The First Witness

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 8: The First Witness

The witness entered the courtroom through the door that witnesses used, a door on the far side of the room from the accused's entrance, the two doors designed to ensure that the witness and the accused did not encounter each other in the corridor, did not share the same threshold, the architecture of the courtroom maintaining a separation that was physical and procedural and symbolic — the witness on one side, the accused on the other, the judges between them, the interpreters above them, the geometry of justice arranged to keep the parties in their designated positions, each position carrying its own rights and its own protections and its own relationship to the microphone and the headphones and the translation that connected them all.

He was a man. The prosecution's first witness, designated Witness 112 in the court's numbering system. He was tall, thin, his body the particular thinness of a person who had been physically strong and who had lost the strength — the frame large, the bones visible, the muscle diminished, the thinness not the thinness of nature but of deprivation, of the particular history that his body carried and that his testimony would describe. He wore a white shirt, buttoned to the collar, and dark trousers, and the formality of the clothing was the formality of a man who understood that the courtroom required a certain presentation, that the testifying was an occasion, the way a church service was an occasion or a funeral was an occasion, events that demanded clothes one did not wear on ordinary days.

He sat in the witness box. The witness box was a chair and a small table and a microphone and a glass of water. The chair was the same kind of chair that everyone in the courtroom sat in — ergonomic, adjustable, the ICC's standard-issue seating, the uniformity of the chairs a democratic feature of the courtroom's design, the witness's chair the same as the judge's chair the same as the accused's chair, the bodies of the court sitting in identical comfort while the proceedings sorted them into categories of authority and vulnerability, of power and powerlessness, of judging and being judged.

He put on headphones. He selected a channel. He would hear his own translation — the translation of the court's questions, the judge's instructions, the prosecutor's questions — in the language he understood, the language that was not the language of the court but the language of the witness, the language he had brought with him from his village to this building in The Hague.

He spoke Swahili.

Amara did not translate Swahili. Swahili was not one of her seven languages. Swahili was handled by a colleague — Gabriel Mwangi, a Kenyan interpreter who worked in Booth 5, the Swahili booth, and who would translate the witness's Swahili into French, the relay language, the intermediate language that connected the witness's testimony to the other booths. Gabriel would hear the Swahili and speak it in French. Amara would hear Gabriel's French and speak it in English. The relay. The chain. The witness's words passing through two interpreters, two translations, two conversions, before arriving in the headphones of the English-speaking members of the court.

The relay was the ICC's standard procedure for languages that did not have a direct booth — that is, languages for which there was no interpreter who could translate directly into English. The court's official languages were English and French, and all translations were routed through one or both of these languages. A witness who spoke Swahili was translated into French by the Swahili booth, and the French was then translated into English by the English booth, and the English was the court's record in English, and the record was the relay's product, the output of two translations, two approximations, two crossings of the bridge.

The relay added distance. Amara knew this. Every interpreter knew this. The relay was a necessary compromise — the court could not employ interpreters for every possible language pair, could not have a Swahili-to-English interpreter and a Swahili-to-French interpreter and a Swahili-to-Arabic interpreter, the combinations too numerous, the specialization too specific. The relay solved the problem by routing everything through the two official languages, the hub-and-spoke model of interpretation, French and English as the hubs, all other languages as the spokes, the testimony traveling from spoke to hub to spoke, the journey longer than a direct route but the system manageable, sustainable, practical.

But the distance was real. Every translation was an approximation, and the relay was an approximation of an approximation. The witness's Swahili was approximated in Gabriel's French, and Gabriel's French was approximated in Amara's English, and the English that the court heard was two approximations removed from the Swahili that the witness spoke, and the two approximations accumulated, the way rounding errors accumulated in mathematical calculations — each individual rounding small, negligible, within tolerance, but the cumulative effect of multiple roundings potentially significant, potentially distorting, the final number different from the original number by a margin that was not the fault of any single rounding but the product of all the roundings together.

Amara thought about this as she waited for the testimony to begin. She thought about the relay and the distance and the approximation, and she thought about what it meant for the court that its record of this witness's testimony would be the product of two translations, two human minds, two sets of choices about equivalence and register and emphasis, the choices made in fractions of seconds, the choices invisible to the court, the choices constituting the translation that the court would treat as the testimony, the translation standing in for the original the way a photograph stood in for the scene it captured, the photograph accurate, the photograph not the scene.

