The Ruby In Her Navel

by Barry Unsworth

"So, you are awake," she said. "I go down to get some soup for you. I make it, I made it, while you were sleeping. It is broth of mutton with lentils."

  "It will be very welcome." In fact I felt hungry for the first time in many days. I was to learn later, from a Caterina divided between resentment and admiration, that Nesrin had taken command of the kitchen during my illness and would brook no opposition to her plans for the feeding of me.

  And very good the soup was, but my strength was depleted, I could not manage my bowl and spoon without spilling, she came and sat by me and fed me as if I were a child and made a joke of it so that I felt no loss of dignity. Afterwards we talked for a while, then I slept again, but more fitfully now, with some slighter spells of fever still returning.

  She was there when I opened my eyes – she kept a low lamp burning. I felt the touch of her hands and heard sometimes the murmur of her voice – she spoke in her own language to me as she bathed my brow. What was in the water to make it smell so good? Again I asked her. There was nothing, she said. It was fresh water from the well in the street.

  Next day I felt much recovered and able to talk for longer. Nesrin had not known of my illness till she came to the house, but she had known of my absence from the Diwan; Stefanos had told her of it during her Greek lesson. She had known of Yusuf's end – this too from Stefanos – and been afraid for my safety. There was an irony in this that I lacked the courage to explain to her. It had occurred to me only now, in these calmer hours of my recovery, that my falsehoods against Yusuf had been kept secret because this was the best way of ensuring silence on my part. Of course, silence could be ensured by killing me and they would do this if they felt it necessary. But in Calabria I would be far enough away. If no other denounced me I would be unlikely to denounce myself, unlikely therefore to relate the circumstances of the betrayal, my part in Yusuf's murder. Why had it taken me so long to understand this very simple thing? My years at the Diwan had taught me nothing. I had spent my spirit in shame, in fear of recognition, fear of being known. Now the appearance of justice would be preserved and the knowledge of my lies would remain with those who had coerced me and so provide them with the means to coerce me again if ever they saw a need for it. These were among the first clear thoughts of my recovery and they were among the most desolate, because I knew that if by some chance I was ever in the King's mind again they would be his thoughts too.

  As I say, I had not courage to speak of this with Nesrin, I was too afraid of her judgement. How could she not think ill of me when I thought so ill of myself? But we spoke of other things during this time that I was gaining strength again though still keeping to my bed. I asked her what I had intended to ask that night after the dancing when we had been alone together for the first time and I had wanted to keep her with me, about the Yazidis and they things they believed in. Her Greek was now so much improved that she was able to explain it to me without much faltering. There were many Yazidis, she said, among the people who lived far to the east, close to the lands of the Syrians and the Armenians and around the big lake they call Van. The people of Mount Ararat too? I asked her, being still much intrigued by the fact – or fable – that she had her origins in this place where the human race found firm ground again. Yes, she said, many of those who lived on the slopes of Ararat were Yazidis. But she herself did not believe in that story of the boat.

  "Why is that?" I asked. I wanted to prolong the talk we were having, in my position of rest, with the pillows at my back, absorbed in watching the quick glances of her eyes, the small frowns that marred her brow when words would not come easily, the movements of her mouth as she spoke.

  "Well," she said, "it is not possible, the time is not long enough to build a boat so big." When she found the Greek word she felt to be the right one she would emphasise it with a small air of triumph. "We must remember, it is only one family," she said.

  "And who is the God of the Yazidis?" I asked.

  "He who rules is Malak Tavus. This name has two parts. Malak is angel.

  Tavus is bird. He is the bird that spread the tail behind and very proud." Here, still sitting where she was at the edge of the bed, shifting her haunches from side to side, she danced for me, shoulders back and arms spread out, turning her head to look proudly behind her.

  "Very beautiful tail."

  The dance itself had been greatly beautiful too. Also, whether by intention or not, very alluring, throwing her breasts into prominence.

  Returning her gaze to me she must have seen some look in my eyes, for she nodded a little and said, "your health getting better, I notice, Thurstan Bey."

  "You mean a peacock," I said, in some confusion.

  "Yes, tavus."

  "So the God of the Yazidis is a peacock."

  She made a face of pity and patience. "Not god. Malak Tavus is the Peacock Angel, he is not peacock but has form of peacock. Is difficult to understand?"

  "No," I said, "no."

  "He has six angels to help him, they go here and there, they have many tasks. But he is not god, god is above him, we do not know the form of god, how can a person know the form of one who made the world and the sun and the stars?" She made a quick gesture as if flicking a fly away.

