Intimacies(13)

Later, I sat at my desk with the file open before me. I felt a little self-conscious, I could hear Bettina’s words in my ear, her injunction to secrecy. But my colleagues were absorbed in their own work and I wanted to familiarize myself with the basics of the situation, the key dates and names and locations, though as Bettina herself had said, even this information was likely unnecessary for the purposes of this evening, for what would only be a brief encounter. I began reading. The accused was a member and then leader of an Islamist militant faction that had seized control of the capital only five years earlier. The faction had immediately enforced Sharia law in the occupied territory, banning music, forcing women to wear the burqa, and setting up religious tribunals. He was only the second jihadist to be detained by the Court, and many of the charges were based on the persecution of women—in this case, the forced marriage, repeated rape, and sexual enslavement of girls and women. There were also counts of torture and religious-based persecution, including the desecration of sacred graves.

The file included a small note to the effect that although the case was significant for being only the second to include among the charges persecution based on gender, the fact remained that the nationality of the accused would do little to counter the growing consensus that the Court suffered from a bias against African countries. I thought of the flyer and the demonstrators outside. Affixed to the file was a photograph of the accused. He was on the street, looking to one side as if aware that his image was being captured, his body in motion and his expression furtive. His face was partially concealed by a headscarf, but his eyes were extraordinarily piercing; the remainder of his features were tired and otherwise unremarkable.

I returned to my apartment after work, I thought I might try to sleep in the early part of the evening, I didn’t know how long I would be kept at the Detention Center, it might be a matter of minutes or hours. As Bettina had said, it was difficult to predict in what condition the accused would arrive, whether he would be in a state of shock or rage, whether he would be utterly silent or whether questions and accusations and counteraccusations would pour out of him, whether he would simply be tired from his journey, like a businessman disembarking a long-haul flight, or whether he would be in a state of physical collapse. I ate dinner and then rested fitfully, curled up on the bed with the duvet pulled over me. I was unable really to sleep, it was only early evening and the pending assignment weighed on me.

As I lay there, the day outside still carrying traces of light, the sound of the neighbors audible through the walls of my apartment, it was the photograph, the image of this man, that most troubled me. He did not look the way I expected, his face did not live up to the magnitude of the crimes I had read about in the dossier. It was not that he looked either innocent or guilty, it was more that his face was utterly without depth.

In a few hours, I would meet this man, who would then no longer be a name and a photograph, a list of actions and accusations, but a person in the world. I didn’t know if I was prepared for that, it seemed almost impossible to fathom—at some point he had crossed a boundary and his personhood had been hollowed out. Maybe the indeterminacy of the photograph was accurate, and was in fact preparing me for the nature of the encounter to come. I checked my phone, there were no messages. I thought of Adriaan, I closed my eyes and tried again to sleep.



* * *



—

I departed for the Detention Center a little before one in the morning. The streets were empty as the taxi pulled up to the curb. When I closed the door behind me and announced my destination, I saw the driver look up, I asked him if he knew where the building was and he nodded.

As we drove through the city in the direction of the dunes, he continued to watch me in the rearview mirror, as if speculating what function I served, perhaps I did not conform to his notion of how a lawyer, a judge, an official of the Court would appear. Maybe he imagined something entirely more sordid, given the late hour, maybe he thought I was a paid escort servicing one of the men detained in the center, it was not impossible. I looked down at what I was wearing, I was dressed conservatively enough, in what is usually described as “business casual”—but I had been told that this was exactly how escorts dressed, the ones that were not walking the street, the ones who were under considerable pressure to be discreet, who had famous and powerful clients, the kind of men who might conceivably be held in the Detention Center. I shifted my weight in the back of the taxi, pulling the hem of my skirt lower, I worried that I had dressed in a manner that was unintentionally provocative, the man had made me thoroughly self-conscious.

I was therefore relieved to arrive at the Detention Center, which sat on the edge of the city, not too far from the Court. In the dark of night it looked forbidding, there were high walls and CCTV cameras, it was a prison in all but name. I paid the taxi driver, who asked if I didn’t want him to wait, I blushed and said that I did not know how long I would be, and that I would call a taxi when I wanted to leave. He handed me his business card and said that he would be working all night, the gesture felt salacious and also a little sad, and I dropped the card into my pocket, feeling as if I needed to wash my hands. The car lingered as I pressed the buzzer, luckily the door opened at once. I passed through a medieval gatehouse and then through security, my bag was taken away and my passport examined.

I was handed a badge and told to wait, the guard indicated a row of plastic chairs. I clipped the badge to my jacket and sat down. The area—less a reception or lobby and more a corridor along which some chairs had been arranged—was clean and anonymous, I could have been waiting in any municipal building, at an American DMV, for example. This feeling only grew as the hour passed two in the morning, and then approached three, the sensation of waiting for a slow and truculent bureaucracy increasing, I had never been in this situation and yet, as my eyes grew bleary with fatigue, I felt exactly as if I had been here before, everything about the act of waiting had removed the specificity of the circumstances, I could no longer remember for whom I was waiting, only that I was waiting for someone who might never arrive, and that I might never leave this vestibule.