Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

The moonlight lay on her hair and shoulders and flanks as she came towards me. Against these parts touched by the light, her eyes and the nipples of her breasts and the little bush of Venus made zones of darkness. Light was caught in the glass pebble at her abdomen, focus of my dreams, and in the thin chain that held it there, slung round the light bones of her hips. I was to think – not then, I was too stirred for thought, but later – that in these last moments before we were joined, as she showed herself to me, she was offering the beauty and promise of her body, an image on which love could rest, could guard itself through periods of separation in a way that memories of ecstasy, of bodies clutched together, cannot be guarded.

What she and I did I could not exactly say, in the sense of one thing following upon another. And since that night I have known for self-deceivers all those who claim a love was blissful and say first we did this, then we did that, as if there were one single track to the reaching of joy. It was no alleyway Nesrin and I entered together but a wondrous labyrinth, from the moment she came to me and with her nearness shielded the moonlight from me and brought me the feeling of darkness as our bodies touched, as if a band had been laid over my eyes. She came down to me and I remember – then or soon afterwards or later – my sight restored to see her face above me, lit once more by the moon, and her face had a look of sorrowing and she made a long murmuring sound. Then the moonlight was streaked with fire and I closed my eyes against the glare. I must have cried out because the mare was startled and snorted – I heard the sounds she made but not my own. I kept my eyes closed, as if the fiery light and the throes of my body could not be endured together, but I still saw the glimmers of red against the lids. They were like sunstreaks: it was like closing one's eyes against some ravishment of the sun. I swear it: there was cool and burn, moon and fire together, this first time we met with our bodies, as there had been on the night when we met with our eyes only.

She was not there when I woke in the morning. On the floor, for only trace of her, was the red ribbon she had used to tie back her hair. The evening of that day they danced again and according to Stefanos, whom I asked to go in my place, they enjoyed a success no less resounding. He had not been asked into the hall, he said; Stephen Fitzherbert, with his jackal's nose for the whiff of success, had taken the Anatolians into his custody and care, and it was he who had presented them.

I was glad to hear of this second triumph, but glad also that I had not been there to assist at it. I could not feel regret for what had passed between Nesrin and me; I could not cease to dwell on it and marvel at it in my mind. But the morning light had brought guilt with it, memories of the vows I had made to Alicia and our exchange of rings at the lakeside.

She was so delicate and fine, a lady born, of noble family, all the best of my past was in her keeping, and all my hopes of betterment in the future. And in spite of this, within days of our promises, I had been overmastered by passion for a vagrant dancer of no birth or breeding whatever and no knowledge of what it means to aspire to knighthood.

Made gloomy by these thoughts, I fell to thinking how much simpler our life on earth would be, how much more tranquil and dignified, if we could return to the time before the Fall. It is clear that Adam was meant to pour his seed into Eve's womb; we know it from God's commandment in Genesis to go forth and multiply. But at that time there was no disturbance of lust. Saint Augustine explains this to us in his 'De Civitate Dei' – I think it is to be found there. He says that in the state of innocence those parts were moved by the same act of will by which we move our other parts, without the soul being snared by hot desire. Like raising an arm or winking an eye. I tried to imagine this blessed state, tried to imagine Adam's member as being moved in the same way as his fingers or his toes, but I could not. I believed it but I could not imagine it. Many men find their faith strengthened by what is beyond their imagining, but I am so constituted that the reverse is true of me – such failure makes the belief grow less. I began to wonder how Saint Augustine could have formed so definite an idea about these things, since he too had come after the Fall and his parts were moved in the same way as those of all of us – and not infrequently, if we can judge from the 'Confessions'.

None of these speculations helped me to a state of grace or made me feel better about myself. I was resolved to keep away from the Anatolians as far as I could, since I was miserably lacking in faith in my fortitude should Nesrin and I by any chance find ourselves alone again; I did not even trust myself not to try and contrive this once I set eyes on her.

But there was no avoiding the farewells. On the afternoon of the day before they were to leave, our King Roger sent them by means of the faithful Fitzherbert a sum of 150 gold tari, a gift of unprecedented proportions. It was brought in a bag of soft leather and left for me to deliver to them. I went with it to their quarters and gave it to Ozgur and watched while it was shared among them. With the coin that had been thrown to them and the eight dinars from the Diwan and now this magnificent gift from the King they would be richer far than they could ever have dreamed.

"What will you do now?"

I spoke the words to Ozgur but the question was for all of them. Nesrin was there with the others, not in her dancing clothes now but in a simple linen gown, and this unaccustomed dress made her seem almost like a stranger, as if she had somehow anticipated the farewell, gone away from me already.

They would go home, Ozgur said, and I took it that he referred to them all. In the village of his birth, his share of the money and that of Yildiz put together would buy them a stone house, land for pasture and for tilling, sheep, two oxen. "Many sheep there," he said. "The land is good in the valleys. My father work for others, for the owner, the mal sahibi. But I work for me and Yildiz."

"And the music?"

"I play for my grandchildren, Yildiz will teach them to dance."

"We will stay in one same place," Havva said, and it was the first time I could remember her speaking directly to me. "No more road. We are tired of road." And she made a sudden grasp at her hip and twisted her face to show aches and pains, and everyone laughed because she was young and supple and graceful in movement.

Nesrin had joined in this laughter, but her face was serious again as she looked at me. And now, as by some unspoken agreement, the others went a little farther off and left us together. She stood there silent in her new dress, her hands by her sides. Would she go without a word to me? On an impulse of anger almost, not wishing, in the distress I felt at parting, that she should be the one to dictate the mood between us in these my final moments of seeing her, I stepped towards her and took her left hand where it lay by her side and I said, "Farewell, go with God."

She allowed her hand to stay in my grasp for a moment and looked me in the face with such a serenity in her regard as made me feel I was looking at her for the first time, instead of the last. That taste of bitterness that lay on the mouth seemed less. Her eyes were darker even than I had thought them, almost black, like water that pools among dark rocks. She freed her hand and said some words of farewell. Once again it seemed she had gone from me already, as if, with her new dress and her newly acquired wealth she had embarked already on a future that held more for her than this scene of farewell. What she saw in my face I do not know. I did not look more at her, but made my last farewells to all of them together, feeling as I did so that I was parting from friends.