After

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 31: After

The trial was over. The word "over" was English, was simple, was a word that meant ended, completed, finished, the word carrying the finality that the occasion required, the finality of a legal proceeding that had concluded with a verdict and that would conclude further with a sentencing and that would then enter the archive, the permanent record, the institutional memory. The trial was over. The word applied to the proceeding. The word did not apply to Amara.

She left the building on the day of the verdict at 2:17 PM. She left through the lobby with its flags and its marble. She walked past the security desk. She exited through the glass doors. She stood in the November air. The air was cold. The sky was gray. The gray was the Dutch gray, the November gray, the gray that was not absence but presence, the gray that was the sky's own color, the color the sky wore when the sun was behind the clouds and the clouds were low and the light was diffuse and the world below the clouds was illuminated evenly, without shadow, without contrast, the gray the color of equality, every surface equally lit, no surface favored.

She did not go home. She did not take the tram. She walked. She walked through The Hague, through the streets she had walked for twelve years, the streets she knew the way she knew her languages — through immersion, through repetition, through the body's daily passage through the same spaces until the spaces were internal, until the map of the city was also a map of the body's memory, the corners and intersections and tram stops and shopfronts all carrying the particular associations that twelve years of daily passage produced.

She walked past the Peace Palace. The Palace was the other international court — the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, the court that adjudicated disputes between states rather than crimes by individuals. The Palace was a building from 1913, ornate, grand, the architecture of a time when international law was young and optimistic and the buildings that housed it expressed the optimism in stone and stained glass. The Palace was beautiful in the way that the ICC was not — the ICC was functional, modern, the architecture of efficiency rather than aspiration, the building designed for work rather than for inspiration. The two buildings stood in the same city, the two courts operating in the same legal tradition, the two architectures expressing different moments in the tradition's history — the early moment of hope and the later moment of necessity.

She walked past the Palace and she thought about law and she thought about language and she thought about the particular relationship between the two, the relationship that was her profession, the relationship that her work embodied. Law was language. Law was words arranged in sentences arranged in arguments arranged in judgments, the entire edifice of justice built from language, the language the material, the way stone was the material of the Peace Palace and concrete was the material of the ICC. Without language, law did not exist. Without translation, international law did not exist — the international requiring the translated, the translated the bridge between the national languages that the international brought together.

She walked south, toward Scheveningen. She walked through the residential streets — the neat houses, the neat gardens, the Dutch orderliness that she had lived among for twelve years and that she admired without belonging to, the admiration the admiration of an outsider, the outsider's appreciation for a quality she could see but could not share, the orderliness not hers, her origins Ghanaian, her origins a different kind of order, the order of Accra, the order of the market and the street and the family compound, the order social rather than spatial, the order maintained by relationships rather than by facades.

She reached the boulevard. She walked along the boulevard, past the restaurants and hotels that lined the Scheveningen beachfront, the establishments closed for the season or open with reduced hours, the off-season the time of quiet, the quiet the coast's winter condition. She descended the stairs to the beach.

The beach was empty. The November beach, late afternoon, the light already fading, the sun setting behind the clouds in the west, the setting invisible but its effects visible — the light diminishing, the gray deepening, the world growing darker in the increments that northern latitude imposed, the darkness arriving at four o'clock in November, the early darkness the season's particular weight.

She walked to the water line. She stood at the edge of the sea. The waves arrived at her feet — the same waves, the same rhythm, the arriving and the retreating that she had run alongside for twelve years, the rhythm constant, the rhythm predating her and outlasting her and continuing while she stood, the rhythm the sea's translation, the moon's gravity translated into the ocean's motion, the translation continuous, the translation not requiring a booth or headphones or a microphone, the translation the planet's translation, the translation of force into form.

She stood at the water line and she thought about the trial. She thought about it the way she thought about a language she had learned — as a structure, an architecture, a thing that had been built in her mind over time and that now existed there as a permanent addition. The trial was in her. The trial was in the sponge. The trial was in the body that stood at the water line and that had carried the testimony for seven months and that would carry the testimony for the rest of its life, the rest of its life the duration of the permanent residue, the residue Marcus had described, the residue that remained after the sponge was squeezed, the residue the cost, the cost the price of the bridge.

