The Testimony Begins

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 10: The Testimony Begins

The witness returned on Tuesday. She entered through the same door, walked the same path to the witness box, sat in the same chair, adjusted the same headphones. The court officer lowered the microphone again — the adjustment from yesterday not saved, the microphone returning to its default position overnight, the default designed for average height, the witness below average, the adjustment a daily requirement, a daily reminder that the courtroom was built for an abstraction, an average person, and that the witness was not an abstraction but a body with specific dimensions, specific needs, specific history written into the specific way she sat and held her hands and positioned her head relative to the microphone.

Amara was in the booth. Left chair. Headphones on. Microphone ready. The red light off, waiting for the moment when the testimony would begin and the red light would come on and she would become the bridge again, the direct bridge, the Lingala-to-English bridge with no relay, no intermediate support, just her, the single span across the single gap.

Her booth partner today was not Fatima but Kwesi Ansah, a Ghanaian interpreter who handled English-to-French and who was Amara's compatriot, a man from Kumasi who spoke Twi with the Ashanti accent and who had been at the ICC for six years, younger than Amara in both age and experience, a man who still ate lunch in the cafeteria with the other interpreters and who still attended the Friday evening drinks at the bar near the Plein and who still had the social energy that the early years at the ICC permitted, the energy that the later years consumed. Kwesi was Amara's relief — when she needed the thirty-minute rotation, Kwesi would take over the English-to-French translation while a different interpreter, in a different booth, handled the Lingala-to-English if needed. But the Lingala-to-English was Amara's, was only Amara's, and the rotation for the Lingala-to-English meant silence — when Amara rested, the direct Lingala translation paused, and the court switched to the relay, the Lingala translated into French by the French booth and then from French to English by the English booth, the relay activated as a backup, the backup less direct, less precise, the backup the compromise the court made when the primary interpreter needed rest.

Judge Okonjo opened the session. He addressed the witness. He reminded her that she was still under oath. He asked whether she was prepared to continue.

The witness spoke. She said, in Lingala, that she was prepared.

Amara translated: "The witness states she is prepared to continue."

The red light was on. The bridge was open.

Devaux stood. She asked the witness to continue from where she had stopped yesterday. Yesterday, the witness had described hiding in the drainage ditch behind the church. Today, the testimony would move forward — from the hiding to what came after the hiding, from the ditch to the village, from the sounds to the sights.

The witness began.

She said that after the second prayer — after the shooting stopped, after the forty minutes — she lay in the ditch for a long time. She did not know how long. She lay in the mud and she listened. She listened for the soldiers. She listened for gunshots. She listened for screaming. She heard nothing. The nothing was worse than the something, she said, because the something — the gunshots, the screaming — meant that the event was ongoing, was present, was happening, and the ongoing-ness was terrible but the ongoing-ness also meant that the event was not finished, and the not-finished contained the possibility that the not-finished would end and the ending would be survival. But the nothing — the silence after the shooting — meant that the event was finished, and the finished-ness was the unknown, the silence the container of the unknown, the silence holding the question of what the finished-ness meant, what was left, who was left.

Amara translated this. She translated the distinction between the something and the nothing, between the ongoing and the finished, between the sound and the silence. The distinction was philosophical — the witness had constructed a philosophy of sound and silence, a theory of the relationship between auditory experience and existential knowledge, and the construction was not academic but experiential, the philosophy built not from reading but from lying in a ditch for forty minutes and then lying in the same ditch for an unknown duration of silence, the philosophy the product of the body's knowledge, the body knowing what the mind could only theorize.

The witness said she eventually stood. She stood in the ditch and she looked over the edge of the ditch and she saw the village. She paused.

Amara translated: "The witness has paused."

The pause lasted eleven seconds. Amara counted. She counted not because the protocol required counting but because counting was a habit she had developed over the years, a way of measuring the pauses, the pauses being a form of testimony that the transcript did not adequately record — the transcript noted "pause" but did not note the duration, and the duration was significant, the duration the measure of the gap between the witness's experience and the witness's capacity to speak about it, the eleven seconds the time required for the witness to cross the gap between the memory of seeing and the speaking of seeing.

