at the university the past two years—ethnology—but I had expected
more and was bored. The lectures only cursorily covered questions
about how people in different cultures deal with life, how they shape it, even though it should have been the very core of the field. Or maybe I always chose the wrong seminars.”
That evening at the bar, the discussion had turned to occupations
and career prospects. Someone mentioned that the job security offered to civil servants was totally cool, eliciting a “yuck” from someone else, and others chimed in with descriptions of civil servants, leaving out not a single stereotype: lazy, slow, stuffy, reactionary, without imagination, and dead set against any change. And cops—they were the
worst. “Actually, I’d really like to find out whether that’s true,” Lina had thought out loud. “I mean, I only know cops from demonstrations and
traffic stops. Hard to believe they’re all idiots.”
“Why don’t you try it out?” one of the gang, Lutz, had said. “Then
you’ll know.”
“Hm, not a bad idea.”
All the others had laughed their heads off. Lina, a cop? Lina who
had been at demonstrations with her mother ever since she was a tod-
dler and who got sick at the mere sight of someone in uniform? “You
wouldn’t dare,” Lutz had said.
“Just watch me,” she replied.
“Never.”
“I’ll do it.”
76
Dead Woods
That was that. She couldn’t back down. They decided that she
would apply for police training and, if accepted, stay with it for four weeks. She had to swear she wouldn’t intentionally flunk the entrance exam. If she lasted the four weeks, her friends around the table would throw a super party for her. If she gave up before the four weeks were over, she’d have to clean the toilet at the dojo for a month.
“In the beginning, I didn’t take the whole thing seriously,” Lina
explained to Max. “I mean, I never thought they’d take me. My mother used to occupy empty houses—she was a squatter. She’s still active.
You know, St. Pauli, the coalition against gentrification, and so on.
But despite all that, I passed the test for the criminal division.” With a wry smile, she added, “I’m a little too small for the uniformed police, but in Major Crimes even a little person has a chance. So I started the training.”
“And when your four weeks were over?” Max asked and ordered
another orange juice and another beer.
“We had a huge party. My buddies rented an entire bar. Everyone
knew about me, my new name was Miss Piggy, and they laughed their
heads off that we, of all people, had managed to place a mole with the cops.”
Max tilted his head, as he always did when he was stunned by
something somebody said. “Sounds like your group saw the police as
the enemy.”
Lina gave him an astonished look. “Of course we did! What did
you think? Otherwise, the bet would have been a joke. The club sits
smack in the middle of St. Pauli, right in the red-light district. Half those people I was with were politically active.” She shrugged. “Cops were public enemy number one. That’s how I grew up, and that’s how
a few in the club still think today.” She took a sip of her beer, put her elbows on the counter, and stopped talking.
“So why did you stay?” Max asked after a while.
77
Maria C. Poets
Lina remained silent. She wondered for a moment how she could
sit in a bar with Max and tell him what she hadn’t told any other colleague, things she could only talk about with very few people. After a long time she said, “I found the training surprisingly interesting, and so I just stayed on for a while after the first four weeks. On one of the first operations during my training, we raided a brothel. We found
three girls from Sri Lanka, none of them older than their midteens.
They were here illegally, of course, and they didn’t know one word of German . . . except some pertinent jargon.” She laughed bitterly. “I saw the fear in their eyes. I heard what my colleagues came up with, not even under their breath, along the lines of ‘Pity we’re on call.’ I tried to calm the three girls the best I could. I tried to speak English with them, which they understood a little, well, better than many of my
colleagues. But in the end they were still led away in handcuffs.” She shrugged. “Afterward I was singled out by our trainer. He claimed I
had interfered with the investigation, done things on my own, without permission. I said that I simply felt