Sa’id dressed me in the black suit. It was a little too tight for me around the middle. I sucked in my stomach and told him, “Button it! Button the pants!” Then I put on the belt so the button wouldn’t pop off and get lost on the floor. He knotted the tie around my neck. Then he moved me back a little to get a good look at me before brushing off some specks of dust he saw on my shoulders. “Ready?” he asked, tears in his eyes. I frowned at him. I felt that my feet were starting to sink into the tiles. “What’s wrong with you?” Sa’id asked. “Answer me. Are you ready?” I shook my head and retreated. I was having trouble breathing. Chest heaving, I felt I was working too hard just to take in tiny quantities of air. “It’s alright,” Sa’id said, closing the distance between us. “Just loosen the belt. You’ve made it too tight.” He undid my belt, unbuttoned the pants, and sat me down on the chair. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll go right down to the market and buy you a suit that fits better. It won’t take us more than half an hour, trust me.” I nodded. Then I shook my head. I felt liquid running down my face, and I didn’t know if it was sweat or what. Sa’id was losing patience. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked again. “This is no time for tears. We have to bury Thurayya. Come on. Get up and wash your face. We’re going to be late.”

I went into the bathroom and locked the door. Sa’id was still telling me to hurry, but I took off my clothes and refused to come out. Naked, I stood in front of the mirror and whispered, “Please make Sa’id leave now!” Sa’id gave me a moment and then he began pounding on the door. “Come on, N! Let’s go! What did I do to deserve a brother like you?”

I couldn’t bear that from him, couldn’t bear for him always to be complaining about me—he, whom life had never shortchanged, a prince unaccountably born into a family of neurotics. “And what do you think I did to deserve Thurayya?” I shouted at him. “And to deserve you and our father? Just go! I don’t want to hear about any of you ever again!”

Sa’id made no reply. I could hear him breathing on the other side of the door, just opposite where I stood. Then I heard his footsteps as he walked away. I heard him put on his jacket, leave the hotel room, and close the door behind him. I didn’t emerge from the bathroom in case it was a trap. But why would he bother trying to trick me? Sa’id knew better than anyone that Thurayya was never a mother to anyone besides him. He came to pick me up so it wouldn’t be said he hadn’t informed his younger brother of her passing. Now, I told myself, he would say that I had refused to attend, and no one would blame him. I alone would be the one to blame, same as always. Sa’id was the social one. He was good with people. Pleasant to have around and easy to talk to. Witty. Smart. N, on the other hand? Naïve, silent, sulky, cautious, shy. When someone was bullying me, yelling at me, mistreating me, Sa’id would listen in silence, never breathing a word of protest. Instead, he calculated what he stood to lose by interfering: things you’d think were of trifling value compared to brotherhood. Yes, people were mean to me, and he never got upset or defended me. Indeed, he would hide a satisfied smile, for his ego inflated and swelled in direct proportion to the degree that I shrank. I couldn’t understand why Sa’id was jealous of me. He was the favorite. He was the pampered son, whose least request was never refused. In everything he did, Thurayya supported him, indulged him, cheered him on, while she hardly ever noticed me or praised me—I who was smarter and more studious than Sa’id, I who had been head of my class for years. There wasn’t a single day that Sa’id declined to play the role Thurayya had written for him. Not only did he perform it to her exact requirements, he relished it and began chewing the scenery. He never once told Thurayya to stop, and he never once defended me, his little brother. He enjoyed his authority, and he didn’t want to lose even a scintilla of his distinction, even if it meant trampling me on his path to success. To this day, I don’t understand his attitude. How was he able to stomach such favoritism? To not only stomach it but swallow it whole, to really see himself as royalty both by nature and by birth? If I had been in his place, I would have choked on the injustice of it, the flagrant unfairness. I would have put a stop to it …

As for me, I didn’t dare stand up to Thurayya—not as a boy, not as a teenager, and not as an adult. It was her lack of love that crippled me and made me weak before her … and toward everyone else too, come to think of it. In abandoning us, my father deprived me of my final stronghold. I was afraid of Thurayya and her fits of anger that came so unexpectedly. I didn’t know what caused them or how to weather them, apart from hiding in corners and behind doors until she calmed down. Which meant living my entire childhood in corners. That’s where my character was truly formed, and it’s where I remain. My brother, Sa’id, was the opposite, of course. He did everything he could to occupy the center. Thurayya loved that about him, and made room for him wherever she went. She pushed me to the corner and him to the center, erasing me from her sight. She would praise Sa’id for resembling her and wonder aloud how I could possibly be related to her. She’d say he was born to lead, to be in charge, and how, from the very first, he was white and perfect as the full moon, with a high brow, a full head of shiny black hair, and eyes that were blue and wide as though the sky itself had taken root in them. She said that drums had been pounded, desserts distributed, and guns fired to proclaim that a son had been born unto the family. She worked herself into a tizzy telling the story of how the Virgin had come to her during the pregnancy, informing her that she would receive a gift to delight her heart and paint the name of Thurayya in gold.

I found that last claim of hers very odd when I was a child, pondering over it for years. What did it mean for a mother to have her name painted in gold? Children tend to bear their fathers’ names, not their mothers’. Later, though, I understood: Thurayya loved winning, but she also loved winners. Neither I nor my father had ever won anything, but Thurayya saw from the start that my older brother suited her to a tee, more than compensating for her disappointment in the two of us. And she was right. Today, Sa’id is a first-class winner. He owns a giant company that has branches in some of the most important world capitals. His picture occupies the front pages of papers that carry the news of the rich and famous. He married a woman from a family of noble descent, quite worthy of Thurayya, who became grandmother to two lovely granddaughters and a magnificent grandson, given the name Sa’id Junior by his father.

