In the Court, what was at stake was nothing less than the suffering of thousands of people, and in suffering there could be no question of pretense. And yet the Court was by nature a place of high theatrics. It was not only in the carefully crafted testimony of the victims. The first time I attended a session I had been startled, both the prosecution and the defense had been unmeasured in pleading their cases. And then the accused themselves were often grandiose in character, both imperious and self-pitying, they were politicians and generals, people used to occupying a large stage and hearing the sound of their own voices. The interpreters couldn’t entirely eschew these dramatics, it was our job not only to interpret the words the subject was speaking, but also to express or indicate the demeanor, the nuance and intention behind their words.
The first time you listened to an interpreter speaking, their voice might sound cold and precise and completely without inflection, but the longer you listened, the more variation you would hear. If a joke was made it was the interpreter’s job to communicate the humor or attempt at humor; similarly, when something was said ironically it was important to indicate that the words were not to be taken at face value. Linguistic accuracy was not enough. Interpretation was a matter of great subtlety, a word with many contexts, for example it is often said that an actor interprets a role, or a musician a piece of music.
There was a certain level of tension that was intrinsic to the Court and its activities, a contradiction between the intimate nature of pain, and the public arena in which it had to be exhibited. A trial was a complex calculus of performance in which we were all involved, and from which none of us could be entirely exempt. It was the job of the interpreter not simply to state or perform but to repeat the unspeakable. Perhaps that was the real anxiety within the Court, and among the interpreters. The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description—description, elaboration, and delineation—of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.
* * *
—
The tram was crowded, and at one point a large group of students boarded. They were raucous, but unlike some of the other passengers—who glanced at them askance before looking away—I did not mind, on the contrary I took the opportunity to listen to their conversation, or at least what fragments I could decipher.
When I moved to The Hague I did not speak or have more than a passing acquaintance with Dutch, however its similarities with German were such that after six months I had some competence in the language. Of course, most people in the Netherlands spoke fluent English, and at the Court there was never an occasion to speak Dutch, so I primarily learned through listening—in the street, in a restaurant or café, on the tram as I was doing now. A place has a curious quality when you have only a partial understanding of its language, and in those early months the sensation was especially peculiar. At first I moved in a cloud of unknowing, the speech around me impenetrable, but it quickly grew less elusive as I began to understand single words and then phrases and now even snippets of conversation. On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked, the city was no longer the innocent place it had been when I arrived.
But there was nothing essentially invasive about listening here on the tram, the students were speaking loudly, almost at the top of their lungs, they intended to be overheard. As I listened to them, I was reminded of the pleasure of learning a new language, unlocking its systems, testing their give and flexibility. It had been some time since I had experienced this particular feeling, having acquired all my other languages as a child or later in school. The students were speaking a Dutch peppered with slang, making it difficult for me to understand exactly what they were saying, mostly they seemed to be talking about school, some teacher or friend who was irritating them.
Two or three tram stops later, I thought I heard one of the girls say verkrachting, the Dutch word for rape. I looked up, startled, my mind had started to drift and I was no longer following their conversation as closely as I had been when I boarded. The girl who spoke was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, her eyes were rimmed with heavy liner and she had a nose piercing. She continued speaking, I heard the phrase bel de politie, or I thought I did. But then the girl she was speaking to began giggling in response and after a moment the girl with the nose piercing also began to laugh and I was no longer certain of what I had heard, after all rape and calling the police were not exactly a laughing matter. The girl with the nose piercing must have felt my gaze, abruptly she turned and stared at me, and although she was still laughing her eyes were hard and empty, entirely mirthless.
The tram approached my stop. The girls were now discussing a new sneaker brand, and although I glanced several more times at the girl, she ignored me. Unsettled by the encounter, I disembarked. The tram moved away and then the Court stood directly before me, a large glass complex that was nestled into the dunes on the edge of the city. It was easy to forget that The Hague was situated on the North Sea, in so many ways it was a city that seemed to face inward, its back turned against the open water.
Prior to my arrival, when I had applied for and then was offered the position, the Court had existed in my mind as a near medieval institution, in the manner of the Binnenhof, the Parliament complex only a couple miles away in the center of the city. Even after I arrived and for the first month of my employment, I had been startled every time I encountered the building. I knew very well that the Court was a recent invention, having been founded only a decade earlier, but the modern architecture still seemed incongruous, perhaps even lacking the authority I had expected.
