Barry Unsworth - The Ruby In Her Navel

"And so?" I stared at her, feeling my jaw slacken at this unexpected reply of hers.

"I like to go forward, not back. I know you are the man for me the first night I see you, so splendid you are. I know it when I see your eyes, when I hear your voice. I dance for you, you are not a stranger, I recognise you."

Wishing to reciprocate – or perhaps not wishing to be outdone – I said, "Yes, I felt the same when I saw you there in the firelight."

"No, it is not so, you did not see me. Of course, you look at me in a certain way, but many men do that. You do not see me, you make the wrong shape."

"What do you mean?"

She made a quick, impatient gesture in the air before her, using both hands to sketch the shape of a globe. "You make a shape of us, five persons, not one, we will dance for the King, we will get money, you will get good words and praises. I try to make you see me, I try to make jokes, I dance for you when they are trying to make the dress…" She gestured again, this time joining slender fingers and drawing them swiftly apart in a straight line.

"The Dance of the Measurements," I said, and the memory of it came vividly into my mind.

"Measurements? That is the name for it? I dance for you, you begin to see me, yes? God gave me this body of a dancer. Dancing is my life. What is Nesrin in Calabria? Always the same place, every day the same. Do you call her after supper to dance for the Normans with their red necks?"

I was completely taken aback by this speech and wounded by it. I was laying my life before her and she was rejecting it. Perhaps she had a fear of being treated ill…

"Do not be sad," she said, and again she laid a hand against my face. "I do not speak about your neck, it is beautiful."

"They will accept you," I said. "I will make them accept you. It will go ill with any who offer you offence."

"You do not understand. It is not them that does not accept. It is Nesrin that does not accept. You are doing the same again. You make a shape that is not true and you keep to that shape and do not see it as the wrong one. You tell us to bow and count before the dance, that is wrong shape, you know it is wrong, you know it while you tell us, but you keep to it, nothing can change you. Then the dance came to break the shape. Do you not see? If we do not break the bad shape, it will break us."

My hurt had faded as I listened. Looking at her face, which was turned a little away from me as she spoke, at the dark lashes over the lowered eyes, the moulding at the corner of the mouth – features dear to me now, amounting to all I thought was beauty in woman – I knew she was right, though she did not know, perhaps never would, of that wrongest shape of all I had made and obstinately held to against all likelihood until it had broken my truth and fidelity and brought my world to ruin.

"I love the road," she said. "That is another wrong shape you make, here is poor wild girl from a far place, needing shelter and look after and one same place. But that is not my need. I never know one home place since I am a small child. I like to see new places, always moving. Also you, it is the same for you, you have no home place. You are a fine singer, I never heard one like you. I watched you when you sang, you were inside the song, and a song has no home place. You sang for me and you looked at me and saw me, and I knew I was in your heart, I knew it then. Why you think I go with you afterwards? Because you are a big lord in the Diwan?"

"It was the most wonderful night of my life." I thought of enlarging on this, to tell her about the fire and the moon, but I saw from her face that it was not the time, it would have been lost on her, she was too intent on what she had to say.

"You play the viele?"

"Why, yes. Also the mandora. Well enough to accompany my singing if need be."

"I can dance to the viele. And you can sing and make the words and perhaps make the music that belongs to the words. Together we are something not seen before – never seen such a dancer and such a singer and two so beautiful people. We get money – they throw more than we can gather in our hands. And we see new places all the time."

Her eyes were shining. There was love for me in them and love for the idea of travelling thus. She was so beautiful to me that I could barely sustain the light of it. Whether she was right to see this future for us I could not tell. I knew only that I wanted to be with her. My title of knighthood was worthless, I knew it now at last. Her rejection had stripped away the last shred of value I placed on it. I knew it for the reward of corruption, a gift from the ruined world I had wept over. A memory came of that dark night at the castle of Potenza and of the French knight who had so praised my singing at a time when I had been too cast down to listen fully to his words. I had never thought of myself as one who might make song a means of living and a way of life.

But I had remembered the knight's name. Perhaps this, finally, was the right shape.

"We could go to Paris," I said. "There would be a place for us there – we would find a welcome there, I am assured of it. You could dance and I could sing. Not in the street but at the royal court."

I did not look at her as I spoke. I was unfastening the clasp at my nape, which held the chain of the ruby – the same gesture the King had made.

"Paris," I heard her say, in the calm tone of one whose delight is very great. "That is a city I am very much wishing to see."

"I want you to have this." I leaned close to her as we sat there, and fastened the chain of the ruby round her neck and arranged the gem so that it lay between her breasts. "It is not to wear thus," I said. "It is for the dancing. I cannot tell if the chain be too long or too short to lie across your hips, your lovely hips. I want you to wear the ruby in your navel when you dance and I will make a song about it and everyone in Paris will sing this song about the ruby that lies in the beautiful navel of Nesrin the dancer."

She clasped the stone for a moment then looked down at it as it lay in her palm. "When I dance it will always be for you," she said. "Let us go and see if it fits me well." She smiled and her eyes looked into mine.

"You will play the viele for me, and I will try if the red stone lies in the right place. We will have a dance of the measurements."