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Chapter Two: October 7, 1809

It was a cool morning. It seemed to Byron that he’d been woken by the cold. His left leg was peeking out from under the blanket, his foot was trembling slightly, and he could feel goose bumps on his skin. The day before it had drizzled constantly, but it had been rather warm; the hot breath of summer was still noticeable. But this morning, by contrast, autumn was baring its teeth. Heavy rain had fallen and the loud, even thudding of the drops called to mind a march. Byron was awake, but he did not yet feel like getting up. He didn’t like autumn. He had never liked it. He once read a poem by that madman, Blake… how did it go? “O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained with the blood of grapes, pass not, but stay beneath my modest roof…”

That’s idiotic, he thought back then, and now it seemed even more preposterous. Accursed autumn, the damned change of the seasons, he thought; this is when the pain in my leg grows. There must be a catch in that phrase “pass not.”

An odd smile passed over Byron’s face. He remembered his first little book, those sixty-six pages to which he had given the title Fugitive Pieces. He loved the title more than anything else about the book, since it referred to loss, evanescence, or flight. He particularly loved that one short poem that still, to this day, gave him at least the intimation of an erection whenever he thought of it. But it was precisely on account of this poem that he had burned all the copies of the book. He didn’t even keep a copy for himself, and he had carefully counted each and every one before the auto-da-fé in order to be certain, and he knew that he had torched all of them, but somehow, nonetheless, he didn’t believe that this book had ceased to exist. He didn’t know his own verses by heart, but he remembered the title, you see and he wasn’t the only one. The thing still existed, therefore, although barely. Indeed, he had felt strange, watching the pyre on which his poems were burning. Present in those flames were also sparks of contentment: the book appeared to have lived up to its title. Its existence in the form of an object was, in fact, fugitive. He was fond of both the thin volumes of his verse that appeared later. Nonetheless, it would not have caused his heart any grief if somebody else had collected them both in turn and incinerated them. The vain bards of yore, who believed that a massive book could ransom their empty lives, would have lived differently if in their youth they had subjected their own books to the treatment he had given Fugitive Pieces. Fire teaches us about proper proportions, he thought.

A second later, he felt a strong stabbing pain in his leg. My damn old bones, he thought; no sooner do they cease growing than they start to break down. A man is like an apple – as soon as his cheeks redden, he drops to the ground.

Then words began to flash through his mind; as when you hear a few beats of a familiar melody – the whole world around you ceases to exist until you remember what the music is. New words are grafted onto the framework of the original ones. A poem. Byron recited it to himself in a whisper:

A drop of rain

licks my eyebrow,

like a suppressed and secret tear.

It tracks across my cheek

as the Rhine the continent.

In a silent insurrection

autumn kills the sun of my summer,

just as the Achaeans did to Ilium

in their wooden horse.

Somewhere I have pen and paper, Byron thought; I have to write that down. And immediately another thought: why should I feel compelled to do that? Let it live in my head; it would be better for oblivion to devour it than flames.

Fortified by this decision, he emerged from under his blanket and sat up on the edge of the bed.

* * *

After breakfast Byron wanted to shave. A razor, as sharp as a sword, was brought to him, along with a jug of warm water and a large, lovely Venetian mirror. He liked to look at the reflection of his own face; he knew he had a handsome one. The curly, jet- black fringe, draped over his pale, high forehead. His skin had a distinctly white tone, like alabaster, and a woman he knew had once compared it to diamonds and moonbeams. He wasn’t the only one who liked the scruffiness on his cheeks and the short hairs in his nose; he realized that the effect of his white skin was even greater when it contrasted with the black of his hair. His sleep-dimmed eyes seemed to show indifference.

Meanwhile, no one knew that his famous agonized look of secret mourning was the product of meticulous training. As a fifteen-year old, he had spent hour upon hour trying out facial expressions in front of a mirror. Women were transported by the way he looked when his eyes, as if irritated by the sun, teared up a little, and his brows tilted upwards towards his smooth forehead. His smile, proud and a touch contemptuous with its vibrating upper lip, was confined to the lower half of his face and did not extend as far as his eyes. A prominent nose, with a bit of the Bourbon about it; his delicate, chiselled lips, deep red, nearly purple; his teeth strong, with the narrow chin – the heart-shaped outline of his own face was thoroughly pleasing to him. He liked the way it gradually and evenly narrowed from his broad brow and protruding cheekbones to his lower jaw. It’ll make a beautiful skull someday, he thought; yet it would be a shame for it to turn to dust somewhere when he could bequeath it to the Royal Theatre.

However, the visible hint of a double chin annoyed him. Since childhood he’d been inclined to corpulence. For him, boxing, swimming, and cricket had always had more of an aesthetic purpose than an athletic one. In the meantime, he had reconciled himself to the barely perceptible accumulation around his mid-­section. His clothes concealed that, but a double chin was something much more serious. Ultimately I’m going to have to grow a beard in order to mask it, he thought. His neck was thin, long, and white, with skin even softer than his face, almost swan-like. His shoulders and torso were perfect. His chest held a thick clutch of black hair, stiff as bristles; then came his powerful arms, slender legs, and the disastrously defective foot. He was born with this handicap, and because of it he had limped since he could walk, but that wasn’t the only agony that caused him to suffer: that crazy Bible-thumper, his governess May, who had deflowered him shortly before his 10th birthday, loved to tell him that he had no soul. ‘The soul is located in one’s feet, young master; wise people know as much. But you either have no soul or it is horrifically evil’ – those were her very words. Much later in life, when he read about such beliefs in a book from the Greeks or Romans he wondered where she had picked up such information. She had also told him that he was the devil, that he was Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, the fallen angel; for the devil – as everybody knows – walks with a limp, because of his fall from the heavens. ‘He tumbled to earth and ever since then he’s been lame. Your mad father sold his soul,’ she said, ‘and now you’re paying for his sins’.

