I was greeted with a scene that had the formality of a Renaissance tableau. Several men sat at a conference table covered with papers, while the former president stood to one side. His gaze trained upon me as I stood in the doorway. The entire legal team appeared to be present, or a good proportion of them anyway, including Kees, who watched me as I came in and whose expression disclosed nothing, not a trace of recognition. A CCTV camera was suspended in the corner, the glossy eye recording everything. Behind me, the door swung shut.
After a long moment, during which I wondered if I had been summoned accidentally, as it seemed clear that no one in this room had any real need of me, entrenched as they already were in the session, the former president spoke. Thank you for coming, he said in French. I saw one of the men sitting at the table look up at Kees, who stood across the room from the former president. One of the lawyers cleared his throat and asked me to sit down. He poured a glass of water, as I reached for it I realized that I was flushed. I took a sip. When I lowered the glass, I saw that Kees was still watching me. His expression was neutral and I quickly turned my face away.
Slowly, the former president approached and sat down in the chair beside me. He was dressed in a polo shirt and slacks and had tied a maroon-colored sweater around his neck, as if he were at the country club. He leaned toward me conspiratorially, and nodding to Kees, said, His French is terrible, much worse than he thinks. I didn’t respond. He cleared his throat and said to the room at large, Let’s continue. One of the lawyers began. His speech was what the English called cut glass, and not too rapid, from that point of view the task of interpretation was easy. The thing to keep in mind is that the trial might continue for months, years. The narrative of a trial functions differently in a case like this. It is not as simple as telling a persuasive story. I sat beside the former president, directing my words into his ear, reaching for a legal pad and pen. He leaned back in his chair, his gaze resting on the lawyer whose words I spoke.
Remember that the judges are themselves aware of how a story fluctuates over the course of years—the trial moves from one side to the other, the story changes, and memory is unreliable. It’s impossible to retain the pattern of these shifts. The advantage can all too easily go to the side that achieves momentum in the final hour. The lawyer paused. As a result, there are safeguards in place, which present both danger and opportunity. At the end of each day, a record is produced. Those records are collated and together are of utmost importance to the trial.
He looked around the room. As much as it may be our instinct to create a persuasive narrative across the days and weeks and months of the trial, we will not win unless we keep our eye on what happens on a day-to-day level. Strategy and tactics are necessary. And so as much—and here he looked directly at the former president—as it is critical to focus on the big picture, as much as we may wish to focus on the story that is told outside the walls of the courtroom, we must proceed with this daily record in mind. Our victory or our loss is in that record. Not in the—performance, shall we say, of our most recent witness, which, however gratifying it may have been on a personal level, did nothing for our case.
He cleared his throat and picked up a file as he waited for me to finish. Beside me, the former president was perfectly still. I was close enough to observe the texture of his skin, the particularities of his features, I could smell the scent of the soap he must have used that morning. He did not move as I spoke into his ear, as quickly and discreetly as possible, I was aware of the whole room waiting. I thought how different this mode of interpretation was to the work performed in the booth, where we were called upon to speak clearly and enunciate every word for the sake of the public, for the sake of the record. Here, I spoke in murmurs and whispers, there was something underhanded about the communication. I quickly finished and was silent.
I could not tell what the former president was feeling, whether he had accepted or even understood the lawyer’s somewhat technical and certainly counterintuitive advice, the Court appeared at first and even second glance as a venue designed for narrative persuasion. The former president gave no indication either way, and after a moment, the lawyer continued. There followed another highly technical discussion, the content of which was obscure at best and as the minutes stretched onward, I began to lose track of what was actually under discussion.
This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. This was happening to me now, in the conference room. I was absorbed by the task at hand, of decoding the legalese in which the content of the discussion was encased, so securely that nothing seemed to penetrate and nothing escaped. And yet—as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand—something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth.