Byron and the Beauty

by Muharem Bazdulj

  Byron shuddered. Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the tortoise occurred to him: as great as the distance was between the elegant and sophisticated mathematical problem and the rustic tale, superficially they had much in common. They linked the names of writings from the classical world with a large, unthreatening, long-lived animal. The myths were alive here in the Balkans, just as Isak had declared the day before. Then, just as their small squad was coming out of a curve in the road, Byron heard one of the Albanians shout. In front of them stood an enormous tree, a remarkably tall and thick oak, perhaps thousands of years old. Isak was surprised, but he was also pleased.

  ‘We’re almost there!’ he called out. He turned to face Byron and Hobhouse: ‘We are closer to the han than I thought. We’ll be there, I believe, in less than an hour.’

  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, despite the increasingly heavy rain. It was only a short time until the outlines of the han were discernible on the horizon. The horses broke into a gallop, as if they, too, were overjoyed.

  * * *

  The han was a hive of activity. A sum of money and the mention of Ali Pasha’s name ensured that Byron and the others quickly obtained good rooms. Isak merely had to utter two or three sentences to the innkeeper and everything was settled. The arrival of this unusual company of people did arouse some curiosity though; the men who sat smoking and playing cards in the forecourt of the han looked up at them and started to whisper. These idlers and brigands, with their tattered tunics and bloodshot eyes, did not exactly make a peaceable impression. Byron watched them out of the corner of his eye, cautiously, so that their gazes did not meet, and he also avoided turning his back to them. Isak said under his breath: ‘Have no fear, my lord. It is written on your brow, so to speak, that you are under the protection of Ali Pasha. Believe me, no one will so much as look askance at you, believe me.’

  ‘Who are those people then?’

  ‘Who knows, my lord, who knows…. Some of them are just passing through and have taken shelter from the rain, as we have done; others however are cut-throats and robbers of the type who always hang around places like this. They would like nothing better than to deprive a person of his worldly possessions, my lord,’ Isak went on, ‘but whoever has a real fortune need not fear them at all, because in the end they will all kill each other.’

  ‘Let everyone go now to his own room!’ Isak said at last, to their whole group. ‘Rest your bodies and souls.’

  ‘How long will we be staying here?’ asked Hobhouse, who had overheard the brief conversation between Byron and Isak.

  ‘Until the storm is finished,’ Isak answered. ‘In two nights, perhaps three, the rains will be over.’

  At these words they parted, each looking for his room. It turned out that Isak and Byron were sharing a room, and Hobhouse took one with Fletcher and Collins; with the other Englishmen ending up in a third room, with the two Albanians in a fourth. The room for Isak and Byron was somewhat larger than the others, and was fitted-out with two hard wooden bunks at either end, and a large, roughly hewn table in the middle. There were no chairs. Directly upon entering, Byron dropped onto a bed, while Isak continued to pace back and forth. The noisy rain went on undiminished. Byron rolled over to face the wall, but he could tell, by the heavy footfalls, that Isak was still pacing about the room. He did so nervously, with rapid, loud steps. Byron sat up suddenly. Isak paused and said, ‘Forgive me, my lord. Were you trying to sleep?’

  ‘Actually I wasn’t, if I were to lie back down now, I definitely wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight. The problem is that when I am faced with a choice between sitting and lying down, I naturally prefer to lie down, and in a room without chairs of course I recline.’ ‘That’s interesting,’ Isak said tentatively. ‘Here in the East, sitting and lying are not such strictly differentiated positions. People here somehow prefer to be half-sitting or half-lying, whether it’s on benches, mattresses, or pillows.’ He paused for a moment and then continued, ‘it probably has something to do with hard and soft. The West is hard and the East is soft, or is that too much of a generalization?’

  ‘I have already noticed this penchant for categorization, as I would put it in Oriental terms,’ Byron asserted with a laugh. ‘But here the issue isn’t sitting or lying, but rather walking.’

  ‘So the noise did disturb you,’ Isak said more earnestly. ‘I was of the opinion that you didn’t intend to sleep.’

  ‘No, It did not bother me and I was not trying to sleep. I am simply not used to seeing a person walk back and forth continually in a room, as if it were a prison cell.’

