Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

  That’s horrible.

  Don’t worry, I did convince her in the end. We came downstairs—Lars had gone back into the kitchen some time ago, to check on the food—and she positively trilled out to Lars, Anton loves the library, he said it’s the most perfect library he’s ever seen in his life. Lars looked at me, I could see in his face that he knew—not that I’d sold him the books, Lars would not have been the one to deal with the interior designer—but he knew that I’d been mocking Lotte. The rest of the dinner, he couldn’t even bring himself to look in my direction, he had nothing but contempt for me. But Lotte was in excellent humor, and I saw him give her a look of such—such tenderness, such deep affection and love.

  He had slowed at last, and now he looked up at Eline. They do love each other, you know. Despite all the money. Lars would kill for Lotte, I’m sure of it. Kill me, if it came down to it.

  Eline shook her head and rose to her feet. Are you done? she asked with a smile. I nodded, and she began clearing the table. At any rate, she said to Anton, you don’t come off very well in that story.

  I never think about coming off well in a story, he said calmly. You have to give me that.

  Eline returned with a platter of fish and cold boiled potatoes and then refilled our wineglasses. Still, she said with a sigh as she looked down at Anton. Cheers. I’m grateful that you’re here. Anton was in a very bad accident, she said to me, it’s been a difficult couple of months. It happened close to where Jana lives.

  Jana? Anton asked.

  Our mutual friend, I said. I waited for Eline to say more, about the manner of her meeting with Jana, but she remained silent and began serving the food.

  Eline is putting a spin on the matter, Anton said as he handed his plate to his sister. I was attacked. There was nothing accidental about it. Accident sounds more humane, normal people are in accidents but only idiots and the unlucky are attacked. I looked at Eline, her face was drawn, she looked pained and irritated, though not, I noted, especially embarrassed. She handed Anton back his plate. I was mugged, Anton continued as he took the plate. Mugged and assaulted. It’s the neighborhood, you know.

  I’m sorry, I said. I wondered—

  About the scar? And the bruises? Yes, that’s all from the attack, they took my phone and my wallet and my watch, but they also beat me very brutally. He paused. The malice is what’s frightening. They didn’t need to do it, they had my money. I wasn’t exactly resisting.

  Was it more than one person?

  He shook his head. I can’t remember, he said.

  How did your meeting with the police go? Eline asked.

  Anton cut into his food. Chewing, he lowered his fork and knife to his plate. He took a sip of wine and then swallowed. They had me do a session with a hypnotist, he said at last.

  A hypnotist? Eline asked, startled.

  Yes.

  I had no idea they did such things. Did it work?

  He leaned back into his seat. Well, I was myself quite surprised. I arrived at the station, they had asked me to come in for some follow-up questions. I was taken into an office, given a coffee, that sort of thing. And then they told me that they wanted to try something a little unorthodox—if I was willing, of course. He paused. I said that I was willing and I asked what they had in mind.

  What did he look like?

  Who?

  The hypnotist.

  Anton shrugged. He was dressed like a low-level bureaucrat. I thought he was another detective at first. He did have a very soothing voice, however. I was of course wary, I don’t go in for that sort of thing, I don’t believe in it. But I agreed. I’d never been hypnotized before and there was something rather compelling about the man, I have to admit.

  And did it work? Eline leaned across the table, her face intent.

  No.

  Nothing new?

  I’m afraid not. He did the whole rigmarole, taking me back to the moment of the attack, putting me in my body or was it taking me out of my body? Either way, it was of no use whatsoever. I can’t remember a damn thing, whether or not I’m hypnotized. I only know what I was told after the fact.

  He reached for his wineglass again. He took a long drink, his eyes blinking restlessly. Eline cleared her throat, It’s a kind of amnesia, she explained to me. He can’t remember anything about the night of the assault.

  It’s apparently very common after a severe concussion, Anton said. Obviously, this is endlessly frustrating to the police. They keep hoping I’ll remember something and as you can see, have resorted to desperate measures.

  You don’t remember who attacked you? I asked.

  No. I don’t remember anything—who attacked me, or why I was in that neighborhood, which I’m not exactly in the habit of frequenting, I’ve never been there before in my life, it’s a real shithole, not the kind of place I’m likely to go. Apologies to your friend. He looked down, his eyes shifting and his mouth tense, I had the definite feeling that he was lying. I suppose it’s a sort of selective amnesia, he continued, his voice silky and too smooth. The brain’s response to the awful trauma of the whole thing.

  What I don’t understand, Eline said, is the fact that you can’t remember why you were there. I can understand why you can’t remember the assault itself, why there might be amnesia around the concussive event—I could see that she was struggling with the language, and I wondered if perhaps she didn’t believe him either, it wasn’t just me, there was something unconvincing about the entire matter. But the reason why you went there in the first place, that would have been something you would have known from the period before the trauma, presumably.

