And then—silence.
“Ya Farid,” whispered the café owner, “the people grow tired.”
The qanun player, a blind man named Tarek who had been silent all night, suddenly struck his zither. The qanun’s metal strings shimmered like rain on the Nile. Now it was three instruments— oud, tabla, qanun —wrapped around each other like lovers in a dark room.
He opened his mouth. An old man’s voice, cracked and raw. He sang a mawwal —unmetered, improvised, from the bone: