Then, when Shmelke and I were maybe five years old, before we were torn apart yet again and sentenced to separate bedrooms, I happened to find in a garbage pail set out for pickup on the curb of our Brooklyn street a picture book sodden with coffee grinds and potato peels, about Hindu gods and goddesses, an object I instinctively assumed to have been confiscated from some kid in our neighborhood who had gone off the rails, God alone knows at what station she ended up. Shmelke and I read this contraband every night, not including the Sabbath, under the covers with a flashlight, we knew all the stories by heart—by heart! I was particularly blown away by the tale of the twin brother and sister, Yama and Yami, the first mortals on earth. Like Yami, I begged my Yama, my twin brother, Shmelke, to marry me. Why not? Why should this not be possible? How could there be closeness tighter than that of twins, so spiritually conjoined? Only an arrogant fool would presume to insert himself between two so bound up together even from the womb and attempt to split them apart. Hadn’t Cain and Abel, according to legend, married their twin sisters—for how else other than through the implicit existence of twin sisters could all that begetting have gotten its kick start, since no mention needless to say is made of female births in the first family? Yet Shmelke turned me down, a rejection that still throbs in memory to this day, like a savagely amputated limb. It was against the laws of the Torah, he pronounced sagely: The nakedness of your sister you may not uncover, Leviticus chapter eighteen verse nine. Already he was a prodigy, an ilui, a category applied only to boys, with a royal career mapped out before him by our father and his hand-picked team of tutors and groomers.