The Morning Run

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 4: The Morning Run

She woke at 5:30 without an alarm. The body knew the time. Twelve years of waking at 5:30 had inscribed the time into her circadian architecture, the way the tides were inscribed into the sea — not chosen but enacted, the rhythm a property of the system rather than a decision imposed upon it. She lay in bed for three minutes. She lay in the dark of the Dutch morning — March dark, the sun not yet arrived, the light outside the window the particular pre-dawn gray of northern Europe, a gray that was neither night nor day but the interval between them, the transition time, the time that existed in the space between states, the way she existed in the space between languages.

She rose. She dressed in running clothes — leggings, a long-sleeved technical shirt, a wind-resistant jacket, shoes. The shoes were important. She ran on sand, and sand required a specific sole — flexible, with traction but not too much traction, because too much traction in sand meant the foot gripped rather than glided and the gripping consumed energy that the gliding preserved. She had learned this through years of running on the beach at Scheveningen, years of trial and error with different shoes, different strides, different relationships between her body and the surface it moved across, and the learning was the kind of learning that did not translate into instruction, that could not be taught in words but only in repetition, the body discovering through practice what the mind could not discover through theory.

She left the flat. The stairs, the door, the street. Scheveningen in the early morning was quiet — a few dog walkers, a delivery truck, the sound of the tram tracks humming with the current that powered the first trams of the day. She walked two blocks to the boulevard that ran along the beach, the Strandweg, a broad promenade that separated the residential streets from the sand, the built world from the natural world, the human architecture from the architecture of the sea.

She descended the stairs from the boulevard to the beach. The stairs were concrete, worn smooth by decades of feet — bathers in summer, walkers in autumn, runners like Amara in winter and spring, the annual cycle of beach users leaving their traces on the stairs in the form of wear, the concrete slightly concave where thousands of feet had landed, the surface shaped by use the way language was shaped by use, the words worn smooth by the mouths that spoke them, the meanings slightly concave where millions of usages had pressed.

The beach. The sand was firm near the water line — compressed by the tides, wet, the color of dark honey. Farther from the water, the sand was loose, dry, the color of unbleached linen. Amara ran at the water line, where the sand was firm, where the footing was stable, where the waves came to her left in their endless repetition, arriving and retreating, arriving and retreating, the rhythm that predated human language and that would continue after human language had ceased, the rhythm of the planet's water pulled by the moon's gravity, a rhythm that was translation in its most elemental form — the moon's gravitational pull translated into the ocean's motion, the abstract force converted into visible wave, the conversion constant and reliable and conducted without the intermediary of human consciousness.

She ran north. The beach stretched ahead of her in a long, gentle curve — Scheveningen to the north, Kijkduin to the south, the coastline of the Netherlands, a coastline that the Dutch had built and rebuilt and fortified against the sea for centuries, the relationship between the Dutch and the North Sea one of engineering and vigilance, the sea always pressing, the Dutch always resisting, the resistance taking the form of dunes and dikes and the particular infrastructure of coastal defense that was visible even here, even on the beach at dawn, in the form of concrete groynes extending into the water at regular intervals, the groynes breaking the waves, managing the sand, controlling the coastline the way the ICC's protocols controlled the courtroom — through structure, through procedure, through the application of human design to natural forces.

She ran. The running was the purpose. Not the beach, not the sea, not the dawn light — these were the setting, but the running was the purpose, because running was the thing Amara did that did not require language. Running was the body in motion, the feet striking the sand, the arms swinging, the breath entering and exiting the lungs in a rhythm that was not linguistic, that was not tonal, that was not gendered or conjugated or declined. The breath was the breath. The heartbeat was the heartbeat. The muscles contracting and extending were muscles contracting and extending, and the contraction and extension were not in Twi or English or French or any of her seven languages but in the language of the body, which was not a language at all but a system, a mechanism, a set of processes that operated below and beyond and without language, the body knowing how to run the way the body knew how to digest food or regulate temperature — automatically, silently, without the intervention of the mind that spent its days translating.

