The Sponge

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 20: The Sponge

Marcus had said: you are not a window. He had said it on a Wednesday evening in his apartment on the Laan van Meerdervoort, sitting in his armchair with a glass of Jenever, the Jenever amber in the lamplight, the lamplight the particular warm light of Marcus's apartment, the light that was the opposite of the booth's fluorescent overhead, the light domestic, private, the light of a space that belonged to a person rather than to an institution. He had said: you think the testimony passes through you. You think you are transparent. You think the words enter through the headphones and exit through the microphone and leave you clean, the way light passes through a window and leaves the glass clean. But you are not a window. You are a sponge. The words enter and they stay. They saturate. They accumulate. And the accumulation is the weight you carry, the weight you do not notice until you notice it, the weight you do not feel until the feeling arrives, and when the feeling arrives it arrives not as a thought but as a condition, a condition of the body, the body heavy with what the ears have received and the mouth has delivered and the space between the ears and the mouth has retained.

He had said this three years ago, during the previous trial, during the child soldier's testimony, during the weeks when the boy's Lingala entered Amara's headphones and the boy's voice entered Amara's sleep and the direct translation — the translation without relay, without buffer, without the intermediate language that would have provided distance — had made the entering complete, total, the boy's words entering Amara's body the way water entered a sponge, through every pore, through every opening, the entering not a choice but a physics, the physics of absorption, the sponge absorbing because absorbing was the sponge's nature, the nature unalterable, the alteration impossible because altering the sponge's nature would mean altering the interpreter's nature, and the interpreter's nature — the capacity to receive language, to hold it, to carry it, to convert it — was the thing that made interpretation possible, and making interpretation impossible would mean making justice impossible, and making justice impossible was not an option.

Amara had received the metaphor. She had received it the way she received all of Marcus's insights — with the quiet recognition of a person hearing something she already knew described in language she had not found. The sponge. She was a sponge. The metaphor was accurate. The metaphor was the translation of her experience into the language of objects, the experience converted from the internal and nameless to the external and named, the naming a relief, the relief the particular relief of having a word for the thing, the word not a cure but a map, the map showing her where she was even if the map could not move her somewhere else.

Three years later, in the Mukiza trial, the sponge had become her primary experience of the work.

She noticed it first in her body. The body was the sponge's location — not the mind, which processed the translation, which managed the simultaneous hearing and speaking, which handled the relay and the direct and the switching between channels and the maintaining of register and the precision of terminology. The mind did its work and the mind's work was clean, professional, the mind trained, the training twelve years of practice, the practice producing a competence that was not diminished by the content, the competence a skill that operated independently of the horror it processed, the way a surgeon's skill operated independently of the wound it treated. The mind was the surgeon. The body was the patient. The body received what the mind's skill produced — the translation completed, the words delivered, the testimony transmitted — and the body retained what the mind discarded, the retaining the sponge's function, the sponge holding what the window released.

The body told her in stages. The first stage was the sleep. The dreams in Lingala — the dreams she had described to Dr. Brandt, the dreams in which the translation was perfect, the dreams in which the booth was the same booth and the headphones were the same headphones and the Lingala and the English merged into a single language, the merger the dream's wish, the wish the mind's desire for completeness, for the bridge to disappear, for the two sides to become one. The dreams were the sponge's overflow — the sponge full during the day, the sponge releasing during the night, the release uncontrolled, the release the body's mechanism for processing what the mind's mechanism could not process, the two mechanisms complementary, the complement the body's gift, the gift unwelcome, the gift the dreams.

The second stage was the flinching. She noticed it on a Saturday in June, a Saturday without the booth, a Saturday of the ordinary, the ordinary the life outside the ICC that Amara maintained — the flat, the market, the tram, the beach, the particular architecture of a life lived in a foreign city by a woman who worked at an international criminal court and who, on Saturdays, was not an interpreter but a person, a person who bought groceries and cleaned her flat and walked the boulevard and existed in the city the way all city-dwellers existed, as a body moving through urban space.

She walked to the Indonesian market on the Keizerstraat, the market she visited weekly for the mangoes and the spices and the particular products of Southeast Asian cuisine that she cooked in her flat, the cooking a solitary activity, the activity one of the few solitary activities she performed that involved the senses — the smell, the taste, the touch of food, the senses that the booth did not engage, the booth engaging only the ears and the mouth, the hearing and the speaking, the other senses dormant during working hours, the dormancy the particular deprivation of the interpreter's body.

She entered the market. She selected mangoes — four, ripe, the skin yielding under her thumb's pressure, the yielding the mango's signal of readiness, the signal universal, the signal understood in Accra and in The Hague and in every place where mangoes were eaten, the mango's language simple, binary, ready or not ready, the language that did not require translation.

