أنا في انتظارك

Fire banked inside the ribs, a hand propping a weary cheek: Bayram al-Tunisi opens with the body of the waiting woman, not her feelings. Zakariyya Ahmad sets the scene in maqam Hijazkar, whose augmented intervals give the vigil its smoldering, Eastern color — and his earthy, sheikh-trained baladi idiom keeps the pathos close to the ground, closer to a mawwal in a Cairo alley than to a concert aria.

Even the title was worked over like a lyric: Bayram's manuscript is said to have read "ana fi istinzarak," a heavier colloquial form, smoothed in rehearsal to the "intizarak" the whole Arab world now knows — the suggestion is credited to Zakariyya Ahmad. A one-syllable edit, and the phrase became proverbial for waiting itself.

The most famous image in the song: absence counted "by the second." In 1943 few homes had clocks worth trusting, and the exactness is the point — grief has turned the waiting woman into a timepiece. Two decades later the great songs of the sixties were still doing arithmetic with lost time; the ledger begins here.

"If only I had never loved at all" — the oldest curse in the lover's liturgy, and Umm Kulthum's audiences waited for it. In surviving broadcasts she leans into the line's self-reproach, letting the melody sag under it before the next verse straightens its back.

The refrain carries the song's finest musical sleight: the critic Victor Sahhab observed that the "ya reit" phrases set out in bright, poised Rast and pivot into the ache of Hijaz exactly at "ya reitni" — regret changing key mid-sentence. Zakariyya then seeds the same Rast approach into the line before each refrain, so the turn lands freshly every time it comes around.

The interrogation verse: waiting's cruelest work is the guessing, and Bayram gives it exactly two hypotheses — anger, or another person — each worse than the other. The verse then audits the speaker's own conduct ("what have I done?") and closes the books clean: no sin found. The acquittal changes nothing, which is the verse's quiet devastation.

The banked fire of the opening has become a bed she lies on: tossing on live coals, then wandering off "with the thoughts" as though they were bad company one cannot refuse. Two verbs of restlessness — turning over, straying — map the two halves of insomnia, the body's and the mind's.

A precise psychology of waiting: the senses become unreliable witnesses, promoting every breeze to a footstep and every whisper to his voice. Bayram, newly returned from years of political exile, wrote colloquial verse with this kind of documentary exactness — the quality that made critics call his and Zakariyya's songs the most authentically Egyptian in her repertoire.

"So I greet my mornings and my nights" — the couplet closes on the full circle of a day, and Zakariyya's setting circles with it, returning to the refrain like the vigil returning to its window. Repetition is not decoration here; it is the subject.

For one line the outside world enters the song: "they saw me, and said — gone mad." The neighbors' verdict places the waiting woman in the oldest company Arabic love poetry keeps, the majnun, the lover driven mad — except that Bayram's madness is documentary: a woman at a window, counting, observed. Her vigil now has witnesses, and their diagnosis is the song's only outside opinion.

The beloved's counter-arithmetic: he deals in "years and days," vague and grand, while she counts seconds. Bayram builds the whole moral argument of the song out of these two incompatible clocks.

Concert recordings peak here: critics — Victor Sahhab among them — single out her handling of this final verse, the disbelief she pours into "we-kalam" ("...and talk"), and the nights she doubled the words into "temorr awam awam," hurrying the melody past itself to mime his hurried hello. Improvisation in service of the argument: the tune itself nods and rushes past.

The cruelest word in the song is its most casual: "I forgot." Against her second-by-second bookkeeping, his one flat syllable of neglect lands like a verdict. Performances survive in which the audience audibly reacts here — the shared outrage of everyone who has ever waited. The song itself was never forgotten: later singers, Sayed Mekawy among them, kept it alive for new generations.