The Grammar of the Booth
The yellow bulb on Thomas Hallin's console came on while the witness was still describing the winter transports, which meant he was speaking too fast for the English to keep pace, and Hallin lifted two fingers from the microphone stand to signal the monitor that he had understood. The witness was a former ministry official in a gray suit that had been taken in at the shoulders, and he spoke the way a man reads a timetable. Evacuations had been carried out, he said. Capacities had been exceeded. A certain number of persons had not survived the journey, and it had been regrettable that provisions for the onward movement had not been arranged in good time. Hallin put each of these into English a half sentence behind the German, holding the verbs in his mouth until the nouns gave him permission to release them, and when the sentence reached its end he noticed that nobody in it had done anything. The trains had moved. The capacities had been exceeded. In the courtroom below the booth, behind the glass, the judges listened through their headsets to an account in which no hand appeared.
He had come to the work in October by way of a recruiting notice on a bulletin board at a camp outside Paris. He was twenty-six, born in Hamburg to a Swedish mother and a German father, and he had been taken to Chicago at fifteen when his father decided that the new government was not going to pass quickly. His German had stayed in the house with his parents, so that it was a kitchen language, good for describing soup and quarrels, and the Army had spent three months teaching him the other kind, the language of statutes and ministries, before it sent him to Nuremberg to sit in a booth with two other interpreters and a rotation of thirty minutes on, thirty off. The work was so unlike ordinary translation that it needed a different name. A person who translates a letter can stop and look at a word. In the booth there was no stopping, and so the grammar of the speaker passed through the interpreter's body before the interpreter had any chance to form an opinion of it.
It was in the second month, on a morning when a field officer was explaining the conduct of an anti-partisan operation, that Hallin began keeping a list. He wrote it on the inside of a cigarette packet because the booth had no spare paper, and the first entry was simply the word man, the German for one, which the witnesses used where a speaker with a clear conscience would have used I. Man hatte keine Wahl, one had no choice. Man musste handeln, one had to act. The second entry was the passive voice, which German allows more freely than English does, and which let a man say that villages were cleared without telling the court who had cleared them. The third was a class of nouns that did the work of verbs, so that a killing became a treatment and a deportation became a resettlement and a murder became an action, a word that in English had the flat, administrative sound of a motion on a committee agenda. By Christmas he had added a fourth, which was the habit of describing each decision as the forwarding of an earlier one. Nobody had given an order. Each man had passed along a communication, and the communication had arrived from above, and when the court followed the chain upward it found at the top only a dead man or a missing one.
The difficulty, which he raised with the supervising captain in January, was that English offered every one of these instruments and that his own ear was beginning to prefer them. The captain was a reserved New Yorker named Weller who had been a professor of linguistics and who had not slept properly since the proceedings began. Hallin explained that when a witness said es wurde beschlossen, the natural English was it was decided, and that natural was exactly the trouble, because the English sentence had the same empty chair in it as the German and sounded so ordinary that nobody in the gallery looked for the person who should have been sitting there. He asked whether he ought to add a subject. Weller took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He said that the interpreter's task was to render what the witness had said and in the way the witness had said it, and that if the court wished to find a subject it had a prosecution staff for the purpose. Then he said, more quietly, that Hallin should keep the list but keep it to himself.
Hallin kept it, and the list grew until the packet was covered on both sides and he had to start another. What troubled him more than the length was the discovery that none of it was foreign. The witnesses did not speak a special dialect of evasion, a German of the ministries that could be pointed at and fenced off. They spoke the language that every person speaks at the moment when something done is about to become something owned, and Hallin had been hearing it all his life without recognizing it. He recalled his father explaining, on the platform at Hamburg, that arrangements had been made for the furniture. He recalled the school principal in Chicago who told Hallin's mother that her son's place in the orchestra had been reassigned. He recalled, with less comfort, the way he himself had said to a girl in Evanston in 1941 that things had changed between them.
The matter came to its point in March, on a Tuesday, when a sergeant of the motor pool delivered to the interpreters' office a folded complaint written in German by a widow in the Fürther Strasse. Her son, aged nine, had been struck by an Army truck in front of the bakery the previous week and had died in the hospital on the following afternoon. She wanted to know who was responsible. The office, which was short of staff, asked Hallin to put the letter into English for the provost marshal, and he sat down with it at the end of a long table and wrote what she had written, a plain account in which a boy had gone out for bread and a vehicle had struck him, and then, because the form required one, he attached the sergeant's reply to the claim. The reply had been drafted by the motor-pool officer. It said that an accident had occurred on the date in question, that a pedestrian had been involved, that the vehicle had been proceeding in accordance with regulations, and that the matter was being looked into.
He read the paragraph four times at the table. The truck had been proceeding. The pedestrian had been involved. The matter was being looked into by a body that had no members and a process that had no end, and Hallin, who had spent four months arranging such sentences in the other direction, could hear the entire list in it, the impersonal noun and the empty chair and the communication forwarded from above. The officer who had written it was not a monster. He was a lieutenant from Ohio with a wife and two daughters, and he had written the paragraph in perhaps four minutes, in the ordinary spirit of a man who wants to protect his unit and cannot see why a report should be made to sound worse than the facts required. Hallin understood that the lieutenant had not chosen the language. The language had been there, available and respectable, in the same way that a coat hangs on a hook by the door, and he had put it on.
That night, in the room he shared with a Belgian interpreter who slept soundly, he took out a sheet of paper and began a letter to the widow. He was not authorized to write to her and understood that nothing he wrote could be sent through the Army. He was merely trying to see whether he could set down what had happened without borrowing from any entry on the cigarette packet. The first draft said that the death of her son was deeply to be regretted and that steps were being taken. He crossed it out. The second said that a truck had struck her son and that the driver was an American soldier, and that the Army had written to her in words that concealed him. He read that over, and then he crossed out the last clause, because it was an explanation and the explanation was another way of standing at a distance, and wrote simply that he was an American and had read her letter and was sorry. On the third sheet he added his name and the name of his unit and the address of the interpreters' office, and he went on looking at it for some time, aware that he had never before signed a document in which the first word was I and the verb that followed it was not hedged.
The next morning the same witness returned to the stand, the man in the taken-in gray suit, and the prosecutor asked him whether he had ever, in the course of his duties, personally seen a transport depart. The witness said that it would be difficult to say precisely what one saw in those circumstances, and the yellow bulb came on, and Hallin heard himself begin the English a half sentence behind. One could not say with precision. He let the one stand, because that was what the man had said, and because the court ought to hear exactly how little of him there was in his own account. When the thirty minutes were over, he took off the headset and went down the back stairs and posted the letter at the camp office himself, and he gave the clerk his name.