The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

by Russell Hoban

  He thought of Sunday afternoons in childhood, smelled the car upholstery, looked out through the windscreen at the waning sunlight, felt his father on one side, his mother on the other, himself between them, sick. I haven't been committing suicide, he thought. Suicide has been committing me.

  All of his unremembered dreams seemed to walk silently behind him, passing one by one between him and the wall, smirking over his shoulder at invisible phantoms in front of him. If I turn very quickly, he thought, and turned. Something very big, something very small, whisked around the corner of his mind. Either way, said the answer in the wall that faced him: betrayed or betrayer. Betrayed and betrayer.

  “Be reasonable,” said Jachin-Boaz quietly to the wall. “I can't be everybody.”

  Loss unending, said the wall. Dare to let go? “I don't know,” said Jachin-Boaz. Suppose, the wall said, sometimes he laughed away from home. What then? You owe her nothing. He wants to rest. If you stand up they lie down. Follow your noes.

  “Lion,” said Jachin-Boaz silently, only shaping the word.

  Oh yes, the wall said. Play with yourself. Jachin-Boaz turned away. Everyone else was going to dinner. The thought of food sickened him, the smell from the dining area was offensive. The lion was still outside, no doubt. He would be waiting all the time now until the end. Everybody would want to feed him, look at him, share him. No, no, no.

  The tightly furled man had taken his plate to the door near the french windows. “Pss, pss,” he called, making the sound one makes for a cat. Three others came and stood near, looking over his shoulder. One of them, a man with a round white face, looked back at Jachin-Boaz and said something to the others. Everyone laughed.

  Jachin-Boaz felt immensities of rage in him, infinities of NO. Crying, he burst into the group by the door, flung them in all directions, and rushed out on to the lawn.

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

  -31-

  Boaz-Jachin had arrived in the city and was staying with friends of the blonde woman. When he told them that his father was likely to be selling maps they advised him to advertise for Jachin-Boaz in the book trade weekly, which he did.

  Boaz-Jachin bought such clothes as he needed and a cheap guitar, and every day he went into the underground stations and sang and played. The money he had earned on the cruise ship would keep him for several months, but he wanted to be able to support himself for as long as he needed to remain in the city.

  His advertisement would not appear until the next week, and while he waited he played his guitar and sang in two different stations every day. He timed his arrival so that he would be at one when people went to work and at the other when they went home. Each day he went to new stations in the hope of seeing Jachin-Boaz. Each station had its own sound and its own feel. Some felt as if Jachin-Boaz was not to be found in them, others seemed full of probability. Boaz-Jachin made a list of the latter. If there was no answer to the advertisement he would keep only those stations on his guitar route as time went on.

  The advertisement appeared, but there were no telephone calls or letters for Boaz-Jachin at the house where he was staying. He went on with his guitar route, trying new stations daily. He made enough money to live on cheaply, found a room for himself, and settled down to stay until he found his father. He no longer asked himself whether he knew or how he knew that Jachin-Boaz was in this city. He felt it was a certainty. Every day he inquired for letters or telephone calls, and every day there was nothing.

  Boaz-Jachin's ear became attuned to the roar of trains arriving and departing, the constant numberless footfalls approaching, receding, voices and echoes. He sang the songs of his country, sang of the well, of olives, of sheep in the hills, of the desert, of orange groves, his voice and his guitar echoing in the corridors and stairways under the ground in the great city.

  Boaz-Jachin inserted another advertisement, subscribed to the trade weekly, and went on to new underground stations with his guitar. He became known to his regular clientele. At each station the same faces smiled at him day after day as coins dropped into the guitar case. He smiled back, said thank you, but said nothing else to anyone. In the morning he saw the daylight and in the evenings he saw the fading of it. Above him the city was immense with all that the lines on the master-map led to. Bridges crossed the river, birds flew up circling over squares, and Boaz-Jachin lived underground, singing in corridors and stairways. He had not spoken aloud the word lion since the ride to the channel port with the van driver.

  Boaz-Jachin found that he was thinking less in words than he used to. His mind simply was, and in it were the people he had been with, the times he had lived. Sounds, voices, faces, bodies, places, light and darkness came and went.

  He had no sexual appetite, wanted no one to talk to, read nothing. Often in the evenings he sat quietly in his room doing nothing. Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness.

  Sometimes at night he walked in the streets. The leaves of the trees rustled in the squares. Lights shone on statues. Often he seemed to be without thought. It ceased to matter to him who was looking out through the eyeholes in his face and it ceased to matter who was looking in. He had no amulet to wear around his neck, no magic stone to hold in his hand. He held nothing. He was. Time passed through him unimpeded.

