What the Court Interpreter Left Out

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

Kumasi, 2019

Lawyer Badu said should have known for the third time that morning, and Efua heard her own sentence come back to her across the courtroom with his voice inside it. He held the transcript at arm's length as though it smelled of something.

"My Lady, the prosecution's own witness told this court that my client was near the matter and should have known. Should. Not did." He laid the page on the bar table and smoothed it with two fingers. "We are not here about carelessness. We are here about fraud. Fraud requires intent."

Justice Amponsah wrote without looking up. The ceiling fans turned with a slow tick, as if counting, and rain ran in sheets down the louvres so that the light in Court Two was the colour of weak tea. On the registrar's desk the case files sat in a stack, each one tied with pink tape gone soft and grey at the knots.

Beside Efua, Serwaa underlined the phrase in her notebook. Twice. The girl had beautiful handwriting and a habit of mouthing words before she spoke them, which Efua had been trying to train out of her for four months.

Near the matter. Should have known. Efua had said those words on Tuesday. She remembered saying them. She remembered, too, what Nana Afua Kyerewaa had actually said, the old woman sitting very straight in the witness box with her cloth knotted at the shoulder, pointing her chin at the surveyor in the dock as though he were a goat that had got into her yam.

Ne nsa da nkwan no mu, na ɔse ɔnnim sɛ ɛyɛ hyew.

His hand is lying in the soup, and he says he does not know it is hot.

It was not a proverb about nearness. It was a proverb about a man with his fingers scalding who pretends to feel nothing. Everyone in the public gallery who spoke Twi had understood it; Efua had seen two market women in the back row click their tongues. But the record was in English, and in English it now said that Kwame Adusei, licensed surveyor, whose stamp sat on eleven site plans for land at Kwadaso that the Kyerewaa family had never sold, had merely been nearby.

She had softened it because the old woman was shouting. Because the judge disliked proverbs and said so. Because after thirty-three years Efua's mouth had learned to make Twi presentable before her mind could stop it.

Kumasi, 1993

On her third day in the job, Mr. Gyamfi gave her his spare biro and told her the only rule he had ever needed. "Whatever they say, you say. If it is ugly, it is ugly. You are not their tailor."

He was a thin man with a cough who interpreted Twi, Fante and some Ewe, and who ate groundnuts from a twist of newspaper during every recess. Efua was twenty-four and owned one suit.

On the fourth day she interpreted for a widow named Abena Konadu, who was fighting her late husband's nephews for a cocoa farm near Bekwai. The judge that year was a heavy man with a sore knee who wanted everything shorter.

"Interpreter. The short of it."

Abena Konadu had told it long. Her husband had called his brothers. He had said before them that the farm was hers for the years she had weeded it. She had brought a bottle of schnapps, and he had poured it, and the brothers had drunk.

Efua, sweating, hearing the judge sigh, said: "My husband gave me the farm in front of his brothers."

She left out the drink.

She understood what she had done on the trotro home, somewhere past Kejetia, with a woman's basket of tomatoes pressing into her knee. The drink was the aseda, the thanks. Under customary law it was the drink that made a gift a gift. Without it, a man talking in front of his brothers was only a man talking.

She did not go back to the judge. She did not tell Mr. Gyamfi, who had been in the other court that day. She told herself the lawyer would raise it, that the widow would say it again in cross-examination, that a fourth-day interpreter could not walk into chambers and announce she had already failed.

The widow's lawyer did not raise it. The nephews' lawyer certainly did not. Judgment came in three weeks: no evidence that the gift had been accepted in the customary manner. The farm went to the family.

A year later Efua was buying kontomire at the market and a voice said her name, or rather said "Interpreter," and it was Abena Konadu with a tray of secondhand children's shoes. She had moved to Aboabo. Her boy had left school; he pushed a truck now.

"You spoke well for me," the widow said, and pressed Efua's hand. "God saw."

Efua paid for the kontomire and did not remember walking home.

Kumasi, 2019

At the eleven o'clock recess the corridor smelled of wet concrete and roasted plantain. Through the gate, girls with basins on their heads were calling "Pure water, ice water," and lawyers in damp wigs were buying sachets two at a time, biting the corners off.

