46 Quotes by Diana Abu-Jaber

She lifts the lid from the pan of smoked green wheat kernels and dips in a spoon. "Here. Taste."He holds the spoon in his mouth for a moment. She knows what he is tasting, how the broth is flavored with pepper and garlic and lustrous, deep smokiness. "And try this," she says. Vibrant vegetable greens, garlic, and lemon. "And this." Herbal, meaty, vaguely fruity.

Han breaks a tangerine into sections and feeds them to her one by one. Then he cuts a lemon in half, sprinkles a spoonful of sugar over the cut top, and bites into it. Sirine looks around at the wandering palms and the dusty street. Just that morning the radio weatherman had said it would be an Indian summer scorcher. She slices open an avocado and sprinkles it with coarse salt before handing it to Han.

She removes the pint of apricots, plump and exquisite as roses, and offers him one. He takes a bite and puts his hand over hers as she takes a bite, the velvety peel and fruit sugar filling her whole mouth. The air between them is complicated, infused with the scents from the bags: toasted sesame, sweet orange blossom water, and fragrant rosewater.

She pulls her uncle's topaz prayer beads out of her pockets and settles herself by thinking of braised squab: a sauce for wild game with motes of cinnamon and smoke.

They sleep late and make a breakfast from the fruit trees and garden in the building's courtyard: sweet oranges, tangerines, tomatoes, grapefruit, avocado. They sit on a fold-out aluminum love seat on his balcony with plates and knives and a bowl of salt. A trail of juice runs along her fingers and Han kisses her palms.

She is stirring a pot of leben yogurt, which is heated slowly, carefully, tenderly, and hopefully, layered with butter and onions and heady and rich as a high summer night. She cannot stop stirring because it is a fragile, temperamental sauce, given to breaking and curdling if given its way. So she must wait and stand and stir and stir and stir and look and look.

Felice admires the long blue tails of the birds just before they vanish into the trees. That's the way to be, she thinks, kicking hard on her board, letting the wind stream through her hair- no plans, no fear, no expectations: never to be held in live captivity.

Sirine buys sweet, dense Mexican candies, pastel-colored Korean candies, crackling layers of tea leaves, lemongrass, kaffir leaves, Chinese medicinal herbs and powders, Japanese ointments and pastes. She tastes everything edible, studies the new flavors, tests the shock of them; and she learns, every time she tastes, about balance and composition, addition and subtraction.

She looks over, still smiling, to Sirine behind the counter, and says, "Roasted lamb, rice and pine nuts, tabbouleh salad, apricot juice." Then she blows a kiss.Hanif glances at Sirine. She looks down, quick, a bunch of parsley pinched in her fingertips, rocks the big cleaver through a profusion of green leaves, onions, cracked wheat. Suddenly she remembers the leben and hurries to the big potful of yogurt sauce, which is just on the verge of curdling.