Police Invasion

Dispatch #21

I didn’t Dream Noodles last night because three police officers with weapons drawn broke into our residency house last night and began to harass us. I debated writing this up as a Dispatch, but ultimately it’s something I want to share.

To set the scene, I was lying on my bed around 12:30pm looking at photographs I had taken earlier that day when there was a slight rustling sound out in the hallway of my bedroom. There is one other person staying at the residency house, Marit Benthe Norheim, an amazing Norwegian artist. I figured she was just going to the bathroom, but it seemed odder than normal. There was a shuffling sound, almost furtive. Normally when either of us get up to pee, we just paddle to the toilet do our business and return back to bed. Not so last night. This was a stranger sound, not the sound of feet but the sound of boots. Suddenly, a mix of lights went on: flashlight-like beams darting about outside my door. Black silhouettes began to be illuminated. This was definitely not Benthe.

The residency house is a bit of a Cold War relic, still, somewhat, decorated in ČSSR fashion from the 1980s with some new IKEA units installed. To me it’s great as it feeds my love of this region and thus I get to spend some domestic time in an environment that I never really got to live in. The doors to our bedroom have a glass panel in them, so while you cannot see directly through them, you do see wavering forms, bursts of light, and silhouettes. This is what I saw last night as I was now sitting alert in my bed. I thought: is Benthe coming to talk to me? At this time of night? And why is she being so weird about the lights? But then, just like in a good horror classic or some kind of noir film, a shadow lurked across the glass panel with a hand outstretched grasping for the doorknob. Immediately, I thought: we are getting robbed. SHIT — I haven’t backed up my photos to my HD yet; there goes weeks of work!

I realized that the scene in a movie where the evil-doer on the other side of the door turns the knob and the hero inside the room can see it twisting ope, their fate soon to be sealed in a manner of seconds, was true. I saw the know turn, a slow creak of the handle and shadows piercing through the crack in the door. Just then, the door started to open ever-so-quietly. I bolted out of bed and plotted what to do next: my first instinct was to grasp my computer like a frisbee and send it spinning across the room into the man’s head as he slowly creeped into my room. But I negated that thought as, again, I really was loathe to lose my photos. Instead, I bolted towards the door (hiding my laptop under my mattress for safekeeping) and shouted:

“HELLOOOOO!!!!!” in a bellowing, overtly English-sounding way. I figured if I started shouting in English and spell rapidly, that might make them think: fuck, we messed with the wrong house, there’s psycho English people here. I was just about to launch my shoulder into the door and slam it on the invaders arm, when I noticed he was also carrying a pistol, pointed into my room. Instead of smashing the door on him and risking me getting shot — what a way to go out! — I thrust the door open and saw, to my amazement, not robbers but police. Again, I shouted: HELLOOOOOO!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?

They looked at me in amazement, this half-dressed guy in a pink t-shirt cursing at them in English. In the hallway there were three officers, but not your regular kind. Dressed in all black, they each had facemarks drawn up — ICE had made its way to Slovakia. Two were bearing pistols, the third, a huge man, had one of the extendable beating sticks you might see in a Russian prison. They spun around me and shouted back something in Slovak, I have no idea. The third man went towards Benthe’s room, saying in broken English “ARE YOU ALONE!” Again and again, “ARE YOU ALONE!” There was no answer, as Benthe was probably in deep dream mode. Eventually, she roused, obviously startled and said: Yes! Yes!

Thankfully, she stayed in her room, I am sure absolutely frightened. I keep speaking in English, it was my only tactic I could think of to disarm them. They had not declared themselves police, they did not declare what they were doing there, nor did they declare how they even got into the house. Inside, there are sings in English and Slovak that say things like: BATHROOM / TOALET, or BEDROOM / IZBA etc. There is the logo of Trenčín European City of Culture on these signs; I pointed at them aggressively saying: CITY HOUSE! CITY HOUSE! City House? One of the officers said back. CITY FUCKING HOUSE I shouted back.

I called Michaela, the person responsible for the residency; thankfully she answered and talked to the cops for a while; I could make out some of the conversation: city, artists, Canada, Norway, Trenčín 2026, that kind of thing. While one cop was talking, the huge man with the extendible beating stick was trying to collapse it but it wouldn’t react. He knelt down, under the burden of all kinds of tactical gear, bullet proof vest, facemark, some kind of weird helmet, and started stabbing the floor with this stick trying to collapse it:

THUUD!