Six months later, it was merely the place of my employment: everything grows normal after a time. I greeted the guards as I entered and passed through the detector—a question or two about their families, some statement about the weather, it was on these occasions that I could practice my Dutch. I collected my bag and proceeded across the courtyard and into the building. There I saw Robert, another interpreter at the Court, who waited for me to join him. He was a large and affable Englishman, outgoing and charming; in my relative reticence I was unusual among interpreters. If interpretation is a kind of performance, then its practitioners tend to be confident and garrulous. Robert exemplified these characteristics, he played rugby on the weekends and took part in amateur theater productions. We were never paired together in the booth, but I sometimes wondered what manner of partner he would make, it would be hard not to feel upstaged by his presence, not to attempt to match the cadences and flourishes of his voice, which was unusually mellifluous, the product of his class and a childhood spent in English boarding schools.
As we made our way up to the office, Robert informed me that none of the chambers would be in session that day, which was frankly a relief, he assumed I was as far behind in paperwork as he was. We greeted our colleagues as we made our way to our desks, the interpreters worked in a single open-plan space, with the exception of the head, Bettina, who had her own office. There was a distinctly collegial atmosphere within the department, due in part to the fact that most of the team had come to the Netherlands in order to work at the Court, having amassed the requisite body of experience elsewhere. Some were like me and did not know how long they would remain either at the Court or in the Netherlands, while others had more or less settled here, Amina for example had recently married a Dutch man and was pregnant.
Now she sat at her desk, her face serene as she reviewed the documents before her. While most interpreters could on occasion become flustered or even exasperated, in some cases requesting that a witness slow down, Amina was always composed, she was able to interpret with a consistency and speed that was remarkable, whatever the circumstances. As she approached the latter stages of the pregnancy, she was if anything even more unflappable, her manner was perpetually calm. While the rest of us would struggle with foibles in speech or delivery, Amina alone never seemed to experience difficulty.
But such praise made her uncomfortable, and Amina frequently insisted that she was far from faultless. As I sat down at my desk, I recalled an anecdote she had told me not long after I arrived at the Court. It was a story I thought of often. She had been tasked with interpreting for the accused, working in Swahili, and was briefly the only interpreter on the team with adequate fluency to perform the task. Her booth partner did not have a strong grasp on the language, and said in private that her mind had drifted during the lengthy sessions, she listened to the originating English and French but less closely to Amina’s interpretation.
But while her partner might have found the days less than taxing, Amina herself was under considerable pressure, she was negotiating marathon sessions that were far longer than standard. She sat in the mezzanine-level booth, the accused positioned directly below her in the courtroom. He was still a young man, a former militia leader, wearing an expensive suit and slouched in an ergonomically designed office chair. He was on trial for hideous crimes and yet he simply looked, as he sat, sullen and perhaps a little bored. Of course, the accused are often in suits and in office chairs, but the difference lay in the fact that at the Court the accused were not mere criminals who had been dressed up for the occasion, but men who had long worn the mantle of authority conveyed by a suit or uniform, men who were accustomed to its power.
And they had a kind of magnetism, in part innate and in part heightened by the circumstances. The Court was generally unable to bring the accused into custody without the cooperation of foreign governments or bodies, and its powers of arrest were fairly limited. There were many outstanding warrants, and many accused being held in other countries, it was not as if we had a plethora of war criminals in our midst. The accused therefore had an aura when they were brought to The Hague, we had heard a great deal about these men (and they were almost always men), we had seen photographs and video footage and when they finally appeared in the Court they were the stars of the show, there was no other way of putting it, the situation staged their charisma.
In the case of this particular man, he was not only young and undeniably handsome—many of the men on trial were elderly, far past their prime, compelling but not in and of themselves physically impressive—but he had a dazzling air of command, even without the aid of the courtroom, it was easy to see why and how so many people had obeyed his orders. But it was not even this, Amina explained, it was the intimacy of the interpretation, she was interpreting for one man and one man alone, and when she spoke into the microphone, she was speaking to him. Of course, she had known when she accepted the post in The Hague that the substance of the Court would be darker than the United Nations, where she had previously been working. After all, the Court concerned itself exclusively with genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes. But she had not expected this kind of proximity: although she was never face-to-face with the accused and was always safely ensconced behind the glass-fronted interpreters’ booth, she was constantly aware that she and the accused were the only two people in the courtroom who understood the language she was speaking, his own counsel was made up of English barristers with no knowledge of either French or their client’s native tongue.
Over the course of these first sessions, Amina grew increasingly uneasy. The case involved a great deal of testimony regarding terrible atrocities, and hour by hour she carried this testimony from one language into another. She found herself on occasion struggling to control the tremor in her voice, she felt herself becoming entirely too emotional. But then, as quickly as the second day and for reasons she did not fully understand, a certain hardness overtook her, she discovered a new and acerbic tone, not exactly neutral, perhaps even reproachful. At one point, as she relayed the details of an embezzlement scheme, something that was morally questionable but a trifle compared to the other charges against the man, she found herself using a voice of cold disapproval, as if she were a wife scolding a husband for some small domestic failing, neglecting to do the dishes, for example, rather than addressing his rampant infidelity, or the fact that he had gambled away their life’s savings.