Judge Okonjo addressed the witness. He spoke in English. His English entered the Swahili booth, where Gabriel translated it into Swahili for the witness's headphones. The judge welcomed the witness. He explained the procedure — the witness would be asked questions by the prosecution, then by the defense, then by the judges if they had additional questions. The witness was reminded that he was under oath, that he must tell the truth, that he could request a break at any time, that the court recognized the difficulty of the testimony and would accommodate the witness's needs.

The judge's words were formal, careful, the words of a man who had delivered this same address to dozens of witnesses over nine years on the bench and who delivered it each time with the same attention, the same care, because the formality was not routine but ritual, the ritual of the court acknowledging the witness, the court saying: we see you, we hear you, we will listen, the listening the court's promise, the promise that made the testimony possible, the promise that gave the witness a reason to speak.

The witness listened. He listened through headphones, through Gabriel's translation, the judge's English arriving in his ears as Swahili, the transformation conducted by Gabriel in Booth 5 with the same skill and the same fidelity that Amara applied in Booth 3, the skill not identical — no two interpreters were identical — but equivalent, the equivalence the court's assurance, the assurance that the witness heard what the judge said, that the judge's promise was translated, that the translation of the promise was itself a promise.

The prosecution began its examination. Claire Devaux stood. She asked the first question in French — she asked the witness to state his name for the record. But the witness's name was protected, and the court was in closed session for the identification, the gallery's screens blank, the public feed muted, the name spoken and recorded but not broadcast, the name the witness's private property, the name too dangerous to make public because public names could be traced and traced names could be harmed.

The witness said his name in Swahili. Gabriel translated the name into French. Amara translated the French into English. The name traveled through three mouths — the witness's, Gabriel's, Amara's — and the name was the same name in each mouth, because names did not translate, names were carried unchanged across languages, the one thing that survived the crossing without approximation, without adjustment, the name the fixed point in the relay, the anchor.

Devaux asked the witness to describe where he lived. The witness spoke. He spoke in Swahili, and his Swahili was the Swahili of eastern Congo, which was different from the Swahili of Kenya or Tanzania, a Congolese Swahili that had absorbed words from Lingala and French and the local languages of the region, a Swahili that carried the geography of its speakers, the particular history of Swahili in eastern Congo, where the language had arrived through trade and colonialism and the particular movements of people and languages that had shaped the region over centuries.

Gabriel translated. Amara heard Gabriel's French in her headphones — the French smooth, professional, the French of a trained interpreter, a French that carried the content of the Swahili without carrying the Swahili's texture, because texture did not survive the relay, texture was the thing that was lost in translation, the thing that linguists called "register" and that poets called "voice" and that the witness might have called, if the witness had thought in these terms, the particular way his words felt in his mouth, the particular way his Swahili moved through his body, the movement personal, individual, the way each person's handwriting was personal and individual, and the loss of the texture in the translation was the loss of the handwriting, the translation typed rather than handwritten, the content the same, the character different.

Amara translated Gabriel's French into English. She spoke into her microphone. She said: "I lived in the village of Matenda, in Kisangani Province. I was a farmer. I grew cassava and maize. I had a wife and four children."

The sentences were simple. The words were ordinary. Cassava. Maize. Wife. Children. Four. The ordinariness was the witness's gift to the court — the gift of context, the gift of the life that existed before the violence, the gift that made the violence comprehensible not as an abstraction but as a destruction, not as a crime against humanity in the abstract but as a crime against this humanity, this cassava, this maize, this wife, these four children.

Amara translated and the ordinary words settled in her — settled alongside the other ordinary words she had translated over twelve years, the ordinary words that witnesses used to describe their lives before the violence, the words for home and work and family and the daily texture of existence that the violence had torn, the ordinariness the weight, the ordinariness the thing that the relay could not diminish, that survived the two translations intact, that arrived in English with the same force it had in Swahili, because ordinariness was universal, was the same in every language, the cassava and the maize and the wife and the children recognizable in every architecture of thought.