  One day Boaz-Jachin took his guitar to an underground station, put the open case on the floor beside him, and tuned the instrument. But he did not begin to play immediately.

  Faces passed him. Footsteps echoed, pattering like rain. Trains came and went. Boaz-Jachin listened past the footsteps, past the trains and echoes to the silence. He began to play music of his own, improvising on themes that he had composed in his room. He was unwilling to let the music out of him but unable to make himself stop.

  He played the shimmer of the heat on the plains and the motion of the running flickering on the dry wind, tawny, great, and quickly gone. He played the silence of a ghost roar on the rising air beneath a shivering honey-colored moon.

  He played lion-music, and he sang. He sang without words, sang only with the modulations of his voice rising and falling, light and dark in the dry wind, in the sunlit desert under the ground in the great city.

  Beyond the footsteps, beyond the trains and echoes he heard a roar that flooded the corridors like a great river of lion-colored sound. He heard the lion.

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

  -32-

  No lion. Nothing. A faint smell of hot sun, dry wind. The green lawn darkening, empty in the twilight. Ha ha, said the twilight. Fading, fading.

  Jachin-Boaz stood on the empty lawn with his fists clenched. I might have known, he thought. I was there, I was ready, high on a great cresting wave. Gone. The chance missed. He's gone. I won't see him again.

  He went slowly back inside. The men who had laughed by the door looked at him warily from a distance.

  “How're we feeling?” said one of the male nurses, laying a heavy hand on his shoulder. “We're not going to be acting up any more this evening, are we? We don't want to be plugged into the wall, do we? Because a little E.C.T.-time is just the ticket for smoothing out the wrinkles in our brow and settling us down nicely.”

  “Feeling fine,” said Jachin-Boaz. “No more acting up. All settled down. Don't know why I made such a fuss.”

  “Lovely,” said the nurse,' squeezing the back of Jachin-Boaz's neck. “Good boy.”

  Jachin-Boaz walked slowly back to his bed, sat down. “What's E.C.T.?” he asked the letter writer.

  “Electro-convulsion therapy. Shock treatment. It's lovely. From time to time when the faces get too many for me I act up and they let me have it. Ever so sooth
ing.”

  “You like it?” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Can't really afford any other kind of a holiday, you know,” said the letter writer. “It scrambles the brain nicely. One forgets a good deal. Sometimes it takes months for everything to come back. Everyone ought to have a portable E.C.T. box, like a transistor radio. It isn't fair to leave a chap all alone and unprotected at the mercy of a brain. Brains don't care about you, you know. They do just as they like, and there you are.”

  “Transistor, transbrothers, transfathers, transmothers,” said the tightly furled man. “Real rock. Groovy. 'No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.' Sometimes there's nothing but Sundays for weeks on end. Why can't they move Sunday to the middle of the week so you could put it in the OUT tray on your desk? No. Bloody bastards. Let the shadow cabinet work on that for a while, and the substance cabinet too. Man is a product of his Sundays. Don't talk to me about heredity. Darwin went to the Galapagos to get away from the Sunday drive with his parents. Mendel pea'd. Everybody tells a boy about sex but nobody tells him the facts of Sunday. Home is where the heart is, that's why pubs stay in business. Forgive us our Sundays as we forgive those who Sunday against us. Parent or child, no difference. Lend me a Monday, for Christ's sake.” He began to cry.

  “Today isn't Sunday,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Yes it is,” said the tightly furled man. “It's always Sunday. That's why business was invented — to give people offices to hide in five days a week. Give us a seven-day week, I say. It's getting worse all the time. Inhuman bastards. Where'd your lion go?”

  “Away,” said Jachin-Boaz. “He won't come back. He only shows up on weekdays, and it's always Sunday here.” He smiled cruelly, and the tightly furled man cried harder and burrowed into the blankets and covered up his head.

  There would be no more lion for him here, Jachin-Boaz knew. The great cresting wave of rage had not been honestly earned, had been artificially forced up in him by the sly teasing of those who had no lion of their own. He would have to be good, be quiet, muffle his terror and wait for his rage until he was out of here. He would have to hide the clanging in him when it came again, would have to wear his terror like quiet gray prison garb, let everything flow through him indifferently.

  From that time on his walk became like that of many other patients. Even when wearing shoes he seemed to go barefoot, ungirded, disarmed. The smell of cooking sang defeat. He nodded, humbled.

  “How's it ticking?” said the doctor when his feet brought him around to Jachin-Boaz again.

  “Very well, thank you,” said Jachin-Boaz. From now on he would remember to answer as if the doctor were speaking real words.

  “Tockly,” said the doctor. “I told you ticks would tock themselves out, didn't I?”

  “Indeed you did,” said Jachin-Boaz. “And you were right.”