Later on, at Cambridge, he had plunged into learning Greek myth­ology, mostly on account of Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith to the gods. And they had something more in common: they were both fatherless sons. While he had no memory of his own father, the man everyone referred to as ‘Mad Jack’, it was said that Hephaestus was born by means of parthenogenesis, which seemed to him like a heathen variant of an immaculate conception. Hephaestus’s disability had been inherited by the Roman god Vulcan, and even the Scandinavians and Slavs had their own gods that limped. In his view, the devil’s lameness belonged on this list: fire and a lame leg are what the devil inherited from Hephaestus.

Just as he was finishing shaving himself, Byron nicked himself on the cheek. He wiped a drop of blood away with his thumb and stared at the blade: it was as thin and keen as a thread of silk.

* * *

Hasan turned up for lunch in the company of a man with a red beard. This fellow was of medium height and average build, and was dressed inconspicuously. His face, however, was quite striking; with its thick, red beard, gleaming green eyes and regular but yellowed large teeth. It was a face impossible to forget. The two of them sat silently at the table. The Englishman finished the first portion of their meal – a thick, greasy vegetable soup – but the two other men had not even started eating. They began conversing loudly, presumably in Turkish, uttering occasional guttural laughs. Byron put down his spoon and pushed the plate away. He looked at the wall and started drumming his fingers on the table, waiting to be served the main course. ‘Does the cuisine here appeal to you, my lord?’ someone asked him, and, without thinking, he replied that the food was splendid. A moment later he comprehended that Hasan’s red-bearded companion had addressed him in English. All the Englishmen looked over at him at once, as if by command, while Hasan and the newcomer began laughing seemingly without reason). Their laughter must have lasted for several minutes: they would stop for a moment, and then a glance at the dumbfounded faces around them would unleash fresh outbursts. At last they calmed down. Now Hasan rapidly spoke a few words to the new arrival, which the other man translated for him at once.

‘Hasan effendi apologizes,’ he said, ‘and I add my apology to his. He tells me that he informed you he was bringing me here, but he didn’t realize that you wouldn’t know that I was the person you were supposed to meet, or that I speak your language.’

Byron suddenly realized that the man must be Isak, Ali Pasha’s physician, and he almost chuckled under his breath. To judge from his clothing and all the rest of it, the man looked quite Oriental, but Byron realized he had assumed that a doctor with knowledge of English would more closely resemble a Londoner.

At this point the main course of roast meat and fresh cheese was served, and the conversation around the table livened up quickly. First they cleared up, once and for all, all the issues they had wrangled with on the preceding day. Indeed, they were told that Ali Pasha was in the north, subduing the disobedient Ibrahim, and that this matter would soon be resolved. They said he would be very pleased to receive the English nobleman and his entourage personally; both he and his son Veli Pasha, Lord of the Morea, who was sojourning at that time in Tepelena. In the event that neither his son nor Ali Pasha himself could come to Yannina in the next few days, he requested that Byron visit them in Tepelena.

‘It is not far away,’ said Isak. ‘Just a couple of days’ ride.’

Byron and Hobhouse looked at each other. Apparently Hob­house was quite set on getting away to Athens as soon as possible. Byron, meanwhile, was happy at the prospect of an additional excursion on horseback across unknown land; and he was also interested in what kind of man this famed Ali Pasha, nicknamed the Lion of Yannina, would turn out to be. What would he look like, he whose fame reached all the way to England? Byron looked straight into Hasan’s eyes and said that he was looking forward to meeting the Pasha and that it made no difference whether it was in Yannina or in Tepelena. Isak translated and Hasan rubbed the palms of his hands together and then stood up from the table. The two of them exchanged a few brief words and then Hasan left the room, leaving him in Isak’s company.

‘I’ll be staying with you,’ said Isak: ‘I’ve been assigned to keep you company and to make certain that you want for nothing.’

Byron made no reply.

‘Let’s drink a coffee,’ Isak continued. ‘I need one, and it won’t do you any harm.’

* * *

Byron asked himself that evening, when he retired to the quiet of his room, where Isak could have learned such good English. They had spent about three hours together after the midday meal, drinking coffee and chatting. Isak’s English was excellent: fluent, supple, and somehow bookish. Admittedly, one did notice the foreign accent, but it wasn’t definable. It was not the accent of someone from France or Spain; Byron would have recognized that readily, yet sometimes, when an English word escaped him, Isak would employ a French one. Byron wondered how many languages the fellow spoke. Their conversation today was fairly abstract and had touched only on general subjects. Neither one of them had dared to ask the other about anything at all personal. Nonetheless Isak had, at one point, asserted that he was a Turk and at the same time a Jew, and yet at the same time neither. Who is he? Byron asked himself. What is the story of his life? How old might he be? Judging from appearances, Byron thought he must be a little past thirty, but based on the amount of knowledge he possessed and the maturity that he exuded, he could well be twice that age. He liked Isak’s deep, sensual voice. The man spoke slowly and deliberately. Byron’s voice, in contrast, had something childlike or perhaps womanly in it. He had always been quick-witted, and the theatrical tone he had adopted in his early years in the salons of the aristocracy had unconsciously become a habit. Women loved the dulcet tone of his voice, calling it charming and magical, but here in the Orient, in the company of Isak, he came across, even to himself, as prolix and unworthy. He fell asleep that night with this concern on his mind.