At that moment, to her surprise, she saw the accused turn his head and look up in the direction of the interpreters. Until this point, he had sat almost entirely still, staring straight ahead, as if the proceedings had nothing to do with him, as if the entire matter was beneath him, although the result, Amina thought, was not the appearance of dignity; rather, he looked like a sulky teenager being reprimanded for some infraction for which he refused to repent. There were perhaps half a dozen interpreters seated in the mezzanine-level booths, it was unlikely that he would know which one of them was his, she had never before noted him observing them. She forced herself to keep her voice steady and focus on the job at hand, the last thing she wanted to do was get distracted. Nonetheless, she was unable to keep from surreptitiously watching the accused, as his gaze swept the glass-fronted booths.
Perhaps feeling her eyes upon him, he suddenly stopped and looked directly at her, turning in his chair in order to do so. Amina couldn’t help it, she stumbled over her words, apologized, nearly lost the thread of what was being said. He continued to stare at her, a grim expression of satisfaction settling into his handsome face, perhaps because he had succeeded in intimidating her, in causing her to falter. She felt at once, even through the glass wall dividing them, the totality of the man’s will. She shivered and looked down. She resumed interpreting, scribbling on her pad, as if making notes. When she looked up again, he had turned and was looking straight ahead once more, his face soft and brooding.
He never looked at her again. However, she found that her voice had shifted, despite herself she had been cowed. The next time she was required to recite a litany of the horrific acts perpetrated by the accused, her voice took on a pleading tone, in response to which the accused gave a thin smile. Somehow, she had become uncomfortable with the idea of confronting the man with his crimes, these heinous accusations that she was not herself making but was simply interpreting on behalf of the Court. Don’t shoot the messenger, she almost added, before remembering that this was precisely the kind of thing the accused did, it might even have been on the list of crimes, actually shooting the messenger. Although she knew there was nothing the man could do to her, she could not deny that she was afraid, he was a man who inspired fear, even while sitting immobile he radiated power.
Still, it was not primarily fear that she felt, but guilt. She felt guilty toward the accused, who not only was a terrible man, but a man for whom she bore no responsibility, apart from adequately interpreting what was said in the courtroom, and doing her part to ensure that he received a fair trial. She bore no responsibility for his happiness, she doubted that the man had been happy since he had been taken into custody by the Court. He was a man entirely without morals, and yet the sentiment she felt toward him was moral in nature. It was illogical, it didn’t make any sense. She concluded that it was the man’s magnetism, which had persuaded thousands of people to commit terrible acts of violence; again there was nothing bureaucratic or banal about him. He was a leader in every sense of the word, she thought as she leaned toward the microphone and continued to interpret, steadily and without pause. He did not turn to look at her, he never did again, after that instance. But it was, she thought in retrospect, her first true encounter with evil.
* * *
—
The day passed uneventfully enough, and soon it was early evening and I was leaving the Court. It was raining, and as I peered up at the sky and unfolded my umbrella, my phone rang. It was Jana again. Almost before I could speak, she told me that she had just arrived at her building. There’s police tape, she said.
The rain was loud on the umbrella, almost deafening, and it was difficult to hear. Someone else was calling. I lowered the phone and saw Adriaan’s name. The rain was falling harder now. I lifted the phone back to my ear as it continued to pulse.
What do you mean?
On the side street, the passageway. Do you know the one? I often take it from the tram. It’s been blocked with police tape. Something must have happened last night.
The phone was still ringing. Jana, I said, I have another call—
There’s no signs or anything. But the passageway is closed off.
In my hand, the phone had stopped vibrating.
Jana—
I’ll call you later.
She hung up, and before I could lower the phone, it buzzed again, a message telling me that I had one missed call followed by a second message, from Adriaan, saying that he would be ten minutes late to meet me, and apologizing in advance.
3.
I met Adriaan at a restaurant in the city center. Despite having warned me that he would be late, he was waiting at the table when I arrived. Before moving to The Hague, I had not associated punctuality with the Dutch character, but Adriaan in particular was incapable of tardiness. He stood when he saw me, I thought again that he was very handsome, and I felt a sense of happy surprise, that this was the man I was meeting for dinner.
Adriaan was the reason why I wanted to stay in The Hague, or at least one of the reasons, though I was embarrassed to admit this even to myself—I did not like to think of myself as a woman who made decisions in this way, for a man. Particularly when things were still so nascent, and the situation so complicated. We had met only four months earlier, but there was already a certain amount of routine to the way we were together. That regularity had many possible meanings and was difficult to interpret, at times I thought it was the expression of an intrinsic ease between us, some deep familiarity superseding our many differences. But at other times it seemed it was a product of habit, and that he knew no other way of being with a woman.
Intimacies Page 2