  “Someticks all it tocks is a little tick,” said the doctor. “My tockness, ticks get to be too tock for all of us someticks.”

  “They do,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Tick,” said the doctor. “That's when a good tock and some tick and tocket will tick tockers, and then a fellow can tick himtock toticker.”

  “Right,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Peace and quiet will work wonders, and I am pulling myself together.”

  “That's the ticket,” said the doctor. “We'll tick you out of tock in no tick.”

  “The sooner the better,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “What's all this about lions then?” said the doctor with every word clear and distinct.

  “Who said anything about lions?” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “It's difficult to have any secrets in a place like this,” said the doctor. “Word gets around pretty quickly.”

  “I may very well have said something about a lion at one time or another,” said Jachin-Boaz. “But if I did I was speaking metaphorically. It's very easy to be misunderstood, you know. Especially in a place like this.”

  “Quite,” said the doctor. “Nothing easier. But what about the bites and the claw-marks?”

  “Well,” said Jachin-Boaz, “everyone's entitled to his own sex life, I think. Some people fancy black rubber clothes. Consenting adults and all that is how I feel about it.”

  “Quite,” said the doctor. “The thing is to keep it in the privacy of one's own home, you know. I'm as modern as anyone else, but it's got to be kept off the streets.”

  “You're right of course,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Things get out of hand sometimes.”

  “But the claw-marks and the bites,” said the doctor. “They certainly weren't made by any human partner.”

  “Animal skins,” said Jachin-Boaz, “can be got with claws and teeth, you know. It's been disposed of since. Really, I'm terribly ashamed of the whole thing. I just want to get back to my job and settle down to a normal life again.”

  “Good,” said the doctor. “That's the way to talk. It won't be long now.”

  Gretel came to visit Jachin-Boaz. He had scarcely thought of her since being admitted to the hospital and would have preferred not to have to think about her just now. He was amazed at how young and pretty she was. My woman, he thought. How did it happen? It's dangerous to have balls but there's something nice about it.

  “They're letting me out tomorrow,” she said.

  “What did you tell them?” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “I said that it was all sex. You know how it is with us hot-blooded foreigners. I said that I thought you were running around with other women and that my jealousy had driven me wild and that somehow I found myself in the street with a knife in my hand.”

  “And they're willing to let you go?”

  “Well, I said that I mightn't have been so upset ordinarily, but being pregnant as I was it was all too much for me. And the doctor said oh well, of course, poor dear and unwed mother and all that. And the doctor said what about the father, and I said not to worry, that everything was all right but we couldn't get married until you had a divorce. And he patted my hand and wished me all the best and said he hoped I'd not be going about with knives any more and I said certainly not and they're letting me out tomorrow.”

  “That was a very good touch, the pregnancy,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Yes,” said Gretel. “It was. I am.”

  “Am what?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “Pregnant,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “That's right. I was two weeks overdue and had a test just before coming to the loony bin. I never found an opportune moment to tell you about it the day they brought us in. Are you happy about it?”

  “Good God,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Another son.”

  “It could also be a girl.”

  “I doubt it. With me it'll always be fathers and sons, I think.”

  “What I said about getting married, you know, was just for the doctor. I don't care about that.”

  “It's something we have to think about, I guess,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “We don't have to think about it right now, anyhow,” said Gretel. “How do you feel about being a father again?”

  “I'm happy about the baby,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I don't know how I feel about being a father again. I don't know how I feel about being a father even once, let alone twice.”

  “It'll be all right, whatever happens,” said Gretel. “A mighty fortress is our something.”

  “What do you mean, whatever happens?”

  “If you leave me. Or if the lion . . .”

  “Do you think I'll leave you?”

  “I never know. But it doesn't matter. I'll love you anyhow, and so will the baby. I'll tell him about his father, and he'll love you too.”

  “Do you think the lion will kill me?”

  “Do you want the lion to kill you?”

  Jachin-Boaz looked at Gretel without answering.

  “What is there to say about a lion?” she said. “There are no lions any more, but my man has a
lion. The father of my child has a lion.”

  Jachin-Boaz nodded his head.

  “Maybe,” said Gretel, “if you go out to meet it again . . .”

  “I'll tell you,” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “All right,” said Gretel. “When I get home I'll do some house-cleaning so the flat can welcome you properly. You'll be out soon, I should think. I shan't come to visit unless you ring me up. You have a lot to think about.”

  “I do,” said Jachin-Boaz. He kissed her. My woman, he thought. The mother of my child. I'm an unwed father, and my heart may stop beating at any moment.

  The owner of the bookshop came to visit Jachin-Boaz again. “You're getting to be quite popular,” he said, and showed him an advertisement in the book trade weekly: