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Chapter Three: October 8, 1809

As breakfast was ending, Isak cleared his throat, seemingly to draw upon himself the attention of those present, and said: ‘Do not be frightened by the gunshots you will hear today.’

‘What shooting is that?’ One could detect the poorly concealed panic in Hobhouse’s voice, but Isak explained that it had to do with a wedding. ‘The lord of a small nearby manor, by the name of Zaim Aga, is marrying off his son. In these parts, people shoot their guns a lot, my lords,’ Isak went on with a smile. ‘But believe me, today’s shooting is only the pleasant kind.’

Byron considered this warning superfluous, for a couple of bullets would hardly disconcert them. In fact, he might now well spend the entire day in anticipation of this event. Isak seemed to have guessed his thoughts.

‘I’d like to emphasize, my lord, that you are going to be surprised by the intensity of this gunfire. It won’t be the modest popping of a few rifles,’ he continued, ‘but rather a full salvo from an arsenal worthy of a real battle. You know,’ he concluded, ‘hereabouts the prestige and reputation of a notable are measured in part by the noise and tumult that he unleashes when his son gets married.’

After breakfast, Isak sat sipping coffee again, and Byron joined him. He was slowly coming to appreciate the importance of the thick, bitter, black drink to these Orientals. It loosened their tongues, brought them closer together, raised people’s spirits, and apparently had the same effect as alcohol in the West, although it was somehow more elegant, and came with caution and wisdom both. It occurred to Byron, that after a few more rounds of coffee, he would be in a position to talk with Isak about nearly anything. Now, though, we are conversing just like two Englishmen: about the weather.

According to Isak, the day was splendid, and almost spring-like, ‘God’s gift to the wedding party,’ he said, although Byron believed he heard a trace of irony in his voice. Byron said he’d enjoyed the sun, and according to Isak it was a good thing that he’d appreciated it so much, because the autumn rains were now, unavoidably, on their way. Isak sniffed the air like a dog, looked out at the horizon like a sea captain, and declared that this weather, was going to last for two or three more days, at most, and then autumn would begin in earnest. Byron just shrugged his shoulders.

‘Indian summer, right?’ Isak said after a short pause. ‘That’s what you all call this kind of weather, right?’

Byron mumbled something in the affirmative. It was hard to remain silent over coffee, he thought, and yet silence is a greater sign of intimacy than any other form of familiarity.

After they had finished off another entire cezve of coffee, Isak explained that he was going to be unavailable until the evening meal.

‘I’m going to the wedding, my lord,’ he said. ‘I’ve been invited, and it’s a great sin to refuse hospitality when it’s offered. But unfortunately, I cannot invite you to join me, lest I abuse this offer of hospitality. It would be best if none of you went onto the street today,’ he added as he left, ‘it wouldn’t be the first time that someone got struck by a stray bullet.’

‘Well, it’s my life’, Byron mumbled under his breath, but Isak heard him nonetheless.

‘Ali Pasha entrusted you to Hasan,’ he said, ‘and Hasan entrusted you to me; woe to him who betrays Ali Pasha’s trust.’

Isak stood there thinking for a moment, before adding: ‘honour, pride, vows, promises, trust, oathes – for all of that people here have one single word, and it rolls all of these things together into one. It’s bigger than any one part and greater than the sum of all the parts: you should note this word, my lord. It is besa.’

* * *

A wedding, Byron thought, is such a silly occasion for a celebration. What poet was it who came up with the image of the marriage hearse? Only once had Byron courted a woman, and he had no intention of ever doing so again. Mary Anne, beautiful Mary Anne Chaworth, his kinswoman Mary. The first time he saw her he was just thirteen and she fifteen. His face back then was still smooth as a girl’s, although several years had passed since he spent his first night as a man with his nanny, May. When they met for the first time, Mary Anne was taller than he. She was as beautiful as a goddess: slender and dark-haired, with budding breasts and curvy hips. She was his sun and moon and morning star, and for her he was apparently a tiresome little snot of a cousin.

