Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

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.

The very thing that the rest of us are unable to endure is the very thing inside of which the defense lawyer must live.

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

the way we understood our own behavior shifted according to whether or not we thought we were being seen.

narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,

realized, belatedly, that she had likely applied the makeup for Adriaan’s sake; certainly she had not done so for mine. I wondered then what it was like to be a man, so often surrounded by such deliberate features, more vivid than actual nature.

One day you are living an ordinary life with its ordinary ups and downs, and then that life is ripped apart and you can never feel entirely secure again. You spend your days looking over your shoulder, your understanding of the world is changed, you see it as a brittle place, full of hostility.

even those who are accustomed to violence can be taken by surprise.

I suppose this is how people become conservative. She sounded a little calmer than before. Being a property owner changes your perception of things whether you like it or not. Even the smallest apartment is enough to do the job, it’s difficult not to be contaminated by it, there’s a difference between living in theory and living in practice.

Every certainty can give way without notice. No one and nothing was exempt from this rule,

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.

This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning.

was with this directive in mind that Jana had conceived the current exhibition, which was titled Slow Food and was the museum’s first exhibition devoted to still-life paintings of food. Jana admitted the concept and the title in particular were something of a gimmick, entirely different to the first two exhibitions she had overseen. But she insisted that she had found plenty of merit in the idea. It’s a clear theme in Golden Age painting, a definite genre, she said, even if titles like Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels do make you think of a Jeff Koons sculpture. I suppose that’s interesting in and of itself. There is a lot to be said about class and consumption and the culture of display.

The artifice of their poses was evident, but that did not detract from the intimacy of the paintings—in fact it was the very act of posing, the relationship that act implied, that created this sense of uncanny familiarity.

In some cases they were clearly posing for the painter, they gazed into what I thought of as the lens or camera eye, although of course the concept was an anachronism, they would have been gazing not into an apparatus but directly at the painter himself. The idea was almost impossibly personal, and I realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was outside the realm of experience today.

For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished p...

As we began walking, Eline indicated the paintings in the gallery. They have such an air of perfect tranquility, but it was not a period without upheaval. The Dutch Empire was rapidly expanding, in many ways these paintings have to be read in that context. The relentless domesticity of these quiet interiors takes on a different meaning seen in that light, she said. It means something, to face inward, to turn your back on the storm brewing outside.

Even the wreckage is somehow funny and interesting, you never get to see the paintings in this state.

I had been complicit in my own erasure.

I began to wonder if, rather than bringing home the nature of the acts he had committed, this process was causing them to recede further and further into some state of unreality. The question of his innocence or guilt seemed of little interest to the people in the room, instead they spoke of degrees and framing and context.

something yawned open inside me. The depersonalized nature of the task—I was only an instrument, and during the hours that I was there I was almost never spoken to directly, in fact the only person who bothered to address me at all was the former president—sat alongside the strange intimacy of the encounter, the entire thing was a paradox, impossible to reconcile.

I asked how old her children were and she said, Ten and twelve. It’s gone quickly, their childhood, but it’s also gone very slowly. When they are young, it is exhausting and you have no time for yourself, but you can still make them happy. That’s no longer the case with my boys. They’re old enough to understand things, they see the world as it is. They are wiser but they are also more vulnerable.

But death is abstract, even grown men and women can be incapable of understanding it. Violence was something different, violence was easier to comprehend, it existed within the realm of the imagination.

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.

The trial by its nature demands more from the victims than it does from the accused, the judge said, which is in and of itself another injustice,