The City

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 11: The City

The Hague was not a city that announced itself. Amsterdam announced itself — the canals, the museums, the particular energy of a city that had been the world's commercial center in the seventeenth century and that carried the memory of that centrality in its architecture and its attitude, the attitude of a city that knew it had been important and that remained, in its own estimation, important still. Rotterdam announced itself — the modern skyline, the port, the architecture of reconstruction, the city rebuilt after the bombing of 1940 and carrying in its new buildings the defiance of a city that had been destroyed and that had chosen to build forward rather than backward, the forward a statement, the statement audible in the glass and steel and the particular angles of the postwar architecture.

The Hague did not announce. The Hague administered. The Hague was a city of government and law, a city whose identity was not commercial or cultural but institutional, the institutions the Peace Palace and the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the institutions a constellation, the constellation the city's sky, the institutions giving The Hague its particular quality, which was the quality of a city that existed to serve a function, the function the administration of international order, the order a project, the project ongoing, the project never complete because the disorder it addressed was never complete, the disorder continuous, the order a response to the continuity, the response also continuous.

Amara had lived in The Hague for twelve years. She had arrived at thirty-three, hired by the ICC from a pool of interpreters who had been tested and interviewed and assessed for their linguistic capability and their psychological resilience and their willingness to live in a Dutch city for an indefinite duration, the duration the ICC's duration, the ICC a permanent court, the permanence meaning that the interpreter's assignment was not a posting but a career, not a deployment but a life, the life lived in The Hague because the court was in The Hague and the court required the interpreter and the interpreter required the city.

She lived in Scheveningen. Scheveningen was The Hague's coastal district — a neighborhood of apartment buildings and hotels and restaurants that faced the North Sea, the neighborhood historically a fishing village that the expanding city had absorbed, the absorption complete, the fishing village now a suburb, the suburb carrying in its name the memory of its independence, the name Scheveningen famously unpronounceable to non-Dutch speakers, the pronunciation a shibboleth, a test of Dutchness, the test the particular sound of the "sch" and the "g" that the Dutch throat produced and that foreign throats could approximate but not replicate, the approximation the closest the bridge could span, the bridge between Dutch and non-Dutch, the bridge that Amara crossed daily, her Dutch good but not native, her "Scheveningen" close but not identical to the native pronunciation, the not-identical the permanent condition of the adopted language, the adopted language never fully native, the way the adopted city was never fully home.

Her flat was on the second floor of a building from the 1930s. Brick. Three rooms — a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. A bathroom with a window that faced the interior courtyard. The flat was functional, clean, the furnishing minimal — a sofa, a table, a bookshelf, the books in seven languages, the seven languages visible on the spines, the spines a small library of the interpreter's professional and personal reading, the professional — dictionaries, glossaries, the ICC's procedural manuals — and the personal — novels in Twi and English and French, the novels the reading she did in the evenings when the day's translation was over and the mind needed a different kind of language, the language of fiction, the language that did not describe atrocity but that described the world as it was imagined, the imagined a relief from the actual, the relief necessary.

From the flat, she could hear the North Sea. Not always — not on calm days, when the sea was quiet and the wind was still and the only sounds were the tram and the traffic and the particular urban sounds of a Dutch neighborhood. But on windy days, on days when the North Sea asserted itself against the coast, the sound of the waves reached the flat through the bedroom window, the sound a presence, the presence the sea's reminder that the city existed at the sea's edge, that the land the city occupied was land the sea had agreed to relinquish, the agreement maintained by dikes and dunes and the particular engineering that the Dutch had practiced for centuries, the engineering a conversation between the land and the water, the conversation conducted not in language but in concrete and sand and the daily monitoring of water levels.

