Another sleepless night: Byron lay awake until morning, looking up at the ceiling. But anyone in the same room with him would have believed him to be sleeping. He did not move, neither turning from side to side nor sitting up nor rising; no, he lay there quietly on his back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Zuleiha,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Zuleiha!’ His lips formed the word silently. Three syllables: zu lei ha. Zu: the incisors in his mouth clicked briefly to make the sound. Lei: the tip of his tongue flitted over his teeth. And ha: his lower lip leapt out as if he were amazed. Oh, how tenderly had Isak pronounced this name! Byron doubted he could do the same.
The local vocabulary and names that had somehow worked their way into Isak’s English possessed a special power. Besa – a word as hot, crackling, and glowing as a flame; giaour – a word as secretive and menacing as a concealed dagger; Zuleiha – a name as rich and multi-layered as life itself, mixed with indolence and serendipity. Can one fall in love, Byron wondered, with a word, or with a name? Does a rose by any other name truly smell as sweet? Would Isak’s story last night have had such an effect on him if, at the end of the conversation, he had uttered a different, but equally beautiful and exotic, name? In his mind he went intently back over every detail of his talk with Isak. Was it not accurate to say that his interlocutor seemed a little drunk? How was it even possible to get drunk at a Muslim wedding, particularly if the father of the bride was such a zealot? Where was Zuleiha supposedly from? ‘She’s known throughout the entire Empire,’ Isak had said. Byron was thus convinced that she was not Albanian. Isak had not said anything about her origin, but the announcement of her arrival would hardly have sparked so much excitement if she hailed from the immediate vicinity. Also, the delay spoke in favour of Byron’s thesis. Zuleiha comes from afar, Byron thought, from a great distance indeed, from one of those regions and landscapes in whose names the magic of her name is matched.
When it gradually began to get light outside, Byron swore that he would see Zuleiha for himself. At least catch a glimpse of her. The vow calmed him. The morning had already broken when a deep, fortifying sleep briefly overcame him, akin to a drink of cold water. He woke up quickly, much refreshed, and he felt as though he had slept the entire night through. He stood up and dressed. He was cheerful, hungry, and impatient. He supposed Isak had already risen, since it was likely he slept no longer than usual despite the drink he had enjoyed the night before, and was already up and active. He hurried to the refectory with that same nearly forgotten feeling of joyous expectation with which he once hurried towards Annesley.
* * *
When Byron walked in, Isak was already eating breakfast. His impression was of one who had also slept poorly: his hair was disheveled, his eyes were a bit red, and pearls of sweat stood out on his forehead. Isak looked so odd that even Byron thought he’d fallen prey to a fever. His voice was hoarse when he wished Byron a good morning. Byron himself mumbled a passing pleasantry as he sat down. Actually, he wanted to ask Isak how he’d slept, and to wish him a pleasant morning and a good breakfast, but only by way of a necessary introduction to what he really wanted: to request that Isak tell him all he knew about Zuleiha. But Isak was the first to speak.
‘Forgive me, my lord,’ he began. ‘I talked a lot yesterday. Too much, like a woman.’ Byron felt as though cold water had been dumped over his head. After a short pause, he replied: ‘I enjoyed the conversation. It seemed to me as though we were both sincere and are on the way to becoming friends.’
Isak nodded his agreement. ‘You bestowed upon me a great honour, my lord, with your story, but I failed to pay you back with the same currency. I was just babbling, my lord, silly stuff, which might have misled you.’
And for one short, terrible moment, Byron believed that Isak’s story from the night before had been pure fantasy. The disappointment left him feeling as if he’d been impaled. And yet, it appeared to him that Isak could read his mind.
‘I invented nothing, my lord. I was just in a lyrical mood, and poets are fools – surely we agree on that point.’
Byron gave a laugh, wordless but bitter, and Isak went on.
‘Zuleiha exists, and she is the most beautiful woman in the Empire, but it’s better to speak of her in ordinary language and simple words. Just in and of itself, her beauty is amazing, and she has no need of ornamental odes.’
After saying this, Isak fell silent again. Indeed Byron was worried that he was going to have to draw the words out of Isak this morning like buckets of water out of a well, but he was mistaken. Isak hesitated for another brief moment, and then he started to speak again.
‘She comes from Bosnia, my lord, and those Bosnians cannot speak about anything without using the words dert and sevdah. And this includes love.’
Once more, two unusual words had made their way into Isak’s smooth English: dert and sevdah.
‘My lord,’ Isak continued, ‘dert and sevdah are one and the same thing and yet different. They mean yearning, they mean craving, and love and burning desire and mania and passion; they mean ecstasy, they mean sighing, and they mean fire. Dert is red like blood, and sevdah is as black as gall. Dert is a wounded wolf, while sevdah is a flower that is withering. And dert and sevdah are songs. Dert sings loudly, and sevdah softly – because the Bosnians must always have their songs. And a song for them, my lord, is what it used to be everywhere: words and music. The Bosnians know nothing of sonnets and other poems; a song is something that is sung, and what one sings of is beauty.’