  Now it was Isak’s turn to laugh. ‘As far as I’m concerned, my lord,’ he said, ‘it’s like this: if I am not doing anything, or when I’m not speaking to anyone, I can neither stand nor sit, and if I am not sleeping, I cannot lie down either. I have to walk, and it’s how I best think over things. It does not matter if I am in the field or in a run-down hut.’

  ‘ So you are a Peripatetic, ‘Byron said, with kindness and a touch of disguised irony.

  Isak fired back: ‘A lonely, laconic, pathetic Peripatetic. But for now, if you really aren’t going to sleep, we could go down and have a bite, for I am starving.’

  * * *

  Isak continued behaving strangely, or at least it appeared thus to Byron. At the meal, his mind seemed elsewhere. Byron asked a question, about some completely trivial matter, but Isak did not appear to have heard him at all. He ate slowly and half-heartedly, although a little earlier he’d complained of hunger. Byron wondered if he was becoming ill. He looked a little more closely at him, as if he were searching for symptoms. But nothing in Isak’s face indicated illness or frailty. “I guess the man is just in a bit of a bad mood, or maybe he’s feeling down on account of all the rain,” Byron concluded. Just then he noticed Hobhouse, who had apparently just come down to eat. He beckoned to him, and as Hobhouse joined them at the table, it was as if Isak had been waiting for this opportunity. Standing up, he said he was going to take a short walk.

  ‘It’s still raining,’ Byron responded.

  ‘I know,’ Isak said curtly.

  Byron and Hobhouse watched him leave.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Hobhouse asked. Byron shrugged his shoulders. Without Isak, he felt somewhat ill at ease in the han, left to the mercy of the other guests. He was not afraid, but it irked him that without Isak he was a man without ears or tongue. Thus he might mistake a greeting for a threat, or a threat for a greeting, and he wouldn’t be able to do so much as ask for water. Hobhouse wolfed down the food he was served. The two of them said nothing to each other the entire time, as if they had silently agreed not to draw unnecessary attention to themselves with unintelligible words as long as they had no one at their side who would fend off possible intruders in their own language. Byron was also aware of the fact that people were staring at them intently, and he sensed a special abhorrence in their glances. Ali Pasha’s name had drawn an invisible line around them and now it protected them the way a heavy cloak protects you from the rain. After they had emptied the bowls in front of them, Byron and Hobhouse sat on for a bit in silence. Dusk was falling, and the front-court of the inn gradually emptied. Soon the two Englishmen retired to their rooms.

  But Byron wasn’t tired. He lit a candle, and shortly thereafter he found himself doing what Isak had been doing – walking up and down the room. “Now all that’s missing is for me to go out for a stroll in the rain,” he thought, and at that very moment the door opened. Isak had returned, and he wasn’t even particularly wet.

  ‘Is it still coming down?’ Byron asked, just to have something to say; the muffled noise from outside was supplying a clear answer.

  ‘Yes,’ Isak replied, ‘it’s still raining, and heavily at that.’ He sat down on his bed.

  ‘That means that tonight nothing will come of your peripatetic ambling,’ Byron spluttered with a laugh.

  Isak did not seem to have understood.

  ‘That pacing back and fort
h in the room,’ Byron explained, ‘I tried it too. Not such a bad idea.’

  Isak was in a visibly bad mood. He nodded his head, commented that he was tired, and stretched out on his bed. Byron, from his own bed, saw Isak lying on his back, but there was no way of knowing whether he was asleep or just staring at the ceiling.

  ‘The best place to look is always at the ceiling, the blue-blooded lady said’ Byron whispered, thinking that he might be merely talking to himself.

  The chuckle from the other side of the room revealed that Isak was awake.

  ‘Such bits of popular wisdom, my lord, are to be found in both the East and the West, among noblewomen and beggars; at least we are no different in this regard. People here say that a woman’s life is hell by day and paradise by night,’ Isak went on.

  Byron called to mind Teiresias, the only person ever to have been both man and woman in his lifetime, and he recalled the wager between Hera and Zeus. ‘Teiresias,’ he began--but there was no response. “He’s probably drifted off,” Byron thought, getting up for a moment to put out the candle. For a long time Byron lay in the dark and stared out into the impenetrable blackness. As slumber at last descended and his eyelids closed, he thought he heard Isak get quietly of bed, open the door, and leave the room. Maybe I’m dreaming, Byron thought. And with that, he sank into Morpheus’ arms.

