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flesh melted in the mouth even as the tongue savored the fragrance of the spices. Karim ate the spaghetti and thought of ox cheek; in fact, he might go so far as to say now that at that moment he could see the ox in front of him and had been ready to attack it, rip it to pieces. That was the day he discovered that death stimulates the appetite. He told his wife that Man is a cruel and trivial being because he believes he can overcome death by eating. Then he burst into tears and told Bernadette he didn’t believe Nasri was dead because the man could never die; how was he to explain to her that he’d been convinced his father would never die because he had no soul? All his life he’d felt quite comfortable with this idea, which had struck him long ago, only for him to discover its fragility at the moment of the old man’s death.
    The brothers were sure their father would never die: he’d told them as much himself. Karim didn’t know when his father had spoken those words, but he knew they were a part of his life, as though he’d been born with them. In all probability Nasri had said what he had to his sons to reassure them. The boys had been terrified by the death of the father of a boy at school. They hadn’t talked about it but had been unable to sleep; their dreams had become more like waking fantasies and they’d stopped being able to recount what they dreamed.
    They used to tell their father their dreams to entertain him. Nasri believed that sleep was a person’s window onto the soul, so he trained his sons to remember their dreams and the boys were expected to make up shared dreams. Things got mixed up in Karim’s mind because he no longer knew how dreams ought to be told. Usually, his brother began and he interrupted Nasim to tell his own stories, but soon he’d find himself following the course of his brother’s dream. Did the twins see the same dreams?
    Though, in fact, they weren’t twins. It was their father who’d turnedthem into twins and imposed on them the illusion that they resembled one another in everything, in so doing leaving his fingerprints on every aspect of their future lives.
    The two children were terrified when the father of one of the students at the Frères School died unexpectedly of a heart attack. They came home from school with the signs of panic sketched in their eyes, but Nasri noticed nothing. He was sitting in the living room sipping coffee and smoking, and sitting next to him was Tante Sawsan. The woman’s nails were painted a bright violet and there were smears of lipstick on the butt of her cigarette. Her voice was loud and hard and her eyes looked droopy because the mascara had run. Nasri was looking at her, his smile swaying to the swaying of her face as he sank into the thick smoke from her cigarette. He saw his sons were in the apartment though he hadn’t noticed their arrival. He asked them to come up to the woman, who kissed them, leaving on them a smell of sweat mixed with a cloying perfume. When the boys had arrived home at four p.m. they’d been surprised to see movement in the living room. Usually the apartment was empty, their father at the shop, the windows closed, and there’d be a smell of the disinfectants with which the pharmacist cleaned the apartment for fear of germs. That sunny spring day in April, however, they’d found the windows open and smelled a strange smell. Their father went off with the woman, leaving them on their own, and when he returned at nine p.m. the apartment was in darkness and the boys were in bed. He heard a strange sound in their room, went in on tiptoe without turning on the light, and found them crying. He went up to them and they pretended to be asleep. He shook them and tried to wake them up, and their crying stopped. But they never showed they were awake. The next morning, as they were eating fried eggs, he asked them what they’d been dreaming about, but they didn’t answer. When he insisted and looked at Nasim, who as