Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber

Author:Diana Abu-Jaber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2003-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

She stands waiting in Nathan’s doorway. In the half-moon light she looks out across the neglected lawn; she can see pears hanging red as roses in the leaves, soft-winged moths, sulfurous and turquoise, flapping past. She smells the lemon leaves and myrtle and berries roasting in the hot night. The late darkness softens the house and the yard, makes it look quaint and romantic.

“Here it is!” Nathan comes back into the front room, holding a photo with a white mat board frame around it. “I meant to wrap it first, but…” He slips it into her hands as if it were a shared secret. “Thank you for coming over here. And letting me go on about—you know—all that. It meant a lot to me.”

She takes the photograph without looking at it and pauses for a moment. She rubs her fingers along the edge of the mat board, then looks up. “Nathan, what would happen to Han if he were to go back to Iraq?”

He turns his head slightly. “Why? Has he said something—”

“No, oh no, I’m just wondering, you know, what would happen if he did.”

“I think we’d never see him again.”

She holds his gaze a moment longer, then steps back and glances at the photograph: a blur of cars, a little boy in one corner with smudged lips that Sirine can tell, even in black and white, are cherry-colored, a hand pulling him out of the frame, a shop sign in sloping Arabic letters. It’s a street scene, the shops between Nadia’s Café and the butcher shop, and at the center, there’s Sirine with her face like a question, her hair white as a torch blowing away from her face, on her way to somewhere.

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