Work Text:
The museum wanted a portrait that would outlive the people who had opinions about it, which Nadia thought was a suspicious way to begin. The director said it with great seriousness in her sitting room while Michael poured coffee and Nadia looked at the folder on the table as if it might contain a legal trap. There had already been photographs, of course. Too many to count. Newspaper portraits, campaign photographs, conference images, photographs in kitchens and streets and airports, formal photographs made by people who asked her to tilt her chin until she no longer felt connected to her own neck. Painting was different. A photograph could pretend to be accidental even when it had been staged within an inch of its life. A painted portrait admitted from the start that someone had looked for a long time and chosen what to keep. The museum director, Dr. Nermine Wahba, explained that the institution was commissioning a series on people whose public work had crossed several decades of Egyptian civic life. Nadia interrupted to ask whether everyone in the series was still alive. Nermine admitted that they were. "Then you are asking us to cooperate with our own memorialisation," Nadia said. "That seems rude." Nermine smiled cautiously, uncertain whether she was being refused. Michael, carrying the coffee tray, said, "She means yes." Nadia told him he had no authority to negotiate her face. He placed her cup beside her and said he had spent more than fifty years negotiating around it. The director laughed. Nadia did too. That, later, would become part of the dispute.
The artist arrived a week later with no portfolio under her arm because Nadia had already seen the work and had disliked enough of it to become interested. Dalia Seif was in her early forties, quiet without being timid, and painted people with an attention Nadia could only describe as impolite. An old actor's hands had occupied almost as much canvas as his face. A retired judge had been painted with the soft skin beneath his chin rendered so carefully that Nadia wondered whether the two men had quarrelled. A young singer's portrait included the faint marks left by spectacles on the bridge of her nose even though she had removed the glasses for the sitting. Nothing in Dalia's work seemed arranged to rescue the subject from having a body. Nadia respected that. She also suspected it would become irritating. At their first meeting Dalia asked no questions about weight, modesty or whether Nadia wanted to appear younger. She asked what kind of chair Nadia preferred, how long she could sit comfortably, whether she wanted her headscarf pinned in a way she could repeat across several sessions, and which room held the best afternoon light. Nadia noticed the practical intelligence of these questions and relaxed enough to become difficult. "You are not going to make me stare nobly into the distance," she said. Dalia set her sketchbook on the table. "Not unless you spend several hours doing it naturally." "I have never done anything nobly for several hours." "Good. That saves time."
They chose the smaller sitting room because its western window gave Dalia the light she wanted and because Nadia refused the museum's proposal to use a studio. If she had to sit still for hours, she wanted access to her own kitchen and the right to complain in familiar surroundings. Dalia moved a chair less than a metre, asked Michael to remove a lamp, then replaced the lamp after deciding its shade reflected warmth into the corner. Nadia watched this with growing amusement. "Artists," she said. "You rearrange one object and call it vision." Dalia answered that organisers rearranged one sentence and called it consensus. The first sitting began well. Nadia wore a deep green dress she had owned for years and a cream hijab, nothing archival or ceremonial. She refused jewellery except for her wedding ring and a pair of small earrings no one would see. Dalia had expected the first hour to be spent finding a pose. Nadia had expected to become bored within twenty minutes. Both were wrong. Dalia drew quickly at first, charcoal moving in short dry sounds across paper, while Nadia talked. She spoke about the absurdity of formal portraits, about an event in the nineties where a photographer had tried to hide half her body behind a plant, about Michael's conviction that no household object should be discarded until he had personally failed to repair it three times. Dalia rarely laughed aloud, but her mouth gave her away. Nadia caught it repeatedly and accused her of encouraging bad behaviour.
Sitting still did not mean silence. Nadia discovered this within the first session and treated it as a loophole. She could not turn her head whenever she wanted, but she could tell stories. She could interrogate Dalia about her training, her family, the price of paint and whether portrait artists ever came to hate faces. Dalia said faces were rarely the problem. "What is?" Nadia asked. "People wanting a portrait of the person they think they ought to have been." Nadia considered this. "Do they tell you that?" "They tell me they want to look natural, then ask whether I can change the jaw, remove tiredness, lengthen the neck, make the shoulders narrower, make the hands younger. Sometimes they ask me to preserve exactly what is there except the evidence that time has passed." Nadia shifted and Dalia immediately told her to return her left shoulder to where it had been. "Tyrant," Nadia said, but obeyed. She was not offended by the idea of visible age. Wrinkles had accumulated without requesting her permission and therefore seemed entitled to representation. Fatness interested her even less as a problem. She had been painted once in a small group mural decades earlier by an artist who reduced every large woman to the same generic roundness, and that had annoyed her because the body ceased to belong to the person. What she wanted from Dalia was accuracy specific enough to include contradiction. "If you make me smooth," Nadia said, "I will assume you are painting my younger sister, whom I do not have." Dalia made another mark. "If I make you smooth, you can refuse the painting." "Excellent. We have established the threat."
