The Gallery

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 24: The Gallery

She had seen them before. She had seen them every day of the trial — the figures in the gallery, the rows of seats behind the prosecution table, the seats occupied by observers and journalists and diplomats and, in the rows closest to the prosecution, the family members. She had seen them through the one-way glass, had registered their presence the way she registered all presences in the courtroom — as components of the proceedings, as elements of the courtroom's composition, as the human material that the trial assembled and arranged according to its protocols and its architecture.

But she had not noticed them. The distinction between seeing and noticing was the distinction between the passive registration of the visual field and the active attention to a specific element within it, the distinction the difference between the eye's automatic scanning and the mind's deliberate focus. Amara had seen the gallery every day for seven months. She noticed the gallery on a Thursday in October, during the recess between the closing arguments and the verdict, a Thursday when the courtroom was not in session but the building was open and Amara had come to collect documents from her locker in the interpretation department and had walked past the courtroom and had looked through the gallery-level window — not the booth's one-way glass but the ordinary window in the corridor that overlooked the gallery seating — and had seen the seats empty and had thought, for the first time with the mind's full attention, about the people who had sat in those seats.

The family members of victims. They had traveled from the DRC to The Hague to watch the trial. The travel was long — Kinshasa to Brussels or Paris or Amsterdam, then to The Hague, the journey requiring visas and flights and the particular logistics of international travel for people from a country where international travel was not routine but exceptional, the travel a project, an undertaking, the undertaking funded by the ICC's trust fund for victims, which provided assistance for travel and accommodation so that family members could attend the proceedings.

They had come to watch. They had come to sit in the gallery and put on headphones and listen to the proceedings in a language they understood — French, mostly, the French channel, the language of the DRC's education system and government, the language in which the family members had received the information about the trial and the invitation to attend. They had come to hear the testimony of the witnesses who described what had happened to their families, their villages, their communities. They had come to hear the prosecution's case and the defense's case and the judge's instructions. They had come to witness the trial of the man accused of ordering the violence that had destroyed their lives.

And they had heard Amara's voice.

Not directly — not the English channel, which most of the family members had not selected, because most did not speak English. They had heard the French channel. But behind the French channel was the English channel, and behind the English channel was the Lingala, and the chain connected them all — the witness's Lingala translated by Amara into English, the English relayed by the French booth into French, the French entering the family members' headphones, the family members hearing the translation of the translation of their own family members' suffering.

The chain was long. The distance was great — from the witness's mouth to the family members' ears, the testimony had passed through two interpreters, two translations, two conversions, each conversion adding a layer of professional processing, each layer smoothing the testimony, the smoothing not a distortion but a refinement, the testimony arriving in the family members' headphones in the clean and professional French of the court's interpretation service, the French accurate, faithful, neutral.

And the family members had listened. They had listened through headphones. They had sat in the gallery with headphones on their heads and they had heard their suffering described in language that was not their language — not the Lingala of the villages, not the language in which the suffering had been experienced, but the French of the court, the language of the institution, the language that the court spoke because the court was an international institution and international institutions required common languages and the common languages were English and French. The family members had heard their suffering in the court's language, and the hearing was both a connection and a distance — a connection because the hearing meant the court had received the testimony, had recorded the testimony, had processed the testimony through its procedures, and a distance because the hearing was in a language that was not the language of the suffering, the suffering having occurred in Lingala and Swahili and the other languages of eastern Congo, the languages the court did not speak, the languages that required translation.

Amara stood in the corridor and she looked through the window at the empty gallery and she thought about the family members. She thought about them for the first time with the sustained attention she usually reserved for the testimony, the attention total, comprehensive, the mind focusing on a subject and holding it and turning it and examining it from multiple angles.

She thought about a woman she had seen in the gallery. A woman in a green dress, seated in the second row, who had been present for most of the trial. The woman was middle-aged — fifty, perhaps, or sixty, the age difficult to determine, the determination made more difficult by the distance between the booth and the gallery, the distance that the one-way glass both bridged and maintained. The woman had worn headphones. She had sat still. She had listened. Amara had seen her — had seen the green dress, the headphones, the stillness — and had not thought about her, because the woman was in the gallery and the gallery was the courtroom's periphery and the booth's attention was directed at the courtroom's center, at the witness box and the judges' bench and the prosecution and defense tables, the center where the testimony occurred and the translation was needed.

