Intimacies(4)

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The tram was crowded, and at one point a large group of students boarded. They were raucous, but unlike some of the other passengers—who glanced at them askance before looking away—I did not mind, on the contrary I took the opportunity to listen to their conversation, or at least what fragments I could decipher.

When I moved to The Hague I did not speak or have more than a passing acquaintance with Dutch, however its similarities with German were such that after six months I had some competence in the language. Of course, most people in the Netherlands spoke fluent English, and at the Court there was never an occasion to speak Dutch, so I primarily learned through listening—in the street, in a restaurant or café, on the tram as I was doing now. A place has a curious quality when you have only a partial understanding of its language, and in those early months the sensation was especially peculiar. At first I moved in a cloud of unknowing, the speech around me impenetrable, but it quickly grew less elusive as I began to understand single words and then phrases and now even snippets of conversation. On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked, the city was no longer the innocent place it had been when I arrived.

But there was nothing essentially invasive about listening here on the tram, the students were speaking loudly, almost at the top of their lungs, they intended to be overheard. As I listened to them, I was reminded of the pleasure of learning a new language, unlocking its systems, testing their give and flexibility. It had been some time since I had experienced this particular feeling, having acquired all my other languages as a child or later in school. The students were speaking a Dutch peppered with slang, making it difficult for me to understand exactly what they were saying, mostly they seemed to be talking about school, some teacher or friend who was irritating them.

Two or three tram stops later, I thought I heard one of the girls say verkrachting, the Dutch word for rape. I looked up, startled, my mind had started to drift and I was no longer following their conversation as closely as I had been when I boarded. The girl who spoke was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, her eyes were rimmed with heavy liner and she had a nose piercing. She continued speaking, I heard the phrase bel de politie, or I thought I did. But then the girl she was speaking to began giggling in response and after a moment the girl with the nose piercing also began to laugh and I was no longer certain of what I had heard, after all rape and calling the police were not exactly a laughing matter. The girl with the nose piercing must have felt my gaze, abruptly she turned and stared at me, and although she was still laughing her eyes were hard and empty, entirely mirthless.

The tram approached my stop. The girls were now discussing a new sneaker brand, and although I glanced several more times at the girl, she ignored me. Unsettled by the encounter, I disembarked. The tram moved away and then the Court stood directly before me, a large glass complex that was nestled into the dunes on the edge of the city. It was easy to forget that The Hague was situated on the North Sea, in so many ways it was a city that seemed to face inward, its back turned against the open water.

Prior to my arrival, when I had applied for and then was offered the position, the Court had existed in my mind as a near medieval institution, in the manner of the Binnenhof, the Parliament complex only a couple miles away in the center of the city. Even after I arrived and for the first month of my employment, I had been startled every time I encountered the building. I knew very well that the Court was a recent invention, having been founded only a decade earlier, but the modern architecture still seemed incongruous, perhaps even lacking the authority I had expected.

Six months later, it was merely the place of my employment: everything grows normal after a time. I greeted the guards as I entered and passed through the detector—a question or two about their families, some statement about the weather, it was on these occasions that I could practice my Dutch. I collected my bag and proceeded across the courtyard and into the building. There I saw Robert, another interpreter at the Court, who waited for me to join him. He was a large and affable Englishman, outgoing and charming; in my relative reticence I was unusual among interpreters. If interpretation is a kind of performance, then its practitioners tend to be confident and garrulous. Robert exemplified these characteristics, he played rugby on the weekends and took part in amateur theater productions. We were never paired together in the booth, but I sometimes wondered what manner of partner he would make, it would be hard not to feel upstaged by his presence, not to attempt to match the cadences and flourishes of his voice, which was unusually mellifluous, the product of his class and a childhood spent in English boarding schools.

As we made our way up to the office, Robert informed me that none of the chambers would be in session that day, which was frankly a relief, he assumed I was as far behind in paperwork as he was. We greeted our colleagues as we made our way to our desks, the interpreters worked in a single open-plan space, with the exception of the head, Bettina, who had her own office. There was a distinctly collegial atmosphere within the department, due in part to the fact that most of the team had come to the Netherlands in order to work at the Court, having amassed the requisite body of experience elsewhere. Some were like me and did not know how long they would remain either at the Court or in the Netherlands, while others had more or less settled here, Amina for example had recently married a Dutch man and was pregnant.

Now she sat at her desk, her face serene as she reviewed the documents before her. While most interpreters could on occasion become flustered or even exasperated, in some cases requesting that a witness slow down, Amina was always composed, she was able to interpret with a consistency and speed that was remarkable, whatever the circumstances. As she approached the latter stages of the pregnancy, she was if anything even more unflappable, her manner was perpetually calm. While the rest of us would struggle with foibles in speech or delivery, Amina alone never seemed to experience difficulty.