Intimacies(19)

I left the shop, the package in my hands. I hardly knew why I had ventured in, or why I had asked so many questions about De Rijk. A week or two, she had said, or possibly three. I had been obscurely relieved to hear this. When I returned to the apartment I unwrapped the book and held it in my hands, it was strange to see it here, in this room. I placed it on the coffee table and then picked it up and moved it to one of the bookshelves in the living room. I saw that after all it wasn’t entirely right, it stood out and looked like a foreign object, with its ornate binding and rubbed edges. In the end I didn’t know who it was for. I sat down on the sofa. I missed Adriaan, and for a brief moment I felt stranded in the enormous apartment, as if I had been left behind.

I slept poorly and when I woke the following morning, it was no longer the weekend and it was later than usual. There was no question of returning to my apartment to change, I showered and then put on the same clothes, for the third day now. On a whim, I opened the door to one of the wardrobes in the bedroom, inside was a vast array of pressed shirts and suits, more than one man could reasonably wear. They were a revelation to me in their excess, so many shirts and so carefully arranged. I knew that a cleaner regularly attended to the house, not a cleaner but a housekeeper, who did the shopping and restocked the cupboards when they were bare, who no doubt fetched the dry cleaning and placed the shirts in the wardrobe after removing their plastic covers. I had run into this woman once, outside the apartment, and from the way she had both ignored and scrutinized me, I knew that she was someone who had been in the family’s employ long before Gaby’s departure.

I left the apartment without tidying up—what days did the housekeeper come to the apartment? Adriaan did not say in his note—locked the door behind me, and carefully placed the keys inside my bag. I boarded the bus around the corner, which quickly reached the shore, and then proceeded parallel to the rolling dunes, in the direction of the Court. Perhaps ten minutes later the bus passed the Detention Center where I had been three nights earlier. In all the months that I had worked at the Court I had only been aware of the Detention Center in principle, I had never imagined it within the context or geography of the city. It had remained as abstract as the photographs displayed on the information boards in the lobby of the Court, photographs that failed to communicate the brutal reality of the place I had seen only the other night—a dark enclosure, standing in utter contrast to the light-filled transparency of the Court itself, a building defined by its density.

By daylight, the Detention Center was less sinister than it had appeared by night, and there was something almost matter-of-fact about its presence on the side of the road. The bus did not stop outside the Detention Center and I saw the wall and outline of the building only fleetingly through the window, it was simply another one of those buildings that exist in the landscape in which you live, of which you never take real notice and whose purpose you never know. There are prisons and far worse all around us, in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below. People eating their sandwiches and sipping their cappuccinos, who had no idea of what was taking place directly above them, no idea of the world in which they were living.

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

This is why I was able to see the Detention Center again by daylight and then, moments later, disembark the bus and enter the Court, greeting the security guards as I always did, exactly as if nothing had changed. It was easy to slip into the crowd of bodies moving through the security checkpoints, swiping their badges and passing through the metal detectors, easy to walk across the courtyard and into the building itself.

But then, as I reached the entrance to the building, I saw Amina standing by the door, she gestured to me and almost before I had reached her, as if she had only been waiting until I was within earshot, she said, They’re moving you to Chamber I. I looked at her in surprise. You’re going to be my replacement, when I go on leave. She took my arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. This is good, isn’t it? I asked her. She nodded, Yes, it’s a very good sign, and I squeezed her hand in return. Come, she said. And together we entered the building.





8.


Inside the elevator, Amina leaned against the wall and recovered her breath. She was now easily winded, the baby inside pushing hard against her lungs. She looked at me and then said her mother was due to arrive from Senegal soon, she would be going on leave in a few weeks. As we exited the elevator and made our way to the booth, she asked me if I was familiar with the case and I nodded, the details were well-known throughout the Court. The trial had been running for several months and was of great significance, it was the first time a former head of state had been brought to trial at the Court and proceedings had caused considerable furor in the international press.

And then of course there was the matter of the protesters who had for months been gathering at the Court on behalf of the accused, handing out those flyers and holding up signs. As we sat down, Amina told me that I’d be working in the booth with her for the week, in order to familiarize myself with the situation. She handed me a file. There shouldn’t be any issue of comprehension, she said, the language thus far has been perfectly straightforward. She nodded to the file, which now sat on the desk before me, and I opened it. According to the case summary, circumstances had developed very rapidly, during a relatively narrow time frame of four to five months, in the wake of a disputed election. The national electoral commission and outside observers called the election in favor of the accused’s opposition. The accused refused to cede power, despite the fact that there was also a constitutional limit of ten years for any presidency, a term the accused had already served. He then indulged in some creative accounting, nullifying the votes in districts where his opponent polled strongly, ordered the army to close the borders, and barred all foreign media.