Devaux asked the witness to describe the morning of March 14, 2018. The witness began. He spoke slowly — not because his language was slow but because the court's procedure required him to speak slowly, to leave gaps for the interpretation, the gaps a concession to the relay, the witness trained by the victims' legal representative to pace his speech so that the interpreters could keep up, the pacing artificial, the natural rhythm of the witness's speech suppressed in favor of the court's rhythm, the witness's body accommodating the court's technology, the human adjusting to the machine.

He described waking. He described the morning — the light, the air, the sounds of the village waking. He described the ordinariness of the morning, the morning like any other morning, the chickens and the cooking fires and the children dressing for school, the school that was a building at the edge of the village, a building with a tin roof and wooden benches and a blackboard, the school where his children learned to read and write in French and Swahili, the two languages of their education, the two languages of their future.

Gabriel translated the morning into French. Amara translated the French morning into English. The morning crossed two bridges. The morning arrived in the court's English record as a morning in a village in eastern Congo, a morning of chickens and cooking fires and children dressing for school, and the morning was accurate, the morning was a faithful representation of what the witness had described, and the faithfulness was the interpreter's achievement, and the achievement was invisible, and the invisibility was the booth.

Then the witness described the sounds. He described hearing gunshots. He described the direction of the gunshots — from the north, from the road. He described the volume — loud, close, the particular volume of automatic weapons, which he recognized because he had heard automatic weapons before, because living in eastern Congo meant hearing automatic weapons, the sound part of the region's auditory landscape, the way the sound of traffic was part of The Hague's auditory landscape, the sound familiar even when the sound was terrifying.

He described running. He described grabbing his youngest child — a daughter, three years old — and running. He described telling his wife to take the other children. He described the running — through the village, away from the sound, toward the river, because the river was the escape route, the water offering concealment and distance, the river the boundary between the village and the forest, the boundary that might save them.

Amara translated the running. She translated the grabbing of the child. She translated "my youngest daughter, she was three" into English, the sentence arriving in the headphones of the court with the precision and the neutrality that the protocol required, the sentence sounding in the courtroom's English channel the way all translated sentences sounded — clear, professional, accurate, the voice of the interpreter distinguishable from the voice of the witness because the interpreter's voice was steady, was controlled, was the voice of training and protocol rather than the voice of experience and memory.

The witness continued. He described reaching the river. He described hiding — in the reeds, in the mud, his daughter pressed against his chest, his hand over her mouth to prevent her from crying, the hand gentle, the gentleness itself a violence, the father silencing the daughter to save the daughter, the silencing a form of love that was also a form of suppression, the love and the suppression fused in the hand over the mouth, the hand that was protection and the hand that was control, the father's hand the instrument of both.

Gabriel translated this into French. Amara heard Gabriel's French and she translated it into English and the English was accurate and the accuracy contained the hand and the mouth and the reeds and the mud and the daughter and the father and the silence and the gunshots and the river and the hiding, and the containing was the translation's work, the translation containing what language could contain while the rest — the smell of the mud, the feel of the reeds, the weight of the daughter against the father's chest, the particular terror of a father hiding with his child while his village was destroyed — the rest existed beyond the translation, beyond the relay, beyond the two bridges, in the space that language approached but could not reach.

The witness described the sounds from the village. He described hearing screaming. He described hearing the gunshots continue. He described hearing the fires — the specific sound of thatch burning, a sound he knew because he had burned brush on his farm and the sound of burning vegetation was recognizable, and the recognition of the sound was itself a horror, the domestic sound made monstrous, the sound of agricultural burning translated into the sound of village burning, the translation not linguistic but experiential, the witness's ears translating a familiar sound into an unfamiliar context, the translation conducted not by an interpreter but by circumstance.

He described the duration. He hid for three hours. Three hours in the reeds with his daughter against his chest, three hours of listening to the sounds of the massacre, three hours of the hand over the mouth, three hours that he measured not by a clock but by the sun's movement, the sun climbing from the horizon toward the midpoint of the sky, the sun's passage the only timepiece available, the celestial clock marking the hours of the killing the way it marked the hours of planting and harvesting and every other human activity that occurred beneath its arc.

