The headset weighed the same as it had thirty years ago. Imma had checked this once, out of curiosity, on a kitchen scale at home: three hundred and ten grams, foam cups gone thin with use, a cable long enough to let her turn her head without disconnecting from the console. Nothing about the equipment had improved in any way that mattered. Only the acoustics of the room had changed, and only slightly.
She arrived at Booth Four eleven minutes before the session, as she arrived everywhere eleven minutes early, and set her water bottle to the left of the microphone stand, cap loosened one half-turn so she would not have to fight it mid-sentence. She removed her earrings and placed them in the felt-lined tin she kept for that purpose, a small ritual she performed the way other people cross themselves entering a church. Not from belief, exactly. From the accumulated weight of having done it every working day for thirty years. The headset did not tolerate jewelry. Neither did she, on days like this one, tolerate distraction of any kind. She checked the console's three dials and adjusted none of them, because none of them needed adjusting, and the checking itself was the point.
Through the booth's glass the courtroom assembled itself in its usual order. The judges came first, three of them, robed, unhurried, exchanging a private word among themselves that the booth's microphones were built never to catch. Counsel followed, unpacking files onto tables angled for a room that had never decided whether it was a courtroom or a conference hall wearing a courtroom's clothes. The public gallery arrived after them, thin this week, four observers and a journalist who kept checking her phone under the desk as though the tribunal's cameras had not already logged the gesture.
The witness came last, led in by an usher. He was seated at the small table angled so the judges could see his face and he could see almost nothing but the judges: a geometry Imma had watched repeated in a dozen courtrooms across three decades, and had never once seen designed any other way.
Imma settled the headset over her ears and tested the microphone with a syllable no one heard but the technician in the booth beside her, who gave a thumbs-up through the dividing glass. She rolled her shoulders once, a small private stretch that belonged entirely to the eleven minutes before a session began and never once to the session itself.
The presiding judge called the session to order in English. Imma rendered it into French for the defense, half a beat behind, the way she had rendered ten thousand openings before this one. The witness answered in Kinyarwanda. She caught the first three words before he finished the fourth, held them the way she had been trained to hold them, in a kind of suspended attention that was neither memory nor prediction, and gave them back in French the moment his sentence closed.
This was the discipline: four seconds behind the speaker, never more, never less. Long enough to understand the shape of a sentence before rendering it. Short enough that the court experienced translation as a single continuous voice rather than two. Imma had spent three decades learning to live inside that four-second window, a woman standing permanently one heartbeat behind her own words. The habit ran so deep that she sometimes caught herself at dinner, holding a full four seconds before answering Willem, as though every sentence in her life still passed through the same narrow gate.
The testimony this morning concerned road logistics in the spring of 2004, a supply convoy misrouted through a checkpoint, nothing that would make the newspapers. This was, in its way, a kindness. Not every session carried weight enough to bruise. She interpreted a question about fuel requisitions, an answer about a broken axle, a clarification about which battalion had authorized the detour. Procedural. Almost soothing, in the rhythm of things that mattered to the tribunal and to no one else. Somewhere behind her the technician adjusted a levels meter with two clicks of a mouse, the only sound in the booth beyond her own rendered voice and the courtroom's filtered murmur. In sessions like this one she often found a kind of peace in the sheer mechanical modesty of the work: a fact, offered, received, carried across without loss.
Her hands moved without her attention, adjusting the volume dial worn smooth by three decades of thumbs, hers and others', a groove in the plastic that fit her thumb the way a stair fits a foot that has climbed it every day of its life. She did not look at her hands. She looked at the witness's mouth, because lips told her things audio alone did not: which syllables he swallowed, which he leaned on, whether a hesitation was linguistic or something else entirely. A man's mouth, she had learned early, told the truth about a sentence's difficulty even when his voice had been trained, or had simply learned by necessity, to hide it.
Eight hours of this wore a body down in ways non-interpreters never asked about. Not the throat, though the throat suffered: a low ache by mid-afternoon that she had stopped mentioning to anyone. Water and silence were the only remedies, and the job reliably supplied neither. The eyes, from the strain of reading a mouth at forty feet through glass built to keep the interpreter's voice out of the courtroom's ambient sound. The neck, from the angle required to watch a witness and a judge at once.
An occupational health study, sent to her as part of a wellness initiative no one at the tribunal took seriously, had once compared the posture to a dentist's. No dentist she had ever met also carried home, each evening, the residue of testimony about checkpoints and convoys and the arithmetic of who had been where, and when, and under whose order.
And beneath all of it, a fatigue with no name in English or French or Kinyarwanda: the exhaustion of speaking constantly in someone else's voice and never once, for eight hours, in her own.
