Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

Across the room, the prosecution was observing him warily, I could imagine that he had a reputation for ruthlessness and deviousness, and I wondered if that was another reason why Adriaan had greeted him with such suspicion, because of his professional capacity for deception.

My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible.

You know, he continued after a pause, the first time I saw you I thought: I like this woman, because she is not truly from the West. But in the end, you are part of the institution that you serve.

Banger line

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?