The witness continued. She described the village. She described it in short sentences — the Lingala sentences short, clipped, the syntax reduced, the words carrying maximum weight because there were few of them, each word load-bearing, each word essential, the language stripped to its structure the way a tree in winter was stripped to its structure, the leaves gone, the branches visible, the architecture exposed.

She said the houses were burning. She said the smoke was thick. She said she could not see clearly. She said she saw shapes on the ground in the clearing. She said the shapes were people. She said the people were not moving.

Amara translated each sentence. She translated the short sentences into short English sentences, maintaining the register, the protocol's requirement, the shortness of the witness's language preserved in the translation, the shortness itself a meaning — the witness could not speak in long sentences about what she saw because what she saw did not permit long sentences, the horror compressing the language, the language contracting around the horror the way a fist contracts around a wound, the contraction instinctive, protective, the language protecting itself from the thing it described by minimizing itself, by becoming small, the way the witness had become small in the ditch.

She said she walked into the village. She said she walked through the smoke. She said the smoke burned her eyes. She said she could smell burning, and the burning was not just the thatch but other burning, a different burning, a burning she knew was not thatch because the smell was different, and the different smell was the thing she could not say, the thing that existed in the pause that followed, the pause that lasted seven seconds and that Amara counted and that the transcript would record as "pause" and that the courtroom absorbed in the particular silence of a room full of people who understood what the different smell was without the witness saying it.

Amara translated: "The witness has paused."

The courtroom waited. Judge Okonjo waited. Devaux waited. Mukiza, in the dock, waited. The gallery waited. Everyone waited because the waiting was the court's acknowledgment that the pause was testimony, that the unsaid was evidence, that the silence communicated what the words could not.

The witness continued. She said she saw bodies. She said the bodies were in the clearing. She said the bodies were men — the men of the village, the fathers and brothers and sons and husbands who had been separated from the women and children and taken to the clearing and killed. She said she counted the bodies. She said she did not count all of them because the smoke was thick and because some of the bodies were — and she paused, and the pause was four seconds — were not whole.

Amara translated: "The witness states that some of the bodies were not whole." She translated this with the neutrality the protocol required, the words precise, clinical, the English rendering of the Lingala faithful to the witness's language, faithful to the incompleteness of the description, the "not whole" a phrase that contained what it did not specify, the phrase a door that the listener's imagination opened or did not open, the opening the listener's responsibility, the translator's responsibility only the carrying of the phrase from one language to another.

The witness described looking for people she knew. She described looking for her husband. She described the looking — walking through the clearing, looking at faces, the faces recognizable and unrecognizable, the faces of men she had known for her entire life now changed by death, the death changing the face the way a language changed a word, the word recognizable but different, the meaning shifted, the familiar made unfamiliar by the context, the context the clearing, the clearing the context of death.

She found her husband. She said his name — the court was in closed session, the name protected, the name spoken and recorded and not broadcast. She said his name and the saying of the name was different from the saying of all the other words she had said because the name was not a description but an address, the witness speaking not to the court but to the person she had found in the clearing, the name a calling-out, a summons, the particular use of language that was not communication but invocation, the witness invoking her husband's presence through his name, the invocation futile and necessary and conducted in Lingala in a courtroom in The Hague eight years after the morning she described.

Amara translated the name. She spoke the name into the microphone, into the English channel, the name crossing the bridge unchanged, the name the fixed point, the anchor. But the name carried a weight that crossed with it, a weight that was not in the syllables of the name but in the speaking of the name, in the witness's voice when she spoke it, the voice dropping, softening, the voice becoming the voice of a woman speaking to a person who could not hear, the voice the particular voice of grief, of address-to-absence, and Amara's translation carried the name but could not carry the voice, could not carry the dropping and softening, could render the syllables but not the grief embedded in the syllables, the grief the thing that survived the crossing only partially, the partial survival the relay's loss, the bridge's toll.

