The Verdict

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 29: The Verdict

The call came on a Tuesday. The ICC's registrar called the interpretation department to inform them that the verdict would be delivered on Thursday at 10 AM. Two days' notice. Two days for the court to prepare the courtroom, for the interpreters to prepare their booths, for the prosecution and defense to prepare their responses, for the gallery to fill with the family members who had waited and who would now hear the result of their waiting.

Amara received the notification by email. The email was from the interpretation department's coordinator, a woman named Sophie who managed the scheduling and logistics of the court's interpretation services with the efficiency of a person who understood that the interpretation was a critical link in the court's chain and that the chain required management, the management the coordination of interpreters and booths and equipment and the particular logistics of providing simultaneous interpretation in multiple languages for a proceeding that the world was watching.

The email said: Verdict delivery, Prosecutor v. Mukiza, Thursday, 10:00. English booth: Osei (primary), Ansah (secondary). Please confirm availability.

Amara confirmed. She confirmed by replying to the email with a single word: Confirmed. The word was English, was professional, was the word of institutional communication, the word that meant I will be there, I will be in the booth, I will put on the headphones, I will press the microphone button, I will translate the verdict.

She spent Wednesday preparing. The preparation was different from the preparation for testimony — testimony preparation involved studying the witness's background, the anticipated vocabulary, the specific linguistic challenges of the testimony. Verdict preparation involved studying the legal terminology of the judgment — the specific phrases the court used to announce its findings, the formulations of guilt and innocence, the articles of the Rome Statute under which the charges had been brought, the particular language of international criminal law that the verdict would employ.

She reviewed the charges. Count One: crimes against humanity, murder. Count Two: crimes against humanity, extermination. Count Three: crimes against humanity, persecution. Count Four: war crimes, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population. Four counts. Four articles. Four formulations. She reviewed the French equivalents — crimes contre l'humanite, meurtre, extermination, persecution, crimes de guerre. She reviewed the vocabulary of the verdict itself — coupable (guilty), non coupable (not guilty), au-dela de tout doute raisonnable (beyond reasonable doubt), a l'unanimite (unanimously), a la majorite (by majority).

The preparation was mechanical, professional, the preparation of a translator who was about to translate a legal pronouncement and who wanted the translation to be accurate, precise, immediate. The preparation was the work before the work, the study that made the translation possible, the same study she had done before the trial began, the same thoroughness, the same attention to terminology.

But the preparation was also something else. The preparation was the last preparation. The preparation was the final study before the final session, the final translation, the final crossing of the bridge. After the verdict, the trial would be over. After the verdict, the Mukiza case would enter the record — the permanent record of the ICC, the archive of proceedings, the institutional memory. And Amara's translation would be in the record — her English rendering of the testimony and the arguments and the verdict, the rendering preserved, the rendering the court's English-language account of the trial, the account that future judges and scholars and students would read, the account that would endure.

Thursday morning. She woke at 5:30. She did not run. She did not run because the running required time and the time was needed for preparation, for the particular preparation of the self for a significant session, the preparation not linguistic but psychological, the self arranging itself for the verdict the way the self arranged itself for any significant event — with attention, with intention, with the deliberate marshaling of resources.

She showered. She dressed. Dark trousers, a white blouse, flat shoes. She drank rooibos tea. She packed her satchel. She left the flat. She walked to the tram stop. She boarded. She sat by the window. The tram moved through The Hague. The city was November now — the autumn deep, the trees bare, the light low and gray, the Dutch November the grayest of the gray months, the gray the color of the season and the color of the sky and the color of the North Sea and the color of the city.

She arrived at the ICC. She showed her badge. She walked through the lobby. She walked the corridor. She entered the booth. The door clicked.

She sat in the left chair. Kwesi was already there — seated in the right chair, headphones around his neck, his expression the particular expression of a young interpreter at a significant proceeding, the expression a mixture of alertness and gravity, the alertness professional, the gravity the gravity of the occasion.

Through the glass, the courtroom was filling. The filling was different from the daily filling of the trial's sessions — the daily filling was routine, the courtroom populating itself with the regularity of a train station, the people arriving in their usual order, the prosecution first, then the defense, then the gallery, the order the habit of seven months. Today the filling was charged, was electric, the particular energy of a courtroom awaiting a verdict, the energy visible in the postures of the people, in the way they sat, in the way they looked at the judges' bench, the bench still empty, the emptiness about to end, the ending the verdict.

The gallery was full. Every seat occupied. The family members were there — the woman in the green dress, seated in her usual seat in the second row, wearing her headphones, the headphones already on, the headphones ready. Other family members. Other faces. The faces from the DRC, the faces that had traveled from Kinshasa and from the villages and from the camps, the faces that had watched the trial and that would now hear its conclusion.

Journalists. More journalists than usual — the verdict a news event, the verdict the conclusion of a trial that had attracted international attention, the attention the attention that international criminal justice attracted, the attention intermittent and selective but present, the media covering the verdict the way the media covered all verdicts, with the particular intensity of conclusion, of resolution, of the story's ending.

Diplomats. Legal observers. Law students. The courtroom full.

