Witness 247

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 9: Witness 247

She was small. This was the first thing Amara noticed through the glass — the smallness, the physical fact of a body that occupied less space than the witness box seemed designed for, the chair too wide, the table too high, the microphone positioned for a person of average height and needing adjustment, the court officer reaching over to lower it, the lowering a small mechanical act that drew attention to the body it accommodated, the body small, contained, occupying the minimum amount of space a human body could occupy while still being present.

She wore a head wrap. The fabric was blue — a deep, saturated blue, indigo, the blue of West African and Central African textiles, the blue that Amara recognized from markets in Accra and Kinshasa and the particular blue that women in the Congo wore, the blue carrying its own history, its own meaning, the color not decorative but communicative, though what it communicated varied by region and context and the particular woman wearing it, and Amara did not know what this particular blue communicated for this particular woman, could not translate the color the way she could translate the words, the color outside her professional domain, the color a language she did not speak.

The woman sat. She adjusted herself in the chair — shifted, settled, the body finding its position the way all bodies found their positions in unfamiliar chairs, the small movements of accommodation, the hips shifting, the back straightening, the hands finding a place to rest, the hands eventually resting on the table, near the microphone, the fingers interlaced, the interlacing a gesture of self-containment, the body holding itself together, the fingers providing the structure that the unfamiliar chair could not.

She put on headphones. She selected a channel.

She spoke Lingala.

Amara's body registered this before her mind did. The sound of Lingala entering her headphones without the intermediary of Gabriel's French, without the relay, without the buffer language that stood between the witness's words and Amara's translation. The sound was direct. The Lingala came from the witness's mouth and traveled through the courtroom's audio system and entered Amara's headphones and arrived in Amara's ears with no processing, no conversion, no intermediate step. The witness spoke and Amara heard and the hearing was immediate, was unmediated, was the sound of a human voice speaking a language Amara understood, the understanding direct, the understanding happening in the space between the witness's mouth and Amara's mind with no other mind between them.

The directness was rare. Most of Amara's work involved the relay — the witness speaking a language that was translated into French by another interpreter, and the French then translated into English by Amara. The relay provided distance. The relay provided a layer of professional processing between the witness's raw testimony and Amara's translation. The French was already a translation, already processed, already converted from the witness's language into the clean, professional French of a trained interpreter, and Amara's task was to convert the clean French into clean English, the cleanliness a quality of the relay, the relay smoothing the testimony the way a river smoothed stones, the original edges softened by the passage through the intermediate language.

But Lingala to English had no relay. Amara was the only interpreter in the ICC's roster who could translate directly from Lingala to English. There were interpreters who translated Lingala to French — several of them, Congolese and Belgian interpreters who had learned Lingala in Kinshasa or in the universities of Brussels and Liege. But Lingala to English was Amara's particular skill, her particular rarity, the combination of her Lingala (learned in Kinshasa during her first ICC assignment) and her English (learned in Accra, refined at the University of Ghana, polished at the Sorbonne) producing a capability that the court needed and that only she possessed.

The directness meant that Amara heard the witness's voice without mediation. She heard the witness's Lingala — not a colleague's French rendering of the witness's Lingala, but the actual Lingala, the actual voice, the actual rhythm and cadence and breath and pause and the particular quality of this particular woman's speech, a quality that was not just linguistic but physical, the voice produced by this particular throat and these particular lungs and this particular body, the body that had experienced what the testimony would describe and that carried the experience in its tissues, in its muscles, in the particular way the voice emerged from the body, the voice shaped by the body's history the way a river's current was shaped by the terrain it passed through.

Amara put on her headphones. She pressed the microphone button. The red light. She was live. She was the bridge — the only bridge, the direct bridge, the bridge with no intermediate supports, the span from Lingala to English conducted by a single interpreter, a single mind, a single body sitting in a booth behind one-way glass.