Where is this place called Bosnia?’ Byron inquired.
Isak pointed towards the mountains. ‘North of here, and to the west,’ he said: ‘A stern and beautiful land. I spent my youth there. It is a perfect land, as a Turk once told me; wherever you dig, up comes potable water, and wherever a seed falls, there a tree will sprout. Nowhere is the water any sweeter, or the shade any more beautiful, my lord. This place you were speaking of, my lord, this Sintra, seems to me to be complete sevdah, but Bosnia is at once sevdah and dert.’
Byron shrugged his shoulders as he reflected.
‘You know, my lord,’ Isak added, ‘I don’t know much more about Zuleiha than what I told you last night, but she is currently somewhere in this vicinity and it is quite probable that we will both catch a glance of her. Meanwhile, I still owe you a story about myself, because yesterday evening you were very honest and forthright with me. If I were to fail to talk more, it would be ungracious of me. The night is better suited for such conversations, so I hope it won’t disturb you if we wait till evening.’
Byron agreed with a nod of his head. ‘Just tell me one thing,’ he whispered, ‘if you know it. This name “Zuleiha” – what does it mean?’
Isak smiled. ‘Do you recall the beautiful Egyptian woman in the Bible, he asked. The one who seduced Joseph?’
Byron said that he remembered.
‘Well, Isak continued, in the Koran that woman’s name is Zuleiha. There is much conjecture about the meaning of her name. But supposedly it means “the one who withdraws” or “she who slips through your fingers”.’
* * *
‘My father,’ Isak began, as the candle sputtered in the background, ‘was a rabbi in Amsterdam. I am, my lord, the child of weak loins. My father was already over fifty-years old when I was born. My mother was not yet sixteen, but I have no real memories of her because she died right around the time I was weaned. My father, incidentally, was a genuine Wandering Jew: I know that he lived in Budapest, Prague, Berlin, Istanbul, and London. He was a distant relative of the famous London rabbi David Nieto. My father’s sister, my Aunt Deborah, lived with us after the death of my mother. It was with her that I first spoke English. In turn she also passed away, before my twelfth birthday. My father had long been fed up with Amsterdam and was looking for a chance to leave. I don’t know how it all came to pass, but one day he departed for Turkey, only this time not to Istanbul but to Bosnia: to Sarajevo, where he would serve as a rabbi. And I moved with him.’
Isak spoke in clipped, spare phrases, like an encyclopedia entry, or as if he were retelling material that he had memorized, rather than recalling his own life. But with his arrival in Bosnia, the report got richer in colour and detail. With much ardour he told of foaming rivers, blossom-covered plum orchards, lonely fortresses, grey-coloured mountains, foggy bottom-lands, muddy roads, steep mountain villages and airy forests.
‘All of Bosnia is riddled with canyons, my lord, like the wrinkles on an old man’s brow. The rivers there gleam blue and green, like the eyes of Slavic beauties of old, and alongside them twist old, narrow roads, blazed by time and history. Wherever a gorge affords you a wider view, the lights of a city shine forth: ancient, terraced, pocket-sized, and lovely.’
That’s how Isak spoke of Bosnia. Authentic sevdah gripped him as he began to speak of Sarajevo, and Byron was reminded again of that word. His very voice grew more resonant. Wax ran down the side of the thick candle like giant, heavy tears, and Isak talked himself into a fever pitch.
‘When it rains in Sarajevo,’ he said, ‘it’s like a transparent curtain of silk; when it snows, it’s as if someone is plucking a whole flock of white geese; when it’s sunny there, the sky gleams like gold and is as hot as coals – hot enough to melt stone. In Sarajevo, the wind blows mercilessly, pushing everything before it like a sickle in the hands of a mighty reaper.’
It transpired that Isak had spent five years in Sarajevo, returning to Amsterdam when his father passed away. Wanderlust had sprouted in his soul, too. At this point Isak’s tale grew spare again; he said only that he learned the basics of medicine in Germany, and that his travels took him to Istanbul. The candles were guttering by then, and Isak was in more and more of a hurry to finish his tale. He was speaking softly, almost whispering, and it was hard to understand him. He said he had converted to Islam, but Byron couldn’t tell if he had done it pro forma and for pragmatic reasons, or if the cause lay deeper, in something more nuanced. For years it seemed, he was one of the most eminent doctors in Istanbul, until one day, out of a clear blue sky, he was overcome by nostalgic longing for Sarajevo. He packed up and made for Bosnia, but shortly before reaching his goal, he changed his mind and turned back. Yet he didn’t return to Istanbul.
‘To make a long story short, my lord,’ Isak said finally, ‘as I was on riding back to Istanbul, returning to my home, my route happened to go through this region, and I stayed. Ali Pasha made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’
With that Isak rose from the table, dipped his thumb and forefinger in water, and pinched out the flame of the candle.
‘Neither, my lord, did you have Yannina on your itinerary. But here you are. And for several days now,’ Isak said into the black of the night that had just swallowed the entire room.