She carried the mangoes to the counter. The woman behind the counter was Indonesian — Javanese, Amara had learned in their weekly exchanges, from a town near Yogyakarta, a town whose name the woman had spoken and that Amara had heard and retained because Amara retained all spoken language, the retention automatic, the retention the sponge. The woman spoke Dutch. Amara spoke Dutch. They conducted their transaction in Dutch — the price, the payment, the small courtesies of commercial exchange, the exchange routine, the routine the Saturday ritual.

And then, from the back of the market, from the storage area behind the counter, a voice spoke in Lingala.

The voice belonged to a man — a Congolese man, Amara understood, a man who worked in the market's storage area, who was speaking to another person in the back, the speaking casual, the speaking the Lingala of daily life, the Lingala of work and instruction and the ordinary communication of two people performing the ordinary labor of stocking shelves and moving boxes. The man said something about a delivery. He said it in Lingala. The Lingala was the Lingala of Kinshasa — urban Lingala, the Lingala of commerce and labor and the particular vocabulary of a man who worked in a market in The Hague and who spoke to his colleague in the language they shared, the language of home, the language of the Congo, the language that existed in The Hague because Congolese people existed in The Hague, the language transplanted, the language living outside its geography the way Amara's Twi lived outside Ghana, the language carried by the people who spoke it to the places where they lived.

Amara flinched.

The flinch was involuntary. The flinch was the body's response — the muscles contracting, the shoulders drawing inward, the chest tightening, the tightening the same tightening she had felt in the booth during the boy's testimony three years ago, the tightening the body's refusal, the refusal not of the language but of the content the language had come to carry, the content the testimony, the testimony the witness's Lingala describing the massacre, the Lingala entering Amara's headphones directly, without relay, without buffer, the directness making the Lingala the language of the horror, the language saturated with the horror the way the sponge was saturated with the testimony.

And the flinch was the saturation's evidence. The flinch was the sponge saying: this language is full. This language carries the testimony. This language, which is also the language of the man in the market and the language of the restaurant on the Thomsonlaan and the language of the Congolese community in The Hague and the language of music and commerce and daily life — this language has been filled by the testimony, has been weighted by the testimony, has been changed by the testimony, and the body cannot distinguish between the Lingala of the market and the Lingala of the courtroom because the body does not process context, the body processes sound, and the sound is the same sound, the phonemes the same phonemes, the cadence the same cadence, and the body flinches because the body has learned that this sound carries horror, and the learning is the sponge, and the sponge does not forget.

Amara stood at the counter with the mangoes in her hand and the flinch passing through her body and the Lingala from the back of the market continuing — the man speaking to his colleague about the delivery, the speaking ordinary, the speaking the opposite of testimony, the speaking the proof that Lingala was alive outside the courtroom, that Lingala was a language of the living and not only a language of the testifying, that the language existed in its fullness beyond the narrow channel of the booth's headphones.

She knew this. She knew this the way she knew that the flinch was irrational, that the market's Lingala was not the courtroom's Lingala, that the man in the back was not a witness and the words were not testimony and the context was commerce and not justice. She knew this and the knowing did not prevent the flinch, because the knowing was in the mind and the flinch was in the body and the mind and the body processed the language differently, the mind processing the context and the body processing the sound, the two processings producing two different responses — the mind's response the knowing and the body's response the flinching — and the two responses coexisting in the same person, the coexistence the condition, the condition the sponge.

She left the market. She walked home. She carried the mangoes. She walked the Keizerstraat and the boulevard and the streets of Scheveningen and she thought about the flinch and about Marcus's metaphor and about the sponge.

The sponge was full. The sponge had been filling for twelve years — filling with thirty-two trials, filling with the testimony of hundreds of witnesses, filling with the languages of atrocity translated into the languages of the court, filling with the Serbo-Croatian of the Yugoslav tribunal and the French of the Rwandan tribunal and the Lingala of the Congolese cases and the Arabic and the Swahili and all the other languages that carried the testimony of the survivors to the record of the court. The sponge had been filling and the filling was cumulative, each trial adding its weight, each testimony adding its residue, the residue the marrow, the marrow the living tissue inside the bone of the legal language, the tissue staying, the staying the sponge's function.

And now, in the Mukiza trial, with the direct translation of Witness 247's Lingala — the translation without relay, without buffer, without the intermediate language that provided distance — the sponge was receiving directly, the receiving unmediated, the Lingala entering the sponge through the direct channel, the channel the Lingala-to-English bridge that only Amara could build, the bridge with no intermediate supports, the bridge carrying the full weight of the testimony without the distribution that the relay provided.

The weight was in her body. The weight was in her sleep. The weight was in the flinch at the market and in the longer runs on the beach and in the isolation of her evenings and in the particular condition of a person who spent her days carrying testimony through her body and who could not set the testimony down because the testimony was inside her, was in the sponge, and the sponge was her, and she was the sponge.