The witness described what she saw. She described her husband's body. She described it in the language available to her — the Lingala of her region, the vocabulary of her experience, the words she had for the thing she found in the clearing. The description was specific. The witness described specific injuries. She described them with the precision of a person who had looked closely, who had knelt beside the body and looked, the looking an act of love and an act of witness, the love compelling her to see and the seeing compelling her to remember and the remembering compelling her to speak, the speaking the testimony she was delivering in the courtroom, the testimony the last stage of the chain that began with the looking.

Amara translated the description. She translated the specific injuries. She translated the specificity with the accuracy the protocol required, the injuries described in English with the clinical precision that the English language provided, the English medical vocabulary available to Amara as a resource, the vocabulary learned not in medical school but in the ICC's preparation materials, the glossaries of injury terminology that interpreters studied before trials involving physical violence, the glossaries a professional tool, the tool necessary, the necessity a fact about the work that Amara had accepted years ago and that she accepted again now, in this moment, translating the injuries with the tool the glossary had provided, the tool adequate for the task and inadequate for the reality, the task the translation and the reality the body in the clearing and the woman kneeling beside it.

The testimony continued. The witness described the aftermath. She described the women and children gathered at the edge of the village by the remaining soldiers — a small group of fighters who had stayed behind while the main force moved on to the next village, the next attack, the militia's campaign not a single event but a sequence, the sequence the prosecution's case, the case alleging a systematic and widespread attack on civilians, the systematic-and-widespread the legal standard that distinguished crimes against humanity from ordinary crimes, the standard requiring that the attack be not random but planned, not isolated but part of a pattern, the pattern the prosecution was establishing through the testimony of witnesses like Witness 247, each testimony a point in the pattern, the pattern becoming visible through the accumulation of points.

The witness described the days that followed. She described being held at the village's edge with the other women and children. She described the soldiers — their behavior, their language, the things they said and the things they did, the saying and the doing described in Lingala with a directness that Amara translated into English with the same directness, the directness the register, the register maintained, the protocol satisfied, the translation carrying the content without softening it, without the cushion that indirection would have provided, the indirection absent because the witness did not use it, the witness speaking directly because the direct was the only language she had for the things she described.

Amara translated. She had been translating for ninety minutes. She had not rotated. Kwesi sat beside her, available, ready, his hand near the console, waiting for Amara's signal — the raised hand that would mean she needed him to take over. But the Lingala-to-English was hers, could not be handed to Kwesi, and so the rotation for the Lingala-to-English was not to Kwesi but to silence, to the relay, to the backup system that would engage if Amara raised her hand, the backup less direct, less precise, the backup the alternative that Amara had not yet needed.

She did not raise her hand.

She continued. The witness continued. The two women continued together — the one speaking, the other translating, the two voices operating simultaneously, the Lingala and the English existing at the same time in the courtroom's audio system, the two languages the two sides of the bridge, the bridge Amara, the bridge continuous, the bridge open.

The witness described a child. A boy. Not her child — a neighbor's child. A boy of approximately six years, she said. The boy was crying. The soldiers told the boy to stop crying. The boy could not stop crying. The soldiers — and here the witness paused, and the pause was nine seconds, and Amara counted, and the courtroom waited, and the waiting was heavy with the knowledge of what the pause contained, the courtroom's silence the acknowledgment that the pause was not emptiness but fullness, the pause full of the thing the witness was about to say and could not yet say.

The witness said what the soldiers did.

Amara translated what the soldiers did.

The translation was three sentences. The three sentences were accurate. The three sentences were spoken in Amara's professional voice, the voice trained and controlled and neutral, the voice of the English channel, the voice of the ICC's interpretation service, the voice that carried the testimony without breaking, the not-breaking the professional requirement, the requirement met, the voice steady, the bridge intact.

Inside the booth, behind the one-way glass, Amara's hands gripped the edge of the console. The gripping was invisible to the courtroom. The gripping was visible to Kwesi, who sat beside her and who saw the knuckles whiten and who placed his hand near the console, ready, and who waited for the raised hand that did not come, that would not come, that Amara would not raise because she would not stop, because the testimony required her and the translation required her and the bridge required her and she would carry the three sentences and the nine-second pause and the boy and the soldiers and the thing the soldiers did, she would carry all of it, would carry it across the bridge into the English channel, into the headphones, into the record, would carry it and would not stop carrying it because the carrying was her work and her skill and the thing she had trained for and the thing she was doing, here, now, in this booth, behind this glass, with this microphone.

