He carried me into our bedroom, still limping but strong, pulled the heavy dark drapes across the window, gathered as many candles as he could find, and lit them around us. He put a tape mix into the boom box and played it low. It wasn’t dance music, but tarab, the classical Arabic songs from the Levant and North Africa. He tied a kuffiyeh around my hips. I danced first for him, but quickly, as always happened, I danced for the music, for the sake of dance, for the sake of my body, the air, and the night. For the sake of memory and the moon. For love of Bilal and longing for my family. It felt good to dance. I gathered up the hours past with my hips, rolled them into my body. Bilal’s hands brushed against me, but I wasn’t yet ready for him. I wanted time with the music. It had been too long since I had danced. I shed my clothes, my dishdasha falling with a swoosh to the floor. Naked now, but for the kuffiyeh Bilal retied around my hips, I returned to the music and danced. He watched. For a long time. There’s music that I can hear, listen to, enjoy. Then there’s something else. It’s when the deft, small movements of instruments invoke a kind of beauty that fills the room. It calls on history to join in. Centuries gone and maybe time yet to come arrive. It takes my breath away. And all I can do is let it seep into my skin, close my eyes, watch beauty expand inside of me, and feel it animate every part of me. At some point, it always happens, the music closes its eyes too. It takes a breath too—maybe with the plaint of a violin, the call of the ney, or the quiver of an oud—and settles so gently on my heart.

Bilal whispered, “You are the most magnificent woman I have ever laid eyes upon.” As Abdel Halim Hafez sang from the speakers the lyrics of “El Hawa Hawaya,” Bilal kneeled next to me and held my leg, kissing my ankles, calves, knees, taking his time moving up my thighs, between my legs. The music kept playing. Candles flickered and burned out as we made love under curfew, behind blacked-out windows, hidden from the tanks and jeeps and snipers hemming in our town.

Temperatures soared, and we struggled to keep ourselves cool. I worried about the trees in this sun without rain, especially the vulnerable burned trees still recovering and the saplings with shallow roots.

As we sat drinking our morning coffee the fourth week of curfew, the radio broadcast: “International condemnation of the Zionist entity is increasing. Zionist occupation forces are rumored to be planning to lift curfew for a few hours to allow evacuation of the sick, burial of the dead, and for people to buy supplies.”