Over the next two years they saw each other only infrequently and for brief periods. By his fifteenth birthday, though, things had changed. Then Byron was markedly taller, dark sideburns framed his face, and Mary looked at him differently. Meetings at a halfway point between Newstead and Annesley became a matter of course. They talked and were silent, laughed and cried over England, pouted and then reconciled. She didn’t call him George, the way his mother did, or Byron like his friends, but rather used his middle name, Gordon. In turn, he thought up a nickname for her by combining her two given names into one: Marian. Lady Marian, as in the tales of Robin Hood. She was the first woman in whose company he didn’t feel embarrassed about his limp, and she was the first who didn’t ask him constantly whether his leg hurt, whether it annoyed him, or whether he was born that way or had hurt himself in childhood. The wonderful Mary Anne could slow her pace and stay beside him when they went on walks, so that he didn’t have to strain, but she did it naturally and unaffectedly, as if she always walked that way.

Byron knew that she was engaged, but he never made mention of it. Engagements are a formality, he thought, but our love is a constant fire. Sometimes they kissed, on the banks of the river or under leafy boughs, passionately, fitfully, and abruptly. At times Mary Anne would simply push him away without a sound, but often she gave herself to him with the ardour of a lover who awaits her suitor after a year of separation. Her willfulness inspired him; never, neither before this nor later, had he experienced the same degree of excitement with a woman as when his lips approached hers. Coolness alternated with volcanic eruptions of desire; her lips would come close, as would the heavens for a great sinner, or they might open wide, like an unlocked chest harboring a legendary treasure.

For two whole years, he lived for the meetings halfway between Newstead and Annesley, and then one day at dusk, he asked his kinswoman for her hand. He was seventeen, and to his mind, a mature man. He would soon enter into his inheritance, and he was ready to marry his beloved. He had never considered that she might reject him and actually give herself to her fiancé. He simply could not have imagined that she would choose this John Masters, of whom they had together so often made sport – over him Byron, in the flesh. ‘You know, Byron, that John and I are engaged’- those were her words. And Byron thought bitterly: I’m no longer Gordon, and he is no longer that mad and preposterous Masters, but rather John. ‘So does this engagement mean anything next to what we had together?’ he asked, and she shot back: ‘Does what we had mean anything compared to an engagement?’ That’s when he knew that it was over. He tried once more to kiss her, but he regretted it immediately, even though she didn’t push him away. Her lips, earlier so sweet and fresh, reminded him now of uncooked meat.

For days and months afterwards, it was as if he had lost his bearings. He didn’t dare tell anyone what had befallen him. It was only the next year, when he and Augusta had grown close, that he could tell someone of that great love. ‘When I recognized the hopelessness of this love, little sister,’ he told her, ‘I felt I was completely alone on the wide open surface of the deep blue sea.’

After Mary Anne he only indulged in embraces of convenience, rapid, frequent, and casual. But he supposed he would never again experience with a woman that swelling in his breast, when his heart threatened to burst; never more would his hands shake as they approached a woman’s face; never again would his lips go dry just before the sweetest moistening. Never more would things be as beautiful again as they had been halfway between Newstead and Annesley. Never again… right up until Sintra. Sintra stood beyond compare: the most beautiful place on the globe.

He would write to his mother a letter with the following words: for me, the words the most beautiful now mean the most beautiful after Portuguese Sintra. Yes, Sintra was beyond compare. Its beauty surpassed everything that one could conceive of or explain. And that girl! When he first saw her, he thought he had before him the fifteen-year old Mary Anne once more, the way she had been when they met for the first time, or even more beautiful. She wore a spotless dress of white linen, with her dark brown, half-African face, and her small nose with the wide nostrils that imparted a sense of immediacy, and her worldly eyes full of health and merriment. She greeted him with words he could not understand, and quite bashfully, but in her voice and movements was something more than a usual greeting, although he knew not what it was. Her body rocked gently back and forth and she smiled at him, looking directly into his eyes, all the while wetting her dry lips with her tongue. Nothing is more arousing than lips like those. They had something of the world of plants and minerals about them. Irregular, like fruit accidentally split open, they showed what hot, dark, sweet blood comprised the inside of the mature little body. Only in the corners of the mouth were her sculpted lips drawn tight, as in a woman of the Caucasian race, but even these corners disappeared into indeterminate shadows, like the petioles of a leaf. They looked at each other for a long time, and Byron sank into her topaz pupils. They circled around each other, but nothing else happened. Voices crashed into their trance-like state, and Byron turned away, almost at a run.

