The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

by Russell Hoban

  Afterwards he lay looking at the glow in the night sky over the city. He fell asleep, dreamed that he was running on an enormous master map with the bronze-studded tire of the chariot wheel rolling behind him, scraping his back, tearing flesh from his back as it pursued him.

  At half-past four he woke up remembering nothing of his dream, bathed, shaved, dressed, and went out carrying the meat for the lion.

  Jachin-Boaz saw the lion as soon as he came out of the building. He was lying on the pavement across the street, the light from the overhead lamp making harsh black shadows under the frowning brows.

  He knows now that I know who he is, thought Jachin-Boaz. We are countrymen. Jachin-Boaz's legs became weak, and there was coldness in the pit of his stomach. He wanted and did not want to go towards the lion, and he felt his body advancing while his mind sat like a passenger inside his head, looking out through his eyes and seeing the lion grow larger as the distance between them lessened.

  The lighted red telephone kiosk was only a few yards to his left, and he moved in that direction as he walked diagonally towards the lion. When the telephone kiosk was ten feet away and the lion was twenty feet in front of him, Jachin-Boaz stopped. Again he smelled the hot sun, the dry wind, the lion-smell.

  The lion got slowly to his feet, stood watching him. He was thin, Jachin-Boaz saw.

  Jachin-Boaz moved forward a little farther, threw the meat to the lion. The lion pounced, tore at the meat as he held it between his paws, ate it quickly, growling. He licked his chops, looked at Jachin-Boaz, his eyes like steady green fires.

  “Lion,” Jachin-Boaz heard himself say, “we are countrymen, you and I.” His voice seemed loud in the empty street. He looked up at the dark windows of the flats behind the lion. “Lion,” he said, “you have come out of the darkness into which the wheel took you. What do you want?”

  For answer his mind showed him lion-colored desert, singing silence in the heat of the sun, taloned sunlight opening endlessly in the eyes of his mind, lion-sunlight, golden rage, blackness.

  “Lion,” said Jachin-Boaz. He was humbled by the lion-feeling his mind had given him, he was dominated by the lion's commanding presence, found it difficult to go on. “Lion,” he said, “who am I that I should speak to you? You are a king among lions, I see that plainly. I am not a king among men. I am not your equal.” While he spoke he watched the lion's face, his feet, his tail. He kept his eyes on the lighted telephone kiosk and edged a little closer to it.

  “But it is you, Lion, who have sought me out,” he continued. “I did not seek you.” He paused as he heard himself say that. The lion had come out of the wheel's turning darkness. Had not he, Jachin-Boaz, entered that darkness, seeking with his map?

  The sky was paling quickly. As on the first morning, a crow flapped slowly overhead, settled on a chimney pot. Perhaps the same crow. Jachin-Boaz, thinking of the turning darkness from which the lion had come, wanted to close his eyes and enter it, but was afraid to.

  Then words imprinted themselves on his mind, large, powerful, compelling belief and respect like the saying of a god in capital letters:

  TO CLOSE ONE'S EYES IN THE PRESENCE OF A LION

  He felt, as in a dream, the layered meanings of the words that stood upright in his mind as if carved in the stone of a temple.

  Jachin-Boaz closed his eyes, felt the darkness slowly rise up in him, felt its turning endlessly revolving through him, rested on its constant motion. He saw sunlight in his mind again, rich patterns of color mottled with falling gold, sunlight as on oriental carpets.

  He remembered the darkness with a smile. Yes, he thought comfortably in the sunlight, turning always. One way. No way back. The blackness surged up through the sunlight, bright with terror, snaky, brilliant. One way. No way back. I shall cease to exist at any moment, he thought. No more world. No more me.

  He dropped through blackness, sank through time to green-lit ooze and primal salt, to green light through the reeds. Being, he sensed, is. Goes on. Trust in being. He rested there, prostrate in his mind, awaiting his ascent.

  From the green light and the salt he rose, opened his eyes. The lion had not moved.

  “My lord Lion,” said Jachin-Boaz. "I trust in being. I trust in you. I fear you and I am glad that you exist. Respectfully I speak to you, and who am I that I should speak?

  "I am Jachin-Boaz, trader in maps, maker of maps. I am the son of Boaz-Jachin, trader in maps before me. I am the father of Boaz-Jachin, who now sits in the shop where I have left him. He has no love for maps, I think, and none perhaps for me.

  “Who am I? My father in his coffin lay with his beard pointing like a cannon from his chin. While he lived he praised me and expected much of me. From my early childhood I drew maps of clarity and beauty, much admired. My father and my mother wanted great things from me. For me. Wanted great things for me. Which of course I wanted also.” Jachin-Boaz felt a tightening in his throat — a sound, formed and ready and aching for utterance, a high-pitched single note, a wordless plea. “Aaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa,” he sounded it, a naked, wanting sound. The lion's ears went back.

  “They wanted,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I wanted. Two wantings. Not the same. No. Not the same.”

  The lion crouched quietly, the green-fire eyes fixed always on Jachin-Boaz's face.

  “What is the sound of not wanting, my lord Lion?”

  The lion rose to his feet and roared. The sound filled the street like a river in flood, a great river of lion-colored sound. From his time, from the tawny running on the plains, from the pit and the fall and the oblong of blue sky overhead, from his death on the spears in the dry wind forward into all the darknesses and lights revolving to the morning light above the city and the river with its bridges the lion sent his roar.

  Jachin-Boaz swam in the river of the sound, walked in the valley of it, walked towards the lion and the eyes now amber in the morning.

  “Lion,” he said, “Brother Lion! Boaz-Jachin's lion, blessed anger of my son and golden rage! But you are more than that. You are of me and my lost son both, and of my father and me lost to each other forever. You are of all of us, Lion.” He moved closer, a heavy taloned paw flashed out and knocked him off his feet. He rolled upright, fell towards the telephone kiosk and was inside it closing the door, waiting for the shattering of glass, the heavy paw and its talons and the open jaws of death. He fainted.

  When consciousness returned to Jachin-Boaz the sun was shining. His left arm hurt terribly. He saw that his sleeve hung in blood-soaked shreds, his arm was bloody, there was blood on the floor of the telephone kiosk. Blood still ran from the long deep cuts of the lion's claws. His watch was smashed, stopped at half-past five.

  He opened the door. The lion was gone. There was very little movement in the street, nobody waiting at the bus stop. It must still be early morning, he thought as he staggered back to the flat leaving a trail of blood behind him.

  He had wanted to tell the lion about the wheel, and he realized now that he had forgotten it completely.

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

  -16-

  It was evening, and Boaz-Jachin was still on the road. In the last town he had stopped at he had earned a little money playing his guitar and singing, had bought some bread and cheese, and had slept in the square. I can always get through every night into the morning, he had thought while sitting on a bench looking at the stars.

  Now he was tired, and the twilight seemed a lonelier time than night. Always the road, said the twilight. Always the fading of the day. The look of moving headlights on the evening road under a sky still light made Boaz-Jachin's throat ache. He remembered how there used to be a house he slept in every night, and a father and mother.

  An old dented van, puttering unevenly, petrol-and-farm-smelling, slowed down and stopped beside him. The driver was a young man with a rough unshaven face, squinting.

  He leaned out of the window, looked at the guitar-case, looked at Boaz-Jachin, cleared his
throat.

  “You know any of the old songs?” he said.

  “Which ones?” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “The Well?” said the farmer. He hummed the tune off-key. “The girl is at the well waiting for her lover and he doesn't come. How many times will she fill her jug? say the old women in the square. And the girl laughs and says the vessel will not be filled until there comes to her that young man with his smiling face . . .”

  “I know it,” said Boaz-Jachin. He sang the refrain:

  Black is the olive, black are his eyes,

  Sweet are his kisses, sweeter his lies,

  Dark is the water, deep is the well,

  Who will give tomorrow's kisses none can tell.

  “That's it,” said the farmer. “Also The Orange Grove?”

  “Yes,” said Boaz-Jachin. “I know that one too.”

  “Where are you going?” said the fanner.

  “The port.”

  “Take you another day at least. You want to earn some money? I'll drive you to the port afterwards.”

  “How do I earn the money?” said Boaz-Jachin.

  “Making music for my father,” said the farmer. “Singing songs. He's dying.” He opened the door, Boaz-Jachin got in, the van started up.

  “Tractor went over him, smashed him all up,” said the farmer. "He's stopped on a slope, forgot to put the hand-brake on, got down to fix the harrow hitch. Tractor rolled back on him. He's all smashed up. Wheel went right over him, broke half his ribs and he's got a punctured lung. He was hemorrhaging inside for a long time before anybody went out to look for him.

  "It's his own goddam fault. He never had his mind on what he was doing any more. All right. So that's how it is. He'll hear the songs Benjamin used to sing and he'll die and that'll be that.

  “By now he can't talk, you understand. He's lying there having a big struggle just to breathe. Can't move his right arm at all. With his left arm, with a finger of his left hand, he makes on the table the name Benjamin. Benjamin I can't give him. I figure I'll give him at least the songs. Maybe he won't know the difference. Son of a bitch.” He began to cry.

  My second crying driver, thought Boaz-Jachin. “Who's Benjamin?” he said.

  “My brother,” said the farmer. “He went away ten years ago, when he was sixteen. We never heard from him again.”

  He turned off into a bumpy dirt road. The headlights looked at stones and dirt, the sound of crickets came in through the open windows. There was cow dung on the road, pastures on either side, the smell of cows. The sparse grass, pale in the headlights, seemed to have been dragged unwilling from the earth blade by blade.

  The van bumped and jolted until there were lighted windows ahead, went in through a gate, pulled up by a shed with a corrugated metal roof. There was a barn behind it, a house to one side. The house was squarish and ugly, made of cement blocks with a tiled roof. In the doorway, silhouetted against the light, stood a woman, a bulky dark figure.

