Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

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.

That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.

Every certainty can give way without notice. No one and nothing was exempt from this rule, not even Adriaan.

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible. This was not the rebuke I wished to make, as a statement it was abstract to the point of saying almost nothing at all. And yet it was true: I would not obfuscate the meaning of what he had done, of these words that he deemed so insufficient, my job was to ensure that there would be no escape route between languages.

That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.

But I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?

He is petty and vain but he understands the depths of human behavior. The places where ordinary people do not go. That gives him a great deal of power, even when he is confined to a cell.

I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.