But the woman in the green dress was not peripheral. The woman was central — was, in a sense, the most central person in the courtroom, because the courtroom existed for her, the trial conducted for her, the testimony given for her, the translation performed for her. The court existed to provide justice for the victims, and the victims were represented in the courtroom by the family members in the gallery, and the family members were the court's audience in the deepest sense, the audience for whom the proceedings were conducted, the audience whose suffering was the reason for the trial.

And the woman in the green dress had heard Amara's voice — or rather, had heard the voice that Amara's voice produced through the relay, the French that the French booth produced from Amara's English, the French the final link in the chain that connected the witness's Lingala to the family member's ears. The woman had heard her family members' suffering rendered in French by a voice that was precise and neutral and that did not break, and the not-breaking was what the woman needed, because the not-breaking meant the testimony survived, meant the words crossed the bridge, meant the court received what the witnesses had given.

The not-breaking. Amara thought about the not-breaking. She thought about what the not-breaking cost and what the not-breaking provided. The cost was the sponge — the absorption, the weight, the dreams in Lingala, the flinching at the sound of Lingala in the street, the longer runs, the isolation. The provision was the testimony's survival — the testimony surviving the translation, the words crossing the bridge intact, the court hearing what the witnesses said, the hearing the purpose, the purpose served.

The family members needed the not-breaking. The family members needed the testimony to survive the translation. The family members needed the voice in their headphones to be steady, professional, accurate, the voice a guarantee that the testimony was being delivered to the court without distortion, without loss, without the particular damage that a breaking voice would have introduced — the damage not to the content but to the confidence, the family members' confidence that the court was receiving the testimony, that the system was working, that the machinery of justice was functioning.

If the voice broke — if the interpreter's voice cracked, if the translation faltered, if the neutral became emotional — the family members would hear the breaking and the breaking would communicate not the interpreter's humanity but the system's failure, the failure of the mechanism that connected the witness to the court, the failure that would mean the testimony was not surviving, was not crossing, was not arriving intact.

And so the not-breaking was necessary. The not-breaking was the interpreter's service to the family members. The not-breaking was the sponge's function — the sponge absorbing the emotion so that the window could transmit the content, the absorption making the transmission possible, the two functions complementary, the sponge and the window not contradictions but partners, the partnership the mechanism, the mechanism the booth, the booth the space where the interpreter performed both functions simultaneously.

Amara turned from the window. She walked the corridor. She walked past the courtroom, past the booths, past the offices. She walked to the ICC's small library — a room on the third floor, lined with legal texts and journals and the particular literature of international criminal law, the room quiet, rarely used during recesses, the room a space of study and reflection that the building provided for its workers.

She sat in the library. She sat at a table by the window. The window looked out over The Hague — the buildings, the streets, the flat Dutch landscape extending toward the horizon, the horizon the line where the land met the sky, the line visible because the land was flat, the flatness the Dutch condition, the flatness making everything visible, the landscape hiding nothing.

She thought about the gallery. She thought about the headphones. She thought about the particular intimacy of hearing one's family members' suffering through headphones, the suffering translated into a language the court spoke, the translation the only access, the access mediated, the mediation the interpreter's work. The family members could not hear the original testimony — could not hear the Lingala, could not hear the Swahili, could not hear the language in which the suffering had been described by the person who had suffered it. The family members heard only the translation, only the relay's output, only the processed and professional rendering of the testimony in the court's language.

And this was, Amara thought, a form of the grief of remaining. The family members remained — remained in the gallery, remained with their headphones, remained in the position of hearing without speaking, of receiving without responding, of sitting in a courtroom while the court processed the worst thing that had ever happened to them, the processing conducted in languages they may or may not have understood, the processing mediated by interpreters they could not see, the processing the court's mechanism, the mechanism designed for justice and not for comfort, the mechanism serving the law and not the heart.