She walked to work. Or she took the tram — Line 1, from the Scheveningen stop to the ICC's stop, the tram moving through The Hague's streets with the particular efficiency of Dutch public transit, the efficiency the city's character, the character orderly, punctual, the tram arriving within two minutes of its scheduled time, the two minutes the tolerance, the tolerance narrow, the narrowness Dutch. The tram passed through neighborhoods — Scheveningen, Belgisch Park, the Statenkwartier, the Archipelbuurt — the neighborhoods named and bounded, the boundaries not walls but streets, the streets the borders between one neighborhood and the next, the borders permeable, the permeability the city's particular form of order, the order not rigid but structured, the structure the grid of streets and tram lines and bicycle paths that organized the city's movement the way a grammar organized a language's expression.

The Hague was flat. This was the fact that Amara had noticed first, arriving from Accra, which was not flat — Accra had hills, had the Akwapim Ridge to the north, had the particular topography of a West African coastal city built on land that rose and fell. The Hague was flat in the way that the Netherlands was flat, the flatness geological, historical, the land not rising because the land had been reclaimed from the sea, the reclamation producing a terrain that was level, that was managed, that was below sea level in places, the below-ness a fact that visitors found alarming and that the Dutch found ordinary, the ordinary the condition of a people who had lived below the sea for centuries and who had converted the alarming into the mundane through engineering and through the particular Dutch talent for domesticating the dangerous.

The flatness meant that Amara could see far. She could stand at the end of her street and see to the horizon, the horizon the line where the flat land met the flat sky, the line unbroken by hills or mountains or the particular interruptions that topography provided. The flatness meant that the landscape hid nothing — every building was visible, every street was visible, the city displaying itself completely, the display a form of transparency, the transparency the Dutch architectural tradition of open curtains and visible interiors, the tradition extended from the house to the city, the city as transparent as its houses, everything visible, everything ordered, everything administered.

Amara walked through this transparency. She walked through it on her way to the ICC, on her way home, on her Sunday walks through the city when the tram did not run at its weekday frequency and the city was quiet and the quietness invited walking, the walking a form of knowing, the knowing accumulated over twelve years of daily walks, the daily walks producing a knowledge of the city that was not intellectual but somatic, the body knowing the streets the way the body knew a language — through repetition, through the daily passage through the same spaces, the passage inscribing the city into the body's memory the way the daily passage through a language inscribed the language into the body's architecture.

She knew the Peace Palace. She walked past it regularly — the ornate building from 1913, the building that housed the International Court of Justice, the building that expressed in stone and stained glass the early-twentieth-century belief that international law could prevent war, the belief the building's foundation, the foundation shaken by two world wars but not destroyed, the belief persisting, the persistence visible in the building's maintenance, the building kept in its original condition, the condition the expression of the belief, the belief still active, still operational, the Peace Palace still a court, still adjudicating disputes between nations, still performing the function it was built to perform.

She knew the Binnenhof. The old parliament buildings at the city's center, the buildings where the Dutch government conducted its business, the business the governance of a small, wealthy, orderly country that had placed at its center the institutions of law — the parliament, the courts, the ministries — the placement a choice, the choice the Dutch national character expressed in urban planning, the city organized around law the way other cities were organized around commerce or religion or military power.

She knew the Noordeinde. The street where the king had his working palace, the palace modest by the standards of European monarchy, the modesty Dutch, the Dutch monarchy the most egalitarian of the European monarchies, the king riding a bicycle, the queen shopping at the supermarket, the royalty visible and accessible in a way that would have been impossible in Accra, where the chiefs and the politicians maintained a distance from the public that was not modesty but authority, the authority communicated through distance, through the inaccessibility that power required in the Ghanaian context.

She knew the Chinatown on the Wagenstraat. She knew the Turkish neighborhoods near the Schilderswijk. She knew the Surinamese bakeries and the Indonesian restaurants and the Moroccan butchers, the city's immigrant communities visible in their shops and their signs and their languages, the languages that entered the city's soundscape alongside the Dutch, the Dutch the dominant language but not the only language, the city multilingual in the way that all European cities were multilingual, the multilingualism the result of migration and colonialism and the particular movements of people that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had produced.

