In those moments, in the face of the former president’s resolute indifference, in that small, airless conference room amidst the folders and piles of paper, something yawned open inside me. The depersonalized nature of the task—I was only an instrument, and during the hours that I was there I was almost never spoken to directly, in fact the only person who bothered to address me at all was the former president—sat alongside the strange intimacy of the encounter, the entire thing was a paradox, impossible to reconcile. Despite the uniformity of these meetings, each time I approached the room with trepidation, and each time I felt I did not know what waited on the other side of the closed door. As for Kees, he never again acknowledged our past acquaintance or the exchange in the corridor, he never even seemed to look at me—he too behaved as if I were not there.
Eline was still waiting for me to respond.
It can be challenging—emotionally, I mean.
Yes, she said. You must be exposed to terrible things, I can’t imagine.
At a certain point you no longer understand the words you are saying. I get lost—I’m so focused on the minutiae of the session that I lose track of the larger story. I couldn’t tell you at the end of a session what’s taken place or what’s actually been said.
The waiter placed a cup of coffee before me.
Did you ever see that movie, the one about the interpreter? Eline said once he had moved away. The plot twist is that she’s actually a revolutionary. Or not a revolutionary, but the lover of a revolutionary? It was a little hard to follow. On the whole, it didn’t make much of an impression on me. But I do remember thinking, what clarity! By the end the actress is waving a gun around, all ambiguity has fallen away, she knows what she has to do. She paused and smiled. You don’t have a gun, do you?
I shook my head. No gun. Nor clarity, for that matter.
She laughed. That’s probably for the best. My older son loved the movie, I think he has a crush on the actress, she’s very beautiful. I asked how old her children were and she said, Ten and twelve. It’s gone quickly, their childhood, but it’s also gone very slowly. When they are young, it is exhausting and you have no time for yourself, but you can still make them happy. That’s no longer the case with my boys. They’re old enough to understand things, they see the world as it is. They are wiser but they are also more vulnerable.
As she spoke, I thought of the violence that had entered their lives when her brother was attacked, violence that was not contained on their tablets or phone screens, that was not abstract but fully realized. They were ten and twelve, it was true that by that age many children had already confronted death in some form, a grandmother or a grandfather or a family friend. But death is abstract, even grown men and women can be incapable of understanding it. Violence was something different, violence was easier to comprehend, it existed within the realm of the imagination.
We live in strange times and there is a great deal to worry about, she said abruptly. For one, the possible demise of the European project. I nodded, the date of the Brexit referendum was rapidly approaching, and the polls indicated that against all logic, the UK might well vote to leave the EU. Even the possibility was disturbing, it said nothing good about the world we were living in, or the longevity of institutions such as the Court; nor did it bode well for the upcoming election in the United States. I knew that a Leave vote would be profoundly disorienting for my European friends and colleagues. Jana was especially troubled, she had told me that if the UK voted to leave, it would be impossible for her to return to England, it would no longer be the country she had once known.
I’m worried about the Dutch election next year, this country has a reputation for tolerance but peel back the skin of it— Eline paused. Given the general tendency, I am not optimistic.
It must be difficult for you to explain to the children, I said.
Yes. Their father is useless, he is worse than useless. He’s absolutely brutal with them, he doesn’t seem to understand that they are still children, that there is a limit to what they can comprehend. Her voice was bitter, she looked across the table at me. I’m divorced, of course. Their father lives in Amsterdam.
But the children live with you?
They go to see him every other weekend. He travels a great deal for work, so those weekends don’t happen as regularly as they should. Luckily, my brother and his wife also live in The Hague. She paused, her phone pinged and she picked it up. Her attention moved away from me and I felt the negative space of its absence. She looked up and said that she would need to be going, her son had just texted. His ride has fallen through, I need to go and pick him up.