Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there.

She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy.

But fluency was merely the foundation for any kind of interpretive work, which demanded extreme precision, and I often thought that it was my natural inclination toward the latter, rather than any linguistic aptitude, that made me a good interpreter.

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.

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.

In the case of this particular man, he was not only young and undeniably handsome—many of the men on trial were elderly, far past their prime, compelling but not in and of themselves physically impressive—but he had a dazzling air of command, even without the aid of the courtroom, it was easy to see why and how so many people had obeyed his orders. But it was not even this, Amina explained, it was the intimacy of the interpretation, she was interpreting for one man and one man alone, and when she spoke into the microphone, she was speaking to him. 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 felt guilty toward the accused, who not only was a terrible man, but a man for whom she bore no responsibility, apart from adequately interpreting what was said in the courtroom, and doing her part to ensure that he received a fair trial. She bore no responsibility for his happiness, she doubted that the man had been happy since he had been taken into custody by the Court. He was a man entirely without morals, and yet the sentiment she felt toward him was moral in nature. It was illogical, it didn’t make any sense. 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.

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

In a few hours, I would meet this man, who would then no longer be a name and a photograph, a list of actions and accusations, but a person in the world.

people behave with such conscious and unconscious dishonesty all the time.

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

But he had not forgotten, and when I entered the kitchen I immediately saw a set of keys, resting on the kitchen counter alongside a note that read I will imagine you here while I’m away.

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.

Her house, when I arrived, was lit throughout. The drapes were drawn back against the darkness, as if to declare that the residents of this home had nothing to hide. I stood outside and wondered what it would be like to live so exposed, to be so fearless. From the street, you could see directly into the ground level, and although there were no figures, the room was like a stage set, there was a great deal of intimate information in the details visible through the drapes, the large kitchen table and the clutter of children’s toys, a dog bowl and bed.

His face was a version of Eline’s face in the way that a photographic negative is a version of the photograph itself.

If it was lacking in beauty his face nonetheless had some dark charisma, it was memorable in a way that Eline’s was not.

The point is, the point is—you’re always hastening toward the denouement, Eline, he said irritably. It’s very tedious of you.

Anton loves to tell stories. He loves—digressions. He takes longer to tell a story than anyone I know. Although it’s true the digressions generally do have a point, at least eventually.

The shadow of loneliness had crept upon me as I watched Eline and her brother, for all their bickering and all the secrets between them, they shared an air of intimate collusion, of things implied and understood.

Her voice, as she read the oath of the Court and swore to speak the truth, was low and strong and supple and it sent a ripple through the room. I saw that I was not alone in recalibrating my sense of this young woman, the former president himself looked up at the sound of her voice and for the first time I saw something akin to fear in his eyes.

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?