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within him. His father said he’d understand things when he grew older, and refused to let him enter the laboratory. “It’s the secrets of the profession, my son, and you refused to do pharmacy. Your brother, who was no good at school, knows more about pharmacy than you. One day, when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
    Nasri Shammas was fifty when the incom​prehen​sible obsession struck him. His sex life had more or less settled down after his wife’s death. He’d refused to remarry “for the boys’ sake,” he used to say, and he believed that one marriage was enough for him and there was no need for a second round of sexual dissatis​faction. He took care of his needs with prostitutes. Once a week he’d go to a brothel in that celebrated street of prostitutes named after the greatest of Arab poets, al-Mutanabbi. Once, he told Nasim the hardest thing one could do was love a prostitute. “When that happens everything turns into a mirage. You’re thirsty and you drink thirst. You drink to quench your thirst and you find yourself thirsty again.” Nasim didn’t ask what the story, which everyone knew about, was because the man had become such an idiot he’d invited Sawsan to the apartment. The smell of scandal had spread through the neighborhood and the twins had felt ashamed.
    As Karim had listened to his brother haltingly recount Hend’s version of his father’s death, he’d said he could see the woman in their apartment in front of him and remember how nauseous he’d felt.
    The brothers had come home from school to find their father sitting in front of a woman. They pulled back to get away from the strange smell but Nasri ordered them to come forward and shake hands with Tante Sawsan, as he called her.
    The brothers never mentioned the matter again, as though it had been erased, and Nasim’s tears and Karim’s silence and sudden dumbness alongwith it. When Karim listened to the story of his father’s death, though, the smell came back, he could see before his eyes the bulging thighs, red-painted lips, and long violet-colored nails, and he believed the story.
    “You mean Father didn’t slip, the way you told me over the phone?” asked Karim. And when he found out that his father hadn’t died quickly but had been taken to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed a small crack in the skull and internal bleeding caused by his fall, he’d felt afraid. Nasri took six days to die and opened his eyes only once, for a few moments.
    “I was standing next to him, holding his hand, and he opened his eyes. He saw me, his hand let go of mine, and he closed them again. Then two days later he died.”
    “Did he recognize you?” asked Karim.
    “I don’t know,” his brother replied.
    “Maybe he thought you were me,” said Karim.
    It was a habit of Nasri’s deliberately to get the names of the two brothers wrong. He’d call out to one of them using the other’s name and when the boy got angry the father would roar with laughter and apologize and say it was going to be hard for women in the future.
    When his brother called to tell him of their father’s death, Karim had been struck dumb. He replaced the receiver and put his head between his hands, preparing to weep, but the tears hadn’t flowed. A lump had stuck in his throat and choked him and he’d felt he was being throttled. Against habit, he went home at noon. Bernadette asked what was wrong and he didn’t answer. He stood up, opened a bottle of wine, started drinking, and told his wife he was hungry. He ate a huge amount of spaghetti and basil and drank two bottles of red wine. Eating the spaghetti he thought of ox cheek. Talal, a Lebanese youth who had come to France to study cinema, had told him about this amazing dish when they were in some bar. He said that a friend of his father’s from Damascus who was living in Paris, and who calledhimself Zeryab, cooked the tastiest French dishes and had invited him to taste ox cheek. He said the