Serwaa caught up with her by the noticeboard.

"Auntie, Tuesday. The soup proverb." She said it carefully, a junior offering a junior's question. "I would have said 'his hand is in the pot.' But I think you were right to make it plain. Her Ladyship gets annoyed."

Efua looked at the girl. Twenty-six, first in her class at the language centre, two years at most before she would sit in Efua's chair and nobody would check her.

"Were you writing it down when she said it?"

"Yes, Auntie."

"Show me."

Serwaa opened the notebook. There it was, in the girl's lovely hand, every word of the Twi, the tone marks correct. And underneath, in English, what Efua had said. Copied faithfully, as Efua had taught her. A student learning the job by watching.

"Badu has built his whole cross on it," Serwaa said. "Should have known. He keeps saying it."

"Yes," said Efua. "I heard him."

She bought a sachet of water from the nearest girl and did not open it. She thought about how it would sound. My Lady, the interpreter wishes to correct her own rendering. Badu would turn and look at her with real pleasure. He would say the word reliability. He would ask, in that courteous way of his, how many other renderings the court ought now to revisit, from an officer with a career of such length. Justice Amponsah, who had once called Efua the best interpreter in Ashanti in front of a visiting delegation, would have to write it down.

And Serwaa would watch.

Efua had imagined her last two years as a kind of tidying. A clean record, a properly trained successor, a send-off in the registry with jollof in foil trays. She had not imagined standing up.

She thought of the shoes on the tray. Small ones, school ones, the buckles polished with spit.

She put the sachet in her bag.

When the court rose for Her Ladyship and sat again, Efua stayed standing.

"My Lady. The interpreter asks leave to approach the bench, with counsel."

Justice Amponsah lowered her pen. Badu half-turned in his seat. In the dock, Kwame Adusei, who had worn the same careful blue tie every day, touched it.

"Come," said the judge.

Efua walked to the bench with both lawyers at her shoulders. Ms. Nyarko for the State smelled of rain and peppermint. Badu smelled of nothing at all.

"On Tuesday the fourteenth," Efua said, and her voice came out level, which surprised her, "the witness Nana Afua Kyerewaa used a proverb. I rendered it as 'He was near the matter and should have known.' That rendering was mine. It was inaccurate, and I ask that the record be corrected."

"Inaccurate how?" said the judge.

"I would like to give it word by word, My Lady. So the court can see it and not take my summary a second time."

A pause. The fans ticked.

"Go on."

"Ne nsa. His hand. Da. Is lying, is resting. Nkwan no mu. Inside the soup. Na ɔse. And he says. Ɔnnim. He does not know. Sɛ ɛyɛ hyew. That it is hot." She drew breath. "In use, it describes a person who is fully involved in something and claims not to feel it. It does not mean 'should have known.' It means he knows."

Badu's voice was quiet and very pleasant. "My Lady, the defence will want to be heard on the reliability of the interpretation throughout."

"You will be heard, Mr. Badu." Justice Amponsah was writing. She wrote for some time. "Registrar, the record will reflect the interpreter's correction of the fourteenth, verbatim as given. Counsel may address it in submissions." She looked at Efua over her glasses, a long look with nothing readable in it. "Thank you, Madam Interpreter."

Efua walked back to her chair. Every step she could feel the gallery. One of the market women in the back row nodded at her, once, the way you nod at someone who has finally paid a debt you had forgotten they owed.

Serwaa had her notebook open. Under Tuesday's English she had drawn a single straight line, not scribbled out, just struck through so it could still be read. Beneath it she was writing the six pieces, word by word, as Efua had said them.

Badu was on his feet, asking for an adjournment to consider his position. Ms. Nyarko was saying something about the weight of the remaining evidence. Kwame Adusei had stopped touching his tie.

Efua took her own logbook from her bag, the one she had kept since 1993, and turned to the inside cover where there was still a little room. She wrote the date. Under it, smaller, she wrote Abena Konadu, Bekwai, the drink, and then she slid the logbook across the desk so that Serwaa could read it too.