When the boys were born, Halim spent two months without touching Zana’s body. He told me how much he suffered: he thought this time of prohibition absurd, and his wife’s mad devotion to Omar even more ridiculous. He spent the day in the shop, passing the time with the customers and layabouts that wandered around the port area, teaching them to play backgammon, drinking arrack from the bottle, just like when he was courting Zana and reciting Abbas’s gazals. Sometimes he came back home merry, his breath reeking of aniseed, and one or two couplets of love poetry on his tongue: maybe that way she would emerge from her self-imposed quarantine. In the end, convinced that the twins’ birth had interfered with his nights of love quite as much as Galib’s death, he had recourse to the same wiles and gallantries he’d used when his father-in-law died. He reconquered Zana, but said goodbye to the times when they shuddered with pleasure in every corner of the house or the yard.

“Right there, under the rubber tree,” he pointed with the index finger, his hand wrinkled, but still firm. “That was our leaf bed. It really made you itch, because the undergrowth was full of nettles. That was how it was before the twins were born.”

Halim no longer had any peace when the boys began to walk. They meddled with the tobacco in the hookah, brought dead lizards into the house, and filled the hammocks with nettles and crickets. Omar was the more daring: he went into his parents’ bedroom during the siesta and did somersaults on the bed until he got rid of Halim. He only quieted down when Zana left the room to come and play with him in the yard. The two of them sat in the shade of the rubber tree, while Halim, irritated, had the urge to lock Omar in the chicken coop, empty since Galib’s departure. “What poor Halim went through with Omar,” said Domingas, remembering the time when he tried to steady his son. When he was riled, he used to chase Omar around the house; the boy would climb into the jackfruit tree and threaten to throw one of the huge fruits onto his father’s head. Zana laughed: “You look as childish as Omar.”