On a brisk, late-winter evening at Zeriab Café, a popular coffee shop in the Old City of Damascus, a trio of young musicians picked up a guitar, a ney, and an oud and began to play. It was Thursday, the start of the Syrian weekend, and the café was packed with stylish young customers, who broke from their conversations as the music started. Zeriab is small—just five wooden tables pressed close together, a bar counter, and a red sofa. Like any decent café in the Arab world, it is part business establishment, part living room—in this case, the living room is that of Bernar Jomaa, the café’s owner, who, at the moment, was angling between the tables to deliver mugs of hot tea to a group of women seated near the back. Depositing the mugs, he lingered to listen in on their conversation, throwing his head back in laughter. He had poured himself a drink behind the counter—cheap vodka and orange juice—and his mood, like that of the café itself, was elevated.

“See those four ladies over there?” he whispered, after leaving their table. “They work at the hospital. They come here so they can have some calm in the middle of this fucking war.”

Jomaa is thirty-seven years old, with a soft face and shoulder-length black hair that he wears pulled back into a loose ponytail. He is a constant presence at Zeriab, a place he likes to think of as a cultivated refuge from the uncertainties of life in wartime Damascus. When he set out to open the café, in late 2010, it was an unsightly box of crumbling walls and metal cages, which were once used for storage. He scrubbed away the filth, replaced the cages with a salvaged-wood countertop, and filled in missing chunks of wall with old stones and clay, following an ancient technique. As with much in the Old City, the décor consists mainly of exposed rock and dark wood, and it makes the café look like the inside of a wine cellar.

Jomaa is particular about the way things happen at Zeriab. He chooses the music (mostly traditional Arabic songs), the menu (home-cooked Syrian specialties), and the occupants. Until recently, he kept a cat around, which he named Socrate. Last fall, Socrate swallowed a chicken bone and died, and regulars say that Jomaa is still in mourning. He is warm without being gregarious. He is likely to be the one to greet you, point you to a seat, take your order, prepare it behind the counter, deliver it to your table, and, eventually, give you the bill. Then he accepts the money belatedly and indifferently; he stuffs the banknotes into the front pocket of his jeans with hardly a glance. He often refers to customers as “my friends,” and they usually are. Some nights, he will host a group for dinner, pushing several tables together and serving platters of whatever dish he has chosen to make. (On one recent evening, it was grilled fish; on another, it was fried minced lamb with green salad.) This can be disconcerting to newcomers, who may have mistaken the café for an ordinary pub. “I feel like I’m in someone’s house,” a first-time visitor remarked, uncomfortably, one evening, before leaving.

Jomaa never intended to run a café during wartime, but now that he does he views the task with a philosophical sense of purpose. He said, “My mission as a coffee shop is to create a place with nice music and a nice atmosphere, and to take people out of their thoughts of war.” He believes in a version of Syria that exists now largely in the form of nostalgia, and at rare places like Zeriab—a version in which, on any given night, the war that has ravaged the country for three years ceases to exist.

In the corner that Thursday, a young violinist had joined the performers, playing in public for the first time. His notes were unsure and a little flat, and the guests began to sing along to the melody, a Syrian folk tune, steadying his bow with their voices. Jomaa sauntered over to a microphone and started to sing as well. The smoke of cigarettes and water pipes drenched the air. As the music swelled, you could barely make out the sound of mortars being fired into a rebel neighborhood nearby.

In central Damascus, the atmosphere is like the interior of a castle in the waning days of a great empire. Within the fortified walls, city life carries on with an air of normalcy, but horrors lurk just beyond. When Syrians look out at the wreckage of the countryside, where groups, some affiliated with Al Qaeda, have seized power, and where their own government bombards residential areas without regard for innocent life, they see an apocalyptic vision of their own future. For much of 2012 and 2013, it seemed all but certain that rebels would breach the city—fighting spread into pro-government neighborhoods like Mezze 86, mortars landed from the rebel-held suburbs, car-bomb attacks proliferated. The government reacted with brutal efficiency, demolishing entire suburban neighborhoods that housed rebels. In the besieged suburbs, the destruction has been near total: in a ring around the city, a swath of apartment blocks has become an undulating moat of gray rubble.

Syria’s unsettled youth often find their way to Zeriab, an insular institution within an insular capital, further insulated by the ancient walls of the Old City. On a recent night, after closing up, Jomaa took a seat on the red couch to drink some Lebanese beers with his friend, who I’ll call Karim. Karim, who is twenty-eight years old, had appeared at the café several hours earlier, wearing gym clothes, and announcing that he was calling it a night. Half an hour later, he was back, cleaned up and changed into a sweater and jeans. “He saw a pretty girl at the bar across the street,” Jomaa said, laughing. In fact, Karim had realized he had nothing else to do. The stasis was overwhelming. “I felt like I was choking,” he said. “So I came back here.”

Before the uprising, Karim worked in ad sales for a high-end Syrian life-style magazine, but he hasn’t had a job in two years. “I used to have a plan for 2014—a vision for this time in my life,” he said. “I had a good job, a savings, a car. I thought maybe I would be married. Now all of that is destroyed. It’s finished.” Most nights, he comes to Zeriab, drinks some beers, hangs out with friends, then goes home. “Every day I wake up in the morning and think, What should I do?” he said. “Should I leave? Should I stay? I’ve been walking in this same space in my head for months now.”

Those questions are rampant among members of a certain class of educated Syrian, the sort who at one point stood to gain from a revolution that would turn their country into a democratic, egalitarian society, but who now find themselves trapped. “It’s so weird these days,” a Syrian friend said to me, as we sat drinking tea on the ancient cobblestones near the Umayyad Mosque. “You wake up in the morning and think, Am I alive? Is this the afterlife? I sometimes say it’s like if you know someone is coming to put a plastic bag over your head, so you take a deep breath and wait for the bag to come. How long can you wait like that?”