  How should I know? he said roughly. If I knew, I wouldn’t be in this predicament. It’s not exactly pleasant you know, it’s not as if I’m doing it on purpose. My body was already a ruin, and now my mind is as well. His voice had grown petulant and his face flushed. It’s as if a piece of my brain has been removed and no amount of trying will bring it back. The police think if only they ask the right question the key will turn and the floodgates will open and I’ll be able to pick out the perpetrators from a convenient police lineup. But it doesn’t happen. I’ve sat there for hours. I’ve looked at my diary, at my messages. I let myself be hypnotized for Christ’s sake. But there’s nothing.

  Shh, Eline said, and she reached her hand out to him. Calm down. He shook her hand off. Yes, he said viciously, that’s what Miriam says as well.

  A silence fell upon the table. He knows, I suddenly thought. He knows more than he is saying. Eline began clearing the table and I got up to help her. There was fruit for dessert, and shortly after I said that I should be going, the Court was in session the following day and I would need to get a good night’s rest. The shadow of loneliness had crept upon me as I watched Eline and her brother, for all their bickering and all the secrets between them, they shared an air of intimate collusion, of things implied and understood. Anton nodded, to my surprise he also rose to his feet, saying that he too would be going. He followed me down the corridor. I was aware of his presence in a new way, as we both pulled on our coats, and when I turned to say thank you to Eline I saw a startled look of warning in her eyes.

  Outside, Anton walked with me half a block until I saw a taxi and I said that I thought I should take it. He flagged the car and opened the door for me in a courtly fashion, as I got in I said that it had been very nice meeting him. He leaned forward and said that he hoped that he would see me very soon. His voice was mischievous and there was something lewd in the movement of his body toward mine, so that I was suddenly made nervous. Still, it occurred to me that it might not be safe for Anton to walk the streets alone, not in his condition, and after a moment I asked if he wanted a ride. I was aware this might have sounded like an invitation of sorts, although that was not my intention. However, he was already walking away, he shook his head and waggled his cane through the air. Not tonight, he called b
ack over his shoulder, not tonight.

  13.

  I sent Eline an email thanking her for dinner. She wrote back to say that she was glad I had made it home okay, a statement that seemed at least in part to refer to her brother, and to which I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. It occurred to me that she was fishing for information, which made me even more uncertain, and for that reason her email languished in my in-box, unanswered.

  The following week, Amina went on maternity leave. Robert was now my regular partner in the booth and we quickly grew accustomed to each other. He was kind, and seemed to understand that these new circumstances would require an adjustment on my part. At the end of our first day working together he accompanied me down to the lobby and warned me to pace myself. The trial will last for many more months. You have to think of it as a marathon. We had reached the entrance and he paused to help me pull on my coat. Months, I said, as I fastened the buttons and tied a scarf around my neck. I could hear the disbelief in my voice, although I already knew how long the trial could last. He patted me on the shoulder. Not to sound patronizing, he said, but you will get used to it. It becomes normal.

  He was right. As soon as the following week, I noticed that the extremity of the trial—its content and language, the physical demands of being in the booth—had started to recede. I was less depleted at the end of each day, despite the fact that by this point in the trial we were mired in technicalities, the sessions dragged on for hours of testimony that were mind-numbingly precise and rarely resolved into an obvious advantage for either the prosecution or the defense.

  I also came to understand, over the course of those sessions in the courtroom, how disciplined the former president really was. The polo neck and chinos were replaced by the tailored suit and with it came a somber, even dignified, mien. I understood then the tremendous will that powered the man. Unlike the lawyers and on occasion judges, his face never betrayed him. Instead, he wore the same expression throughout the proceedings, one of keen but impersonal interest. He maintained the affect of a star debater on a university team, somebody who was looking for openings, who took note of everything, a man who conceded nothing and had nothing to conceal. Not once did I see the sullen indifference that I had observed on the faces of other men on trial, that I had seen on his own face in the conference room, an expression that seemed to declare that whatever was taking place was of little interest, and guilt a foregone conclusion.

  No, he was nothing like the man I saw in the conference room—although perhaps I had always known that this person, this polished and ruthless competitor, lurked inside the more impulsive character I encountered in those meetings. During this period, he did not take the stand, and yet each gesture he made was highly calculated. Upon entering the courtroom, he would look up at the public gallery, at his audience, and nod in acknowledgment of his supporters, of which there were still many, so many that I wondered whether they had traveled to The Hague to be there, and how they could afford the money and the time to stay in the city for weeks on end, what kind of life they were living in this rainy place.