Amara translated the three hours. She translated the duration the way she had translated the forty-five minutes in Devaux's opening statement — with the accuracy the protocol required and with the interior recognition that the duration was a duration she understood in her body, that three hours was a unit of time she lived in daily, that three hours was the length of a morning session in the booth, the length of a long run, the length of a Wednesday evening at Marcus's apartment, and the recognition connected her body to the witness's body, connected her three hours to his three hours, the connection not emotional — she suppressed the emotion — but physical, the body's knowledge of time creating a bridge that was not the linguistic bridge of the translation but the experiential bridge of shared duration.

The testimony continued. The witness described emerging from the reeds. He described walking back to the village. He described what he saw. He described it in Swahili, and Gabriel translated it into French, and Amara translated the French into English, and the relay carried the description from the witness's memory through two interpreters to the court's record, the description traveling through three mouths and settling in the ears of the judges and the prosecutors and the defense and the gallery, the description of a destroyed village, of burned houses, of bodies in the clearing, of the particular scene that awaited a man who had hidden in the reeds while his village was massacred and who returned to find the village transformed from a living place to a dead place, the transformation complete, the transformation irreversible, the transformation the thing the court was assembled to judge.

He described finding his wife. He did not find his wife. He described looking for his wife and his three older children and not finding them. He described the looking — the specific places he looked, the specific houses he searched, the specific bodies he turned over, the turning over a physical act that the testimony re-enacted in language, the witness's hands moving as he spoke, the hands gesturing the turning, the body remembering the turning while the mouth described it.

Amara could see the witness's hands through the glass. She could see the hands moving, turning, the gesture the physical companion to the verbal testimony, the body speaking what the mouth was speaking, the two languages — the language of the body and the language of the mouth — synchronized, the synchronization the witness's unconscious coordination of his two modes of expression.

She translated the turning. She did not translate the hands — the protocol required that she note significant non-verbal behavior, but the hands' movement was simultaneous with the verbal description and therefore redundant to the record, the hands saying what the mouth was saying, the translation of the mouth sufficient for the court's purposes. But she saw the hands. She saw them through the glass, and the seeing was its own translation, the visual entering her mind alongside the auditory, the two streams of information converging in the space where she processed the testimony, the space where the sponge absorbed and the window transmitted and the interpreter sat between the two functions, performing both, being both, the dual nature not a contradiction but the actual mechanism of the work.

The witness paused. He stopped speaking. The pause was sudden — the words stopping the way a river stops at a dam, the flow interrupted, the pressure building behind the interruption, the silence not empty but full, the fullness the pressure of the words that the witness could not speak, the words that existed in the witness's mind but that could not travel from the mind to the mouth to the microphone to the interpreter's ears.

Gabriel translated the pause: "Le temoin fait une pause." The witness is pausing.

Amara translated Gabriel: "The witness is pausing."

The pause continued. The courtroom waited. Judge Okonjo looked at the witness with the particular attention of a judge who had presided over many pauses, who understood that the pause was testimony, that the silence was evidence, that the inability to continue was itself a statement about the nature of what was being described, the nature too large for continuous speech, the witness's language reaching its limit and the limit visible in the pause, audible in the silence, present in the courtroom the way a missing person was present — through absence, through the space where the person should be.

The victims' legal representative approached the witness. She offered water. The witness drank. The water was a ritual — the offering and the drinking, the cup raised and tilted, the liquid entering the mouth that could not produce words, the physical need substituting for the verbal need, the body receiving what the mind could not deliver.

The witness continued. He continued because the court waited and the court's waiting was a form of invitation, a form of the court saying: we are here, we are listening, we will wait, the waiting the court's patience, the patience a form of respect, the respect the court's acknowledgment that the testimony was difficult and that the difficulty was not a weakness but a condition of the testimony, the condition of trying to speak about the unspeakable, the unspeakable not a figure of speech but a literal description of the witness's experience — there were things that could not be spoken, and the witness was trying to speak them, and the trying was the testimony.

He described finding his wife. He found her later — not in the village but at a camp for displaced persons, three weeks after the attack. She was alive. His three older children were alive. They had fled in a different direction — south, through the forest, the opposite direction from the father and the youngest daughter, the family split by the attack, the family's unity broken by the violence the way a stone breaks when struck, the pieces scattering in different directions, the pieces eventually found, eventually collected, but the stone never the same, the stone bearing the cracks of the breaking even when the pieces were reassembled.

