Dr. Brandt

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 12: Dr. Brandt

The office was on the fourth floor of the ICC's administrative wing, a floor that most interpreters never visited because the fourth floor housed departments that operated in the background of the court's proceedings — human resources, finance, the staff medical unit, the wellness program. The fourth floor was the institutional infrastructure of the court's institutional function, the machinery that kept the machinery running, the back-of-house that supported the front-of-house, the administrative stage behind the judicial stage. Dr. Elena Brandt's office was at the end of a corridor that was identical to every other corridor in the ICC — gray carpet, fluorescent light, numbered doors — the sameness a feature of institutional architecture, the building's interior designed not for aesthetics but for function, for the efficient routing of people through spaces designated for specific purposes.

The door was ajar. Amara knocked on the frame. The knock was a formality — the door was open, the appointment was scheduled, the psychologist was expecting her. But the knock was also a threshold, a signal, the body announcing its arrival the way a translator announced her presence by pressing the microphone button, the knock the red light of the therapy session, the indication that the session was beginning, that the roles were being assumed, that the space was transitioning from an office to a clinical environment.

Dr. Brandt was seated behind her desk. She was forty. Amara knew this because Dr. Brandt had disclosed her age during one of their early sessions, a disclosure designed to establish parity, the psychologist sharing personal information to reduce the asymmetry between the person who asked questions and the person who answered them, the sharing a therapeutic technique, the technique transparent, the transparency itself a technique — the psychologist showing her tools so that the patient would trust the tools, the showing a form of consent, the patient consenting to be treated with tools she could see.

Dr. Brandt was German. She had studied at the University of Heidelberg and at University College London. She had published papers on vicarious trauma in court interpreters and on the psychological effects of sustained exposure to testimony about mass violence. She was an expert. Her expertise was in the specific and narrow field of what happened to the human mind when the human mind was used as a conduit for other people's suffering, when the mind's professional function was to receive and process and transmit descriptions of atrocity, and the receiving and processing and transmitting left traces, and the traces accumulated, and the accumulation was what Dr. Brandt studied and treated and could not cure.

She could not cure it because it was not a disease. It was not a pathology. It was not a disorder to be diagnosed and medicated and resolved. It was a condition — the condition of the work, the condition that the work created in the worker, the way mining created silicosis in miners and typing created carpal tunnel in typists, the condition occupational, the occupation the cause, the cause not eliminable because eliminating the cause would mean eliminating the occupation, and the occupation was necessary, and the necessity was the court's necessity, and the court's necessity was the world's necessity, and the world needed interpreters to translate testimony about atrocity so that the atrocity could be judged, and the judging required the interpreting, and the interpreting required the interpreter, and the interpreter was Amara, and Amara was sitting in Dr. Brandt's office on a Tuesday afternoon in April because the ICC required its interpreters to attend quarterly wellness sessions and because Amara had not missed a session in twelve years.

Dr. Brandt said: "How are you, Amara."

The question was not a question. The question was an opening, a door left ajar, the way Dr. Brandt's office door was left ajar, the opening an invitation, the invitation gentle, the gentleness professional, the profession the art of inviting people to speak about the things they did not want to speak about, the things that lived in the silence, the silence that Dr. Brandt specialized in, the silence of court interpreters who carried testimony in their bodies and who did not speak about the carrying because the carrying was not speakable, not because it was classified but because the language of casual conversation could not hold it, the language too small for the carrying, the container too small for the content.

Amara said: "I am fine."

The answer was automatic. The answer was the answer she gave to all inquiries about her well-being — from Dr. Brandt, from colleagues, from her mother on the phone, from the woman at the Indonesian market who asked how she was while weighing mangoes. "I am fine" was the translation of her condition into the language of social exchange, the translation a reduction, the condition reduced to two words, the two words adequate for social purposes and inadequate for clinical purposes, the inadequacy the reason Dr. Brandt asked the question and the reason Dr. Brandt waited after receiving the answer.

The waiting. Dr. Brandt's waiting was the psychologist's primary tool. The waiting was to therapy what the microphone was to interpretation — the instrument through which the work was conducted. Dr. Brandt waited the way Amara translated — professionally, patiently, with the trained discipline of a person who understood that the work required time, that the silence after the question was not emptiness but process, the patient processing the question, the processing requiring time, the time the space in which the patient might move from the automatic answer to the authentic answer, from "I am fine" to whatever "I am fine" concealed.