She knew the city's languages. She heard Dutch everywhere — on the tram, in the shops, in the street. She heard Turkish and Arabic and Surinamese Dutch and the particular Papiamento of the Antillean community. She heard English — the English of the international organizations, the English of the diplomats and lawyers and interpreters who worked at the courts and the tribunals, the English the lingua franca of international justice, the English that Amara spoke at work and that she heard in the cafes near the ICC where the court's workers gathered for coffee and conversation.

She heard, occasionally, Lingala. She heard it at Chez Mama Bolingo, the Congolese restaurant on the Keizerstraat. She heard it on the tram sometimes — Congolese passengers speaking to each other, the Lingala a surprise in the Dutch soundscape, the surprise a physical event, the body registering the familiar language in the unfamiliar context, the registration producing the flinch or not producing it, depending on the day, depending on the trial, depending on the weight of the sponge.

The Hague was a city that believed in order. The Hague believed that justice could be constructed the way a building was constructed — with foundations and walls and a roof, with plans and specifications and the particular engineering that converted the abstract into the concrete, the abstract justice and the concrete the courtroom, the courtroom the building's purpose, the building the city's purpose, the city the world's instrument for the administration of international criminal law.

Amara lived inside this belief. She lived inside it six days a week — the six days of the working week, the days when she entered the ICC and sat in the booth and put on headphones and translated testimony, the testimony the content that the building contained, the content the reason the building existed, the content the justice that the city believed could be constructed. Six days a week she inhabited the constructed justice, the justice of procedure and protocol and the particular architecture of law — the courtroom's geometry, the booth's glass, the microphone's technology, the headphone's intimacy — the architecture designed to convert the chaos of human violence into the order of legal proceedings, the conversion the court's project, the project the city's project, the project Amara's project.

On the seventh day, she ran.

On the seventh day — Sunday, the day without the booth, the day without the headphones, the day without the microphone — she ran along the North Sea, and the North Sea did not believe in anything. The North Sea was not constructed. The North Sea was not administered. The North Sea did not have foundations or walls or a roof. The North Sea was gray and vast and indifferent, the indifference not hostile but constitutional, the sea constitutionally indifferent to the city and the court and the booth and the testimony and the translation and the seven languages and the silence, the indifference the sea's nature, the nature older than the city, older than the law, older than language itself.

She ran along the water line and the water came to her feet and retreated and the rhythm was the rhythm of something that was not justice and not language and not the particular order that The Hague had built from stone and glass and procedure. The rhythm was the rhythm of the planet — the moon pulling the water, the water responding, the response automatic, gravitational, conducted without protocol, without procedure, without the particular machinery that the court required to convert testimony into verdict.

The sea was the thing outside the law. The sea was the space beyond the courtroom. The sea was the territory that the booth's glass did not contain, that the microphone did not carry, that the headphones did not deliver. The sea was the unregulated, the ungoverned, the thing that existed without the particular order that The Hague believed in and that Amara served and that the booth contained.

And the sea was the rest. The sea was the space where Amara went when the ordered world of the court had filled her to capacity, when the protocol and the procedure and the constructed justice had occupied every room in the house of her seven languages and she needed a space that was not a room, that was not constructed, that was not ordered. The sea was the unordered. The sea was the silence between the languages. The sea was the between that had no walls.

She ran along the sea and the city was behind her — the city with its Peace Palace and its Parliament and its ICC, the city with its trams and its bicycle paths and its orderly streets, the city that believed justice could be built — and the sea was before her, gray and vast and believing nothing, and the two — the city and the sea, the order and the indifference, the constructed and the unconstructed — coexisted at the coast, at the edge where The Hague ended and the North Sea began, and Amara ran along the edge, along the boundary, along the line between the two, the line the beach, the beach the between.

The between. The between was where she always was. Between languages. Between the city and the sea. Between the order and the indifference. Between the constructed justice and the unconstructed gray.

She ran along the between. The city behind her. The sea before her. The booth waiting for Monday. The silence filling Sunday.

The Hague. Amara's adopted city. The city of law. The city where justice was constructed.

And at the city's edge, the sea. The gray. The unconstructed. The thing that did not believe in anything. The thing that was not translated. The thing that was, on the seventh day, enough.