The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

by Russell Hoban

  An old humpbacked-looking open lorry loaded with oranges came puttering up and stopped with a mingled reek of petrol, oranges, and orange-crate wood. The driver leaned out of the window. He wore an old black felt hat from which the brim had been cut. What remained was too big for a skullcap and too small for a fez. His face had too much expression.

  “Where are you going?” said the driver.

  “To the seaport,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Get in,” said the driver.

  Boaz-Jachin got in and put his rucksack and guitar on the shelf behind the seat.

  “What's in the guitar-case?” said the driver, raising his voice above the roar and rattle of the lorry as they pulled away.

  “A guitar,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “It doesn't hurt to ask,” said the driver. “It could be a machine-gun. You can't tell me that everybody with a guitar-case is carrying a guitar. The laws of probability are against it.”

  “In the films I think the gangsters use violin cases,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “That's in the films,” said the driver. “Real life is something else. Real life is full of surprises.”

  “Yes,” said Boaz-Jachin, yawning. He leaned his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes, smelling the petrol, the oranges, and the orange-crate wood.

  “Films,” said the driver. “Always the films are full of men with guns. Why do you think that is?”

  “I don't know,” said Boaz-Jachin. “People like excitement, violence.”

  “Always in the film posters,” said the driver, “the hero is pointing with a gun, shooting with a gun. Because we men feel ourselves to be gunless. You follow me?”

  “No,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “I've talked to professional men — scholars, lecturers,” said the driver. “It's a widespread emotional condition. We men feel ourselves to be weaponless. You know what I mean?”

  “No,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  The driver put his hand between Boaz-Jachin's legs, gripped him firmly, took his hand away before Boaz-Jachin could react.

  “That's what I mean,” said the driver. “A man's weapon.”

  Boaz-Jachin took his rucksack from the shelf behind the seat and put it in his lap.

  “Why'd you do that?” said the driver.

  Boaz-Jachin said nothing.

  The driver nodded his head bitterly, looking at the road, both hands on the steering-wheel.

  “They should rather make films about the women who take away our guns,” he said. “Nobody wants the truth.”

  “You can drop me off in this town we're coming to,” said Boaz-Jachin. “I have an uncle here that I have to see before I go to the port.”

  “I don't believe you,” said the driver. “You didn't say anything about your uncle when I picked you up.”

  “I forgot,” said Boaz-Jachin. “But I have to see him. I have to get out here.”

  They were almost at the edge of the town. The lorry, roaring and rattling, did not slow down.

  “I can stick my head out of the window and yell for help,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Go ahead,” said the driver. “You look like a runaway to me. If you make trouble I can always turn you over to the police.”

  The town flew by on either side: chickens, dogs, children, houses, petrol pumps, awnings, shops, vans, cars, lorries, soft-drink machines, a barber pole, a cinema, petrol pumps, houses, children, dogs, chickens. The lorry roared and rattled. The town grew small in the rear-view mirror.

  “You are cruel,” said the driver. “You are cruel like all the young. You come out into the world, you want this and that. 'Take me here, take me there,' you say to the world. You don't look at the people who offer friendship along with the ride or the food or whatever you hold out your hand for. You don't see their faces. For them you have no feelings.”

  “If I'd known you were going to get so worked up over giving me a ride I wouldn't have taken it,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “You're going to the seaport,” said the driver. “What will you do there?”

  “Work my passage on a boat if I can,” said Boaz-Jachin, “or earn money so I can pay for it.”

  “Doing what?” said the driver.

  “I don't know. Playing the guitar. Waiting on tables. Working on the docks. Whatever I can do.”

  “Where are you going with the boat?”

  “Why do you have to know everything?”

  “Why shouldn't I know everything I can find out? Is it a big secret where you're going with the boat?”

  “To look for my father,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Ah-h-h!” said the driver, as if he had finally worked a bit of meat out of the tooth it was stuck in. “To look for the father! The father ran away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother has a new man and you don't like him?”

  Boaz-Jachin tried to imagine his mother with someone other than his father. His mind gave him pictures of the two of them together. When he took his father out of the pictures he had nothing else to put there. Would his father have a new woman? He took the mother out of the mind-pictures. The father simply looked alone, subtracted from. He shook his head. “My mother hasn't got anyone,” he said.

  “What do you want from your father, that you're looking for him?”

