The Corridor

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 15: The Corridor

The corridor ran the length of the building's second floor, from the interpretation booths at the eastern end to the cafeteria at the western end, a distance of approximately one hundred and fifty meters, the distance traversed multiple times daily by interpreters, lawyers, court officers, journalists, and the particular traffic of an international criminal court in session — the human current of justice, the bodies moving through the corridor in patterns determined by the court's schedule, the morning flow from the entrance toward the courtrooms, the midday flow from the courtrooms toward the cafeteria, the afternoon flow reversing, the evening flow dispersing, the patterns regular, predictable, the corridor a channel through which the court's population moved in the rhythms the court's proceedings established.

The corridor was institutional. Gray carpet, which Amara had walked on for twelve years and which bore the faint tracks of twelve years of walking, the carpet wearing thinner along the center where the traffic was heaviest, the wear a palimpsest of movement, the corridor recording the bodies that had passed through it the way the court's transcripts recorded the words that had been spoken in it, both records incomplete, both records capturing only a portion of what had occurred — the carpet capturing the pressure of the feet but not the purpose of the walking, the transcripts capturing the words but not the weight of the words.

Fluorescent lights. The lights were the lights of every institution Amara had ever worked in — the same tubes, the same frequency, the same flat and shadowless illumination that erased the particular quality of natural light, the quality that distinguished morning from afternoon and sunny from cloudy and season from season. Under the fluorescent lights, it was always the same time. The corridor existed outside of time — or inside of institutional time, which was not the time of the sun and the seasons but the time of schedules and sessions and the particular temporality of legal proceedings, proceedings that could span months or years and that were conducted in sessions of hours, the hours the building blocks of the proceedings, the hours accumulated into days and weeks and months, the accumulation the court's pace, the pace deliberate, the deliberateness the court's form of thoroughness.

Amara walked the corridor during the midday recess. She walked from the booth toward the cafeteria, the walk a transition, the walk the passage from the booth's enclosed space to the cafeteria's open space, from the private labor of translation to the public activity of eating, from the headphones to the open air, the walk a decompression, the body adjusting from the particular pressure of the booth to the ambient pressure of the corridor.

She walked. She passed the other interpretation booths — Booth 1 (French), Booth 2 (Arabic), Booth 4 (Swahili), Booth 5 (additional languages as needed). The booths were closed, the interpreters already in the corridor or the cafeteria or the restrooms, the booths empty during the recess, the booths waiting, the equipment waiting, the headphones on their hooks and the microphones dormant and the one-way glass reflecting the empty courtroom below, the booths' emptiness a rest, a rotation, the thirty-minute rotation extended to ninety minutes, the recess the court's gift to all its workers, the interpreters and the judges and the lawyers and the accused all resting simultaneously, the simultaneity the one time when the entire court was doing the same thing.

She passed the defense team's office. The door was open. She could see inside — desks, files, a computer screen displaying a document, the office the workspace of the lawyers who defended Mukiza, the workspace unremarkable, the workspace indistinguishable from any other legal office except for the content of the files, the files containing the defense's strategy for a man accused of crimes against humanity, the strategy ordinary in its methodology (legal research, precedent analysis, cross-examination preparation) and extraordinary in its subject (the killing of three hundred and forty people).

She passed the prosecution's office. Door closed. The closing a matter of security or preference, the prosecution's files more sensitive perhaps, the files containing the evidence that would convict or fail to convict, the evidence the prosecution's construction, the construction being tested in the courtroom, the testing the trial, the trial the reason for the corridor and the booth and the cafeteria and the building and the city's identity as the city of international justice.

She passed the witness waiting room. The door was closed and guarded — a court officer seated beside the door, the officer's presence a protection, the protection for the witness who was inside, the witness resting between sessions, the witness waiting in the particular way that witnesses waited during trials, the waiting heavy with what had been said and what remained to be said, the waiting a form of the testimony's intermission, the intermission not a break but a continuation by other means, the witness's body resting while the witness's mind continued to inhabit the testimony.

Amara walked and she thought about the building. She thought about the building as a container — a container for the proceedings, a container for the testimony, a container for the translation. The building contained the courtroom and the courtroom contained the witness and the accused and the judges and the lawyers and the gallery, and above the courtroom the building contained the booths and the booths contained the interpreters, and around the courtroom the building contained the offices and the offices contained the files, and the building contained the cafeteria and the cafeteria contained the food and the food sustained the bodies that performed the functions that the building contained. The building was the container of the container of the container, the nesting dolls of institutional architecture, each container holding the next, the whole structure designed to hold the thing at the center, which was the testimony, which was the witness's voice, which was the words spoken in the courtroom that the interpreters translated and the transcribers recorded and the judges weighed and the verdict resolved.