The silence. This was what she ran for. The silence between the languages, the silence that existed when the mind was occupied with the body's work and the body's work did not require words. In the booth, the mind was never silent — the mind was always translating, always listening, always converting, always moving between languages, the movement continuous and demanding and exhausting in the particular way that sustained mental effort was exhausting, an exhaustion that was not physical but that manifested physically, in the tension of the jaw, the tightness of the shoulders, the headache that sometimes arrived at the end of a long session, the body absorbing the mind's fatigue the way the sponge absorbed water, the metaphor that Marcus used and that Amara resisted and that she could not escape because the metaphor was accurate.

On the beach, running, the mind was quiet. Not empty — the mind was never empty, could never be empty, the way a room was never empty because even an empty room contained air — but quiet, the thoughts subdued, the languages resting, the seven architectures dormant while the body did its work. Amara ran and the sound was the sound of her breathing and the sound of her feet on the sand and the sound of the waves and the sound of the wind, and these sounds were not language, were not testimony, were not the voice of a witness describing what happened in a village in eastern Congo, were not the voice of a prosecutor describing what the evidence showed, were not the voice of a judge asking the interpreter to repeat the translation, were not any of the voices that filled her headphones for six or seven hours a day and that she carried in her body after the headphones were removed, the voices lingering the way a song lingered after the music stopped, the melody present even in the silence, especially in the silence.

She ran past the Kurhaus, the grand hotel at the center of Scheveningen's beach, a building from the nineteenth century, ornate, white, the kind of building that European architects had built when Europe believed in grandeur, in the physical expression of confidence, in buildings that announced themselves to the landscape rather than accommodating themselves to it. The Kurhaus was closed at this hour — the hotel sleeping, the restaurants dark, the terrace where summer tourists would sit with their beers and their sunscreen empty, the chairs stacked, the umbrellas furled. The building in its early-morning emptiness was like the courtroom in its evening emptiness — a space designed for human activity, temporarily without humans, the design visible in the absence of its function.

She ran past the pier, which extended into the sea like a sentence that did not end, a long structure of concrete and steel that reached into the water and stopped, and the stopping was the pier's boundary, the limit of its reach, and beyond the limit was the sea, which had no boundaries, or whose boundaries were the coasts of other countries — England across the water, invisible but present, the way other languages were present in the mind even when they were not being spoken, the English coast existing beyond the North Sea the way English existed beyond Twi, another shore, another architecture, reachable but separate.

She ran and she thought about Mukiza's hands. She had watched his hands in the courtroom — the fingers adjusting the headphones, the hands resting on the dock's barrier, the particular stillness of the hands, which was the stillness of a man who was aware that he was being watched and who had arranged his body accordingly. The hands had been large. The fingers thick. She thought about what those hands had done, or what those hands had ordered, because the charges alleged that Mukiza had given the orders, had commanded the attacks, had directed the forces that had entered the villages and killed three hundred and forty people, and the directing was done with the voice, with the radio, with the commands spoken in French or Lingala or Swahili that traveled through the radio frequencies to the fighters who received them and acted upon them, and the acting upon was the violence, and the violence was what the witnesses would describe, and the description was what Amara would translate.

She stopped thinking about Mukiza's hands. She stopped because the thinking was a form of work, a form of the booth's labor extending beyond the booth, the way a workday extended beyond the office for people whose work was mental, whose tools were thoughts, whose product was invisible. She stopped thinking about his hands and she returned her attention to the running, to the feet on the sand, to the breath, to the North Sea, which was gray, always gray, the gray of the Dutch coast, the gray that was not depressing but neutral, the gray that was the sea's resting color, the color the sea wore when it was not being illuminated by the sun or darkened by a storm, the default color, the way the default color of the courtroom was the pale wood of the judges' bench and the gray carpet of the floor and the dark suits of the lawyers, a color palette of neutrality, of institutional restraint, of the particular aesthetic that international justice had chosen for itself.