  Boaz-Jachin thought the word map, and it became a no-word, a word that he had never seen or heard, a sound without meaning. Something very big, something very small, seemed present in his mind, but in his mind there seemed no place for him. He squirmed in his seat. The lorry driver in his strange hat with his face that had too much expression suddenly seemed a no-person. Lion, thought Boaz-Jachin, but felt only the emptiness where something had gone out of him. He saw the map of Lila's body spread on the floor in the dark shop. Gone. No map.

  “Well?” said the driver.

  “He promised me something,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Money, property, an education?”

  “Something else,” said Boaz-Jachin. “I don't want to talk about it.”

  “Something else,” said the driver. “Something private, noble, sacred even, such as can only be between men. And what will you bring him?”

  “Nothing,” said Boaz-Jachin. “There's nothing he wants from me.”

  “You're a real giver,” said the driver. He sighed heavily. “Parents are a mystery. Sometimes I think about my father and mother for ten or fifteen miles at a stretch. My father was a prosperous and well-known man, an intellectual. Every morning he read the newspaper from front to back, straight through, and said many profound things. My mother was a whore.”

  “What was your father?” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “A pimp,” said the driver, "and a homosexual as well. Classical profession, classical principles. Sometimes he made love with my mother as a special favor, but he never intended to have children. I represent the triumph of whoring over pimping.

  "My mother always said that fatherhood broke my father's spirit. He left us when I was five. I grew up among black silk underwear, pink kimonos, the smell of last night's drinks in smeary glasses, ash trays full of dead cigarettes, and antiseptic.

  “Be your own father and your own son is what I always say. That way you can have many long talks with yourself, and if you're often disappointed you're no worse off than every other father and son. Black silk underwear is very smooth against the skin when you're alone.”

  Underwhere, thought Boaz-Jachin. Under our where we wear our underwhere. I have no underwhere. The road to the citadel, the roadside stones, the hill, the lion-colored plain, the tawny motion, the lion-king, the emptiness where he has gone from. I have underwhere, thought Boaz-Jachin. “I think my father was disappointed in me,” he said.

  “More likely in himself,” said the driver. “You should make love with strangers whenever you can.”

  “What's that got to do with my father?” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Nothing. Your father isn't the only thing in the world.”

  “
Why with strangers?” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Because that's the only kind of person there is,” said the driver. “When you get to know a face or a voice or a smell you think the person isn't a stranger, but that's a lie. With an unknown face and the nakedness of an unknown body the whole thing is purer.”

  Boaz-Jachin was silent listening to the noise of the lorry and smelling the petrol, the oranges, the orange-crate wood.

  “I go back and forth on this road all the time,” said the driver. “Always there are new unknown faces on it, new faces coming out into the world, heading for the port. I go to the port, come back again always.”

  Boaz-Jachin hugged his rucksack to himself in silence.

  The lorry slowed down, the roar separated into individual putterings, rattles, and squeaks. The driver pulled into a layby, stopped the lorry, shut off the motor. He put his hand on Boaz-Jachin's knee.

  “Don't,” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Just for a little while,” begged the driver. “On the road between the past and the future. Just for a little while give me your strangerhood, your strangeness and your newness. Give me some of you. Be my father, my son, my brother, my friend. Be something to me for a little while.”

  “No,” said Boaz-Jachin. “I can't. I'm sorry.”

  The driver began to cry. “I'm sorry I bothered you,” he said. “Please leave me now. I need to be alone. Go away, please.” He reached past Boaz-Jachin and opened the door.

  Boaz-Jachin took his guitar from the shelf behind the seat and got out. The door slammed shut.

  Boaz-Jachin wanted to give the lorry driver something. He opened his rucksack, looked for something that could be a gift. “Wait!” he called above the roar of the engine as the lorry started up again.

  But the driver had not heard him. Boaz-Jachin saw his face still crying under the old black brimless hat that was not a skullcap and not a fez as the lorry, trailing its aroma of petrol, oranges, and orange-crate wood, pulled out into the road and away.

  Boaz-Jachin closed the rucksack, buckled the flap. There was nothing in it that could have been a gift for the lorry driver.

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  -13-

  Jachin-Boaz continued to wake up very early in the mornings, always with the knowledge that the lion was waiting somewhere in the streets for him. But since he had seen him eat real meat he dared not go out until the rest of the world was awake and moving about. He did not see the lion during business hours or in the evening. He was in a state of excitation most of the time.

  “You make love as if you're saying hello for the first time and goodbye for the last,” Gretel told him. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “If there's a tomorrow for me I'll be here if here is where I am,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Who could ask for more?” said Gretel. “You're a reliable man. You're a rock.”