She reached the junction where the corridor met the cross-corridor that led to the detention unit. The detention unit was in a separate wing — connected to the main building by a corridor that was accessible only to authorized personnel, the corridor guarded, the access controlled, the control a function of the separation that the court maintained between the accused and the rest of the court's population. The accused was brought through this corridor to the courtroom each morning and returned through it each evening, the corridor the accused's path, the path controlled, the path the physical expression of the accused's status — present in the courtroom by the court's authority, absent from the rest of the building by the court's restriction.

Amara walked past the junction. She had walked past this junction hundreds of times. She had never walked down the cross-corridor — she had no reason to, no authority to, no business with the detention unit. The cross-corridor was the territory of the court officers and the defense counsel and the medical staff who attended to the accused's health and the chaplain who attended to the accused's spirit. The cross-corridor was Mukiza's territory, or the territory of the institution that held him, the territory the interpreter did not enter because the interpreter's territory was the booth, the booth the interpreter's cell, the interpreter's enclosure, the interpreter's particular form of containment.

She was walking past the junction when she saw him.

Mukiza was in the cross-corridor. He was being escorted — two court officers flanking him, the officers in dark suits, the officers walking at the pace that the accused set, the pace unhurried, the pace the pace of a man walking from one form of containment to another, from the detention unit to the courtroom or from the courtroom to the detention unit, the direction unclear from Amara's position at the junction.

He was wearing the dark gray suit. The same suit, or a suit identical to it — Amara could not tell whether it was the same garment or a rotation, the accused perhaps having multiple identical suits, the uniformity of dress a choice or a limitation, the dark gray the color of the trial, the color Mukiza wore every day in the courtroom, the color becoming his color the way the blue head wrap was the witness's color.

He was walking. His stride was military — she had noticed this before, through the glass, from above, the stride the stride of a man trained to walk with purpose, with direction, with the particular posture of command. But from this angle — the corridor angle, the horizontal angle, the angle of a person standing at a junction while another person walked through a cross-corridor — the stride was different. The stride was the stride of a man walking between escorts. The stride was measured not by command but by confinement, the pace controlled not by the walker but by the institution, the institution setting the parameters within which the walking occurred.

Mukiza looked up. He looked in her direction. He saw her.

He saw her the way anyone sees a person in a corridor — a glance, a registration, the mind noting the presence of another human body in the visual field and categorizing the body (not a threat, not relevant, a court employee, a woman, middle-aged, standing at the junction) and moving on. The glance was brief. The glance lasted perhaps one second. The glance was the ordinary glance of passing, of sharing a moment of proximity in an institutional space, the proximity accidental, the moment unremarkable.

But Amara felt the glance as though it were a hand. The glance touched her. The glance was the first time Mukiza had seen her face — or rather, the first time Mukiza had seen a face that his eyes could not connect to the voice in his headphones, because Mukiza did not know that the woman standing at the junction was the woman whose voice he had heard for weeks in his headphones, the woman who had translated the charges against him, the woman who had translated the testimony of the witnesses who described what his forces had done, the woman whose English had entered his ears through the French relay and who had given him the words of his victims in a language the court required.

He did not know her. She knew him. The asymmetry was the booth's asymmetry — the interpreter knew the accused, knew his face, knew his posture, knew his hands, knew the way he adjusted his headphones and the way he sat in the dock and the way he composed his expression. The interpreter had studied the dossier, had read the biography, had looked at the photographs. The interpreter knew the accused the way a doctor knew a patient — through observation, through professional study, through the particular knowledge that professional attention produced. But the accused did not know the interpreter. The accused knew only the voice — the voice in the headphones, the voice that carried the translation, the voice that was Amara's voice processed through the booth's audio system and delivered to Mukiza's ears with the particular intimacy of headphone audio.

The intimacy. Amara stood at the junction and she thought about the intimacy. She thought about the fact that her voice had been inside Mukiza's head — not directly, not the English-to-French translation that Mukiza heard, but through the relay, her English translated into French, the French entering Mukiza's headphones, the chain connecting her mouth to his ears through the intermediary of the French booth, the chain making them intimate without their consent, the intimacy forced, institutional, a feature of the court's technology rather than of any human relationship.

And now Mukiza's eyes had seen her face. The eyes that had not seen her before — the one-way glass preventing the seeing, the invisibility the booth's design, the design ensuring that the interpreter was a voice and not a body, a translation and not a person. Now the design had failed — not through malfunction but through geography, the junction a place where the booth's invisibility did not extend, the corridor a place where the interpreter's body was visible, was present, was a woman standing at a junction while the accused walked past.

Mukiza's glance passed. He walked on. The officers walked with him. The cross-corridor received them. They disappeared around a corner. The moment ended.

Amara stood at the junction. She stood for five seconds, ten seconds, the standing a form of processing, the mind processing the encounter the way the mind processed testimony — receiving, converting, storing. The encounter was brief and ordinary and unremarkable and it affected her in a way she had not expected and could not immediately name, the affectedness a presence in her body, a sensation she associated with the booth, with the moment when the microphone went live and the voice became the bridge and the bridge connected two sides that the bridge's existence kept separate.

