The Oud Player's Muse | ملهمة عازف العود
"A Lebanese musician in Paris. A French woman who wanders into his concert. The music he writes for her becomes famous—but their love stays private."
The Oud Player's Muse
ملهمة عازف العود
The Institut du Monde Arabe is hosting a concert.
Traditional Arabic music, performed for Parisians who want culture without leaving the city. I'm in the front row—I don't even know why.
Then he plays.
I'm Marguerite.
Forty-three, divorced, a translator who spends her life in other people's words. I came here looking for my own.
The oud player gives them to me.
His name is Fares.
Lebanese, fifty, exile since the civil war. His music tells stories in languages that don't need translation.
After the concert, I wait.
I don't know why I wait. I just know I must.
"You liked the performance?"
He's standing beside me, oud case in hand.
"I understood it. That's more than liking."
"Understood what?"
"The longing. The loss. The hope that remains anyway."
He stares at me like I've read his diary.
"Come to my studio," he says. "I want to play something. Just for you."
"We just met."
"The music doesn't care about time."
His studio is in Belleville.
Small, filled with instruments. He plays something I've never heard—mournful, beautiful, incomplete.
"What is that?"
"I don't know yet. It started forming when I saw you in the audience." He looks up. "Will you let me finish it?"
"What does that mean?"
"Be my muse. Sit here while I compose. Let me play you into existence."
It's mad.
I have a job, responsibilities, a life that doesn't include becoming some musician's inspiration.
"Yes."
I come to his studio every evening.
He plays. I listen. Sometimes I read, sometimes I just watch. The piece grows like something alive.
"Who are you writing this for?" I ask.
"For you. For me. For the space between us."
We don't touch.
For weeks, we don't touch. The music is enough—the intimacy of creation, of being seen so clearly.
But then the piece ends.
And what's between us has nowhere else to go.
"Marguerite."
We're in his studio. The final notes still hang in the air.
"Yes."
"I've been in love with you since measure forty-seven."
"Which measure is that?"
"The one where I realized I wasn't writing music anymore. I was writing you."
He kisses me.
Gently, like I'm a melody he doesn't want to rush.
"This is fast," I say.
"This has been weeks. Months, if you count the music."
"Is that how you count?"
"It's how I count everything that matters."
We make love while the oud rests on its stand.
His musician's hands on my body—precise, practiced, finding notes I didn't know I had.
"Beautiful."
"I'm not young—"
"You're timeless. Like all good art."
He plays my body like an instrument.
Slow movements, building. When I come, it sounds like music even to me.
"Ya helwa," he murmurs. "My beautiful one."
He enters me surrounded by instruments.
The oud, the qanun, the nay—all witnesses. The rhythm is something I feel more than hear.
"Je t'aime," I gasp.
"Ana kamen bahebek."
The piece debuts at a major concert.
Critics call it a masterpiece. They ask what inspired it.
"Love," he says simply. "The only inspiration worth having."
They don't know about me. We keep our secret.
Three years later
We're married now.
Small ceremony, both cultures mixed. The piece plays as we sign the papers.
"Your greatest work," someone says.
"My greatest work," he agrees.
He's looking at me.
He still composes.
I still translate. Our life is words and music and the quiet spaces between.
"Happy?" he asks.
"Très heureuse. Incredibly."
"Enough for another piece?"
"Enough for a symphony."
He pulls out his oud.
Plays something new. Something that sounds like our apartment, our coffee, our tangled sheets.
"What's this one called?"
"Home." He smiles. "The working title, at least."
Alhamdulillah.
For concerts that find their audience.
For muses who stay.
For music that becomes love.
The End.