Day 337: The Statement

# The Statement

A week ago, when I got home, my flatmates were waiting for me in the kitchen looking rather serious. I had received a letter with the letterhead of the Saxon police, and they didn’t want to just leave it on my desk. I opened it immediately with them peering over my shoulder: they simply wanted to take my statement again regarding the Alaunpark incident.

So, the appointment was today and, once again, I’ve had a fantastic experience to recount. The statement was taken in the same place where I testified last time: the central police station (Polizeidirektion), the one located in the Altstadt (Dresden’s city center), next to the synagogue. I arrived at the entrance and was told to go to an office at the opposite end of the building. I don’t know whether it was because of the building’s neo-baroque style, but as I walked through the corridors I couldn’t shake the feeling that the place must once have served some very sinister purpose (although it has always been the police headquarters; the Gestapo operated out of the Hotel Continental next to the main train station, and the Stasi had their offices, cells, and interrogation rooms in the complex on Bautzner Strasse). When I reached the appropriate section, a police officer told me to wait in a small windowless room where the interpreter was already sitting — the letter had said that if I wanted, I could request an interpreter in advance by phone (a phone line answered only in German). Shortly after we started talking, I discovered she had studied in Salamanca, and for the rest of the waiting time we chatted about it and got along very well.

After quite a while, we were shown into the office of an older, pot-bellied policeman with a white moustache and the expression of someone permanently annoyed with life. The office equipment was undoubtedly from before the fall of the Wall. The man made no attempt to stand up from his desk and I don’t think he even took his eyes off the screen. The interpreter and I sat down in the two chairs opposite him, as he indicated with a nod of his head, and without introducing himself or explaining anything, he began firing off questions. Looking at the interpreter, he would half-heartedly read a question from his computer; she would translate it into Spanish; and I, glancing back and forth between them like at a tennis match, would give my answer. The interpreter would then translate my response into German, and the little man would type it into his computer using only his two index fingers. It didn’t take us long to realize that he wasn’t using the space bar between words, and once he had finished typing an answer, he would spend a moment inserting the spaces one by one, marking their positions with the mouse. During each of those endless moments, the interpreter and I would exchange looks that said, “Oh my God, this can’t be real.”

The questions were along the lines of: What were you doing in the park at that time? What happened at that moment? What happened next? The man placed a lot of emphasis on the bottle I smashed over one of the attackers’ heads (should I have brought a lawyer?). His questioning, just like the night they first took my statement, clearly aimed to prevent me from suggesting that the attackers of Koki were far-right racists. This insistence led to the second surreal moment of the day. The man stood up, left his office briefly, and returned with a padded red binder, which he opened over his thick forearms. It was an album of large, A4-sized photos from police files. In a grave voice, as he slowly turned the pages one by one, he asked me to make sure I did not recognize any suspect. All the photos were of far-left punks, and with each new portrait the interpreter and I found it harder to keep a straight face. The photos were hilarious: one man with a thick marker shoved through his nasal septum, another with a chain running from ear to ear across his face with a clearly stolen Mercedes emblem hanging from it, another with sexually explicit tattoos on his forehead, another with spike-shaped piercings sprouting all over his face, another… (each worse than the last). I tried to survive by biting the inside of my cheeks. On top of that, there must be some internal rule requiring the full head to appear in police photos, because occasionally, when he turned a page, a punk would appear with a tiny head like a shrunken head: his mohawk was so huge that the photographer must have stepped several meters back just to fit it into the frame.

After finishing the album and my having recognized no one, the policeman declared the statement concluded. In the end, because of his peculiar typing method, we spent almost two hours at the station. I don’t know what will happen now, but the truth is I have little more to add, since in less than a month I’ll be returning to Spain.

The central police station