The sittings stretched over several weeks. Some days Nadia was energetic and made Dalia stop twice because she was laughing too hard to hold the pose. Once Michael came in carrying a bowl of pomegranates, caught sight of the preliminary drawing and said Nadia looked as though she had just caught him lying about a household expense. Nadia laughed so suddenly that Dalia's brush stopped in midair. Another afternoon Ghalia arrived and sat cross-legged on the carpet with tea, talking about a colleague's disastrous engagement while Nadia tried to keep her face oriented toward the window. Dalia finally asked Ghalia to move because Nadia's eyes kept following her. "My eyes belong to me," Nadia protested. "Not between three and five on Thursdays," Dalia said. Ghalia took great pleasure in this and spent the rest of the afternoon addressing every question to Dalia as if she were Nadia's legal guardian. Yet there were quieter sessions too. Nadia sometimes grew tired. The effort of maintaining posture settled into her back. Conversation thinned. In those periods Dalia worked with an intensity that made the room feel smaller. Nadia would listen to the distant traffic, the clink of Michael moving dishes in the kitchen, a call to prayer travelling between buildings, and feel herself become less a public person than a body occupying a chair while another person watched the changes of light across her face.
Dalia never asked Nadia to smile. Nadia noticed this only after the fourth sitting. Photographers almost always did. Some asked gently, some commanded it, some made jokes until they got the expression they wanted, and a few seemed disappointed when Nadia's resting face failed to communicate a lifetime of benevolence. Dalia took whatever expression arrived. "You realise people think I am warm," Nadia said one afternoon. "I have read this." "Maternal." "Repeatedly." "Comforting." "Often beside descriptions of what you served the journalist." Nadia turned her eyes toward Dalia without moving her head. "You have done your research." "I read profiles. I stopped counting pastries at nine." Nadia laughed. "My family used to keep statistics." "I know." That made Nadia move despite herself. "How do you know?" "Ghalia told me." "Traitor." Dalia waited until Nadia settled again. "I am not painting the profiles." "Good." "I am also not painting against them." Nadia liked that answer. She had no desire for an artist to manufacture severity merely to correct decades of descriptions that reduced female authority to warmth. If Dalia found warmth, let her paint it. If she found exhaustion, that belonged too. If she found a woman thinking about lunch, Nadia only hoped the museum would have the courage to label it accurately.
The first time Nadia saw the nearly finished portrait, she disliked it immediately. Dalia had brought it to the house covered in a grey cloth, accompanied by Nermine and a conservator who behaved as if the canvas might be damaged by strong opinions. Michael stood near the back. Ghalia had arrived because she had been told not to and understood this as an invitation. Dalia removed the cloth without ceremony. Nadia looked at herself. The first thing she saw was size, not because it bothered her but because Dalia had refused every visual trick that painters and photographers used to reduce it. Nadia's body occupied the chair heavily and without apology, the green dress gathering over her stomach and hips, one hand broad and relaxed on the armrest. The second thing she saw was age. The lines around her eyes were exact. The softness beneath her chin was exact. Fatigue sat lightly beneath the eyes. Her mouth was closed. Her gaze was steady and direct, turned slightly away from the viewer but not into any noble horizon. The painting was beautiful in the technical sense Nadia trusted least. The colours worked. The light felt like the room. The hands were unmistakably hers. And the woman in the chair looked as though she had just received news of a death.
