The text was published, almost simultaneously, by several regional media outlets. It also circulated for quite a while on social media networks and was lauded, disputed, and ignored in equal measure. But since the journalist M.N., “due to a serious illness,” was first totally unavailable and then passed away quickly thereafter, the circumstances around the text’s publication added the necessary dose of mystery to the whole thing and it stayed in the public eye for quite a long time.
We read the text together, Zoe and I. Words fail me every time I try to describe the look on her face when we spotted the name on the page: Zumreta. Followed this time by a surname: Alispahić. According to M.N., the story of that particular young girl — Zumreta Alispahić — begins in the early summer of 1992, when the armed local Serbs began to wreak terror on Bosniak locals in her village. One night they broke into the Alispahić home and, after a brief altercation with Zumreta’s father, shot both of her parents right in front of her. Everything moves fast, the journalist contended. Much faster than one thinks. People are sacks of blood, flesh, and bones, you attack them with a bullet, knife, or bayonet and they fall apart, dissolving into nothing, like deflated balloons. Nothing. People are nothing and death is nothing.
Zumreta Alispahić screamed for a long time. She trembled, huddled in a corner of the room. Much later, she was taken, along with eight other girls and women, to the Korzo Motel, that bullet-riddled building on the main road not far from the little town. A group of about thirty soldiers was already there. They greeted the women with impatient cries, wild chants, and a burst of uncontrollable, drunken laughter.
On that first night, ten men raped Zumreta Alispahić. At first, she resisted. So they hit her with their fists and thrashed her with their belts and kicked her with their boots until she could fight no more. Covered in blood, she lay motionless while the soldiers took turns.
Out of the nine women brought in the first group to the motel, three did not survive the night. The rape and torture, beatings, mutilations, and random killings continued into the days that followed. When they were not being raped, they were treated like slaves. After a while, each one of them was allocated to one of the soldiers who would occasionally reside there in the Korzo Motel. Except Zumreta Alispahić. She was, as they liked to point out, “at everyone’s disposal.”
At this point in the narrative the journalist herself makes an appearance. She also swiftly introduces a third character to the story, a certain Neđo, describing him in a few off-hand strokes as a tough, unwavering soldier assigned as her guide during her first visit to the Korzo Motel. He drove her there from Pale, that depressed little mountain town that became the political and military center for Bosnian Serbs during the war.
The journalist’s fascination with Neđo is evident throughout the text but it doesn’t affect her professional judgment. For instance, she does not fail to notice that he was nowhere near as shocked as she was with what they encountered inside the motel. And she couldn’t but notice a gleam in his eye when he caught sight of a dirty, malnourished girl, with bruises, cuts, and burns all over her body.
The journalist spent a greater part of the day interviewing soldiers. But she was strictly forbidden from speaking to the women.
Neđo, on the other hand, was free to roam around. Later in the day he approached a frightened young girl and gave her a shriveled apple that he dug out from the pocket of his uniform. The journalist remembers watching the girl from the corner of her eye as she “grabbed the withered fruit and started devouring it ravenously, like a starving little animal.”
When Neđo came to pick her up and led her toward the jeep, she was somehow not surprised to find the little emaciated creature by his side. Hobbled by confusion and fear, the girl was helped into the backseat. On the way back to Pale, M.N. tried talking to her over her seat. She asked for her name repeatedly, but the girl kept turning away and hiding her face.
“Her name is Zumreta,” Neđo finally spoke for her.
“Zumreta,” the journalist repeated, as if tasting the word, and then turned again to the little girl. “Really?”
“Yes,” said Neđo. “Zumreta Alispahić.”
The rest of the way, they drove in complete silence through the apocalyptic beauty of Bosnian landscapes razed by the war.
Even though that name — Zumreta Alispahić — stayed with M.N. forever, she confesses that at first she did not think much about the girl’s personal fate. As far as she was concerned, Zumreta Alispahić was saved. Neđo had taken her with him, and that was that. “And so I forgot about her,” she admits. “Simply because I believed she had more luck than the others.”
She supposedly dedicated herself to the more pressing fate of all those women who still remained in the Korzo Motel and claims that she used all the influence she had on a few of the Bosnian Serb authorities in Pale. “And,” she wrote with glowing pride, “things actually started getting better.”
The women presumably began receiving food more regularly. They were allowed to gather in the dining room. They were even provided with basic toiletries. Rapes were thinned out significantly. As was the harassment. And the beatings. Days passed without even one of them being killed. And most importantly, the steady stream of “contingents” or “packages” was completely suspended. Then the resettlement began. They carted them away one by one or in small groups. Although the journalist spent many days at the Korzo Motel, she couldn’t figure out where they were taking them. The soldiers kept quiet, and the women knew nothing. Only much later would it become known that they were distributing some of them to the local fitness center and some to the construction site of an electrical power station. In both locations the individual and group rapes, torture, and killings continued with undiminished intensity. A number of women were also distributed to a former women’s prison. The same one where Zumreta Alispahić would also arrive, although much later.
Several months passed after the journalist had last seen Neđo. But Pale is small and she spent a lot of her days there, so it was truly just a matter of time. When they literally bumped into each other on the street one day, Neđo took the opportunity to invite her over to “his” apartment. She happily agreed and they walked together to a neighborhood at the very edge of town.
Even though it really couldn’t have been that long since she had last seen him, she couldn’t help but notice certain changes in Neđo. That conceited prince with his long limbs and light step, who once seemed to float high above all the horrors of war, had gone through a striking transformation. His head was no longer raised on his slender neck in that aristocratic way, but as if it had grown heavier and had become difficult to hold up, so much so that his beard constantly touched the top of his chest. The expression on his face had become suspicious, maybe even evil, his step significantly heavier, and his posture revealed an unending tension. He was quieter than before, but simultaneously more crude and short. But his eyes, at this point the journalist’s words were nearly rapturous, dear God, those eyes! Intensely green and sad. Like the Neretva River he grew up near.
Together they went to a one-bedroom apartment on the last floor of a standard three-story building. She was very surprised when Neđo pointedly rang the bell and when, a moment later, a girl opened the door. It took her a second or two to realize who she was. It was Zumreta Alispahić, of course, but more properly nourished and changed so much from that first encounter that M.N. could barely recognize her. Her eyes gleamed and her cheeks charmingly blushed whenever Neđo addressed her. She fulfilled every order at once and without any comment. She was his faithful, obedient slave. That was obvious from the beginning. The journalist, who had recently read a lengthy essay on Stockholm syndrome, had it all quickly figured out. Or at least I thought that I had it all figured out, she wrote.