Amara sat in the chair across from Dr. Brandt's desk. The chair was not the clinical chair of a psychiatrist's office — it was an office chair, ergonomic, the same kind of chair that was in the booth. The sameness was deliberate, Amara suspected. The sameness said: this is not a clinical space, this is a professional space, you are not a patient, you are a colleague, we are two professionals discussing the effects of a shared profession, the discussion not treatment but maintenance, the way an athlete's visit to a physiotherapist was not treatment but maintenance, the body maintained so that the body could continue to perform.

Dr. Brandt waited. The waiting lasted fifteen seconds. Amara counted. The counting was her habit — the habit of the booth, the habit of measuring silence, the habit that she could not stop because the habit was trained, was automatic, was the interpreter's reflex, the reflex of measuring the duration of the thing that could not be translated.

Then Amara spoke. She spoke because the waiting worked. The waiting always worked. The waiting created a space that the patient filled, the filling involuntary, the way water filled a container — not by choice but by nature, the patient's nature to speak, to fill silence, to convert the internal into the external, the conversion the purpose of the session, the purpose served by the waiting.

She said: "I am dreaming in Lingala."

The sentence arrived in the room without preamble, without context, the sentence extracted from the interior by the waiting, the sentence carrying with it the particular weight of a disclosure that the speaker had not planned to make, the sentence surprising Amara as much as it surprised Dr. Brandt, the sentence having emerged not from a decision but from the space the waiting created, the space a vacuum, the vacuum drawing the sentence out of the silence the way a pump drew water from a well.

Dr. Brandt did not react visibly. The not-reacting was professional — the psychologist's training including the skill of receiving disclosures without visible reaction, the not-reacting a form of acceptance, the acceptance saying: whatever you say, I will receive it, I will not be shocked, I will not be alarmed, I will not change my expression, my expression will remain the expression of a person who is listening, and the listening will continue, and the continuing will create more space, and the more space will produce more disclosure.

Dr. Brandt said: "Tell me about the dreams."

Amara told her. She told her about the dreams the way she translated testimony — faithfully, accurately, without editorializing. She said that the dreams had begun two weeks ago, when the Witness 247 testimony had started. She said that the dreams were not nightmares in the conventional sense — they were not frightening, they did not wake her, they did not produce the physical symptoms of nightmares, the sweating and the racing heart and the disorientation of waking from terror. The dreams were not terrifying. The dreams were professional.

In the dreams, she was in the booth. The booth was the same booth — Booth 3, English, the left chair, the console, the microphone, the one-way glass. She was wearing headphones. She was translating. In the dream, she was translating Witness 247's testimony, but the translation was different from the actual translation she performed during the day, because in the dream the translation was perfect. The Lingala entering her ears and the English exiting her mouth were in complete correspondence — every word matched, every nuance preserved, every tone carried, every pause rendered, the translation achieving the perfection that waking translation could never achieve, the dream's perfection a fantasy, a wish fulfillment, the mind's desire for the impossible accuracy that the protocol required and that the human instrument could only approximate.

She said: "I hear her voice in my sleep and in the dream I am translating and the translation is perfect and the perfection is the horror, because perfect translation means the horror has entered my language completely, has made itself at home in my English, has unpacked its bags and settled in."

She heard herself say this and the hearing was strange, the words coming from her own mouth about her own dreams in a psychologist's office in The Hague, the words describing an experience that she had not described to anyone, not to Marcus, not to Kwesi, not to her mother, the experience private, interior, the interior now made exterior by the waiting, by Dr. Brandt's professional silence, by the space the silence created.

Dr. Brandt said: "The horror has made itself at home."

She said it as a repetition, not as a question. The repetition was a therapeutic technique — the psychologist reflecting the patient's words back to the patient, the reflection creating an echo, the echo allowing the patient to hear her own words from outside, to experience her own language as an observer rather than a speaker, the observation creating distance, the distance creating perspective.

Amara heard the echo. She heard her own words in Dr. Brandt's voice — "the horror has made itself at home" — and the hearing was like the relay in the booth, the words traveling from one voice to another, the content the same, the speaker different, and the difference in speaker creating a difference in reception, the way testimony heard through the relay sounded different from testimony heard directly, the content the same but the distance different.

She said: "In the dream, the Lingala is inside the English. Not translated into English — inside English, like a splinter inside skin, the Lingala lodged in the English, the two languages fused, and the fusion is the perfection, the perfection the thing the dream wants, the dream wanting the two languages to be one language, the dream wanting the bridge to disappear, the dream wanting the two sides of the bridge to merge into one side, one land, one language that contains both the witness's experience and the court's record, one language in which the testimony does not need to be translated because the testimony and the translation are the same thing."