  Then his gaze would travel across the gallery, over to the interpreters’ booths, where I was sitting. He would look directly at me, through the glass window, and nod. As if to recognize the work that I performed, as if to demonstrate the level of his civility and consideration. This became routine, but the first time it happened it was so unexpected that it felt unreal, as if he had ruptured some fourth wall. Robert made a small, startled movement and I felt myself growing hot. Down in the courtroom, Kees craned his neck to look up at the booths. I hesitated and then nodded awkwardly in return, I didn’t know what the etiquette was in such matters. The former president then began speaking to a junior member of his defense counsel. Still seated, I looked over and saw that some of the supporters in the public gallery were now looking curiously in my direction, the gesture had not gone unnoticed. On the courtroom floor, Kees returned to his papers, slowly shaking his head.

  From then on, the former president never failed to acknowledge me, both at the start of each session and then again at the end. In those first days in Chamber I, I was certain that I would never grow accustomed to this moment of recognition, the meaning of which remained unclear to me. Was it mere politesse or was it something more sinister, more calculating and exploitative? But then as Robert had told me, it became normal. We would nod to each other and then we would look away and carry on.

  Over the course of those long hours in the booth, I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best. In those moments, out of what I can only describe as an excess of imagination, he became the person whose perspective I occupied. I flinched when the proceedings seemed to go against him, I felt quiet relief when they moved in his direction. It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy. I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable. With increasing frequency, I avoided looking down into the courtroom, I concentrated on the notes on the page before me, on the words being spoken into my earpiece. And yet he was always there, sitting to one side of the courtroom, unavoidable and inescapable.

  But then the prosecution called to the stand the first of several victims whose testimony, the lead prosecutor promised, would remind the Court of the gravity of the crimes committed by the accused, the moral weight of the issues currently under consideration. Robert had already warned me that the victims’ testimony was almost always the most difficult to interpret, he confessed that earlier that year he had been obliged to excuse himself from the testimony of a young mother whose children had been brutally murdered, literally torn from her arms and slaughtered. I have nieces and nephews, he said, his voice shaking, I felt no compunction whatsoever about saying that I couldn’t do it.

  When I arrived in the booth, Robert was already there. I couldn’t tell if he was more subdued than usual, or if it was merely the projection of my own tension, I had never before worked a victim’s testimony. He nodded to the booth across from us and I raised my hand in greeting to the visiting interpreters, who raised their hands in return; the witness would be speaking Dyula, which the pair in the opposite booth would interpret into French, and which we in turn would interpret into English. I sat down, I saw that they had drawn the curtains on the windows of the public gallery. Facial distortion software would be used on the video link, the voice would also be altered, utmost caution would be taken so that the witness’s identity would not be publicly revealed. Almost all the victims would have family back home, they were taking considerable risk in choosing to appear, risk that might even and without warning be converted into concrete sacrifice, violence or death to their loved ones.

  The moral weight of the situation was therefore already evident in the courtroom, and as people began to enter, I thought their expressions were also more than usually somber. There were no smiles, no visible demonstrations of humor, nor was there the frenetic urgency that had sometimes earlier been apparent. Instead, there was a kind of muffled seriousness, one that was not even particularly self-conscious; for once, nobody seemed to be performing, either for themselves or for the benefit of others. Even Kees, when he came in, running his hands through his hair, appeared restrained, he merely sat down and began reviewing the text on the monitor before him.

  When the former president was brought into the courtroom, I saw at once that he had no intention of submitting to the prevailing mood, that he perceived such tamping down of emotion as a concession to the magnitude of the victim’s loss, and thus the severity of the crimes he stood accused of having committed. Or perhaps it was simply that he was unaccustomed to the room’s attention being focused elsewhere. I observed the defiance that seemed to roll off him in waves, as he lifted his chin and surveyed the courtroom, his gaze resting without hesitation on the witness stand before moving smoothly on, as if to show he had nothing to fe
ar, no cause for trepidation. I felt a jolt of disgust so strong I could taste it in my mouth.

  The judges entered. Within moments, or so it seemed to me, the presiding judge had asked for the witness to be brought in. The side door opened and a slender young woman entered. She was obliged to walk past the former president as she made her approach to the witness stand, and did so stiffly and without looking in his direction. He leaned forward, folding his hands on the desk and watching her carefully. She looked no older than twenty. The court usher poured her a glass of water, adjusted the microphone. The witness barely seemed to respond, her face was empty of expression. It was obvious the entire thing was an ordeal for her, she sat rigid in her chair and stared straight ahead, as if afraid to move.

  Thank you for joining us today, the presiding judge said. It seemed to me that her voice was softer than usual, as though wary of startling the witness. You have a card on the table with the oath. If you could please read this out.

  The young woman wet her lips, then leaned forward and spoke into the microphone. As she spoke, I saw that I had misapprehended her character, what I had interpreted as nerves was instead the extremity of her focus, she had come here to perform a monumental task and it followed that she was a person of no small courage. Her voice, as she read the oath of the Court and swore to speak the truth, was low and strong and supple and it sent a ripple through the room. I saw that I was not alone in recalibrating my sense of this young woman, the former president himself looked up at the sound of her voice and for the first time I saw something akin to fear in his eyes.