The Dance of the Bee was the evening’s highlight. The musicians lowered a fold of their turbans to cover their eyes. Only Gustave and Maxime would have the honour of witnessing the special dance in that cramped, dimly lit space. One rabab player was reluctant to blindfold himself and, for reasons unfathomable to the French travellers, fixed them with a hostile stare. The man appeared old and haggard. He had a skeletal figure and long, bony fingers. His face was dark and he had sunken cheeks and a thin moustache.

‘Mehmet,’ Kuchuk Hanem called his name gently and winked.

Gustave and Maxime guessed that this Mehmet was protesting. His broken voice was indistinct. For Gustave, such unintelligibility went beyond a language barrier. He couldn’t tell whether the man was uttering a sentence, presumably unfinished, or was simply grunting like a pig. His tongue seemed trapped. Gustave could only hear choppy laryngeal sounds, conjuring images of a rite to resurrect the dead.

‘No need for him to close his eyes if he doesn’t want to. The old man is quite harmless,’ said Maxime, who had little interest in local dramas.

Confronted with Kuchuk Hanem’s stubbornness over the integrity of her performance, Mehmet finally gave up. But the phrase ‘gave up’ didn’t reflect what was in his eyes just before he applied the blindfold. Something was festering there, decaying slowly, as if Mehmet himself had started decomposing long ago.

In the next moment, Kuchuk Hanem transformed into a beautiful girl pondering a lover, motionless, her feet fixed on the ground. Suddenly, a shrill. The music grew frantic, terrifying, like an angry bee. Such a merciless bee it was, darting at her breasts, making her writhe, her feet still grounded, compelling her to shed all her garments. As she jerked her hips in a frenzy, Gustave observed the folds of flesh on her belly and caught a faint scent of turpentine emanating from her skin. Perhaps not Hasan el-Belbeissi, Gustave thought, but a muse regardless.

The Bee was hardly the Muse’s favourite piece of choreography, but at least it allowed the pleasure of acting silly rather than sexy.

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