She thought about the fourteen witnesses. She did not think about them as Witness 112, Witness 155, Witness 247 — the numbers the court's anonymity, the anonymity the protection. She thought about them as bodies. The tall, thin man who had hidden in the reeds with his daughter. The small woman in the blue head wrap who had hidden in the drainage ditch behind the church. The others — the farmer who described the burning, the woman who described the displacement, the boy (now a young man) who described being forced to watch, the elder who described the village before the attack, the aid worker who described the camp, each witness a body that had traveled to The Hague and sat in the witness box and spoken into the microphone and described what had happened, each body carrying its particular testimony, its particular grief, its particular relationship to the violence that the trial adjudicated.

She thought about their voices. The voices she had heard through the headphones — the Lingala voices, the Swahili voices, the French voices, each voice distinct, each voice carrying its own particular quality, the quality not translatable but audible, the quality the thing that made each voice a specific voice rather than a generic voice, the specificity the human quality, the quality that the translation preserved imperfectly and that the sponge preserved completely, the sponge holding the voices the way a recording held music, the holding permanent, the permanence the cost.

She thought about Witness 247. She thought about the small woman in the blue head wrap. She thought about the voice — the quiet voice, the voice that came from deep inside the body, the voice that had described the village and the attack and the hiding and the church and the grief. She thought about the untranslatable word — the word for the grief of remaining, the word that existed in Lingala and did not exist in English, the word that Amara had defined in twenty-nine words and that the court had accepted and that the record contained and that the sponge held.

She thought about the word and she thought that the word applied to her too — not the specific word, not the specific grief of a mother who had lost a child to violence and who continued to live in the place where the violence occurred. But the structure of the word, the architecture of the word — the remaining, the staying, the continuing to inhabit a space that was marked by what had happened in it. The booth was Amara's space. The booth was marked by the testimony that had occurred in it. And Amara remained in the booth — would remain, would return, would continue to inhabit the space and perform the work and carry the weight, the remaining her choice, the choice renewed every day she entered the building and walked the corridor and opened the door and sat in the left chair.

She thought about remaining. She thought about whether remaining was a choice or a condition. She thought about Marcus, who had stopped remaining, who had left, who had squeezed the sponge and departed for Amsterdam and the shampoo bottles. Marcus's leaving was a choice. Amara's remaining was — what? A choice? An inability to leave? A need for the work? A recognition that the work was the thing she was built for, the seven languages and the between and the booth and the bridge all constituting a purpose that she could not abandon because the purpose was not separate from her, the purpose was her, the way the seven languages were her?

She did not know. She stood at the water line and she did not know whether her remaining was a choice or a condition, and the not-knowing was the honest answer, the answer that did not translate the complex into the simple, the answer that respected the complexity, the complexity the actual state of her interior, the interior complex, the complexity the seven languages and the thirty-two trials and the sponge and the window and the fiction and the truth all coexisting in the same body, the same mind, the same woman standing at the edge of the North Sea on a November evening.

The water came to her feet. She was wearing shoes — she had not changed from her work clothes, had not gone to her flat, had walked directly from the ICC to the beach, the walking a need, the beach a destination, the destination the one place where the silence was not the silence of the booth or the silence of the flat but the silence of the sea, the sea's silence not empty, the sea's silence full of the sound of the waves, the sound the sea's language, the language the one language Amara did not speak, the language that did not require translation.

The water soaked her shoes. The soaking was a sensation — the cold, the wet, the particular shock of cold water on warm feet through leather, the shock physical, immediate, the body registering the sensation the way the body registered all sensations, directly, without the mediation of language, without the intermediary of translation, the sensation itself, unmediated, the sensation the thing that the testimony could never fully convey, the testimony always a translation of sensation into language, the translation always incomplete, the incompleteness the gap between the event and the record.