The family members remained. They remained through seven months of testimony. They remained through the prosecution and the defense and the cross-examinations and the pauses and the silences. They remained in their seats in the gallery, wearing headphones, listening, the listening their form of carrying, their form of the carrying the witness had described — the carrying of water from the river, the carrying done without speaking about the carrying, the carrying simply done.

And between the family members and the testimony — between the gallery and the witness box, between the headphones and the microphone, between the hearing and the speaking — there was the translation. There was Amara. There was the booth. There was the voice that did not break.

The voice that did not break was the bridge. The bridge connected the witness to the family. The bridge carried the testimony from the witness's language to the family's language. The bridge was invisible — the family members did not see Amara, did not know her name, did not know her face, did not know the seven languages or the morning runs or the flat in Scheveningen or the rooibos tea. They knew only the voice, only the translation, only the words in their headphones that told them what the witness had said about what had happened in their village, to their family, in their lives.

The voice was Amara's gift. The gift was not chosen but given — given by the work, by the profession, by the booth, by the particular arrangement of glass and microphone and headphones that made the translation possible. The gift was the bridge. The gift was the not-breaking. The gift was the neutrality that was a fiction and that was necessary and that kept the booth from being a cage and that kept the testimony crossing and that kept the family members hearing and that kept the court functioning and that kept the justice — imperfect, approximate, conducted through translation — possible.

Amara sat in the library. The afternoon light was October light — low, golden, the light of the Dutch autumn, the light that entered rooms at a sharp angle and illuminated surfaces with a warmth that contradicted the cold outside, the warmth the light's gift, the gift temporary, the gift the particular grace of northern light in autumn.

She thought about returning to the gallery. Not during a session — the booth's schedule did not permit gallery visits during proceedings, and the gallery during proceedings was the family members' space, not the interpreter's space. But during the recess, during the deliberation, she thought about sitting in one of the gallery seats, about putting on the headphones, about hearing the silence through the headphones, the silence the absence of the proceedings, the absence the deliberation's condition, the deliberation conducted in the judges' chambers, behind closed doors, the silence the gallery's condition during the waiting.

She did not go to the gallery. She sat in the library and she thought about going and she did not go, because the going would have been a crossing of a boundary, the boundary between the booth and the gallery, between the interpreter's space and the family members' space, between the voice and the ear, and the boundary was the booth's architecture, the architecture that kept the interpreter separate from the courtroom, the separation the condition of the neutrality, the neutrality the fiction, the fiction the mercy.

She sat in the library until the light changed. The golden light faded. The afternoon became evening. The October evening arrived with its early darkness, the darkness of the Dutch autumn, the darkness that came at five o'clock and that deepened until eight the next morning, the darkness the season's weight.

She stood. She left the library. She walked the corridor. She left the building. She walked to the tram stop. She went home.

In her flat, she stood at the kitchen window. She looked at the street below. She thought about the woman in the green dress. She thought about the headphones on the woman's head. She thought about the voice in the headphones — her voice, relayed, translated, the voice that carried the testimony from Lingala to English to French, the voice that the woman heard without knowing whose voice it was.

She thought: I gave her the words. I carried the testimony from the witness's language to the court's language and the court's language reached her headphones and the headphones gave her the words and the words were the testimony and the testimony was the bridge and the bridge was me.

She thought: the bridge is invisible. The family members do not see the bridge. They see only the two sides — the witness on one side, the court on the other. The bridge between them is invisible. I am invisible.

She thought: the invisibility is the work. The invisibility is the gift. The invisibility is the cost.

She stood at the window. The street was dark. The tram passed on its tracks, lit from within, the passengers visible through the tram's windows, the passengers on their way home, the passengers living their lives in a city where the International Criminal Court conducted its proceedings and the interpreters translated the testimony and the family members sat in the gallery and the bridge was invisible and the translator was silent.

The gallery. The headphones. The family. The voice. The not-breaking.

The translator's silence held them all.