Only last week, I had been shopping in the Old Town when I saw three uniformed men moving down the busy pedestrian street alongside a large machine. Two of the men held slender picks while the third held a large nozzle that protruded from the machine, the effect was rather as if he were leading an elephant by the trunk. I had paused to observe them without really knowing why, perhaps only because I wondered what manner of slow-moving work they were doing.
They eventually approached and I could see exactly the task they were performing, the two men with the picks were carefully extracting cigarette butts from between the cracks of the cobbled road, one by one by one, painstaking labor that explained their sluggish pace of progress. I looked down and realized that the road was strewn with cigarette butts, this despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone. The two men continued to flip the cigarette butts out of the cracks while the third man followed with his elephantine vacuum, dutifully sucking up the debris with the machine, the drum of which presumably held many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cigarette butts, each of which had been disappeared from the street by the work of these men.
The three men were almost certainly immigrants, possibly Turkish and Surinamese. Meanwhile, their labor was necessitated by the heritage aesthetic of the city, not to mention the carelessness of a wealthy population that dropped its cigarette butts onto the pavement without a thought, when the designated receptacle was only a few feet away, I now saw that there were dozens of cigarette butts on the ground directly below the ashtrays. It was only an anecdote. But it was one example of how the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.
Around me the light was beginning to come up, color blotting the horizon. I went inside and dressed for work. I left the apartment not long after, I was now running late. I hurried to the nearby tram stop. Jana called me while I was waiting, she was still at home and I could hear her moving through the apartment, collecting her keys and gathering her books and papers. She asked if I had made it home safely and I assured her that the journey had passed without incident. There was a pause, I heard the slam of a door, she was on her way out of her building and into the street. She sounded distracted, almost as if she could not remember why she had called, then she reminded me that I was bringing Adriaan to her house for dinner on Saturday, and asked if there was anything in particular he did or did not eat.
The tram was arriving and I told her that anything would be fine, and that I would call her later. I hung up and boarded the tram and was soon jolting toward the Court, where I was now nearly six months into my contract. Most of my colleagues had lived in multiple countries and were cosmopolitan in nature, their identity indivisible from their linguistic capabilities. I qualified in much the same way. I had native fluency in English and Japanese from my parents, and in French from a childhood in Paris. I had also studied Spanish and German to the point of professional proficiency, although these along with Japanese were less essential than English and French, the working languages of the Court.
But fluency was merely the foundation for any kind of interpretive work, which demanded extreme precision, and I often thought that it was my natural inclination toward the latter, rather than any linguistic aptitude, that made me a good interpreter. That exactitude was even more important in a legal context, and within a week of working at the Court I learned that its vocabulary was both specific and arcane, with official terminology that was set in each language, and then closely followed by all the interpreters on the team. This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.
As interpreters it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps. That navigation—which alongside accuracy required a certain amount of native spontaneity, at times you had to improvise in order to rapidly parse a difficult phrase, you were always working against the clock—was more significant than you might initially think. With inconsistent interpretation, for example, a reliable witness could appear unreliable, seeming to change his or her testimony with each new interpreter. This in turn could affect the outcome of a trial, the judges were unlikely to note a change of personnel in the interpreters’ booth, even if the voice speaking in their ears suddenly became markedly different, switching from male to female, from halting to deliberate.
They would only note the change in their perception of the witness. A sliver of unreliability introducing fractures into the testimony of the witness, those fractures would develop into cracks, which would in turn threaten the witness’s entire persona. Every person who took to the stand was projecting an image of one kind or another: their testimony was heavily coached and shaped by either the defense or the prosecution, they had been brought to the Court in order to perform a role. The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity.