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 turned them 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 a child had provided the weak point through which the pharmacist 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 his brother 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 conceptualization 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 told his brother that their father had no soul and would, therefore, never die, since, for a person to die, the soul has to leave the body. Nasri, though, was a body without a soul, one that held itself together on its own, as uniform in its consistency as something cast out of brown mud and then baked in the sun.
When Karim had picked up the receiver in Montpellier and heard his brother’s voice recounting the news, he’d seen, as clearly as though it were taking place before his eyes, a strange scene: his father falling to the ground and breaking up into pieces like a child’s doll, the limbs and parts all becoming detached. He’d knelt down to pick up the pieces and put them together again, and every time he touched one it had turned into sticky clay. Had the dream come from the sense of exile and loneliness he’d felt when his brother told him their father had died and that there was no need to come to Beirut because they’d already buried him? Or was it a fantasy, a picture created by the poor connection and the crackling that had obscured his brother’s voice?