The prosecution team. Devaux at the table, her papers arranged, her posture erect, the posture of a lawyer awaiting a verdict she had spent three years pursuing. The defense team. Laporte beside his client's empty dock, the dock about to be filled.

Mukiza entered. The side door. The security officers. The dark gray suit. The white shirt. The burgundy tie. The walk — military, measured, the walk of a man who had walked into this courtroom for seven months and who was walking into it for the last time, the last time the walk would be the walk of the accused, the walk about to become the walk of the convicted or the walk of the acquitted, the walk about to be transformed by the verdict.

He sat. He put on his headphones. He selected the French channel. He looked at the judges' bench. The bench was still empty.

Amara put on her headphones. She adjusted them — the cups against the ears, the seal that blocked ambient sound, the sound of the courtroom reduced to the sound of the audio feed, the audio feed carrying the silence of the courtroom, the silence the pre-verdict silence, the silence heavy with anticipation, heavy with the weight of seven months compressed into the minutes before the judges entered.

The judges entered. The courtroom rose. Judge Okonjo in the center, Judge Herrera to his left, Judge Tanaka to his right. Three judges. Three robes. Three faces that revealed nothing, the faces judicial, the faces the faces of people trained to withhold their conclusions until the conclusions were formally delivered, the withholding a professional discipline, the discipline the judicial equivalent of the interpreter's neutrality.

The courtroom sat. Judge Okonjo adjusted his microphone. The sound of the adjustment entered Amara's headphones. The sound was familiar — the same small scrape, the same click, the same sound she had heard at the beginning of the trial, seven months ago, in March, when the courtroom was new and the testimony was ahead and the verdict was a distant eventuality.

Now the eventuality was here.

Judge Okonjo spoke. He spoke in English. He spoke slowly, deliberately, the pace the pace of a pronouncement, the pronouncement the court's most formal act, the act requiring a pace that conveyed the gravity, the gravity communicated through the slowness, the slowness the verbal equivalent of the processional, the judge's words processing through the air the way the judges had processed through the courtroom.

He said: "In the case of the Prosecutor versus Jean-Pierre Mukiza, Case Number ICC-01/04-02/23, the Trial Chamber has reached its verdict."

Amara pressed the microphone button. The red light. But the judge was speaking English, and Amara's channel was English, and so she waited. She waited with the microphone live, the waiting the readiness, the readiness the last time she would be ready for this trial, the last time she would sit in this booth with this microphone live and this trial's proceedings in her headphones.

Judge Okonjo described the deliberation. He described the process — the three judges reviewing the evidence, discussing the testimony, applying the law. He described the standard — proof beyond reasonable doubt. He described the charges — the four counts, the four articles. The description was procedural, the procedure the frame around the verdict, the frame required before the painting was revealed.

Then he read the findings.

Count One. Crimes against humanity, murder. The judge switched to French for the formal pronouncement — the French the language of the court's legal tradition, the French carrying the particular weight of the legal formulation, the formulation ancient, the formulation the same formulation used in French courts for centuries, the formulation the language of law.

He said: "Coupable."

Guilty.

Amara translated. She heard the French word in her headphones and she spoke the English word into her microphone and the English word entered the headphones of the English channel and the English word was "guilty" and the word was one word, six letters, two syllables, the word small, the word ordinary, the word used in courtrooms around the world in languages around the world, the word the most common word in criminal law and the most consequential word in criminal law, the word that changed the accused from accused to convicted, that changed the presumption from innocent to guilty, that changed the man in the dock from a man who might not have done it to a man who did.

Amara translated "guilty" and the translation was the same act she had performed thousands of times — the hearing, the converting, the speaking, the crossing of the bridge. But the crossing was different because the word was different. The word "guilty" carried the seven months. The word carried the fourteen witnesses. The word carried the three sentences from the church and the five-minute pause and the untranslatable word and the forty minutes in the ditch and the prayer and the boy and the clearing and the bodies and the burning and the camp and the plastic sheet and the maize flour. The word carried all of it because the word was the court's conclusion about all of it, the court saying: we heard the testimony, we weighed the evidence, we applied the law, and our conclusion is this word, this single word, guilty, coupable, the word the verdict, the verdict the conclusion, the conclusion the translation of seven months of testimony into one word.

Count Two. Crimes against humanity, extermination. Coupable. Guilty. Amara translated.

Count Three. Crimes against humanity, persecution. Coupable. Guilty. Amara translated.

Count Four. War crimes, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population. Coupable. Guilty. Amara translated.

Four counts. Four guilties. Four translations. Four crossings of the bridge.

Mukiza heard the verdict through his headphones. He heard it in French — not Amara's English but the French of the judge and the French of the relay, the French that entered his ears through the headphones, the French that told him in the language he understood that the court had found him guilty on all counts, that the court had determined that he had ordered the attacks on the villages of Kisangani Province, that the court had concluded that his orders had produced the deaths of three hundred and forty people and the suffering of the survivors.

His face. Amara watched his face through the glass. She watched for the change — the change that the verdict might produce, the change from composed to something else, from arranged to unarranged, from the face of the accused to the face of the convicted. She watched.

