They found themselves in that part of the city by accident. Arguments and resentment can cause that sort of aimless wandering, but it's always strange when the two are too stubborn to pull away and wander as individuals. The smells and the sounds shook them out of their thoughts, nutmeg and incense, rhythm and laughter of an unfamiliar hue. In front of them was the source of the music and motion, dimly lit in a recess of the street, but with the unmistakable scent of life pouring out of it. Drawn forward, as if by some invisible force, they entered that bar we resident ex-pats call L'Serpent Rougue.
Cushions and carpets and hookah smoke, dim lamps and cinnamon and coffee, above all the beat of the drums. Drums of all shapes and sizes, Darbouka's most numerous, played by toothless old men and bare chested youths, pounding out sound that got into the blood and burned the heart. They had no words for it, this throbbing in the chest. Barely through the door and already they felt the urge to loosen clothes, remove shoes, partake of unknown sensations. They were seated in a corner towards the back by a middle-aged man who gave them that appraising look purveyors of delights save for those they recognize as novices. Hossam didn't ask their order, immediately brought strong Turkish coffee and a double hosed brass hookah. He also guessed, correctly, that both of them drank whiskey. They sat back in their cushions, closer than they had been for weeks, and drank of that place as they would have of a complex wine or the work of a master painter.
Faces gazed unclothed out of lamplight, shorn of the daytime business-as-usual mask, bidding the couple to do likewise and share in this freedom. This sheer, abject celebration of humanity was something they had never seen or truly comprehended, something more in the way of an abstract idea like physics or the Trinity. But to have it here, now, ****** upon them in such a place was such a shock that perhaps they may yet have shied from it and fled, but it was at that moment that the music changed to a new tempo. Hossam excused himself from the bar and, picking up the Oud propped in a corner, took his place among the musicians.
Simoom was said to be the most beautiful woman in the city, and to have seen her that night, anyone would have believed it. Eyes not quite midnight, but the kind of dark blue that comes just before the sun hints at it's rise. Skin that rich olive color which moves all people deep inside, reminding them in a round about way of the days when the abundant harvest was a reason for rejoicing. The very ideal of grace as she took her own sacred place within the circle of the drummers.
Hossam began a melody, so worn with time and use that one could see the years fall from his body, could see through time to the passion that had always driven his music. And the drummers, young and old alike, followed slowly, almost hesitantly in his wake, as if unsure that they should try and accompany the wellspring flowing from his fingertips. But Simoom, she knew this song, this timeless outflowing, and matched every undulation, every direction Hossam poured out of his instrument and his heart. He played like some Sufi dervish caught up in ecstasy, flames of music which she danced through as a Jinn of the Hejaz.
All of this, the two almost estranged lovers became a part of. In one of those mysterious and unquantifiable facets of human experience, their finite lives became something else. This warmth they had never known suddenly reached out its arms and embraced them. In the midst of that dark place they had found their love descending into, by some chance or will or what have you, they arrived at what some might call a...what's the term...oh yes, "Den of Iniquity". This is the miracle: the differences and petty quarrels, resentments hidden for months, the weight of mundane life, all of the pinpricks upon the heart that lovers unknowingly bestow upon each other fell away, just as the passion of the Oud shed years from Hossam.
They left L'Serpent Rougue with his arm around her waist and her hand in his back pocket, smiling and open to the world. The walk home was itself a new adventure. They danced arm in arm in the middle of the street to a homeless man who played the fiddle, sang the words to their favorite '90s songs as they climbed up the apartment stairs.
Who cares what the landlord says anyway?
She had one of those Chinese calligraphy sets, and she had practiced with it in the years since it was given to her. Practiced that art almost as if it was the only thing that truly belonged to her. As if her entire identity was composed of beliefs ****** upon her by some outside force save for this. Little did she know that this conviction about being an almost carbon copy of ideas not truly his own was a feeling also held by her lover.
That night at the bar and in the street, he saw something in her that he had never witnessed before. The moment when after they got home he took off his shirt and asked her to get the brush and ink was close to forcing him to recede back into a shell. The memories of a person he used to be, fallen far away. But then she smiled and pushed him back upon that rickety bed. She took that brush and ink, painted her soul onto his secret places, and he did the same in turn to her.