Judge Okonjo spoke. He addressed the witness. He welcomed her. He explained the procedure. Amara did not translate the judge's English — the witness was hearing the judge's words in French through the French booth, the standard relay for witnesses who spoke languages other than English and French. But when the witness spoke, when the Lingala began, Amara would be the one translating, the one carrying the words across the bridge.

The prosecution's counsel, Devaux, stood. She asked the first question, in French. The French booth translated the question into Lingala for the witness's headphones. The witness heard the question in Lingala. She paused.

She spoke.

The Lingala entered Amara's headphones. The voice was quiet — not soft in the way that shyness was soft, but quiet in the way that depth was quiet, the voice coming from a place inside the woman that was not the surface but the interior, the words rising from deep in the body the way water rose from a deep well, slowly, with effort, the effort not of the pumping but of the rising, the water heavy with the minerals of the depth it came from.

The witness said her name. The court was in closed session for the identification. The name traveled from the witness's mouth through the microphone through the audio system through Amara's headphones and Amara spoke the name into her microphone and the name entered the English channel, the name unchanged, the name the fixed point, the anchor.

Devaux asked the witness her age. The witness spoke in Lingala. She said she did not know her birth year. She said her mother had told her she was born during the rains, and the rains she meant were the rains of a particular year, but the year was not numbered the way the court numbered years, the year identified not by a number but by an event — the year the river flooded the lower fields, the year the church was built, the year the president was killed — and the event-year could not be converted to a calendar-year with certainty, and so the witness did not know her age, could not state her age for the record, could offer only the approximation that she was "not young and not old," a phrase that Amara translated directly — "The witness states she is not young and not old" — the phrase carrying in its simplicity the distance between the witness's world and the court's world, the court's world a world of numbers and dates and precise identifications, the witness's world a world of seasons and events and the particular timekeeping of a life lived without calendars.

Judge Okonjo asked whether the prosecution could provide an estimated age based on the witness's physical assessment during the pre-trial phase. The prosecution stated that Witness 247's age was estimated at between forty and fifty-five years. Amara translated the estimate into Lingala for the witness through a separate channel — she could speak into both the English channel and the Lingala channel, switching between them, the switching a function of the booth's technology and of her own bilingual capability, the capability that made the direct translation possible.

The witness heard her estimated age and said nothing. The saying-nothing was a response — the witness receiving the court's approximation of her age with the particular silence of a person for whom age was not a number but a condition, a condition of the body and the memory and the experience accumulated in the body and the memory, the accumulation not measured in years but in events, in survivals, in the particular currency of a life marked by what happened rather than by when it happened.

Devaux asked the witness where she had lived. The witness spoke. She said the name of her village — a village near Matenda, in Kisangani Province, a village so small that it did not appear on most maps, a village that existed in the lived experience of its inhabitants and in the memories of those who had passed through it and in the ICC's investigative files and nowhere else, the village's existence a fact that the court was required to establish because the court's jurisdiction depended on geography, on the location of the alleged crimes within the territory of a state party to the Rome Statute, the geography legal as well as physical, the village existing in two registers — the register of the land and the register of the law.

Amara translated the village's name. She translated the location — the province, the region, the relative position to Matenda, which had been described in the prosecution's opening statement. She translated the geography, and the geography was the geography she had studied when she learned Lingala in Kinshasa, the geography of eastern Congo, the rivers and the forests and the roads and the villages, the geography that was the setting of the testimony she would translate, the geography that was not abstract but specific, not a map but a place, a place where this woman had lived and where something had happened to her that she was now in The Hague to describe.

The testimony began.

The witness described her life before the attack. She described it in the Lingala of eastern Congo, a Lingala that was different from the Lingala Amara had learned in Kinshasa — the accent different, the vocabulary slightly different, the particular regional variations that existed in every language, the variations that made language alive, that made language a living thing rather than a fixed system, the variations the evidence of language's evolution, its adaptation, its responsiveness to the people who spoke it and the places where it was spoken.