This brief encounter made more of an impression on him than anything since Mary Anne. Over and over he thought about the girl from Sintra, and in his mind he called her “little creature.” This obsession was not always the most pleasant of things, and he attempted to get rid of it by hurling himself into the arms of Lady Spencer Smith, the Circe of our enchanted island. She was a fascinating woman, the daughter of the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul, who combined the elegance of the West with the Eros of the East in her person. But it didn’t work. As the voluptuous woman came noisily to her climax, Byron’s thoughts were in Sintra. Coincidentally, at the same time all of Yannina was booming with hundreds of gun-shots, and all the members of his retinue pressed themselves against the walls like frightened animals.

* * *

Long after night had fallen, the door squeaked quietly. Byron was sitting alone at the table in the light of an oil lamp. Isak very nearly tripped over his own feet as he entered. It seemed he has had something stronger than coffee to drink, Byron mused.

‘You are awake, my lord,’ Isak said, almost light-heartedly. ‘I thought you’d be asleep.

‘I was hoping to write a few letters,’ replied the Englishman, ‘but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’

Isak joined him at the table.

‘How was the wedding?’ Byron asked.

‘It was a wedding like any other, my lord. A wedding like any other.’ He fell into a brief silence, and then asked softly, ‘You are young, my lord, yet you are not married?’

Byron shook his head, and, in this fraction of a second a thought ran through his mind. Outside of Albania, he mused, I will never again meet this Isak anywhere; therefore there’s no reason not to be as honest with him as I am with myself.

‘I have not married,’ said Byron, ‘although four years ago I hoped to do so.’

Then he looked him straight in the eye and told him, rapidly, as if he feared he might change his mind, the whole story of Mary Anne and the girl from Sintra. Isak knew how to listen: he interjected not a single word, and his facial gestures showed that he was listening intently. When Byron concluded, Isak merely sighed. They sat there without conversing for a few moments before Isak spoke.

‘You know, my lord,’ he said, ‘this is really a beautiful story: painful for you, perhaps, but beautiful. You truly loved that woman, and this is not often the case. That’s why women love you, too; they sense that you are capable of love. The fact that she whom you loved did not return your love is, if I may be so bold as to assert, of perhaps less importance. It is you yourself who have found love.’

With that suggestive whisper, Isak ended his short monologue. Byron’s eyebrows rose inquisitively.

‘Is there any way to discover love other than finding it oneself? Tell me, my lord,’ Isak inquired, ‘how many men courted your esteemed kinswoman?’

‘Two,’ Byron replied, ‘Masters and I.’

‘Ah, the West,’ Isak said, smiling ambiguously. ‘Even in love, you make the calculations. Here in the Orient, he went on, a girl who is even halfway attractive has dozens of suitors. This Leila, who at this very moment’ and here he rubbed his hands together lasciviously, ‘is probably being deflowered by Ahmed, the son of Zaim Aga, received proposals from thirty other men.’

Byron remarked that Leila must be a real beauty.

‘She’s pretty,’ came Isak’s somewhat indifferent reply. ‘Listen, my lord,’ he went on. ‘You were very forthright with me, but I have not been completely so with you. I told you that I didn’t invite you to the wedding so as not to abuse my host’s hospitality, but I withheld the actual explanation. It would, for instance, have been no problem for me to take Hasan with me, although he was already invited. I could not take you,’ and here he averted his eyes, as if by way of apology, ‘because Zaim Aga simply would not tolerate the presence of a giaour’.