Nadia said, "I hate the expression." Three people inhaled at once. Nermine began immediately. "We can discuss adjustments, of course. Dalia's intention was never to make you uncomfortable about the physical representation, and I think the body is handled with enormous dignity-" Nadia turned to her. "What body?" Nermine stopped. "Your... representation." "My body is fine. Why would my body be the problem?" Ghalia looked down to hide a smile. The conservator became fascinated by the edge of the canvas. Nermine tried again, more carefully. "I only meant that portraiture can be confronting, especially when it shows age and-" "Nermine, I know I am fat. I was present when it happened." Michael made a coughing sound that was not a cough. Nadia pointed at the painted face. "That woman is attending a state funeral." Dalia, who had not spoken, said, "No. She is sitting in her own house." "Solemnly." "Yes." "I was not solemn." "Sometimes you were." "I laughed through half the sittings." "Not while I painted that passage." The room went still in the particular way rooms did when two people had found the actual disagreement and everyone else realised their contribution was no longer useful.
Nadia moved closer to the painting. From a metre away, details sharpened. Dalia had caught the fine looseness at the cuff where the dress had been altered years ago. She had painted the wedding ring with almost no emphasis. The skin at Nadia's temple showed beneath the scarf exactly as it did in the mirror. There was warmth in the colour, yes, but not in the expression. "You have made me severe," Nadia said. Dalia shook her head. "I have made you still." "Stillness is not the same thing." "Neither is stillness the same as sadness." "This looks sad." "To you." "I am the subject." "You are one viewer." Nadia stared at her. Michael moved toward the kitchen and took Ghalia with him by the elbow, an act of tactical retreat so smooth that neither woman could object before they were gone. Nermine and the conservator found reasons to examine the window. Dalia stepped beside Nadia, not in front of her. "You spent many hours laughing," she said. "You also spent many hours not laughing. You listened. You rested. You thought. Once you sat without speaking for forty minutes because you were tired. That was not less you than the woman telling me about the photographer and the plant." Nadia folded her arms. "You chose the forty minutes." "I chose the face I kept returning to."
That answer annoyed Nadia for the rest of the day. After Dalia and the museum staff left, the portrait remained propped against the far wall under its cloth because it was too large to remove immediately. Nadia kept uncovering it. She would walk past, pull back the fabric, look for a minute and cover it again. Michael refused to offer an opinion until she asked directly. "What do you think?" she said after dinner. He dried his hands. "I think it looks like you." "That is cowardly." "I have survived marriage by learning when accuracy is cowardice and when it is strategy." Nadia uncovered the painting again. "Do I look miserable?" Michael came beside her. "No." "Solemn." "Yes." "Am I solemn?" "Sometimes." She made an exasperated sound. "Everyone has joined Dalia's conspiracy." Michael looked at the canvas for a long time. "You know what I see? I see the face you make when you are listening to somebody you take seriously." Nadia glanced at him. "I look like that?" "You do when you have stopped planning your answer." "I always plan my answer." "Exactly." She elbowed him. He kissed her forehead and returned to the dishes before she could recruit him further.
Ghalia was less diplomatic. She came the next morning, looked at the portrait again and said, "I love it." Nadia told her children were supposed to support their mothers. "I am supporting you against the tyranny of only having one face." "I have many excellent faces. Dalia chose the least sociable." Ghalia sat on the sofa and studied the canvas. "You know everyone is going to assume you hate that it shows your weight." "They already did." "Of course they did." "Nermine nearly apologised for my stomach." "That would have gone badly." Nadia sat beside her. The portrait stood across the room, the painted Nadia looking past them both. Ghalia said, "Maybe that is why you are annoyed. Not because of the painting. Because you know what people will say about why you are annoyed." Nadia considered denying it and found she could not. There was something irritating about knowing that any discomfort an older fat woman expressed about her own image would be translated into shame whether or not shame was present. If Nadia asked for the expression changed, perhaps the public story would become that she could not bear to see herself truthfully. Her actual objection, that she believed herself funnier than the portrait allowed, sounded almost frivolous beside the cultural machinery waiting to reinterpret it. "I should be allowed vanity that has nothing to do with thinness," she said. "Yes." "I should be allowed to think she made me look boring." "You are many things, Mama. Boring has never been among them."