Amara adjusted. The adjustment was automatic, trained, the mind recalibrating to the witness's particular Lingala the way a musician's ear recalibrated to a different tuning, the recalibration a skill, the skill developed over years of hearing Lingala from dozens of speakers, each speaker's Lingala slightly different, the differences navigated by the interpreter's ear and mind, the navigation the invisible work of interpretation, the work that preceded the translation, the work of understanding before the work of converting.

The witness described washing clothes in the river. She described the morning of the attack. She described the river — its name, its width, its depth, the temperature of the water in March, the particular quality of the light on the water in the early morning, the light reflected and refracted, the water carrying the light the way language carried meaning, the carrying visible in the movement, the movement the evidence of the carrying.

She described the sound of gunshots.

The sound arrived in Amara's headphones not as a description but as a word — the Lingala word for the sound of gunshots, a word that Amara knew, that she had learned in Kinshasa, that she had encountered in previous testimonies, a word that her mind translated automatically into the English "gunshots" and that her mouth spoke into the microphone with the particular neutrality the protocol required, the word "gunshots" entering the English channel, entering the headphones of the judges and the lawyers and the gallery, the word arriving in English ears with the precision and the distance of a translated word, the word accurate, the word clinical, the word not carrying the witness's voice or the witness's fear or the witness's body flinching at the memory of the sound, the word carrying only its semantic content, its dictionary meaning, the meaning sufficient for the court's purposes and insufficient for the witness's experience.

The witness described running. She described the running differently from the way Witness 112 had described his running — this witness's running was not toward the river but away from it, away from the sound, into the village rather than out of it, the direction wrong, she said, the direction a mistake, because she ran toward the village thinking the village was safety and the village was not safety, the village was the thing the gunshots were aimed at, and she realized this when she saw the soldiers, when she saw the men with guns entering the village from the north while she ran toward the village from the south, the two movements converging, the witness and the militia arriving at the village from opposite directions at the same time.

Amara translated the convergence. She translated the wrong direction, the mistake, the running toward danger rather than away from it, and the translation was accurate and the accuracy contained the mistake but not the terror of the mistake, not the physical sensation of running toward the thing you should be running from, the legs carrying you forward while the mind screamed backward, the body and the mind in conflict, the conflict resolved only when the eyes saw what the ears had heard, when the soldiers became visible, when the guns became visible, when the mistake became apparent.

The witness described hiding. Not in the river, not in the reeds — in a drainage ditch behind the church. The church was a concrete building at the center of the village, the one concrete building, the building that would not burn when the thatch-roofed houses burned, the building that was the village's one permanence, the building where she hid in the drainage ditch that ran behind it, the ditch designed to carry rainwater away from the foundation, the ditch narrow, shallow, filled with mud and refuse, the ditch not designed for hiding but used for hiding because there was nothing else, because the options available to a woman in a village being attacked by militia were not options but accidents, the accidental proximity of a ditch to a body, the accidental depth of the ditch sufficient to conceal a body that pressed itself flat into the mud.

Amara translated the ditch. She translated the mud. She translated the pressing-flat, the body making itself as small as possible, the smallness a survival strategy, the smallness the witness carried still, Amara thought, looking through the glass at the small woman in the witness box, the smallness not just physical but existential, the witness having made herself small to survive and having remained small, the smallness a permanent condition, the body remembering the ditch and the mud and the pressing-flat and carrying the memory in its posture, in its occupation of space, in the way it sat in the witness box as if trying to occupy as little of the chair as possible.

The witness described the sounds. She described what she heard while hiding in the ditch. Gunfire. Screaming. The sound of fires starting — and here the witness used the same detail that Witness 112 had used, the sound of thatch burning, the specific sound that residents of a village of thatch-roofed houses recognized because they had heard it in controlled burns, in cooking fires, in the daily domestic use of fire, the domestic sound made monstrous by its scale, a single thatch roof burning a domestic event, an entire village of thatch roofs burning a massacre.