Didn’t work. Again:

THUUDD!

Again:

THUUDDD!

This was such a vivid image, this huge police officer in the semi-dark kneeling down with a stick that wouldn’t fold stabbing the ground repeatedly, making a sickening noise into the floor, a strange cosplay of stabbing that terrified me even more than the gun nosing its way through the crack in my door into my room. Eventually, one of the other cops walked over and gently tapped him on the shoulder: enough. He never got his stick to collapse.

By this point, while tension had not been defused, it was still an incredibly strange situation, cops sneaking into our home, violating domestic space, not really saying a word, not identifying themselves, not communicating why they were there, but a palpable deflation did happen. At then I let out a sigh of relief when a cop who seemed to be in charge asked me if I have a key.

A key? To the house? Why, I asked.

“So you can let us out,” he said.

This was utterly confusing. What do you mean, to let you out? How did you get in? I presumed they had some kind of lock pick and secretly let themselves in. In a way, they did let themselves in, but they went in through the garage door and came up through the basement, which, when you think about it, is even more bizarre and terrifying. Here we were up on the second floor, and they went in through the basement, quietly probing through empty and forgotten paces below, finding their way into the main house, the moving upstairs towards my solitary light that signalled someone was awake inside. Here, they gathered outside my door, ready to secretly burst in — and do what? Tackle me? Throw me on the floor, off the balcony?

The thought of them creeping through the house, up the stairs, gathering their weapons is an unsettling vision. So I hd to let them out of my own house at night. I asked them: did you also climb the wrought iron fence, the one with spikes on the top? Yes, they said. They told me: “Lock your garage door.”

I went back inside the house, locked every door I could find, and chatted with Benthe. Obviously terrified, here was a woman alone in her room, caught in deep sleep, when a large burly man dressed in all black with a face mask and gun drawn slithered into her room. Never identifying himself, just shouting words: “ARE YOU ALONE!?”

We chatted for a bit but needless to say we were both rattled. I said to Benthe that I felt like I was back in Ukraine; I have been involved in some dicey situations before, but never like this, where violence is inserted into your own domestic space. My next thought was: I am glad I am leaving Saturday, the good energy had been completely displaced by these psuedo-things in black.

A few days ago Benthe and I were walking from our residency house into the city, when I mentioned that in Soviet times people were obliged, when riding public transport, to show their bus passes. You’d walk down the aisle and shout “prezdnoi!” declaring your legality. The assumption was that you were cheating first; to offset these accusations, you showed your pass to alleviate any fears that you were dodging the authorities. This story came back to me last night, as we learned that a local neighbour had called the police because there was “suspicious activity” at the house: people were living there! Apparently, the house years before had been filled with unhoused until the city took it over. Mostly, it’s been empty until the past few years when it was turned into a residency house for artists. But the extreme response is bizarre; these were not ordinary police, but I learned they were of the “drugs and gang” kind, hence their masks and all-black outfits.

A few dispatches ago I mentioned that we are still in Eastern Europe, no matter how much people would like to believe that this is Central Europe. It is not. And I do not say this in a disparaging way, but as a caution that there are still very real legacies at work in and throughout a country like Slovakia, histories that will decades more to subsume as an after-thought. Here, even the mention of potential strangers in a house is enough to trigger the city’s special gang police and to creep through the building weapons cocked and loaded. No explanation, no identifying themselves, nothing but a very blurry line between thieves and police.

I think of my previous book Interrogations, something I really prefer not to have too present in my life. In this work, I was looking at how the state manifests itself in material ways, notably through the police and their methods of extracting confessions. The police were not individuals but extensions of the state’s need to produce truth, to assert themselves as arbiters of what and how a nation ‘should’ be. Power here becomes administrative, amplifying the paranoia that runs through society. I have not felt this paranoia much in Slovakia, not as sharply as in Ukraine. Yet there it was again, the state’s phantom reappearing in my own room — a reminder that history sits just beneath the skin, ready to flare when two grey-haired artists become threatening enough to summon the masked men.