nice house where a married middle-aged couple lives. Statovci uses innuendo at first to convey that the man sexually abuses Bujar on a regular basis, yet Bujar does not seem traumatized by it. It is just a means to an end for him to stay, virtually for free, in such a fine house. Statovci paints a picture of such a poor Albania that parents think nothing of offering their young daughters for the purpose of prostitution, if it will earn the family enough money to survive. I wonder if sexual abuse in such poor countries is not even considered to be abuse. Young bodies in destitute societies are regarded as assets, in demand as valuable merchandise and hence for sale. This is not the first time I have encountered stories of this happening, as I recall reading about it during the Holodomor.
Statovci jumps ahead in time and I wondered at first where I was and when things were happening, but for the most part he included a place and year at the beginning of each chapter. Nevertheless I found Crossing to be less adherent to a linear timetable than his earlier novel. The ending wasn’t the concrete finality I like, and seemed incomplete. I was left shrugging my shoulders and asking myself “Is that it?”
As with My Cat Yugoslavia, Statovci has a way with writing similes and I loved the examples below:
“I went into my mother’s room. She was sprawled on the bed like a torn bag of flour.”
“I ran out to the balcony and vomited over the railing and into the garden, the half-digested chunks of bread hitting the grass like the lazy clapping of sweaty hands.”
“These were the same men who shook their heads as they passed Romany beggars with their children placed in the middle of the pavement and wrapped so tightly in dirty sheets that they looked like a wasps’ nest on which someone had drawn the wrinkly face of a baby.”