He had seen her. He did not know who he had seen. He would return to the courtroom after the recess and sit in the dock and put on his headphones and hear the translation and the translation would be Amara's translation, relayed through the French booth, and the translation would enter his ears in the voice of the French interpreter, and the French interpreter's voice would be the voice Mukiza associated with the court, with the testimony, with the particular sound of his trial being conducted in the language he understood.

But Amara's voice was behind the French interpreter's voice, the way Amara's face was behind the booth's glass. The English was the source of the French relay. The English was Amara. And Mukiza, hearing the French, was hearing Amara at one remove, hearing the translation of the translation, hearing the relay's output without knowing the relay's input, the input Amara, the input invisible.

She walked to the cafeteria. She bought coffee — black, bitter, the coffee of the ICC cafeteria, which was not good coffee by Dutch standards (and the Dutch standards for coffee were lower than the Italian standards but higher than the American standards) but which served its purpose, the purpose stimulation, the purpose alertness, the purpose the caffeine entering the bloodstream and reaching the brain and providing the particular chemical support that sustained interpretation required.

She sat at a table by the window. The cafeteria window overlooked the ICC's courtyard — a paved area with benches and a few trees, the trees stunted by the coastal wind, the trees the building's token gesture toward nature, the gesture insufficient, the trees too few and too small to counterbalance the building's concrete and glass. She drank her coffee and she looked at the trees and she thought about the corridor and the glance and the asymmetry.

She thought about what it meant to be heard without being seen. To have one's voice inside another person's head — inside the heads of judges and lawyers and accused and gallery members — while one's body was hidden behind glass. To be the most intimate voice in the courtroom — intimate because headphone audio was intimate, because the voice in the headphones seemed to come from inside the listener's own head rather than from a source in the room — while being the most invisible person in the courtroom. The intimacy and the invisibility. The voice and the glass. The two conditions the interpreter's conditions, the conditions that defined the work, that made the work possible, that were the work.

Mukiza had heard her voice more intimately than he had heard anyone's — more intimately than the judge's voice, which he heard through the courtroom's speakers and through his headphones simultaneously; more intimately than his lawyer's voice, which he heard from the defense table and through the headphones; more intimately than the prosecutor's voice, which he heard from across the courtroom and through the headphones. He heard the interpreter's voice only through the headphones. Only inside his head. Only in the particular closeness that the headphones created. The interpreter's voice was the voice without a source, the voice that came from the glass, from the booth, from the invisible space above the courtroom, the voice that descended into his ears like a voice from the architecture itself, the building speaking, the institution speaking, the translation speaking.

And the translation had told him what his victims said. The translation had carried the testimony from Lingala to English to French and the French had entered his headphones and the French had told him, in the language he understood, what the witnesses described — the attack, the killing, the burning, the hiding, the ditch, the church, the grief, the word for the grief. The translation had given him his victims' words in a language he could understand, and the giving was Amara's work, and the work was intimate, and the intimacy was one-directional, the accused receiving the voice without knowing the woman, the woman giving the voice without being known.

She finished her coffee. The recess was ending. She stood. She carried her cup to the counter. She walked back through the corridor — the same corridor, the same gray carpet, the same fluorescent lights. She passed the junction. The cross-corridor was empty. Mukiza was already in the courtroom, or on his way, the path from the detention unit to the dock traversed while Amara traversed the path from the cafeteria to the booth.

She entered the booth. She sat in the left chair. She put on the headphones. She pressed the microphone button. The red light came on.

The afternoon session began. The courtroom filled. The judges entered. Mukiza was in the dock. His headphones were on. His face was composed. His eyes were directed at the judges' bench. He did not look at the booth. He could not see through the glass even if he looked.

Amara looked at him through the glass. She looked at the face that had glanced at her in the corridor. She looked at the face that did not know it had seen the voice. She looked at the composed expression, the arranged neutrality, the face of a man listening to his trial through headphones, hearing the words of his accusers and his victims translated into his language, the words entering his head through the technology the court provided, the technology the headphones, the headphones the bridge's endpoint, the bridge's other endpoint the booth, the booth where Amara sat, invisible, essential, the voice without the face.

The testimony continued. A new witness. A different voice. Different Lingala, different French, different relay. Amara translated. The words crossed the bridge. The bridge was open. The corridor encounter was behind her, was a moment, was a glance, was one second of visibility in twelve years of invisibility.

But the glance stayed. The glance settled beside the testimony, beside the word, beside the three sentences and the five-minute pause and the forty minutes and the ditch and the mud and the prayer. The glance became part of the accumulation, part of the sponge's content, part of the weight the translator carried — the weight of being heard without being seen, of giving without being known, of bridging without belonging to either side.

The corridor. The junction. The glance. The voice. The glass.

The translator's silence held them all.