The session broke for lunch. Judge Okonjo declared a ninety-minute recess. The courtroom began to empty.

Amara turned off her microphone. She removed her headphones. She sat in the booth. Kwesi stood, looked at her, did not speak. He left. The door clicked behind him.

She sat alone. The booth was warm. The courtroom below was emptying — lawyers gathering their papers, gallery members stretching, the particular redistribution that occurred at every recess, the room exhaling after the held breath of the testimony.

The witness was still in the witness box. She was still sitting. She had not moved. The victims' legal representative was approaching, offering a hand, offering to help the witness stand, and the witness was looking at the representative's hand without taking it, looking at the hand as if the hand were an object she recognized but could not identify, the recognition without identification the particular state of a person who had just testified, who had just spoken the unspeakable, who was sitting in the aftermath of her own words the way a person sat in the aftermath of an explosion, the world still present but changed, the coordinates the same but the landscape altered.

Amara watched through the glass. She watched the witness eventually take the representative's hand. She watched the witness stand. She watched the witness walk toward the door, the witness's walk slow, measured, the body moving through space with the deliberate care of a person for whom space had become unreliable, the floor not quite solid, the air not quite breathable, the courtroom not quite real, the unreality the aftermath of testimony, the testimony having opened a door between the past and the present, and the door was still open, and the past was leaking through, and the past was the village and the clearing and the smoke and the bodies and the boy.

The witness walked past the booth. Amara watched her walk past. The blue head wrap. The small body. The hands at her sides, the fingers no longer interlaced but loose, open, the interlacing undone by the testimony, the self-containment broken by the speaking, the body no longer holding itself together because the testimony had released something that the holding had been holding, and the released thing was in the courtroom now, was in the air, was in the headphones, was in the record, was in Amara.

The afternoon session. The testimony continued. The witness described the days after the attack — the displacement, the walking, the camps, the particular geography of flight that the people of eastern Congo knew because the flight was not a single event but a recurring condition, the villages attacked and abandoned and the people walking to the next safe place, the next safe place temporary, the temporary the permanent condition, the permanent displacement the region's particular injury.

She described arriving at a camp for internally displaced persons — an IDP camp, the acronym the international community's shorthand for the particular population of people who had fled violence but had not crossed an international border and who were therefore not refugees, the distinction legal, the distinction significant, the distinction determining which international body was responsible for their protection and assistance, the distinction meaningless to the woman who arrived at the camp with her surviving children and who received a plastic sheet for shelter and a ration of maize flour and a registration number and who lived in the camp for three years while the war continued around her, the war a weather, a climate, the war the atmosphere in which the camp existed.

Amara translated the camp. She translated the plastic sheet. She translated the maize flour. She translated the three years. The translation was accurate, the accuracy the professional standard, the standard met. The translation carried the content of the testimony across the bridge, from Lingala to English, from the witness to the court. The bridge was open. The words crossed.

And inside Amara — in the space between the ears and the mouth, in the space where the seven languages lived, in the space that was the sponge — the testimony accumulated. The washing in the river. The gunshots. The running. The ditch. The mud. The prayer. The forty minutes. The smoke. The bodies. The clearing. The husband. The name. The boy. The three sentences. The camp. The plastic sheet. The maize flour. The three years. All of it translated. All of it carried. All of it remaining.

The testimony would continue tomorrow. Witness 247 had more to say. The court had more to hear. The bridge had more to carry.

And Amara would carry it. She would carry it because the carrying was her work. She would carry it because the carrying was the bridge. She would carry it because the carrying was the thing that connected the witness's Lingala to the court's English, the connection the purpose, the purpose the reason Amara sat in the booth, the reason Amara put on the headphones, the reason Amara pressed the button and spoke.

She would carry it. The sponge would hold it. The window would transmit it. The translator would do both, simultaneously, the dual function the mechanism, the mechanism the work, the work the carrying, the carrying the silence that was not empty but full.