She stood in the water. She stood with wet shoes and cold feet and the November wind on her face and the gray sea before her and the gray sky above her and The Hague behind her and the ICC behind The Hague and the booth behind the ICC and the trial behind the booth and the testimony behind the trial and the witnesses behind the testimony and the village behind the witnesses and the violence behind the village and the order behind the violence and Mukiza behind the order and the verdict behind Mukiza and the word — guilty, coupable — behind the verdict.

Behind everything, the silence. The translator's silence. The silence that held everything she had translated and everything she had not translated and everything the translation had carried and everything the translation could not carry. The silence that was the cost of the bridge and the space where the bridge-builder lived and the sound of the eighth language, the language without words.

The waves came and retreated and came again. The rhythm was the rhythm of testimony — the witness speaks, the interpreter translates, the silence follows, the witness speaks again. The rhythm was in her. The rhythm was in her body. The rhythm had been placed in her body by seven months of translation, by twelve years of translation, by the daily passage of testimony through her body from the headphones to the microphone, the passage a rhythm, the rhythm inscribed, the inscription permanent.

The rhythm would not end because the trial ended. The rhythm would be there tomorrow. The rhythm would be there the day after. The rhythm would be there when she returned to the ICC for the next trial, the next case, the next accused, the next witnesses, the next languages, the next testimony. The rhythm was the work's rhythm, and the work would continue, and the continuation was the remaining, and the remaining was Amara's condition.

She stood at the water line. The evening darkened. The sea was gray. The gray was the same gray.

She thought about the morning. She thought about tomorrow morning — the alarm at 5:30, the rising, the dressing, the running. The running would be on this beach, on this sand, at this water line. The running would be in the silence between the languages. The running would be the rest from the work, the rest that the body needed, the rest that the sponge needed.

But the rest would be temporary. The rest was always temporary. The rest was the rotation, the thirty-minute rotation, the rotation that gave the interpreter time to recover before the next session, the recovery partial, the recovery sufficient for the continuation, the continuation the work.

She would continue. She would return to the booth. She would put on the headphones. She would press the button. She would translate. The bridge would open. The words would cross. The testimony would begin again.

And between the words — between the witness's language and the court's language, between the horror and the record, between the speaking and the hearing — there would be Amara. Carrying. Translating. Absorbing. Silent.

She stood at the water line until the light was gone. She stood until the sea was not gray but black, the black the sea's night color, the color the sea wore when the sun was gone and the moon was behind clouds and the only light was the distant light of The Hague's streetlamps reflecting off the low clouds, the light diffuse, faint, the light the city's glow.

She turned from the sea. She walked across the beach in the dark. She climbed the stairs to the boulevard. She walked to her flat. She climbed the stairs. She entered. She stood in the doorway.

The flat was dark. The flat was quiet. The flat was the space where Amara lived when she was not in the booth, the space of the between, the space of the seven languages and the one silence.

She turned on a light. The light was warm. The warmth was artificial, electrical, the warmth of a bulb in a lamp in a room in a flat in a building in a city in a country where a woman lived who spoke seven languages and who had translated a trial and who stood in her flat with wet shoes and the North Sea's cold in her feet and the verdict in her body and the silence in her mouth.

She removed her shoes. She placed them by the door. She walked to the kitchen. She made tea. Rooibos. The taste of South Africa. The taste of neither home nor work but between. The taste of the between.

She drank the tea. She stood at the kitchen counter. She looked out the window at the dark street. The tram passed, lit from within. The passengers inside, going home.

The trial was over. The after had begun. The after was the rest of her life, or the rest of her life until the next trial, the next trial the continuation, the continuation the work, the work the bridge, the bridge the silence, the silence hers.

She finished the tea. She washed the cup. She turned off the light. She went to bed.

She lay in the dark. She listened to the North Sea. The sea was audible — faintly, through the window, the sound of the waves arriving and retreating, arriving and retreating, the rhythm.

The rhythm was the rhythm of testimony. The rhythm was the rhythm of translation. The rhythm was the rhythm of the bridge.

The rhythm was in her now. The rhythm would be there tomorrow.

She closed her eyes. She slept. She did not dream. Or if she dreamed, she dreamed in the eighth language, the language without words, the language of the silence, the language of the between.

The after. The trial over. The translator silent. The silence full.

The rhythm continuing.