She reached her flat. She entered. She set the mangoes on the kitchen counter. She stood at the window. The North Sea was visible — the gray, the constant gray, the gray that was the sea's identity and the coast's identity and the particular color of Amara's adopted landscape, the landscape gray, the sea gray, the sky gray, the gray the neutral, the gray the color of no particular emotion, the gray the color of the between.

She thought about the runs. The runs were longer now — six miles had become seven, seven had become eight. The runs were longer because the silence the runs provided was the silence the sponge needed, the silence the non-linguistic space, the space where the body moved and the mind rested and the languages were quiet, all seven of them quiet, the quiet the rest, the rest the maintenance, the maintenance the thing that allowed the interpreter to return to the booth and put on the headphones and press the button and translate.

But the runs were providing less silence now. The silence was shorter — not in duration, because the runs were longer, the duration increased, the miles increased. The silence was shorter in quality, the quality diminished, the diminishment the testimony's intrusion, the testimony following her onto the beach, the testimony present in the rhythm of her feet on the sand, the rhythm the rhythm of Lingala, the rhythm the cadence of Witness 247's voice, the voice present in the body's rhythm because the body had absorbed the voice and the body expressed what it absorbed, the expression involuntary, the expression the sponge's overflow.

The words followed her. They followed her onto the beach the way they followed her into the market, the way they followed her into her sleep. The words were not specific words — she did not hear the testimony replaying, did not hear the sentences, did not hear the witness's voice. The words were a presence, a weight, a condition of the body that was the residue of the translation, the residue the thing that remained after the translation was complete, the remaining the sponge's permanent content, the content not dischargeable, not squeezable, the content settled, lodged, incorporated.

Marcus had said: the sponge fills and the sponge does not empty. You can squeeze it — the running is the squeezing, the silence is the squeezing, the Jenever is the squeezing — but the squeezing does not empty the sponge, the squeezing only redistributes the content, the content moving within the sponge, the movement producing the sensation of lightening, the sensation temporary, the sensation the relief that the squeezing provided, the relief not a cure but a management, the management the best that the work permitted.

Amara stood at the window and she understood what Marcus had meant. She understood not with the mind's understanding, which was the understanding of the three-year-old metaphor received and intellectually processed and filed in the mind's archive of useful insights. She understood with the body's understanding, which was the understanding of the flinch, the understanding that the Lingala of the market was the Lingala of the courtroom because the sponge did not distinguish, the understanding that the runs were longer because the silence was shorter, the understanding that the sleep contained Lingala because the sponge released at night what it absorbed during the day.

She understood that she was the sponge. Not metaphorically but actually, the metaphor having been absorbed into the reality, the reality the condition, the condition the carrying, the carrying the work, the work the twelve years, the twelve years the sponge's filling, the filling the weight, the weight the thing she carried on the runs and in the sleep and at the market and in the booth and in the flat and everywhere, everywhere, the weight everywhere because the sponge was everywhere, the sponge was her body, and her body was everywhere she was.

She turned from the window. She went to the kitchen. She began to prepare the mangoes — cutting them, the knife dividing the fruit from the seed, the cutting a manual act, the act engaging the hands and the eyes and the nose (the mango's scent, the scent tropical, the scent Accra, the scent home) and the senses that the booth did not engage, the engaging a rest, the rest the particular rest of manual work after mental work, the rest the body's recovery through a different kind of labor.

She ate the mango. She stood at the counter and she ate the mango and the mango was sweet and the sweetness was the opposite of the testimony and the opposite of the flinch and the opposite of the sponge, the sweetness the body's other capacity — the capacity for pleasure, for taste, for the sensory experience of food, the capacity that the testimony did not touch, the capacity that remained clean, unsaturated, the capacity that the sponge had not filled because the sponge held language and the mango was not language, the mango was fruit, the fruit the body's rest, the rest the mango's gift.

She finished the mango. She washed her hands. She stood in the flat. The flat was quiet.

The quiet was the between. The quiet was the space between the Lingala of the market and the Lingala of the courtroom, the space between the testimony and the silence, the space between the sponge and the window. The quiet was the space where Amara lived — the between, the space her mother would name on a Sunday phone call months from now, the between the space that had always been hers, the between the translator's address, the between the home.

And in the quiet, the sponge held. The sponge held the testimony and the flinch and the dreams and the runs and the weight and the twelve years and the thirty-two trials and the hundreds of witnesses and the languages, all the languages, the seven languages and the one silence, the silence the sponge's eighth language, the language of carrying, the language of holding, the language of the weight that did not empty, that did not discharge, that settled and stayed and became, over the years and the trials and the testimonies, the permanent content of the body that sat in the booth and put on the headphones and pressed the button and translated.

The sponge held. The translator carried. The silence remained.

And on Monday morning she would return to the booth. And the headphones would be on their hooks. And the microphone would be waiting. And the red light would come on. And the testimony would continue. And the sponge would receive.

And the receiving was the work. And the work continued. And the sponge held.