The sky began to lighten. The horizon — the line where the sea met the sky — became visible, a faint differentiation between two shades of gray, the darker gray of the water and the lighter gray of the sky, and the differentiation was the dawn, the slow arrival of light that in the Netherlands in March was gradual and reluctant, the sun rising not in a burst but in an incremental revelation, the light increasing in degrees, the way understanding increased in degrees during a trial, the evidence accumulating, the testimony building, the picture clarifying not in a single moment of revelation but in a long and slow and sometimes painful process of accretion.

She turned. She ran south now, back toward her flat, the return leg of the run, the wind at her back instead of in her face, the running slightly easier with the wind pushing rather than resisting, and the ease was physical, measurable in the reduced effort of each stride, and the reduced effort freed a portion of her attention, and the freed attention drifted, as it always drifted on the return leg, toward the day ahead.

She would shower. She would dress. She would eat breakfast — fruit, yogurt, toast, the breakfast she had eaten for twelve years in The Hague, a breakfast that was neither Ghanaian nor Dutch but the particular breakfast of a person living between cultures, a person who had adopted some of the new country's habits (yogurt, dark bread) while retaining some of the old country's habits (fruit, tea rather than coffee) and who had blended them into a routine that was hers alone, a routine that did not belong to any culture but to her, to the individual life she had constructed in the space between her origins and her residence.

She would take the tram. She would arrive at the ICC. She would walk the corridor. She would enter the booth. She would put on the headphones. She would press the microphone button. She would translate.

The translation today would be procedural — the prosecution outlining its case, presenting its evidence strategy, describing the witnesses it intended to call and the order in which it intended to call them. The procedural sessions were easier than the testimony sessions. The language was legal — precise, formal, structured, the sentences organized in the particular syntax of legal argument, which was the syntax of logic, of if-then, of premise and conclusion, and the syntax was predictable and the predictability made the translation manageable, the interpreter able to anticipate the direction of a sentence before the sentence was complete, the way a driver on a familiar road anticipated the turns.

But the testimony would come. The witnesses would be called. The survivors would sit in the witness box and speak into the microphone and describe what had happened in their villages in Kisangani Province, and the description would be in Lingala or Swahili or French, and the description would not be in legal syntax but in the syntax of memory, the syntax of trauma, the syntax of a person trying to convert experience into language, the conversion always incomplete, always approximate, the way a translation was always approximate — and then Amara would translate the approximation, would convert the approximate conversion into English, and the double approximation would be the court's record, the double approximation would be the basis for judgment, the double approximation would be the best the court could do, and the best was good enough, had to be good enough, because the alternative to the approximate was the silent, and the silent was not justice.

She reached the stairs. She climbed from the beach to the boulevard. Her breathing was heavy — the run had been six miles, longer than usual, the body having wanted the extra distance, the extra silence, the extra time in the space between languages. She stood on the boulevard and looked at the sea. The sea was gray. The sky was lighter now — the dawn progressing, the sun approaching the horizon, not yet visible but its effects visible, the light spreading from the east, the clouds underlit in a faint pink that would deepen and then fade as the sun rose above the clouds and the day's gray settled in.

She looked at the sea and she thought about translation. Not translation as her profession but translation as a condition, as the fundamental condition of human communication, the condition of trying to convey what one mind contained to another mind, the effort always incomplete because the minds were different and the languages were different and the experiences that the languages tried to convey were different, and the difference was not a failure but a fact, a fact that the ICC's work made visible, that the booth made visible, that the headphones made audible — the fact that when a witness spoke in Lingala about a massacre in eastern Congo and an interpreter translated those words into English for judges from Nigeria and Colombia and Japan, the translation was a bridge and the bridge was necessary and the bridge worked and the bridge also, inevitably, lost something in the crossing, something that could not be measured but that could be felt, something that lived in the original language the way the salt lived in the sea — dissolved, invisible, but present in every drop.