  “Is he still alive?” said the farmer.

  “Certainly he's still alive,” she said. “He's been dying already for quite a few years. Why should he rush the job now just because a tractor ran over him? Who's this? You decided this is a good time to bring company home for dinner, or you're opening a youth hostel?”

  “I thought, let him hear some music,” said the farmer.

  “Wonderful,” said the mother. “That'll cheer everybody up. We'll have a nervous breakdown together while your father dies. With ideas like this you should work in a resort, a hotel. You should be a social director.”

  “Would you feel better if we stood out here all night or may we come in?” said the farmer.

  “Come in, welcome, have a good time, enjoy yourselves.” said the mother. She left the doorway and went into the kitchen.

  “Probably our guest wouldn't say no to something to eat,” the farmer called after his mother.

  “Anything you want,” she said. “Twenty-four hours a day. Serving you is my supreme joy.”

  The farmer and Boaz-Jachin sat down in a parlor with ugly pictures on the walls, a bowl of fruit on a sideboard, a short-wave radio, some books, some ugly vases. The spaces between things in the room separated them rather than connected them.

  “Maybe we better have a look, see what kind of shape he's in,” said the farmer. “If he's dead it's no use singing for him.” He got up, led the way upstairs. Boaz-Jachin followed with his guitar, looking at his back, the frayed shirt with the sweat dried into it, the heavy dragging trousers with a rusty bolt sticking out of one pocket, a coil of wire in another.

  “Even if he's dead it might be nice for him to have a song,” said Boaz-Jachin. “If nobody would mind.”

  Upstairs the father lay in a strong dark bed while the room stood up around him. The chairs stood up, the wallpaper stood up, the windows stood up in the wall, the night stood up outside the windows.

  A chromium-plated pole with a crossbar stood up beside the bed, a plastic bottle hung on a hook from the bar, a plastic tube fed the big vein in the father's arm.

  There were white bandages across his chest and over his right shoulder. The skin of his neck and chest that was usually exposed by his collar opening was creased and dark and weathered. Elsewhere the skin was white and inexperienced-looking. His eyes were closed, his head lay back on the pillow, his beard pointed like a cannon from his chin. His breath whistled in and out, fluttered, broke, went on unevenly.

  His wrist, colored like his neck, came out of his thin white arm, presented itself as the wrist of a boy. Forget the years, said the wrist. This is how I used to lie on the coverlet when someone else was the man and I was the boy. I had nothing in my hand then, I have nothing in my hand now.

  The doctor sat in a chair by the bed. He wore a dark suit, open sandals over dark socks, looked at his watch, looked at the father's face.

  “The hospital's twenty miles away,” said the farmer to Boaz-Jachin. “The ambulance was out, couldn't get here for hours. The doctor came, did what he could right here, said not to move him now.”

  The farmer looked at the doctor, pointed to Boaz-Jachin's guitar.

  The doctor looked at the father's face, nodded.

  The mother came in with coffee, fruit and cheese, while Boaz-Jachin tuned his guitar. She poured coffee for the doctor, for her son and Boaz-Jachin, then sat in a straight-backed chair, her hands in her lap.

  Boaz-Jachin played and sang The Well:

  By the well in the square

  See her waiting daily there . . .

  The sound of the guitar, round and expanding, moved out from him to the standing-up walls, came back into the center of the room, said to the walls, not you. Beyond you.

  The father's breath whistled in and out unevenly the same as before. When Boaz-Jachin sang the refrain the mother walked to the window and stood before her reflection on the night:

  Dark is the water, deep is the well,

  Who will give tomorrow's kisses none can tell.

  Boaz-Jachin sang The Orange Grove:

  Where the morning sees the shadows

  Of the orange grove, there was nothing

  twenty years ago.

  Where the dry wind sowed the desert

  We brought water, planted seedlings, now

  the oranges grow.

  “Did you bring in the tractor?” said the mother to the son.

  “It's in the shed,” he said. “His eyes are open.”

  The father's eyes, large and black, looked straight up at the ceiling. His left hand was moving on the bedside table.

  The son stood over his father's moving hand, watched the finger spelling on the dark wood of the night table.

  “F-O-R . . .” he read. The finger kept moving. “'Forgive,'” said the son.

  “Always the humorist,” said the mother.

  “Benjamin he forgives,” said the son. “Always.”

  “Maybe he meant you,” said the doctor.

  “Maybe he's asking,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Fo
r himself.”

  Everyone turned to look at him while the father died. When they looked back at the father there was no sound of breathing, the eyes were closed, the hand on the table was still.

  Boaz-Jachin spent the night in the room that had been Benjamin's. In the morning the mother made the funeral arrangements and the son drove Boaz-Jachin to the port.

  They traveled all day, stopping halfway for lunch in a café. The son had shaved and was wearing a suit and a sports shirt. It was evening when they came to the port. The sky showed that they were at the sea..