Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.

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.

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.

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.

It was not that I thought a man could not be superficial and cunning and also a brilliant lawyer or politician—there were many men and women of considerable social repute who were nothing less than reprehensible in their private lives—it was more that I couldn’t believe the men and women in the Court would take him seriously, it seemed extraordinary that they would trust this man, a man of the flimsiest construction, in this most critical of matters.

if at that party I had happened to say that I worked at the Court, it was possible that we would have had an entirely different conversation, that he would have then seemed to me an intelligent and informed man, who knew a great deal about a world I was only just entering. I might then have been more open to his advances, I might have taken his number or even gone home with him that night, rather than Adriaan.

He surveyed the lawyers around the table, he could not bear them because they were the physical manifestation of his culpability, of which I had little doubt. These men who hectored him about the specificities of his actions, he wished to be free of them, in the same way that he wished to be free of his guilt. This was why he found my presence soothing. Not because he required my interpretation, not even because I was an amusing distraction, but because he wished for someone to be present during those long hours, someone who would not insist on examining the actions of his past, from which there could no longer be any escape. And I realized that for him I was pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape,

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.

her voice came through with remarkable clarity in the gaps between interpretation, the syllables distinct, the timbre unmistakable, so that I still had the sense that I was speaking for her, despite the layers of language between us.

We didn’t know each other well enough for these disclosures to bring us closer together, we had exposed ourselves in the wrong way, at the wrong time. I had the feeling that I would not see her again. I realized it had been some weeks since I had spoken to Jana. I really was quite alone.

When I entered, the young woman at the register addressed me in Mandarin, her manner hopeful. Her face clouded over when I shook my head and from that point she treated me with greater disdain than seemed normal. I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.

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.