The Dance
By Basim Mardan
I was sitting in my usual corner in the bar, wasting my moments, trying to rediscover my world again, this time through the bottom of my glass of beer. People around me did not exist, and the music echoed as if it was coming from a distant place. The sounds were very vague, very unclear and completely meaningless, Not only because they were spoken in a language that I know very little about, but also because of this state of mind that I sometimes get. When all my senses are not in any way functioning, and there appears this wall that blocks my brain from receiving any sign from the rest of me or from whatever that's around me, you can cut me with a knife and I will not feel a damn thing.
The music got higher, and the human forms around me began to move, aimlessly, and somehow strangely. I could see the half fading smiles on their tired faces, and that was not amusing at all. She came towards me, half walking, and half dancing. A woman in her mid 40s. Her perfume reached out for me before she did. I felt her approaching, maybe in the same way you feel a demon, a spirit, or a bad memory approaching towards you. Her make-up reminded me of a young gipsy girl who used to sing on a TV show in my country when I was young. She stood before me, with an inviting smile, but the wrinkles on her face were stronger than the darkness of the place, her wrinkles were like the strokes of the brush on a cheap painting. She grasped my hand pulling me to dance with her. The next moment I found myself putting my arms around her as she laid her head on my shoulder. And her perfume began to kill the rest of my living senses and my brain felt like a sponge, a small numb object floating aimlessly in an ocean.
She was tempted by my young looking skin, or maybe by the color of my skin, the color of a man who would not normally say no to a dancing queen, an old dancing queen.
- Love hurts! love scars!
And I was thinking, not only love that hurts, there are millions of things that can hurt million times worse than love. Life hurts. But we kept dancing, trying to capture the beat but our feet were dancing their own way. I felt her loneliness and sadness resting on my shoulder. A foreigner, a dark skinned foreigner with curly black hair, a speechless and confused young creature who needs to be fed, to be taken care of, and who might as well need someone to dance with, and that was me. Maybe that was the way she was thinking, if she was thinking at all, and I smiled. I pulled her gently towards me and whispered something in her ear, but she kept on dancing, she would not bother me saying anything to her, she would always be dancing here. She was dancing here all the time, even when I was 12 years old, sitting scared in the darkness, afraid of even showing my fear, while the jet fighters were bombing my town. She was here dancing even when I was sitting somewhere in the desert, clinging to my rusty AK-74 waiting for an unknown enemy to take my life. She was dancing here, in this old place even when I was exiled in my own room, writing my poems by the light of a primitive oil lamp. She was dancing here, going through every song, right until the end. And we kept dancing, and dancing and dancing. Each dance was a memory, was a whole life written by the confused steps of two drunken exhausted people. Each dance was some kind of a mean trade of lives. We sold a moment, a shoulder, a memory to each other and, we became one, somehow!
The music stopped. And she held her head back from above my shoulder like someone who wakes up from a nightmare. It was the same moment that I felt my hand fell from around her waist just like falling chains. She took a step backward, looking at some point in the wall behind me. We let each other go, the same way we used to do it before when we needed to forget a bad memory, or wipe away a guilty tear, as if we both needed to wash away a dreadful sin from our bodies.
I sat again in my corner, my glass was still half full, and my life was still half empty.