Dr. Brandt listened. Dr. Brandt's listening was not the same as courtroom listening — courtroom listening was for the purpose of translation, the listening a step in the process of conversion, the ears receiving in order that the mouth might produce. Dr. Brandt's listening was for the purpose of understanding, the listening its own end, the understanding not a product to be transmitted but a condition to be achieved, the achievement therapeutic, the therapy the understanding.

Dr. Brandt said: "You dream in the witness's language."

Amara said: "I dream in the witness's language."

The admission was the session's center, the nucleus around which the rest of the conversation would orbit. She dreamed in Lingala now. She dreamed in the language of the testimony. The language that she had learned in Kinshasa for professional purposes, the language that she used in the booth to translate the words of Congolese witnesses, the language that was her sixth language, her professional acquisition, her tool — this language was now the language of her dreams, which meant that the language had moved from the professional to the personal, from the booth to the bedroom, from the working hours to the sleeping hours, the migration of the language a migration of the testimony, the testimony traveling with the language from the courtroom to the dream.

Dr. Brandt said: "This is not uncommon. Many interpreters report dreaming in the language of the testimony they are currently translating. The dreams represent the mind's processing of the material — the mind continuing the work of the day in the sleep of the night, the processing not voluntary but automatic, the automatic processing the mind's mechanism for integrating difficult material, for finding a place for the material in the mind's architecture."

Amara knew this. She knew the clinical explanation. She had read the literature — Dr. Brandt's papers among them, papers with titles like "Vicarious Trauma in Court Interpreters: A Qualitative Analysis" and "The Psychological Cost of Accuracy: Interpreters at International Criminal Tribunals." She knew that her dreams were a known phenomenon, a documented effect, a predictable consequence of the work she did. The knowing did not diminish the experience. The knowing did not make the dreams less present, less vivid, less intrusive. The knowing was knowledge, and the dreams were experience, and knowledge and experience occupied different territories in the mind, the knowledge living in the intellect and the experience living in the body, and the body did not read papers, and the body did not care about qualitative analyses, and the body dreamed in Lingala because the Lingala had entered the body through the headphones and had settled in the body's tissues and the body's tissues replayed the Lingala in the sleep because the body processed what the mind could not.

She said: "Knowing why it happens does not make it stop."

Dr. Brandt said: "No. It does not."

They sat with this. They sat with the acknowledgment that Dr. Brandt could explain but could not fix, could name but could not cure, could describe the mechanism but could not stop the mechanism, the mechanism running in Amara's body the way the audio system ran in the courtroom, the mechanism automatic, designed, built into the architecture, the architecture the architecture of sustained interpretation, the interpretation producing the dreams the way the interpretation produced the translation, the dreams and the translation both outputs of the same process, the process the passage of testimony through a human mind.

Dr. Brandt asked about other symptoms. She used the word "symptoms" carefully, the word chosen for its clinical precision, the precision a form of respect, the respect acknowledging that the things she was asking about were not weaknesses but indicators, the indicators not of failure but of impact, the impact the measurable effect of the work on the worker.

Amara described other things. She described the flinching — the involuntary contraction of her body when she heard Lingala outside the courtroom, in the street, in the Congolese restaurant near her flat where the servers spoke Lingala and the music played in Lingala and the language filled the air with the same sounds that filled her headphones during testimony, the sounds the same sounds, the context different, the context the only thing that distinguished the Lingala of the restaurant from the Lingala of the testimony, and the body did not always distinguish context, the body sometimes reacting to the sound regardless of context, the sound triggering the reaction, the reaction the flinch, the flinch the body's confusion between the restaurant and the courtroom, between the music and the testimony, between the living Lingala and the testifying Lingala.

She described the running — the longer runs, the six miles becoming seven, the seven becoming eight, the body needing more silence, more time on the beach, more of the non-linguistic space that the running provided, the need increasing as the testimony intensified, the increase measurable in miles, in minutes, in the growing distance between the flat and the turnaround point, the distance the measure of the need, the need the cost of the work.

She described the isolation — not the loneliness, which was different, but the isolation, the withdrawal from social contact that was not a choice but a consequence, the consequence of spending the day's social energy in the booth, the booth consuming the portion of human connection that Amara possessed, the consumption leaving insufficient reserve for the evening's social possibilities, the reserve depleted, the depletion the reason she went home rather than to the bar, the reason she sat in her flat rather than at a dinner, the reason she spoke to no one in the evenings except Marcus on Wednesdays, the Wednesday exception the one concession to social need that the depletion permitted.