Byron looked at him curiously.

‘An unbeliever,’ Isak said: ‘A non-Muslim. Those people are giaours. Make a note of this expression, my lord, for when you hear it uttered, people are talking about you. Zaim Aga would not have invited me either, for I am distasteful to him, but I once saved the life of his son. I healed a wound he had sustained in battle, after everyone else had written him off. Thus he is for all time indebted to me, and he forgives me for being an infidel. But I doubt that he would forgive a companion of mine. I wanted to confess that to you, my lord,’ Isak concluded.

‘There is no cause for concern,’ Byron said in turn, ‘but one thing still intrigues me. If he is indebted to you, then why did you still have to go to the wedding? If I understood you correctly, he would not have held it against you if you hadn’t gone.’

Isak beheld him with bright eyes filled with what Byron took to be fondness, ‘you are a wise man, my lord: so young, and yet so wise. Yes, he said, in this matter also I was not honest with you. Have you read that book containing the stories from A Thousand and One Nights?’ he asked. ‘You must have read it, for you are an educated man. You must be familiar with Galland’s translation.’ Byron nodded. ‘Do you recall the story of Shahriman’s son Badr Basim?’ Isak inquired. ‘Or the one about Ibrahim and Jamilah?’ Byron didn’t remember them.

‘It contains a disguised tale about love in the East,’ Isak added. ‘Here we do not discover love ourselves. You asked if Leila is beautiful,’ he went on, speaking faster and faster. ‘Yes, she is a beauty from Yannina, but that’s nothing. The whole land knows of true beauties; there is a certain Nizama from Tepelena who is known as such a beauty. Meanwhile there are other beauties, of whom entire countries speak.

In Shkodra, a good thirty years ago, there was raven-haired Belkisa, who had hundreds of wooers but finally took up with Ali Pasha. She died giving birth to Veli Pasha. Once in Thessaloniki there was Rahel, a Jewess, who made the old man Bilal Pasha and his five sons lose their minds. Eventually, she drowned herself in the harbour like Aegeus. No one knows why, although people say it was on account of her beauty. And a long while ago, Sarajevo had Katinka, about whom people sang songs while she still lived; for her, not even Djerzelez Alija – a figure like Robin Hood in your country – was good enough. Once every three hundred years there is born a beauty who becomes known throughout the entire Empire. And then we live those stories from A Thousand and One Nights. Men fall in love with these women by hearsay alone. Nobody, or almost no one, has ever seen one of these women, but every man in the Empire daydreams of one of them, and is sure he would recognize her the moment he laid eyes on her – from the beardless Roma youths right up to the Sultan himself. She’s a beauty of the order of the city Sintra you were talking about; no one could invent her, or dress her in the right words, but she is lovlier than any city, because she’s a living being. You also know that a woman such as this truly exists, because no one could invent her. One may well be able to describe her in metaphors: hair as dark as a night of farewell, a face as beautiful as a whole day of ecstasy, eyes as blue as the sky in May, globes of ivory for breasts, hips as powerful as the crown of a tree, and feet like spearheads. But words are nothing, my lord.

It is a splendid thing to be born at a time when a woman like this treads the earth, let alone appears before our eyes. That is the reason I went to the wedding, my lord. It was rumored that such a woman would be in attendance; since she’s a relative of some sort of the unfortunate bridegroom, Ahmed. But she did not come, and perhaps it’s better that way.’

A bit out of breath, Isak paused momentarily and then added, ‘It’s time to go to sleep, my lord.’

‘Why now?’ Byron asked.

‘Ask me no more,’ Isak said, ‘for I can talk no more tonight, my lord, but perhaps tomorrow. Morning brings fresh counsel.’

‘Very well,’ said Byron. ‘But at least reveal her name to me.’

‘Zuleiha.’