Shouts in the dawn: Omar shouting, Rânia and Domingas weeping. Zana covered her face with her hands; she was sitting on the floor surrounded by fragments of the bowl, near Halim, perhaps unaware of how it had happened. No one, that night, saw the old man come into the living room. He must have come in the very early morning, treading imperceptibly, a wounded old man fleeing from everything and everybody, to die. Omar surprised us with his angry gesture, his finger pointing at Halim’s face, at the nearly closed, lifeless eyes in his father’s lowered head. Rânia was paralyzed: she didn’t know what to do; she couldn’t stop her brother shouting, grabbing his father’s chin and lifting his head. The widower Talib came in time to prevent a confrontation between the live son and the dead father. It was already dawn when Talib and his two daughters burst into the room and separated Omar from his father. Omar reacted, kicking out, shouting, and I couldn’t bear seeing him so full of courage in the face of the dead Halim. I made a gesture to Talib and his daughters, pushed Omar out of the room and dragged him out into the garden. He was furious, grabbed a machete and threatened me. I shouted louder than him: let him face me once and for all and cut me in pieces, coward that he was. The machete trembled in his right hand, while I said over and over: “Coward …” He went quiet, gripping the big knife he used for playing at being a gardener. He did have the courage to look at me, and his look only inflamed my anger. He backed off, and stayed squatting under the old rubber tree, his shocked face turned towards the living-room door, from where Domingas was looking at us. She called me, hugged me, and begged me to come back into the room.

Talib’s daughters were unfolding a sheet to cover the gray sofa, where the dead Halim was laid out.

“Don’t touch his body, and don’t weep near here,” Talib said, three times over.

So, lying down, rolled in a white sheet, the father of the twins was ready to leave the house. Zahia and Nahda lifted the corner of the sheet and looked at the dead man, who had so often applauded them. The dancing girls knew it too: Halim would have preferred to die in the bedroom or dancing with Zana, as he himself said at her birthday parties.