Sofia worked in the glass booth at the back of the General Assembly and translated between languages that did not map cleanly onto one another. The word for mercy in Kinyarwanda carried a weight that the English word had long since been depleted of. The French word for security implied a relationship between state and citizen that the Arabic equivalent did not assume. She translated anyway, precisely and quickly, because that was her job and the negotiation could not stop to account for the gaps. After fifteen years she had developed a private list of words she called untranslatables, not because no equivalent existed in the target language but because the equivalents did not carry the same cultural mass. She wrote them in a notebook at home, with explanations she knew no one else would read. She was not sure what she intended to do with the list. The negotiation she was working on in March was about water rights. Both delegations used the word sharing. The word meant something different to each of them in ways that the written treaty would paper over and that would become visible only after implementation. She translated sharing as sharing and moved on, because her job was not to stop the process but to carry it forward, and she had been carrying things forward long enough to know that the gaps did not disappear. They just changed shape.