His face did not change. His composure held. The composure that had held for seven months held for the verdict. The hands in his lap did not move. The eyes directed at the judges' bench did not change their direction. The body in the dock did not shift, did not contract, did not exhibit the physical reaction that the verdict might have been expected to produce. The composure was complete.

Or the composure was a performance. Amara could not know. The glass between them — the one-way glass, the glass that let her see him and prevented him from seeing her — did not transmit the interior. The glass transmitted the surface, the arranged face, the composed body. The interior was behind the face, behind the composure, behind the performance, the interior the space that the glass could not reach, the space that the translation could not reach, the interior the territory of the untranslatable, the territory that existed inside every person in the courtroom, the territory where the verdict was received not as a legal pronouncement but as a personal event, as the specific and individual experience of hearing the word that changed everything.

The gallery reacted. The reaction was visible — movement, sound, the particular redistribution of bodies that accompanied emotional response. The family members moved — leaning forward, reaching for each other, the reaching the body's response to the verdict, the body seeking connection in the moment of the hearing. Some wept. The weeping was audible in Amara's headphones — the headphones picking up the gallery's sound, the sound the ambient sound of the courtroom, the courtroom's audio system capturing not just the judge's voice but the gallery's response, the response part of the proceeding, the response part of the record.

Amara translated: "The gallery is reacting emotionally."

She spoke the sentence into her microphone. The sentence was the protocol's sentence — the protocol requiring that significant non-verbal events be translated, the gallery's reaction a significant non-verbal event, the reaction part of the record. The sentence was accurate. The sentence described what was visible and audible. The sentence was sufficient for the court's purposes.

The sentence did not translate Amara's reaction.

The protocol did not require it. The protocol required the translation of the courtroom's events, not the interpreter's events. The interpreter was not part of the courtroom. The interpreter was behind the glass. The interpreter's reaction was not a non-verbal event in the courtroom but a non-verbal event in the booth, and the booth was not the courtroom, and the booth's events were not part of the record.

And Amara's reaction was — what was it. She sat in the booth and she tried to name it, tried to translate her own interior into the language of her own understanding, tried to find the word. The word was not in English. The word was not in French. The word was not in Twi or Ewe or Hausa or Lingala or Dutch. The word was not in any of her seven languages.

Her reaction was in the eighth language. The language that had no words. The language that existed between the seven, the language that the booth created in the person who sat in it, the silent language of the translator who had carried the words and set them down and carried them still. The eighth language was the language of the between, the language of the space where the translation happened, the language that was not a language but a condition, a state, a way of being that the booth produced and that the booth contained and that the booth's silence held.

In the eighth language, the verdict was not guilty or not guilty. In the eighth language, the verdict was the weight setting down, the bridge completing its final crossing, the sponge receiving the last word, the last translation, the last carrying. In the eighth language, the verdict was the end of the trial and the beginning of the after-trial, and the after-trial was the space where the testimony would continue to live, not in the courtroom and not in the booth but in the body, in the sponge, in the permanent residue that Marcus had described, the residue that could not be squeezed out, the residue that was the cost.

Judge Okonjo concluded the pronouncement. He announced that sentencing would be scheduled for a later date. He thanked the prosecution and the defense. He thanked the witnesses. He thanked the court staff. He did not mention the interpreters — the interpreters were not mentioned because the interpreters were invisible, were the infrastructure, were the technology, were the bridge that the court walked across without seeing.

The courtroom rose. The judges departed. Mukiza was escorted from the dock — escorted through the side door, through the corridor, to the detention unit, the escort the same escort as always but the destination now different, the destination no longer the detention of the accused but the detention of the convicted, the status changed by the word, by the single word, by coupable, by guilty.

The gallery remained. The family members remained in their seats. Some were standing, embracing. Some were sitting, still. Some were weeping. The woman in the green dress was sitting in her seat, her headphones still on, her hands in her lap, her face still, the stillness the stillness of a person who had heard the thing she came to hear and who was absorbing the hearing, the hearing settling into her body the way the testimony had settled into Amara's body, the settling slow, deep, the settling the body's process for integrating significant information.

Amara turned off her microphone. She removed her headphones. She placed them on the hooks. She sat in the booth.

The booth was quiet. The courtroom below was emptying. The trial was over.

She sat in the quiet. She sat with the eighth language. She sat with the verdict — guilty, coupable, the word in two languages and in the eighth language that was not a language. She sat with the weight and the carrying and the sponge and the window and the fiction and the truth and the seven months and the fourteen witnesses and the word for the grief of remaining and the three sentences and the five-minute pause and all of it, all of it, sitting in the booth, sitting in the silence, the silence the eighth language, the eighth language the translator's silence.

The trial was over. The translation was over. The bridge had carried its last word.

Amara sat in the booth. The verdict was the word. The word was guilty. The word was in every language and in the language that had no words. The word was the end.

And the silence that followed the word — the silence after the verdict, the silence after the last translation, the silence that was not empty but full, the silence that held everything the seven months had carried — the silence was hers. The silence was the translator's.

The silence was the cost of the bridge. The silence was the price of the carrying. The silence was the eighth language.

And the eighth language was silent.