Dr. Brandt listened to all of this. She listened with the professional attention that was her skill, the attention total, comprehensive, the listening absorbing Amara's words the way Amara's listening absorbed the witness's words, the parallel not lost on Amara, the parallel the particular irony of her situation — she was translating her own experience for a psychologist the way she translated the witness's experience for the court, converting the internal into the external, the private into the professional, the felt into the spoken.

Dr. Brandt said: "You are describing the effects of sustained exposure to traumatic testimony. The dreaming, the flinching, the extended running, the isolation — these are indicators of vicarious traumatization, which is the term we use for the condition that develops in professionals who are repeatedly exposed to the traumatic experiences of others through their work."

Amara said: "I know the term."

Dr. Brandt said: "Knowing the term does not make it stop either."

They both said nothing for a moment. The nothing was a shared silence, a different kind of silence from the professional silences of the session — this silence was collegial, two professionals acknowledging a shared limitation, the limitation of their respective expertise, Amara's expertise in language and Dr. Brandt's expertise in psychology, both expertises reaching their limits, the limits the edge of what language could carry and the edge of what therapy could treat, the two edges the same edge, the edge the boundary of the human capacity to process suffering.

Dr. Brandt recommended things. She recommended a mindfulness practice — meditation, she said, the meditation not spiritual but clinical, the meditation a technique for creating distance between the self and the self's experience, the distance a buffer, the buffer the thing the direct translation lacked, the thing the relay provided and the direct translation did not. She recommended continued running — the running was good, she said, the running a form of somatic processing, the body processing through movement what the mind could not process through thought. She recommended talking — not about the case, which the ICC's confidentiality rules prohibited, but about the experience of the work, the experience translatable even when the content was not, the experience shareable with Marcus, with colleagues, with Dr. Brandt herself.

Amara listened to the recommendations. She received them the way she received all professional advice — respectfully, attentively, with the understanding that the advice was offered in good faith and with expertise and that the advice would help in the way that advice helped, which was partially, incrementally, the help not a cure but a management, the management the best that the situation permitted, the situation the work, the work not stoppable.

The session ended. Amara stood. She thanked Dr. Brandt. The thanking was genuine — she was grateful for the space, for the waiting, for the silence that had drawn the disclosure out of her, the disclosure that she dreamed in Lingala, the disclosure that the testimony had entered her sleep, the disclosure that the sponge absorbed even when the translator was unconscious. She was grateful because the disclosure, having been made, was now external, was now shared, was now in Dr. Brandt's clinical file and in Dr. Brandt's professional awareness and in the space between two people rather than in the space inside one person, and the sharing was a distribution of weight, a lightening, the weight still present but now held by two instead of one.

She left the office. She walked the corridor of the fourth floor, past the numbered doors, past the departments that operated in the background. She took the elevator to the ground floor. She walked through the lobby. She exited the building.

The air was April now. April in The Hague. The air was slightly warmer than March, the spring arriving in its northern European way — reluctantly, incrementally, the warmth increasing by fractions of degrees, the light increasing by minutes per day, the season changing the way all things changed in the Netherlands, slowly, methodically, the change managed, the management Dutch, the Dutch managing their seasons the way they managed their water, with dikes and schedules and the particular engineering that was the national character.

Amara walked to the tram stop. She waited. She boarded. She sat. She looked out the window.

She thought about the dream. The dream in which the translation was perfect. The dream in which the Lingala and the English merged. The dream in which the bridge disappeared.

She thought: the dream is wrong. The bridge cannot disappear. The bridge is the work. The bridge is the space between the languages. The bridge is the translator's silence. And the silence is not the absence of language but the presence of the carrying, the carrying that the translation does and that the translator does, the two carryings different, the one professional, the other personal, the one governed by the protocol, the other ungoverned, ungovernable.

The tram carried her home. She entered her flat. She stood in the doorway. The flat was quiet. The flat was always quiet.

Tonight she would sleep. Tonight she might dream. The dream might be in Lingala. The dream might contain the witness's voice. The dream might contain the three sentences from the church. The dream might contain the five-minute pause. The dream might contain everything the sponge had absorbed, everything the window had transmitted, everything the translator carried.

And in the morning she would wake. And she would run. And the run would be long. And the North Sea would be gray. And the silence of the run would be the silence between the languages, the silence that the body needed, the silence that was not empty but full, the silence that Dr. Brandt could name and could not cure.

The silence that was the translator's.