  Chapter Ten: October 15, 1809

  When Byron woke up, Isak wasn’t there. Indeed, he had apparently run off somewhere in the wee hours. It occurred to Byron that perhaps he didn’t go anywhere till this morning, and he had dreamt the rest. But in fact he knew he was just trying to find comfort in such thoughts. He was at present more dependent upon Isak that he wanted to admit to himself. And to think that he actually knew nothing about him, despite their regular conversations and mutual avowals. He had read or heard somewhere that people from the Orient, the Balkans, and the Levant are sometimes, at irregular intervals, overcome by a type of shiftlessness, a kind of periodic madness, so that they disappear from their dwellings and frequent obscure taverns, drinking and carrying on until at some later point they return to their homes, peaceful and well-behaved, shy and docile. “Social epilepsy, or something like that,” thought Byron. It seemed to him that Isak had most likely succumbed to something like that.

  The rain continued strong and implacable, and Byron assumed that Isak couldn’t have gone far. That comforted him somehow in the midst of this whole situation. There soon came a knock at the door, and he opened it cautiously. It was Hobhouse.

  ‘Still raining,’ he said, ‘are you hungry?’

  ‘Let’s go down,’ Byron suggested.

  ‘Where’s Isak?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Byron shot back.

  Downstairs, at the large table, their whole little caravan was sitting down to eat; everyone except Isak. Byron and Hobhouse joined them. The two Albanian escorts had no idea where Isak was, or at least that’s how Byron interpreted their mutely inquisitive glances. Immediately after the meal, Byron withdrew to his room. The han struck him as dreary and empty. The rain was having a depressive effect on him, too. Listlessly, he stretched out on his bed. He had barely been awake for an hour but would’ve liked nothing better than to go back to sleep. He had a couple of books with him, but had no desire to read. Suddenly he had an inspiration: he stood up and pulled the large table over to his bed, and then he fetched a pen and paper. He would write his mother a letter.

  * * *

  Dearest Mother,

  I’ve been in Turkey for some time now. Four weeks ago we set out in a warship from Malta, and we arrived, after ten days at sea, in the Turkish Mediterranean port of Preveza. We did not remain there long, but headed straight for the mountains. The proper name for this province is Albania. In a few days I am supposed to meet its ruler, Ali Pasha, a man about whom one hears only good things here. Although I have still never laid eyes on him, I can say that he has exhibited extraordinary and rare hospitality to me. Somehow he heard that an Englishman of noble lineage was on his territory, and he commanded his people to take care of my every need; there is no chance of my being allowed to pay for anything.

  In the city of Yannina, my entourage and I lodged in a house that had been put at my disposal, and we dined upon the most wonderful foods of the Orient. Now I am en route to the city of Tepelena, where Ali Pasha is expecting me. Incidentally, he rules not only over Albania but also over Epirus and Macedonia, and his family also controls Morea and has great influence in Egypt. I have already met Husein Bey and Mahmut Pasha, Ali Pasha’s grandsons, in Yannina. Both of them are still young, but they do not remind one in the least of English boys their age. They are already little men. I cannot recall ever having seen more delightful boys. Mahmut Pasha gave me a magnificent Albanian garment: a long white kilt, a gold-embroidered cape, a purple silk jacket with hems of gold stitching, and a jerkin in the same pattern. I have not yet tried them on, but with my silver pistols and my hançer, I will truly look like an Albanian. I like Albania, and the Albanians, very much. The Albanians are either Muslims or Christians, but their appearance hardly varies accordingly.

  The countryside is beautiful. The section of coastline that I have seen is prettier than anything in Spain or Malta, and the sea at Preveza gleams in such a peculiar way that I cannot tell if its real colour is purplish-blue or bluish-green. The smell of salt from the sea blends with the intoxicating aroma of the pines. The trees growing by the ocean are bent back towards the continent, probably on account of the wind that blows in constantly from the water. Like dogs, they bend down before the hand that feeds them, and their boughs seem to have their doubts as to whether that is the sky or the earth. If you lean against a tree like this, your hand gets sticky with sap as thick as honey.

