Miss Zahra closed the door. The smell of her perfume preceded her and flew straight up Mr. N’s nostrils. Indeed, it tousled his hair, cracked open his skull, and penetrated his very pores with a shudder that crackled in his belly like lightning. Femme, thought Mr. N with irritation, realizing that the visitor was certainly his brother, Sa’id. Who else could it be? He came to see Mr. N once or twice each year, whenever his work and his many travels permitted, though they rarely did. No doubt Sa’id had given Miss Zahra this perfume on some previous visit, and she’d decided to put it on that day for his sake after he’d called to say he was coming.

Sa’id never came without giving notice of his arrival. He always liked people to be ready for him, never leaving them any room for pretext or excuse, which gave him all the more license to reproach them if they failed to roll out the red carpet for him. As for the perfume, he gave the same brand—his mother’s—to every woman he knew, because, as far as he was concerned, every woman was a project, someone to mold. It would start with the perfume, and then they would invariably fall for Sa’id’s good looks and dazzling charm. In Sa’id’s heart, all women were variations upon the theme of Thurayya, attempts to return to the model she’d presented, transcriptions of various portions of her melody, at least, if not, indeed, full and comparable copies. This was why he’d married Asiya, daughter of the owner of the largest and most important marketing company in the Middle East. She embodied the beauty and elegance of a woman on a billboard, so Sa’id had nothing to add apart from Thurayya’s perfume, which Thurayya always boasted was created especially for her. She never used any other, and she would go on at length about it until the person listening to her really did begin to believe it had been blended for her sake and according to her own specifications. “Femme! That’s a real woman’s perfume. It first hit the market the same year I was born! A telling coincidence, no?”

Then Thurayya would lean over little Sa’id, inviting him to smell her wrist, followed by her neck, adding, “I put it where you can feel my pulse—that’s so the heat helps diffuse all its notes … Close your eyes, and savor the first scents: apricot, peach, and cinnamon. Inhale the Brazilian rosewood and lemon! Then enjoy the underlying hints: clove, lily, rosemary, jasmine, and rose. Finally, swim in its depths, where you’ll find leather, ambergris, patchouli, benzoin, vanilla, and musk … ”

Sa’id listened, smiling, enrapt, while N circled about, furtively listening from his hiding place between two couches. He saw Thurayya as a sorceress, gathering flowers, grasses, and spices to mix them in copper pots before breathing upon the mixture to finish her special perfume. Then she distilled the potion into bottles of translucent crystal that she distributed to the girls of the neighborhood, who would queue up in endless lines, waiting and waiting for their own bottle.