The testimony ended. The witness had spoken for four hours, across two sessions, with a break in between. He had described his life, his village, the morning, the attack, the hiding, the return, the searching, the finding. He had spoken in Swahili, and his Swahili had been translated into French by Gabriel, and the French had been translated into English by Amara, and the English was the record, the court's record, the document that the judges would read and consider and weigh alongside the other evidence, the other testimonies, the other records.

The witness left the courtroom. He left through the door he had entered, the witness's door, the door that led to the corridor where the victims' legal representative waited to escort him to the waiting room, the room where witnesses rested after testifying, a room with chairs and water and tissues and the particular atmosphere of a room designed for the aftermath of testimony, the room's function to contain the witness's reaction to having spoken, to having described, to having testified, the reaction that the courtroom could not contain because the courtroom was designed for the testimony itself, for the speaking, not for the aftermath of the speaking.

Amara sat in the booth. The testimony was over. The microphone was off. The headphones were on the hooks. Fatima had left. Amara was alone in the booth, in the silence that followed the testimony, the silence that was different from the silence before the testimony because the before-silence was empty and the after-silence was full, the fullness the residue of the words that had passed through the booth, the words that had entered Amara's ears in Gabriel's French and exited her mouth in English and that had also, despite the protocol, despite the training, despite the discipline, stayed.

The relay. The two bridges. The witness's Swahili crossing to Gabriel's French crossing to Amara's English. The testimony traveling through two human minds, two sets of linguistic architectures, two bodies, before arriving at the court's record. The distance of the relay — the distance between the witness's Swahili and the court's English, the distance measured not in meters but in translations, in approximations, in the accumulated loss of each crossing.

But also the intimacy of the relay. The intimacy of hearing Gabriel's voice in her headphones, the voice close, inside her head, the voice carrying the witness's testimony in French, the French carrying the Swahili, the Swahili carrying the experience, the experience carried through two voices into the court's ear. The intimacy was the relay's other quality — not just distance but closeness, the closeness of the headphones, the closeness of the voice, the closeness of one interpreter to another, the two interpreters linked by the testimony that passed between them, the testimony the thing they shared, the thing they carried together, the burden distributed between two sponges, two windows, two bodies in two booths.

Amara stood. She gathered her satchel. She left the booth. She walked the corridor. She walked past Booth 5, the Swahili booth, and she saw Gabriel inside, still seated, still in his chair, his headphones on the console, his hands in his lap. He was sitting the way Amara sat after testimony — in the after-silence, in the fullness, in the space where the words settled. She did not knock. She did not enter. She walked past, and the walking past was its own acknowledgment, the acknowledgment that Gabriel carried what she carried, that the relay distributed the weight but did not eliminate it, that two sponges absorbed the same testimony from different ends of the relay chain and that the absorption was the same absorption, the weight the same weight, the silence the same silence.

She walked to the exit. She left the building. She stood in the March air. The air was cold. The sky was gray. The day was ending, the Dutch afternoon fading into the Dutch evening, the light retreating, the darkness approaching from the east the way the militia had approached from the north, the darkness a direction, a movement, an arrival.

She walked to the tram stop. She waited. She boarded. She sat. The tram carried her home.

In the tram, she closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, she saw the witness's hands — the hands turning, the hands searching, the hands that had held his daughter in the reeds and that had turned bodies in the village and that had gestured in the witness box while his mouth described what his hands had done. The hands were in her now. The relay had carried them from the witness's body through Gabriel's French through Amara's English into the space where the testimony settled, the space between the ears and the mouth, the space that was the sponge, the space that was the silence.

The first witness. The first testimony. The trial would continue. More witnesses would come. More testimony would be spoken. More relays would carry the words from language to language, from booth to booth, from mouth to ear to mouth to ear, the chain unbroken, the translation continuous, the bridge open.

And the weight would accumulate. And the sponge would absorb. And the window would transmit. And the translator, sitting between the two metaphors, would carry both — the transmission and the absorption, the output and the residue, the translation and the silence.