  Just a few miles east of these calm coves along the Mediterranean, however, rise mountains that are harsh but proud. Albania is, truth be told, a mountainous land. The magical attractiveness of these lofty mountains reminded me immediately of Scotland. The whole region has something of the stories and novels of Walter Scott, something noble, solid, and venerable. Narrow paths twist past thick forests, frothing watercourses leap over stones of white flint, and the everlasting snow on the summits caresses the downy cloudlets on the blue canopy. Under the resplendent sun, landscapes of fairy tales and dreams let themselves be discovered, but let just a few clouds push their way in front of the sun, and it’s enough to remind one that nowhere is there as much evil as in fairy tales, and that nightmares are dreams, too.

  A rain of Biblical proportions descended upon us recently: the tracks are impassable, the streams are swollen, and in the grey, rainy air neither mountain peaks nor sky can be seen. But do not be afraid for me, Mother, for I am safe and am waiting tonight in a pleasant inn for the rain to cease. I believe that I wrote to you from Malta about the virtues of Lady Spencer Smith and my joy at having the good fortune to meet such a person in an unfamiliar land. A similar thing has transpired here.

  Ali Pasha has assigned his personal physician to me as interpreter. His name is Isak, and he speaks excellent English. Without him I would be well nigh helpless here, but what is even more important, I believe, is that we have become so intimate that I can count him a friend. His life story is even more interesting than that of Lady Spencer Smith. I would very much like to tell you his story, but I have neither time nor space now. I haven’t even managed to tell you aught of the city of Yannina or that village with the Orthodox monastery in which I spent a night, or about the local weddings and a thousand other things.

  I will write about all of that, perhaps, in the letters to follow. In general I am doing well, and am in good health, as is my companion, Mr. Hobhouse. And the same is true for all the others in my retinue. A few days ago Fletcher fell off his horse, but fortunately sustained no injuries. I have almost forgotten England in this place, and there is probably nothing from there that it would interest me to hear except that you are well and happy. It would be best for you to write me in care of the
English consulate in Athens.

  I will also write to you again as soon as I have an opportunity. It is difficult for me to find the time to write, and so you must remember: if my letters do not arrive often, that doesn’t mean that all is not well with me, or that I don’t want to reach out to you. Please believe me. I love you and am thinking of you.

  Your devoted son,

  Byron

  * * *

  Byron’s day had passed very quickly. The onset of dusk seemed to him to arrive the moment he finished the letter. He had written slowly and deliberately, paying attention to his handwriting and to every word, yet it still astonished him that he had written for almost an entire day. At first he couldn’t believe that it was already so late; it was cloudy, and day and dusk overlapped. He was not bothered that another rainy day was behind them, but Isak’s continued absence filled him with great concern. With the onset of darkness, truly grim thoughts began to plague Byron. It occurred to him that perhaps someone had taken Isak’s life, which made his skin crawl. Yesterday Isak had been flashing a lot of money around with the owner of the han, in order to get them the best rooms, and one of the numerous bandits lurking around down there must have seen it. For all of Isak’s attempts at explaining in rational terms the behaviour of the local thugs, Byron remained quite aware that such attempts at explanation did not hold water. ‘These are bandits, not mathematicians,’ Byron said inaudibly to himself, regretting that he had not told Isak this. Instead, he had just wordlessly agreed with his arguments. Byron mused that consequences were almost never on the minds of these people. One hour ahead, at most one day, that is the time frame with which they concern themselves. Eventual punishments do not bother them, he thought; their understanding does not extend that far.

  Byron stood up and began to wander around. His state of mind now fell under the description of “panic.” He could imagine Isak’s corpse, drenched by the rain and lying in a ditch; he could see clearly the slit throat and many holes in his chest, and his fingers seemed to feel the warmth of Isak’s blood. The dead eyes stared into the emptiness, the forehead was damp and cold as ice, and the rain pelted the water, pooling in his half-opened mouth. And although this vision filled Byron with horror, there was something more terrible still. A thought had taken shape in his mind; it was as clear a sentence as a beloved line of poetry or an ancient maxim: If Isak has been killed then there is no salvation for us. For the first time on this long journey Byron felt something akin to fear. He did not fear death, but he was terrorized and humiliated by the thought that his life could be snuffed out by some of these stinking, Balkan knaves. But it lasted only a moment. One look at his pistol and knife replaced the fear inside of him with a renewed will to fight. Some of those degenerates would pay for their impudence before Byron’s body hit the ground. Maybe it’d be wise for me to go see Hobhouse so that we can make a plan, he thought; if we stand together, we stand a chance of saving ourselves. We could also continue on our journey despite the rain and darkness, and that would be better than waiting here for our executioners.