  "He made them just like that, for a game. He had joy to make them but after he does not care, he leaves everything to the Peacock Angel. He never judge, he never punish anybody. He forgave Shaitan and took him back to be chief of the angels. So there is no wrong. Well, there is wrong, but it is not to do with Shaitan, as you Christians believe, because he is not Shaitan, he is chief of the angels now. I do not know the word for this kind of wrong."

  "You mean, there is no sin?"

  "Yes, I mean that. There is wrong but there is no sin."

  She was very clear about this difference and convinced, as I could see from her face. It was hard for me to think of a god who did not judge, hard to imagine a religion without promise of reward and threat of punishment, though glimpsing the freedom there might be in such a view.

  But I said nothing of this at the time. She was confiding her beliefs and I felt it brought us closer in understanding.

  "If you do much wrong," she said, "you will be less in your next life."

  She left soon afterwards saying she would return later. I remember sitting there, still propped up in bed, and looking round the room she had just left. For a while her voice and movements still seemed to stir in the air. Then it was as if the room darkened.

  XXX

  When I no longer kept to my bed she did not come any more. For three days, as my strength returned, I sought to see my room in its own light and not somehow dimmed. The light of day that entered by my window – the window I had valued so much, which have made me want the room in the first place – fell short of the glory that was desired. And the knowledge grew that this lack would continue so long as I was alone there: the light that was missing could only return with her, with the shrug of her shoulders, the toss of her head, the proud carriage of her body.

  During these three days I considered my prospects and possessions; the latter were soon counted, but the former took on lustre as I thought of sharing them with Nesrin. I had the title of knighthood that had been bestowed upon me, though in circumstances very far from those I would have wished. I was in royal vassalage and could count on the King's good will so long I was no danger to him. My fief lay across the water in Calabria, distant enough from this island of Sicily that had brought me to ignominy and shame.

  On the fourth day I went on foot to seek her. Where she lodged had been told me by Stefanos and was present in every detail to my mind. I was in via San Cataldo and approaching the shop of the saddler-maker, which was half-way along, when she came out into the street and turned towards me.

  I saw recognition come to her face, saw her smile, and I was swept with happiness at this chance meeting, a joy that came as revelation: I had wanted her in my room, to bring back the light, as if it could dwell only there, but here in the open, under the sky
, she was clothed with it. And it came to me, as I walked towards her and hoped for other meetings life might give us, that I could be a bearer of light for her also.

  Something of this should be said, I felt, as I drew near to her, something to mark the happy chance of this encounter, which had depended so much on the timing of our steps. But no words came to me; I could only gaze at her. She, on the other hand, had something immediately to impart to me, I saw it on her face – I was to learn that she always gave voice, in the first moments of meeting, to what was uppermost in her mind.

  "I forgot to tell you," she said. "We Yazidis do not come from seed of Adam."

  "Do you not?"

  "No, God turned aside from Adam to make the Yazidis. He made us separate."

  I looked at her for a moment in silence. The eagerness with which she had spoken was still on her face. She was dressed very lightly in the Arab style, and wore no under-shift – her cotton bliau, slashed at the sides, allowed a glimpse of brown skin beneath. She had blackened her eyelids with kohl and wore small rings of copper in her ears.

  "I well believe it," I said, and the fervour in my voice made her smile.

  "Why did you not come back."

  "I did not think you need me."

  "Not need you?"

  "When you are sick, yes. But when you are not sick you are the big lord of the Diwan."

  Under my guidance, without saying much more, we walked together to the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti and sat there on a marble bench, close to where, in another life as it seemed now, I had watched Gerbert and Atenulf talking closely together.

  "I was not such a big lord," I said. "And I am not a lord of any kind now. All that is finished."

  I told her then of my knighting, though not the true reasons for it, only that I had earned the gratitude of the King. In truth I could not bring myself to tell her of the tangled courses that had led me to confront Spaventa in the Royal Chapel, all the ugly tale of my weakness and folly, the traitor's part I had played, the ruined world I had wept for, Yusuf's, my father's, my own. All that lay behind me now, or so I wanted to believe, removed by sickness and delirium and corrupted vision, in another land, another life, there where the King had a changing face and hands that hesitated.

  "I cannot stay here in Sicily," I said. "I cannot stay at the Diwan, after what has happened. It would not be fitting in any case, now that I am made a knight. But the King rules also in Calabria and he has made me a grant of land there that I would be lord of. We could live away from the court."

  "We?"

  "I want you to come with me. I do not want to go anywhere without you.

  Life without you is like my room when you have left it."

  I would have said more but she stayed me, raising a hand with great gentleness and laying it for a moment against my cheek. She was silent for a time, looking before her. And this silence disconcerted me, when I was offering my life to her.

  "I would go with you anywhere in the world," she said at last. "My heart says so. But I was already in Calabria."

  "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."

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