Nermine telephoned that afternoon, and the call clarified another part of Nadia's annoyance. The director was careful, almost painfully so. She said the museum could ask Dalia for modifications if there were elements Nadia felt "did not represent her self-understanding." Nadia repeated the phrase and asked whether museums had committees devoted to inventing sentences no ordinary person would ever say. Nermine laughed, then admitted she was trying not to offend her. "You are not offending me," Nadia said. "You are worrying about the wrong thing." She made Nermine list what changes she had imagined might be requested. The director resisted, then conceded: perhaps softening the lines around the mouth, adjusting the angle of the torso, warming the expression, reducing the sense of fatigue. Nadia stopped her. "You see? Even you put the face last." Nermine went quiet. Nadia explained that she had no wish to have her stomach moved inward, her jaw redrawn or her age repainted. She had spent too much of her life watching fat women offered flattering lies disguised as kindness. What she wanted to know was why everyone found it easier to believe she objected to visible flesh than to visible solemnity. Nermine apologised. Nadia told her not to. "Just do not turn my irritation into a story about courage. If the portrait remains as it is, I am not brave for allowing myself to look sixty-eight." "You are right." "I know. It is one of my least charming qualities." By the end of the call Nermine sounded relieved, which Nadia considered unfair. Nadia was the one still stuck with the expression.
That evening she made Michael take down a box of photographs from the top shelf of a cupboard. They sat at the dining table after dinner while she spread forty years of versions of herself across it. There was Nadia at twenty-one, laughing with her head thrown back, her body already much larger than the adolescent body relatives had once expected to return. There was Nadia at thirty, unsmiling beside a group of organisers after a meeting that had gone badly. There was Nadia at thirty-six in an image connected to Arab Ass, gaze direct, the camera refusing to pretend faith, fatness, sexuality and middle age belonged to separate women. There were press photographs where she smiled because someone had asked, and family photographs where she did not because no one had. In one, Karim was talking beside her and Nadia's face had the same concentrated stillness Dalia had painted. "There," Michael said. Nadia accused him of collusion with visual evidence. He ignored her and found another: Ghalia as a teenager leaning across a table while Nadia listened, chin slightly lowered, mouth at rest. "There again." Nadia snatched it from him. "You have spent decades taking unflattering photographs." "You said this one was beautiful." "I was younger and naive." Michael looked at the portrait across the room, then at the photographs. "Maybe you think laughter is more truthful because you feel it happening." Nadia frowned. He explained that she knew when she was laughing; she experienced the joke, the breath, the movement. Listening did not announce itself from inside in the same way. "So when you see the listening face, it feels unfamiliar." Nadia disliked how plausible this was. "You should have remained an engineer and stayed out of aesthetics." "I am retired enough to become dangerous." She put the photographs back in their envelope but kept the one with Ghalia on the table.
The next morning Nadia looked at that old photograph before she uncovered Dalia's portrait. The resemblance was not exact, and she was glad of that. Dalia had not simply found a facial habit and enlarged it into a thesis. The old image held motion around Nadia: Ghalia's hand blurred, another person half visible at the edge, cups and papers scattered across the table. Nadia's stillness existed because the others were moving. In the painted portrait there was no visible speaker, no argument, no daughter requiring attention. The viewer had to imagine what Nadia might be listening to, or whether she was listening at all. That absence, she realised, made the expression heavier. "You removed the excuse," she told the painted woman. Michael, entering with toast, asked who she was accusing. "Dalia. In absentia." "A safe opponent." Nadia told him the problem was compositional. He said he was pleased she had advanced from hating the face to blaming composition. She threw a folded napkin at him. Yet the thought remained. Public images had almost always given Nadia a context that explained her expression: podium, crowd, family, meeting, food, protest, celebration. Dalia had stripped all that away except the room and the chair. Without activity around her, seriousness became visible as a thing in itself. Nadia had spent a lifetime insisting she was more than the symbols other people attached to her body. The portrait was inconveniently applying the same principle to her biography. No placards, no microphone, no family, no text explained who she was. An older woman sat and looked.
The museum did not pressure her. Dalia, more irritatingly, did not pressure her either. She left the portrait in Nadia's house for three days and told her to live with it. Nadia did. She resented breakfast under its gaze. She resented passing it on the way to prayer. She resented how Michael became accustomed to it within hours. On the second evening she found one of her grandchildren standing in front of the canvas, hands behind their back, copying the posture. "Why are you doing that?" Nadia asked. The child said, "I'm being you." "You are doing a terrible job. I have never stood like that in my life." "You're sitting in the painting." "Then your method is even worse." The child looked from Nadia to the portrait and said the painting made her look "like you're thinking a lot." Nadia asked whether that was good or bad. The answer was a shrug. Children, she reflected, were useless critics because they had not yet learned which interpretations adults expected. That made them valuable. The child ran off. Nadia remained before the painting, noticing for the first time that the mouth was not downturned. It was simply at rest. The eyes were not empty. Dalia had painted the slight narrowing Nadia made when concentrating. Michael had been right, which was unfortunate.
