So it went in Kfar Susseh, a wealthy neighborhood in Damascus where security forces wounded several protesters last week. According to residents, peaceful worshipers emerging from the Rifai mosque came under fire as they chanted a slogan calling for the fall of the government, a slogan uttered from Tunisia to Bahrain. They were chased through the neighborhood, caught and severely beaten as residents standing on their balconies pleaded with security forces to show them mercy. The protesters were later taken in military buses to detention centers.

During a visit two days after the unrest, the neighborhood was buzzing. Save for a sign declaring that the mosque was closed, there was no evidence of trouble. Unlike Homs and Hama, where the uprising has managed to knock down the wall of fear and allowed people to say what they want to say, no one here seemed to broach politics in the streets.

Pedestrians walked by, rarely glancing at the mosque, as if a long look would draw the kind of attention so long feared in a country notorious for its security apparatus. A woman leaned against the mosque’s iron fence. Across the street from her a sign read, “I am with Syria.” It, too, seemed too sensitive to stare at.

The poster was one of many on the streets here that are part of a campaign aimed at raising loyalty to the government. Not far away, another sign warned, “Be aware of those who are trying to instigate strife and attack them.”

At the salon, curiosity is subversive. The entrance of any new customer jolts the conversation back to orthodoxy; the choice of nail polish returns as a topic.

But in less-guarded moments, even here in a bastion of unreality, the reverberations of the uprising are felt. Terms once taboo in public in Syria come up in casual back-and-forth: opposition, sectarianism, demonstrations and the very word “uprising.” Behind closed doors, the idea that nothing is different gives way to fears that something has changed.

One manicurist said she was shocked when she accidentally learned that one of her closest friends opposed President Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000. The manicurist and her friend are Christians, and, like other minority groups, they fear that a change of leadership would usher in a more conservative administration, perhaps delivering the country to Islamists bent on enforcing a tyranny of the Sunni Muslim majority. Christians often point to Iraq — where their very existence as a community is imperiled — to offer a notion of what can happen in times of violence and chaos.