She turned from the sea. She walked to her flat. She climbed the stairs. She entered. She showered. The water was hot and the hot water was the second necessity of her mornings, after the run — the run for the silence, the shower for the warmth, the two necessities bookending the transition from sleep to work, from the private body to the public voice, from Amara Osei who lived alone in a flat in Scheveningen to the English-channel interpreter at the International Criminal Court who sat behind one-way glass and translated the words of witnesses and lawyers and judges into the language the court required.

She dressed. Dark trousers, a blouse, flat shoes. The clothes were professional but not formal — the booth was not visible to the courtroom, and the interpreters' dress code was less strict than the lawyers' or the judges', but Amara dressed professionally because professionalism was a form of preparation, a form of the self arranging itself for the work, the way Mukiza had arranged his face for the courtroom. The clothes were armor, or if not armor then uniform, the outfit that signaled to her body that the day's work was beginning, that the languages would be activated, that the seven architectures would be needed, that the mind would be required to perform the particular labor of simultaneous interpretation for six or seven hours, and the labor was demanding, and the demand required preparation, and the preparation began with the clothes.

She ate breakfast. Fruit — a mango, which she bought from the Indonesian market on Keizerstraat because the Indonesian market had the best mangoes in The Hague, mangoes that were almost as good as the mangoes in Accra, almost but not quite, the not-quite a distance she tasted in every bite, the distance between The Hague and Accra, between the Dutch coast and the Ghanaian coast, between the life she lived and the life she had left. Yogurt. Toast with butter. Rooibos tea. She ate standing at the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the street below, where the morning traffic was beginning — cars, cyclists, the tram passing on its tracks, the daily motion of a Dutch city waking.

She washed the dishes. She packed her satchel — thermos, notebook, pens, laminated witness list. She checked her phone. No messages. No messages was normal. She did not receive many messages because she did not maintain many relationships, not because she was unfriendly but because the work consumed the portion of her attention that relationships required, the work leaving insufficient residue for the daily maintenance of connection — the texts, the calls, the dinners, the small and regular exchanges that kept relationships alive. She had colleagues. She had Marcus. She had acquaintances in the Ghanaian community in The Hague, whom she saw occasionally, at events, at gatherings organized by the Ghanaian embassy, events where she spoke Twi and the Twi was a relief, the mother tongue a rest from the professional languages, the way the beach was a rest from the booth.

She left the flat. She walked to the tram stop. She waited. The tram arrived. She boarded. She sat by the window. The tram moved through The Hague, and Amara looked out the window at the city passing, the city that was not her city but that was her city, the city she had lived in for twelve years, the city where she had learned to run on sand and to buy mangoes from the Indonesian market and to translate testimony from survivors of massacres in eastern Congo, the city where she was invisible and essential, the city where her voice filled the headphones of the court and her face was seen by no one, the city of The Hague, the city of international justice, the city where the booth waited.

The tram stopped. She stepped off. She walked to the ICC. She showed her badge to the security officer at the entrance. She walked through the lobby with its flags and its marble and its particular institutional grandeur. She walked the corridor. She passed the cafeteria, where early arrivals were drinking coffee. She passed the other interpretation booths. She reached her booth — Booth 3, English. She opened the door. She entered. The door clicked behind her.

She was in the booth. The run was over. The silence was over. The seven languages were activating. The microphone was waiting. The headphones were on their hooks. The courtroom below was empty but would fill. The trial of Colonel Jean-Pierre Mukiza would continue. The witnesses would speak. The interpreter would translate. The bridge would open.

Amara sat in the left chair. She poured rooibos tea from her thermos into the thermos cap. She drank. She waited. She waited in the particular way she had learned to wait over twelve years — actively, attentively, the waiting not passive but preparatory, the mind arranging itself for the work the way she had arranged her body for the run, the preparation invisible but essential, the readiness a state that required effort to achieve and effort to maintain.

The courtroom began to fill. Through the glass, she watched. The lawyers, the clerks, the gallery. The judges. The accused.

She put on her headphones. She pressed the microphone button. The red light came on.

The morning run was over. The silence was behind her. The translation was ahead.