Table of Contents
Chapter Three: October 8, 1809
Chapter Five: October 10, 1809
Chapter Seven: October 12, 1809
Chapter Eight: October 13, 1809
Chapter Nine: October 14, 1809
Chapter Eleven: October 16, 1809
Chapter Twelve: October 17, 1809
Chapter Thirteen: October 18, 1809
Chapter Fourteen: October 19, 1809
Afterword: The Men and the Mountains by John K. Cox
Muharem Bazdulj
BYRON AND THE BEAUTY
A Turkish Tale
Translated from the Bosnian by John K. Cox
Remember’d yet in Bosniac song.
The Bride of Abydos, xiii, 219
English language edition first published by
Istros Books
London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com
First published in Bosnian as Đaur i Zulejha, 2005
© Muharem Bazdulj, 2016
The right of Muhaem Bazdulj to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Translation and afterword © John. K. Cox, 2016
Edited by S.D. Curtis
Cover design & typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr
ISBN 978-1-908236-28-9 (printed edition)
ISBN 978-1-908236-73-9 (MOBI edition)
ISBN 978-1-908236-69-2 (e-PUB edition)
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Chapter One: October 6, 1809
Dawn was coming. The rain fell softly. A flat greyness lay over the mountains. The city still lay in complete darkness. A kind of clear light, meanwhile, could be discerned on the far side of the encircling heights.
Byron had not had any proper sleep the entire night; he always slept worst when he was extremely tired. After three days of riding like the possessed, and three nights of sweet sleep under the stars, he could not fall asleep in a bed. Hobhouse was in the next room, snoring loudly. The other members of my party are surely asleep as well, he thought to himself, while I keep vigil like an eremite.
At first, it seemed that his bed was too soft. When he lowered himself onto the mattress, he sank in so far that, for a moment, he thought he had put on some disgusting amount of weight. He simply could not find the right position: either his leg ached, or he lay on his arm and felt it going to sleep, or he found himself lying on his back, his arms stretched out beside him like a corpse – but he could never sleep in that position. After that it seemed that the bedlinen was emitting an odd odour, but in reality it was quite clean: freshly washed and dried, it smelled like water and the powder that was used to wash laundry in these parts. Subsequently, he thought the ambience was too quiet. After all, this was a city, but there was no street noise; neither horses nor people were audible. Outside of the city, other sounds lulled him to sleep: the wind in the tree-tops, the roar of a freshet, the calls of the birds. But here the stillness was unbearable. In the end, he managed to settle down just before daybreak, blaming his insomnia on his own fatigue.
In his sleep, as in life, he was always at odds with the rest of the world. Insomnia had had the power to torment him since childhood. He would lie there in the dark all blessed night straining his ears and thinking. It was actually death on which he reflected the most. He was afraid of sleep; he was afraid of not waking up again. The thought of dying now struck him as less terrible than awareness of the final moment, but at the time there was nothing more horrifying to him than the idea of going to sleep and not waking up again. Once he heard his mother say that to die in one’s sleep was a blessed thing, and yet he was appalled at the thought of such a fate. No, it seemed to him that as a boy he never once fell asleep without dread.
By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, however, things had changed. He craved sleep, but it came sparingly, and unannounced, like a beloved but unexpected guest. It was at that point he grasped the fact that fatigue could not lull him to sleep. He could be up on a horse all day long and then toss and turn in bed the whole night, tired as a dog but as alert as a sentry. Later, at Cambridge, his classmates would sleep best when they were drunk, while he on the other hand could not sleep a wink even when inebriated. Only a few times in his life, when he was dead-drunk, utterly wasted, blinded, was he able to fall into a strange, short sleep that was more like unconsciousness than slumber. Such sleep, however, never lasted more than two or three hours, and was usually followed by a terrifying, instantaneous awakening, full of irrational anxiety. He would be sweating, his heart hammering and his head throbbing with a dull, insistent ache. It was on account of such things that he did not enjoy drinking.
Even the act of love deprived Byron of sleep. Indeed, spilling his seed did bring gratification, but peace seemed to depart from him along with his vital male fluids. The sight of the sleeping body next to him was cause for envy and unease.
Suddenly, the ezan interrupted the stillness. The Arabic ode to the greatness of the one God reverberated in the ravines of the Balkans, echoed in the mountains of ancient Hellas. ‘God is the greatest,’ the muezzin sang, and Byron recalled