She described the duration. She said she counted. She said she counted by praying — a prayer her mother had taught her, a prayer in Lingala, a prayer that took a specific amount of time to complete, and she prayed the prayer and when the prayer was finished the shooting had not stopped and she prayed the prayer again and when the prayer was finished the shooting had stopped, and the two recitations of the prayer were her measure of the duration, the prayer her clock, the prayer her timepiece, the prayer the instrument through which she converted the unbounded terror of not-knowing-how-long into the bounded duration of two prayers.

Amara translated the prayer. Not the prayer itself — the witness did not recite the prayer, did not share its words — but the fact of the prayer, the use of the prayer as a measure of time, the prayer's duration serving as a unit of measurement, the unit approximately twenty minutes, the witness estimated, approximately twenty minutes per recitation, approximately forty minutes total, the approximately a word that Amara used because the witness used the Lingala equivalent, the uncertainty a feature of the testimony, the uncertainty honest, the uncertainty more accurate than a precise number would have been because precision would have implied a certainty that the witness did not possess, the precision a lie, the uncertainty the truth.

Forty minutes. Forty minutes hiding in a drainage ditch behind a church while a village was destroyed. Amara translated the forty minutes and the forty minutes settled in her the way all durations settled in her, alongside the other durations — the forty-five minutes of the killing described in the prosecution's opening statement, the three hours of Witness 112's hiding in the reeds. The durations accumulated. The durations were the time-weight of the testimony, the translation of horror into minutes and hours, the quantification that the court required because the court operated in quantities, in numbers, in the particular arithmetic of legal fact-finding.

The session ended. The testimony was not complete — the witness had described the hiding but not the aftermath, the ditch but not the emerging from the ditch, the sounds but not the sights. The remaining testimony would continue the next day. The court adjourned.

The witness stood. She was helped from the witness box by the victims' legal representative, a hand on her elbow, the hand gentle, guiding, the hand acknowledging the difficulty of what the witness had done — the sitting, the speaking, the describing, the testifying — and the difficulty of what the witness would do tomorrow, when she returned to the witness box and continued, when the testimony moved from the hiding to the finding, from the sounds to the sights, from the ditch to the village.

The witness walked past the booth. She walked past the one-way glass. She did not look up. She did not know that behind the glass a woman sat with headphones on her hooks and a microphone turned off and her hands in her lap, a woman who had just spent three hours translating the witness's Lingala into English, a woman who had heard the witness's voice without mediation, without relay, without the buffer of an intermediate language, the voice entering Amara's ears with the directness of a person speaking to another person in a shared language, the directness the rarity, the directness the thing that made this testimony different from the relay testimonies, the directness the thing that made the weight heavier because the weight was not distributed, was not shared with Gabriel or any other intermediate interpreter, the weight carried entirely by Amara, the bridge with no intermediate supports, the span unsupported, the translator alone with the testimony.

The witness walked past. Her head wrap was blue. Her body was small. Her testimony was inside Amara now — the words, the pauses, the prayer, the ditch, the mud, the forty minutes, all of it translated into English and all of it remaining in the space between the translation and the translator, the space that was the sponge, the space that Marcus had named and that Amara could no longer deny.

She sat in the booth. She sat in the silence. The silence was the space between the Lingala and the English, the space where the translation happened and where the residue accumulated, the space that was hers alone, the space that no one else could enter because no one else carried the specific combination of Lingala and English in the specific body of this specific interpreter, the space individual, unique, solitary.

The booth was quiet. The courtroom was empty. The day was ending.

Tomorrow, Witness 247 would return. Tomorrow, the testimony would continue. Tomorrow, Amara would put on the headphones and press the button and open the bridge and the words would cross.

And between the words — between the Lingala and the English, between the witness and the court, between the speaking and the hearing — there would be Amara, carrying, translating, absorbing, the sponge and the window, the voice and the silence.