Inside was not the same club—the stage was smaller, the ceilings lower, the people younger—but the air held that same particular hush, as if the place had been waiting to learn how to be mended.
“Yes,” Mara said. “It’s what we use to finish songs.”
A woman at the back wiped her hands and asked, “Torabulava?”
The club was not empty. A handful of people moved like actors in a scene that had always been waiting for them—an old woman polishing glasses with the concentration of a ritualist, a lanky man tuning strings on a guitar whose headstock looked like it had seen a hundred storms, a boy with ink-stained fingers arranging small, curious machines on a table. They eyed Mara kindly, as if they had been expecting this particular arrival all along.