On the third day Nadia telephoned Dalia and asked her to come without the museum staff. Dalia arrived carrying nothing. They sat facing the portrait together. Nadia said, "I still do not like it." "That is allowed." "You say that too easily." "Would you prefer I demand gratitude?" "No. I would prefer you to be wounded enough that I feel powerful." Dalia smiled. Nadia pointed at her. "There. That. You have painted none of that." "It is my portrait of you, not your inventory." "Convenient." They sat in silence. After a while Nadia asked why Dalia had chosen that particular expression. The artist took time before answering. She said that laughter changed Nadia's whole face quickly and beautifully, but the laughter belonged to moments: Michael entering, Ghalia saying something outrageous, Nadia remembering an old story. Between those moments there had been a steadiness Dalia found more difficult to paint. "You have a public face that invites people in," she said. "It is genuine. I saw it constantly. But when you were not speaking, there was another face. Not closed. Not sad. It looked as if you had spent a very long time seeing people clearly and had no need to make that pleasant for the viewer." Nadia frowned. "That sounds suspiciously like an artist's speech." "It is. You hired one."
Nadia asked whether Dalia had ever considered painting her smiling. Dalia said yes. There were studies in the studio, quick ones, some with Nadia laughing. "And?" "They became charming." Nadia heard the word and recoiled before she could help it. Dalia noticed. "Exactly." Charming had pursued Nadia for half a century in nicer clothing than maternal. A smiling older fat woman could be made safe very quickly. Warmth could become a cage even when the warmth was real. Nadia had fought this before, insisting that being loving did not dilute seriousness, that hospitality did not make analysis accidental. Yet now she was demanding an image that showed more of the warmth because she feared solemnity would erase joy. The contradiction amused her as soon as she saw it. "So I have spent decades complaining that people make me too soft," she said, "and now I am complaining that you have not." "I did not say that." "You were about to." "I was waiting for you to say it better." Nadia looked again. "I still think I look like someone has died." Dalia shook her head. "You are allowed to be wrong about your own face." "This friendship is not progressing well." "I am not sure we are friends." "Excellent. Then I can dislike you freely."
They examined the portrait inch by inch. Dalia showed where layers of paint had changed the set of the shoulders, how she had repainted one hand after realising she had made the fingers too elegant, how the colour around the cheek had been warmed because the first version looked lifeless. Nadia asked whether artists truly saw all those tiny changes or invented explanations after the fact. Dalia told her both happened. "And the solemnity?" Nadia asked. "Would you change it if I insisted?" Dalia did not answer immediately. "If the museum contract required your approval, yes. But I would consider it a worse painting." "That is not the same as refusing." "No. I am not the heroic artist defending truth from a tyrannical patron. It is your face and the museum's commission. But you asked me to paint you without idealising. Idealisation is not only making someone thinner or younger. It can be making them more agreeable to themselves." Nadia absorbed this with reluctance. She had imagined refusal of idealisation in physical terms because those were the terms others most often imposed on her. But Dalia was right that a person could be flattered by mood as easily as by anatomy. To insist that she be represented as cheerful because she valued her cheerfulness might be no different in principle from insisting on smoother skin because she valued youth.
Nadia did not surrender. She asked Dalia to uncover the studies. Two days later she went to the studio with Michael and looked through them. There she was laughing, mouth open, eyes nearly closed. There she was speaking with one hand lifted. There she was leaning forward to argue about something. There she was tired, chin lowered. There she was listening. The studies were alive in a way the finished portrait was not, but they were also fragments so obvious they needed no patience from the viewer. The laughing Nadia announced laughter. The speaking Nadia announced force. The tired Nadia announced fatigue. The portrait resisted announcement. It held several possibilities at once, which perhaps was what had irritated her. "You could put these beside it," Michael said. Dalia looked at Nadia. Nadia shook her head. "No. That would be explaining the painting because I am afraid someone will misunderstand it." "Someone will," Dalia said. "People misunderstand paintings professionally." Nadia smiled. "Then let them earn their salaries." She chose one small charcoal study for herself, the one where she was mid-laugh and had forgotten to hold still. Dalia gave it to her without charge, claiming it was compensation for the sittings. Nadia said the museum had already paid her. Dalia replied that the payment had been for work, while the sketch was for endurance.
The portrait went to the museum unchanged. At the unveiling Nadia stood beside it in a blue dress and low shoes, listening as Nermine spoke about decades of activism, interfaith work, feminism and public life. Nadia had warned her not to describe the portrait as brave. Nermine obeyed. People approached afterward and said predictable things. Several praised Dalia for showing Nadia "as she really was," a phrase Nadia considered impossible to prove. One woman whispered that it was wonderful Nadia had allowed herself to be shown at her age. Nadia asked what alternative age she might have used. A journalist asked whether seeing her body rendered so honestly had been difficult. Nadia said, "No. Seeing my expression rendered so solemnly was difficult," and watched the journalist blink as the expected story disappeared. Dalia, standing several metres away, caught Nadia's eye and smiled. Nadia did not smile back. She was posing for a photograph and wanted to cause trouble later.
The coverage after the unveiling irritated Nadia in predictable and occasionally inventive ways. One columnist praised the "fearless honesty" of showing an older woman without softening her size, as though Dalia had crossed a battlefield to paint a stomach. Another called the portrait "unflinching," a word Nadia circled in the clipping before writing, What was expected to flinch? in the margin. A younger critic came closer, arguing that the painting refused the public habit of demanding visible cheerfulness from women known for warmth. Nadia liked that interpretation enough to distrust it. Dalia telephoned and told her she was impossible to please. "Correct," Nadia said. "That is why you painted me." The most useful response came from a woman at a community centre who had seen a reproduction and said simply that Nadia looked as if she were waiting for someone to finish speaking. Nadia laughed when she heard that. "Michael said the same thing." "Then perhaps," Dalia replied, "your husband and the public have conspired against you." Nadia said the conspiracy was broadening dangerously.
For a while the portrait also changed how people looked at Nadia in person. Visitors who had seen it sometimes studied her face as though searching for the solemn woman beneath the conversational one. Nadia found this unbearable and began making deliberately ridiculous expressions when she caught them. Ghalia accused her of sabotaging art history. Nadia said art history could defend itself. Yet in quieter moments she noticed the reverse happening too: when she became still, she now recognised the face Dalia had painted. Not every time. Sometimes stillness was only fatigue or distraction. But occasionally she would listen to someone speak and become aware, almost from outside, of the mouth at rest and the narrowed attention of the eyes. The portrait had not invented the expression. It had taught Nadia to recognise it. That was an intimacy she had not expected from something she still refused to call flattering.
Months afterward, Nadia still had not decided whether she liked the portrait. This pleased Dalia, which Nadia found irritating enough to mention whenever they met. She visited the museum once alone on a quiet weekday and stood before the painting without identifying herself to the school group clustered nearby. The students discussed colour, history and whether the sitter looked strict. One girl said she looked tired. Another said she looked powerful. A boy said she looked as though she was listening to someone he could not see. Nadia nearly turned around. Instead she remained at the edge until the group moved on. The painting did not become more cheerful because she had accepted it. It did not reveal a secret smile. It remained solemn, still, broad, lined, tired and attentive. Nadia thought again of the hours Dalia had watched her between stories. Perhaps the portrait contained a Nadia she did not often see because mirrors were used quickly and photographs captured moments she knew were being taken. This woman had been observed during the spaces between performance, even the performance of being naturally herself. Nadia did not have to prefer that woman. Preference was not ownership.
At home the charcoal study hung near the kitchen, where Michael had chosen a frame Nadia considered too expensive. In it she was laughing so hard her chin had folded into her neck and one hand was blurred from movement. Nadia loved it instantly and without complication. The museum portrait required more from her. When people asked whether she liked it, she stopped giving an explanatory answer. "Some days," she said. Or, "I respect it more than I like it." Once, when Dalia asked again, Nadia said, "I think you painted a part of me I would not have commissioned." Dalia answered, "That may be the nicest thing you have said about it." Nadia warned her not to become sentimental. Yet the phrase stayed. The solemnity was not false merely because it was not Nadia's favourite account of herself. It was also hers: the quiet face after laughter, the listening face, the tired face, the face of a woman old enough to have accumulated grief without becoming reducible to it. She had spent much of her life insisting that bodies were allowed complexity without apology. It seemed only fair to extend the same courtesy to expressions.