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a child had provided the weak point through which thepharmacist could force himself into the life of his sons, the boy burst into tears and asked his father not to die.
    That morning Nasri promised his sons he wouldn’t die. He told them he would stay with them and never leave them.
    “We don’t want that woman who was with you yesterday,” said Nasim, crying.
    “Okay,” said Nasri. “Forgive me. I was abandoned for a moment. God abandoned me and put me in the way of that whore.”
    “What’s a whore?” asked Nasim.
    “You’re still young. Shut up and don’t ask questions!” yelled Karim.
    The boys decided to believe Nasri, but Sawsan’s shadow continued to haunt the apartment, even creeping into their dreams, and the name of the woman with the violet nails stayed with them a long time.
    When Nasim told his brother about the first time he had sex with a prostitute in the souk, he said he’d “sawsanned” to the singing of Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab emerging from a large wooden wireless set on the prostitute’s bedside table; she’d opened her legs, yawned, and fallen into a doze.
    “Was her name really Sawsan?” asked Karim.
    “Sawsan’s something else. I’m telling you how I got on. I was sawsanning her and everything was going fine but when I told her how nice sawsanning was she started to laugh and you know what happens if someone laughs and you’re inside them.”
    “I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Karim.
    “You’re an idiot and you always will be an idiot about women. The only way to learn, you ass, is from whores, because if you don’t start practicing now, the women will laugh at you and you’ll have a headache all your life from the horns.”
    When Nasim had told his brother he was an idiot, he was referring to his relationship with Hend. Nasim took back his words when he found hisbrother was having an affair with the brown-skinned girl. In truth, though, there was nothing to take back as matters hadn’t gone any further between them than smiles when she’d come to the pharmacist’s with her mother. Nasim had said to his brother jokingly that perhaps she’d love both of them at the same time, then noticed the anger on his brother’s face and said, “No, I was just joking, don’t take it so hard. But I have to take you to the souk so you can get some practice on the women there.”
    Karim couldn’t get Sawsan out of his mind. He saw the image of his father mixed up with weird sexual dreams. Karim hadn’t admitted to his brother that the first ejaculation of his life had been a result of one of those dreams, but Nasim had known with a twin’s intuition that Sawsan’s nights moistened his brother’s too with the smell of manhood.
    Nasri had told his sons not to be afraid as he was never going to die. Karim believed his father, and the business became linked to a strange concep​tualiza​tion that had taken shape in his mind via some process he couldn’t understand. He grew convinced his father wouldn’t die because the man had no soul. His father, with his white hair, was a mass of taut nerves and muscles. The pharmacist continued to run and swim up to his death at the age of seventy-six: he was thin and had firm muscles – unlike his sons, who tended to be slightly overweight and had problems with their health. Karim got stomachaches and Nasim carried from his childhood the burden of asthma, which, he reckoned, was the result of genetic factors inherited from their mother. She, who had died when the twins were five, had passed on to them the whiteness of her skin, her straight back, and her poor health. The dark-skinned father with the crown of white hair looked at his sons in sorrow and asked himself what relation they bore to him: “It’s like you weren’t my children. I swear I have no idea where your mother got you from.” Nasim overcame the asthma when he was twelve and started to swim, but poor health continued to dog his elder brother.
    Karim had