Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

With inconsistent interpretation, for example, a reliable witness could appear unreliable, seeming to change his or her testimony with each new interpreter. This in turn could affect the outcome of a trial, the judges were unlikely to note a change of personnel in the interpreters’ booth, even if the voice speaking in their ears suddenly became markedly different, switching from male to female, from halting to deliberate.

The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I reached over and touched him but he did not move, his skin smooth and still.

The eroticism currently missing from my life

His voice was affectionate and familiar and the thought occurred to me at once: he must have said these words to Gaby, that designation must have belonged to her, My darling, come back to bed.

Consider this with your next relationship whether with M or someone else

The arrest and trial of the former president was nothing short of illegal, the paper declared, the entire affair completely underhanded. Imagine the emotions of the former president, given no opportunity to contest the legality of the arrest and simply handed from one set of enemies to another! This was the true face of neocolonialism, this apparatus of Western imperialism, this Court. The case against the former president was paper thin, built by the U.S. State Department and the Elysée, a question of policy rather than justice. A coup d’état, executed by men in white gloves, for which the Court was simply the façade—

DDS talking points

maybe he thought I was a paid escort servicing one of the men detained in the center, it was not impossible. I looked down at what I was wearing, I was dressed conservatively enough, in what is usually described as “business casual”—but I had been told that this was exactly how escorts dressed, the ones that were not walking the street, the ones who were under considerable pressure to be discreet, who had famous and powerful clients, the kind of men who might conceivably be held in the Detention Center.

Even at The Court, corruption.

There are prisons and far worse all around us, in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below.

????

So Lars and Lotte are dragging me all over the house, the kitchen, the pantry, the guest room, even into their bedroom for Christ’s sake, with the king-sized bed and the Frette linens and the foul stench of bourgeois sex, which is of course the most perverse sex of all, when Lotte opens a final door and says in a voice of particularly shy triumph—oh, I do like Lotte, it’s not her fault she’s so stupid—And this is the library.

LOL

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.

Compare Duterte at Den Haag

The shoes were sexy, or at least they denoted sex in an explicit way, it might have been that they were primarily shoes to fuck in, the kind of shoes that were given by men to women.

This is some sex-play bullshit, isn't it?

The case against the former president was formally dismissed two weeks later. We had all known it was possible, the prosecutor’s brief, once submitted, had been less than convincing. There had been weaknesses to the case from the start, problems in proving chain of command. From a moral perspective, the man was guilty; from a legal perspective, the man was likely innocent. That both those things were possible was of course understood.

The former president had already released a statement denouncing the Court as a tool of Western imperialism and an ineffectual one at that, for obvious reasons he felt vindicated by the collapse of the case against him.