Yes. Children come according to their mothers’ stories about them. A mother loads her child down with fairy tales, nothing more, and then sends him out to the world—either full and self-sufficient or else lacking and deficient forever. My own story began with Thurayya’s disappointment that I wasn’t a girl, then her frustration that my skin was so dark, my eyes black, that I came out with hair on my face, and that my birth weight was so paltry. All this frustration compelled Thurayya to refuse me her breast when I was born, because, as she said, I most certainly couldn’t have sprung from her loins but was someone else’s baby, swapped for her own. The proof? That I didn’t look like my brother. And Thurayya said all of this in front of me, without batting an eye. Half-smiling, she’d then relate how the nun in charge had rebuked her and compelled her to feed me after I was washed and dressed and my hair was combed. I took in the story of my birth without feeling much of anything, since it was forbidden for me to be sad, reproachful, or angry, in case Thurayya might get annoyed and so become sick.

And when Thurayya did get sick, even though he knew we could hardly have been the cause of her illness—an illness of some mysterious variety we could never quite identify—my father, who never lost his temper with us, would lose his temper. His anger would be diluted with a deep sadness when Thurayya informed him, so improbably, that we were behind her fatigue and the decline in her health. Because we wouldn’t comply with her wishes, she said; we didn’t obey her, and we showed so little respect. As for this “we,” which included me, it should have been directed only at my brother, seeing as I was far more a child of the corners, the shadows, the silent, shameful hiding places of the apartment, than I was her son. Nevertheless, my father would scold and threaten to punish me, with hardly a glance at Sa’id, who ignored my father right back. Then he would order the two of us off where he wouldn’t have to look at us anymore, but my mother, in the meantime having been overcome by regret and compassion, would order my father to go after us and bring Sa’id back, at least, because he hadn’t had his dinner yet. She was worried, she said, because Sa’id was looking a little too pale lately. And my father would do it, and Sa’id would return to our mother triumphantly, as always, while I remained a prisoner in my room, where the doctor of the poor would eventually take pity on me, take me on his lap and hug me, and offer me fruit or candy, which I would refuse, not being hungry. Then he would pick me up and put me to bed, since he knew he shouldn’t keep Thurayya waiting too long.

Despite all the gaps in my memory, I remember—and always will remember—how hard I tried to rise to even the lowest verge of the image Thurayya clearly would have preferred to see in me, thinking that maybe she would be satisfied and love me a little if I could manage it. After I had my own little nervous breakdown as a child, and after Mary arrived, I realized that Thurayya couldn’t bear the idea of having a sick child, even if the sick one was me, so I became a healthy boy, obedient, kind, and content. I lost my appetite, and the desire to disappear overwhelmed me, a disgust with both speaking and eating, though I pretended quite the opposite in Thurayya’s presence. Then I started doing so well in school that I was first in my class, year after year. I brought home awards and certificates of distinction, but Thurayya would turn away, saying only that she knew already that I was smart, that there was no need to elaborate. Meanwhile, I read in her eyes the regret that Sa’id wasn’t the one who could achieve such excellence and bring home those grades.

Whenever she had company over, she went on and on, praising Sa’id in my presence, giving elaborate descriptions of his small triumphs, while I would listen contentedly, happy about my older brother, waiting for my turn to come, convinced that this time she surely wouldn’t ignore whatever I’d just accomplished, sitting as I was directly opposite her. Except my turn didn’t come, and it never came a single day as far as she was concerned. Even when she grew gentler and weaker, when my father left us for his grave, and then my brother left us to make his fortune, and I alone remained with her, happy that I now finally had the opportunity to get close to her and win her heart … even then I couldn’t win. Almost at once, she started forgetting my name and calling me by his. She would kiss my hands as they fed her, and take hold of my arms as they supported her. And if I asked, in her moments of clarity, “Who am I?” she would smile and say, “You are my father.” I would tell her, “No, I’m your son,” and she would reply, joyfully, “Of course! You are Sa’id.” And when I corrected her, when I said, “No, not Sa’id,” she would begin sobbing, “You don’t love me anymore.”

We all have a spot on our backs that is vulnerable to loss, where love and security can leak out. They’re square, these areas, the size of a hand, cut into the middle of that smooth, flat surface of our body, where all our nerves, all our feelings, all our longings are exposed. A secret panel that grants entrance to the heart for reassurance, or its absence, to spread within. When we are born, and our first sob makes us realize that we have entered this vale of tears, the doctor lays us on our mother’s breast for her to press the palm of her hand onto that spot. That’s how the heart is unsealed, how the lungs begin working. Oxygen comes in, our organs throb with life. But when a mother doesn’t put her hand on that secret spot in her child’s back to rub and massage and caress, the baby isn’t let off the hook, no: life itself steps in to keep its pulse moving, like those machines we plug our hopeless cases into so as to prevent them from leaving this world too soon … and the child becomes just another digit in life’s tally, without an identity or family of its own.

Me? You’ve probably guessed that no mother pressed her hand onto that special spot on my back. She neither kissed nor nursed me. She suffered me to live in her vicinity, that’s all. Perhaps my father took an interest in me, inasmuch as fatherhood allows, but a father’s hand is not the lifeline that can save the little creature who’s been floating inside his mother’s belly for nine months …