My name is Maja, BTW. From a very young age, they filled my head with stories about how my name relates to spring. To the month of May, precisely. Maja, or Maia, they chirped, is the Roman goddess of fields and produce associated with nature’s awakening and rebirth.
My mother was a mean-spirited woman who taught me many false things. And so it took me awhile to independently uncover that the truth about Maia — like the truth about many other things — was totally different than what I’d been told. I was quite relieved when I learned that Maia was no hormone-driven psycho goddess who frolicked in a white gown on freshly bloomed fields weaving flower wreaths, but actually one of seven mountain nymphs — a dangerous bitch, if you will. Titan’s daughter who fucked Zeus in the darkness of a cave and gave birth to Hermes, god of thieves, merchants, and orators.
As for Zoe, her name means “life” in Greek. That’s what Hellenized Jews, translated from the Hebrew havvah, called the biblical Eve. It was only logical that someone entirely unburdened from any history and free from it, like Eve, would appeal so strongly to Zoe, who wanted more than anything to free herself from the weight of her own past. To the extent that she changed her previous name to the one that, she felt, suited her much more. And thus became Zoe.
And now we can safely make a great leap over time and space to this very moment when the two of us, Zoe and I, the dynamic duo of lesbian-detective-avenger-murderesses, are driving in our little Japanese car through the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout with a heavy load in the trunk.
They’ve taught you Newton’s laws, I assume? They definitely have, you’ve just forgotten. You don’t remember those kinds of things. What’s it good for? you think. But you’re wrong. Take Newton’s second law, for instance. Or the law of force. Owing to the fact that the total mass of our car is now greater than usual, and by about two hundred pounds of male body weight which, bound with rope and tape, is jerking violently in the trunk right now, its rate of acceleration is slower than usual. Because of that, this dizzying movement around a quarter of the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout is taking forever.
I’ll use that time to tell you how Zoe and I met.
It was seven years ago, during an open mic poetry festival at an alt-cultural center in Belgrade where I performed among a crowd of comparable losers. At the time, presenting myself as a radical poet-performer still seemed exciting to me. I believed passionately in the transformative power of words. My idealism began to fade when I realized that those who fared best at the aforementioned festival were the notorious psychos. And maybe a talentless idiot or two.
That’s why I consider it a real wonder that poetry, the thing I progressively lost faith in, eventually brought me something so vital. I mean Zoe, of course. What attracted me, in a word, were her eyes. Enormous and green, with a distinct hazel lining, they looked right at me from the audience during my last performance where I read that long poem dedicated to Pat Califia. When they tried to get me off the stage, I started to resist and cry out against the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy and the impotent militarism that bars a poet even from reading her poem to the end. Only Zoe jumped out of the audience to help me. We fought with the organizers and got wasted together later that night at some dive bar in lower Dorćol. We made out until the crack of dawn in a dark dead-end street that smelled like rotten trash. What can I say? I was beside myself with love and happiness.
What delights me most about Zoe? Basically: everything. Our love was and remains a real spectacle. Today, after this many years, I can openly declare that my love for her is eternal. All you women who aren’t fortunate enough to get to know Zoe, you don’t even realize what you’re missing.
Zoe is a privilege. She is, admittedly, also a mystery. Although life with Zoe is not all sunshine and rainbows. Because the past stalks Zoe and breathes down her neck with its rough, putrid breath. Zoe does everything to shake it off, but it isn’t easy.
I remember that I read somewhere, Faulkner I think, that the past is never dead. And that more often than not it isn’t even the past. Well, that is one big, painful truth. In Zoe’s case, at least. The past has inextricably enmeshed itself in her present. Demons grip her constantly and the tightening of their sharp claws inflicts unending pain on her.
Finally, after a lifetime or two, we exit the roundabout and turn into a cozy unlit boulevard. It bores through thick woods to the lower parts of Topčider and on toward the neighborhoods of Banovo Brdo and Košutnjak. In all that darkness and peace and quiet around us, a bout of forceful drumming coming from the trunk startles us both. I can feel Zoe freeze up next to me. The load then jerks even more forcefully than before and the car suddenly reels to the side. “U pičku materinu. Motherfucker,” I murmur, searching for support in Zoe’s gaze.
And Zoe? She just shakes from the feet up. Like a volcanic eruption. This also happens in accordance with some law of physics, though no Newton can be of any help here anymore. “Stop now, please,” she says through clenched teeth. “Here, stop here.”
Zumreta.
That unusual name was, for a long time, the only tangible information Zoe had about her past and her origins. She learned of it at the age of sixteen, from her foster parents. Zumreta was, apparently, the name of her mother. She also learned that she was born somewhere in Bosnia during the war, in 1993. They couldn’t tell her much more than that. But even that was enough to tear her apart. Truth crumbled noisily before her eyes. When it settled, she discovered that not much remained. Nothing but scattered fragments. Unsubstantiated, unreliable, impermanent stories.
Some years later, however, her fragmented knowledge was largely validated and significantly supplemented, during the trial popularly known as “The Case of the Women at the Korzo Motel.”
A good part of the testimonies of two female witnesses under protection codes BP-76 and RN-72 focused on a certain girl that both witnesses had shared a cell with in a female prison in the Republika Srpska territory. She was called Zumreta.
The mere mention of that name was enough to attract Zoe’s complete attention. She almost fainted when she learned that Zumreta had already been very well into her pregnancy when she was brought there. A certain unnamed Republika Srpska army soldier or corporal or officer had pulled her sometime earlier out of the notorious Korzo Motel and had held her captive in an apartment for several months. But when she became pregnant, he simply disposed of her and left her to rot in the prison.
According to the testimonies of the two witnesses, Zumreta gave birth prematurely, maybe a month after arriving at the prison. She had a beautiful girl. But three or four days later (at this point, the statements diverge somewhat), the child was viciously seized from the cell. Two days after that, Zumreta was also taken away. And she was never seen again.
Only much later would the witnesses get wind of two opposing versions of her ending: that she threw herself, as one claimed, or that she was on the contrary thrown, as claimed by another, through a window during one of the nightly “interrogations.”
It took quite some time before another significant piece of information came up about Zoe’s mother. Half a decade later, precisely. Two years ago almost to this very day, a confessional article entitled “Cries from Korzo Motel” appeared in a popular national weekly, signed by the well-known and quite infamous journalist M.N. She was then quickly fading in the oncology department at the Clinical Center in Belgrade. So this text can be seen as her attempt to redeem a life filled with political subservience, an extreme betrayal of the profession, and all sorts of other improprieties. This unusual and unexpected testimony on the systematic rape and sexual slavery of Bosniak women during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina complemented and shed light on what the public had only heard about from the women at the Korzo Motel.