A Love Story in the First Person

When I interpret in a courtroom, I speak in the first person. I saw, I was standing by the fountain, I do not know what time it was. The judge knows this, the court reporter knows it, the lawyers know it, and yet every time someone on the public benches turns and looks at me as if I had been there. I was not. I only stand beside the witness, a little to one side, so he can see both my hands and my face, and I lend him my voice. For this the court pays me by the hour, from nine in the morning until the judge gets hungry.

I was lending my voice before I had one of my own. My parents are deaf, both of them from birth, and in our apartment in Zenica my first word was not mama but the sign for milk. At eight I interpreted for my father at the bank, at eleven for my mother at the doctor's, at fifteen at a meeting of the building council, where the neighbor from the third floor asked me why my parents did not learn to talk normally. I interpreted that exactly, word for word, and my father stood up and left. Since then I have always interpreted exactly.

I first saw Faruk Ajanović in October, in the hallway on the second floor of the court. He was a witness in a case against a pickpocket who, in June, near the Sebilj, had pulled a wallet out of the backpack of a tourist from Malaysia. The police had camera footage that showed only a cap. Faruk had the face. He sold ceramics in a small shop in Sarači, and that day he had been standing in the doorway, clay up to his elbows, watching. He came to court in an ironed white shirt, but under his nails there was still a little clay, like a child who had been playing in the garden.

He testified quickly and precisely, the way people testify who have spent their whole lives watching instead of listening. He described how the man walked, a little on his toes, how he wore his watch on his right wrist, and how the lace on his left sneaker was untied, so that twice he stopped to keep from falling. I said all of it in the first person, and the court reporter typed. Then defense counsel, attorney Dautović, stood up and asked how the witness could claim to know what had happened if he had heard nothing. I interpreted. Faruk looked at the lawyer, then at me, and answered slowly, so I would not have to hurry: "I did not hear him. I watched him. You, as far as I can see, only listened to him." I had to say it aloud, in my own voice, to a man in a two-thousand-mark suit. Judge Omanović lowered her eyes to the file, and the lawyer sat down.

In the hallway he was waiting for me by the coffee machine. "Thank you for saying it exactly the way I did," he signed. I told him I was not allowed to talk to a witness while the proceedings were under way. "How long do they last?" "In this building? Sometimes three years." He laughed without a sound, with his whole face, made the sign for patience, and went down the stairs. I stayed by the machine, holding a coin I had not put in.

I avoided Sarači until November. Then one Saturday, on my way to the bakery, I walked past his shop and stopped. On the shelves were coffee cups, bowls, and plates in a green the Miljacka has only in April. A small board hung on the glass, written in chalk: I am deaf, not mute. Write, point, draw. Faruk was sitting at the potter's wheel and did not see me. I did not go in. I bought bread and ate half of it on the way home, which I never do.

The verdict became final in February. The pickpocket got a suspended sentence, and the tourist from Malaysia sent the court a postcard thanking the witness. That same afternoon I walked into the shop in Sarači. Faruk was standing at the counter with a young couple from Japan, who were trying to ask in English whether the cups could survive a suitcase. I opened my mouth to interpret, out of habit, the way you open an umbrella at the first drop. Faruk raised his hand without looking at me. "No," he signed. "You are not at work today." He took a cup, wrapped it in newspaper, pushed it into a sneaker that stood under the counter, and put the sneaker in a box. The Japanese couple laughed and bought six. When they had gone, he turned to me. "Now," he signed. "Coffee?"

We sat down in a small café called the Two Mulberries, behind the Bey's Mosque. The waiter, naturally, looked at me. I started to say two coffees, and Faruk took a napkin and wrote in capital letters: ONE WITH MILK, ONE PLAIN, BILL TO ME. The waiter read it, nodded, and left, and I felt embarrassed, as if I had been caught at something. When the coffee came, Faruk asked me, slowly: "When did you last say something of your own?" I did not understand. "In court you speak other people's words in the first person. At home, I am sure, you interpreted for your parents. What do you want?" My hands lay on the table, still, as if someone had switched them off.

I did not answer him that day, or the next. But I kept coming. On Saturdays I sat on a three-legged stool in the corner of the shop and watched the clay rise on the wheel under his palms. In the evenings we walked up to Vratnik and back, and on the tram we talked with our hands while the passengers watched us like television. For the first time I argued in sign with someone who was not my father. For the first time someone kissed me in the middle of a sentence, and I had to start over from the beginning.

I gave him my answer in March. We were sitting on the low wall below the Yellow Bastion, the city was in fog, and without thinking how it would sound in some other language, I signed: I want, sometimes, for nobody to need me. To sit at a table and just eat. Faruk looked into the fog for a long time. Then he took out his phone and wrote me a message, though I was sitting right beside him: Take me to your family.

We went to Zenica on the first Sunday in April, by train, with a box of coffee cups on our laps. My mother made potato pie and spinach pie, and my father put on the shirt he wears for Bajram. At the door, before I could say a thing, my father asked him which team he supported. Željezničar. My father made a sign I would not be allowed to interpret in any courtroom, and both of them laughed. At the table hands flew over the pie. My mother showed Faruk her Zenica sign for the old town, he showed her the Sarajevo one, and they argued over which was prettier. He and my father debated Čelik and the price of clay. Nobody asked me to interpret anything.

I sat between them and ate. For the first time at that table I did not turn my head from one face to another, and I did not wait for someone to finish a sentence so I could repeat it to someone else. Before coffee my father tapped a finger on the table, the way deaf people ask for attention, and we all looked at him. He raised his glass of juice. "To Kanita," he signed, "who has no work today." My mother laughed, Faruk laughed, and I laughed with a mouthful of pie, and nobody waited for me to tell them what was funny.