  Jachin-Boaz thought about the lion constantly — how he had eaten real meat, how the young couple had not seen the lion but had seen the meat being eaten. He dared not encounter the lion again without some kind of professional advice.

  He spoke guardedly to the owner of the bookshop. “Modern life,” said Jachin-Boaz, “particularly modern life in cities, creates great tensions in people, don't you think?”

  “Modern life, ancient life,” said the owner. “Where there's life there's tension.”

  “Yes,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Tension and nerves. It's astonishing, really, what nerves can do.”

  “Well, they have a system, you see,” said the owner. “When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?”

  “Exactly,” said Jachin-Boaz. “He could have delusions, hallucinations.”

  “Happens every day of the week,” said the owner. “Sometimes I, for example, have the delusion that this shop is a business. Then I come back to reality and realize that it's just an expensive hobby.”

  “But people who have hallucinations,” Jachin-Boaz persisted, “powerful hallucinations — what's to be done for them?”

  “What kind of powerful hallucinations do you have in mind?” said the owner.

  “Well, say a carnivorous one,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Just for the sake of argument.”

  “A carnivorous hallucination,” said the owner. “Could you give me an example of such a thing?”

  “Yes,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Suppose a man saw a dog, let's say, that wasn't really there in the usual way, so to speak. Nobody else but the man can see the dog. The man feeds the dog dog food, and everyone sees the dog food eaten by the dog they can't see.”

  “Quite an unusual hallucination,” said the owner, “to say nothing of the expense of keeping it. What breed of hallucinatory dog is it?”

  “Well, I'm not actually thinking of a dog,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I was speaking hypothetically, just to give an idea of the sort of thing that's on my mind — the way reality and illusion can sometimes get mixed up and all that. Nothing to do with dogs. What I had in mind was perhaps to consult a professional man about it. Can you recommend someone?”

  “I have a friend who's a psychiatrist,” said the owner, “if you're talking about something that has to do with the mind. On the other hand, if it eats real dog food, I don't know. And he's expensive.”

  “Actually it's nothing terribly pressing,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I might ring him up or I might not. Sometimes it's good to clear up a thing like that rather than have it on your mind.”

  “Certainly,” said the owner. “If you'd like the afternoon off, you know . . .”

  “Not at all,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I'm perfectly all right, really.” He rang up the psychiatrist and made an appointment for the next day.

  The doctor's office was in a block of flats, on the top floor of four floors of cooking smells. Jachin-Boaz climbed the stairs, rang, let himself in, and sat on a studio couch in a big kitchen until the doctor appeared.

  The doctor was short, had long red hair and a beard, and was dressed like a man doing odd jobs around the house on a weekend. He turned on an electric kettle, made tea in a little Chinese teapot, put two little Chinese cups on a tray with the pot, and said, “Come in.”

  They went into the room that was his office and sat on facing chairs. There was a studio couch along one wall. By another stood a big table piled with books and papers, a typewriter, two tape recorders, a briefcase, and several huddles of large brown envelopes and file folders. There were more books and papers on smaller tables, on chairs, on the floor, on the mantelpiece, and on shelves.

  “Start wherever you like,” said the doctor.

  “I'll start with the lion,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I can't afford to come more than once, so I'll get to the point immediately.” He told the doctor about his two encounters with the lion, particularly stressing the five pounds of beefsteak.

  “And always I know that just before dawn he will be waiting for me somewhere in the streets,” said Jachin-Boaz. “And of course I know that lions are extinct. There are no lions any more. So he can't be real. Can he be real?”

  “He eats real meat,” said the doctor. “You saw him do it, other people saw him do it.”

  “That's right,” said Jachin-Boaz. “And I'm meat.”

  “Right,” said the doctor. “So let's not split hairs about whether he's real. He can do real damage. He's a real problem that has to be coped with one way or another.”

  “How?” said Jachin-Boaz looking at his watch. He was paying for fifty minutes of the doctor's time, and ten of them were gone.

  “Try to remember the night before you saw the lion for the first time,” said the doctor. “Is there anything at all that comes to mind? Any dreams?”

  “Nothing,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “The day before the night before?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Anything happen at work? You said on the telephone that you work at the bookshop.”

  “Not
hing happened at the bookshop. There was a lion door-stop at the other shop, my own shop where I sold maps before I came to this country.”

  “What about the lion door-stop? Anything come to mind?”

  “My son said that my map wouldn't show where to find a lion.”