Russell Hoban: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

‘And those things are part of the present,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘and therefore to be used by the present. Look,’ he said, ‘this is exactly what I mean.’ He took the master-map out of a drawer and spread it on the counter for his son to look at. ‘I have been working on it for years,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘and it will be yours when you are a man. Everything that you could wish to look for is on this map. I take great pains to keep it up to date, and I add to it all the time.’

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, at the cities and towns, the blue oceans, the green swamps and grasslands, the delicately shaded brown and orange mountains, the clear lines in inks of different colours that showed where all things known to his father might be found by him. He looked away from the map and down at the floor.

‘What do you think of it?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

Boaz-Jachin said nothing.

‘Why won’t you say anything?’ said his father. ‘Look at this labour of years, with everything clearly marked upon it. This map represents not only the years of my life spent upon it, but the years of other lives spent in gathering the information that is here. What can you seek that this map will not show you how to find?’

Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, then at his father. He looked all around the shop and down at his feet, but he said nothing.

‘Please don’t stand there saying nothing,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Say something. Name something that this map will not show you how to find.’

Boaz-Jachin looked around the shop again. He looked at the iron door-stop. It was in the shape of a crouching lion. He looked at his father with a half-smile. ‘A lion?’ he said.

‘A lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I don’t think I understand you. I don’t think you’re being serious with me. You know very well there are no lions now. The wild ones were hunted to extinction. Those in captivity were killed off by a disease that travelled from one country to another carried by fleas. I don’t know what kind of a joke that was meant to be.’ As he spoke there opened in his mind great mystical amber eyes, luminous and infinite. There blossomed great taloned paws, heavy and powerful. There was a silent roar, round, endless, an orb of reflection imaging a pink rasping tongue, white teeth of death. Jachin-Boaz shook his head. There were no lions any more.

‘I wasn’t making a joke,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I was looking at the door-stop and I thought of lions.’

Jachin-Boaz nodded his head, put the map back into its drawer, went to the back of the shop and sat down at his desk.

Boaz-Jachin went to his room on the top floor over the shop. He looked out through the window at the clear twilight, the darkening red-tiled roofs and the tops of the palm trees around the square.

Then he sat down and played his guitar. The room grew dark around him, and for a time he played in the dim light that came from the lamps in the street. Not here, said the guitar to the walls of the room. Beyond here.

Boaz-Jachin put away his guitar and lit the lamp on his desk. From a drawer he took a sheet of paper on which was a roughly sketched map. Many of the lines had been erased and drawn over. The paper was dirty and the map seemed empty compared to the one that his father had shown him. He began to draw a line very lightly from one point to another. Then he erased the line and put the map away. He turned out the light, lay on his bed, looked at the lamplight from the street on the ceiling and listened to the pigeons on the roof.

Jachin-Boaz dreamed every night, and every morning he forgot his dreams. One night he dreamed of the scissorman his mother had told him about when he was a child. The scissorman punished boys who wet their beds by cutting off their noses. Had she said noses? In Jachin-Boaz’s dream the scissorman was huge, dressed all in black, with great hunched shoulders, a long red nose, and a beard like that of his father. Jachin-Boaz had done something terribly bad, and he was to have his arms and legs cut off by the dreadful scissors. ‘It won’t hurt very much at all,’ said the scissorman. ‘Actually it will be a great relief for you to be rid of those heavy members — they’re really too much for you to carry around.’ When he cut off Jachin-Boaz’s left arm the scissors sounded as if they were cutting paper, and there was no pain. But Jachin-Boaz cried ‘No!’ and woke up with his heart pounding. Then he went back to sleep. In the morning he had not forgotten the dream. His wife was in the kitchen making breakfast, and he sat on the edge of the bed trying to remember how many years ago he had stopped waking up with an erection. He could not remember when it had happened last.

A few months later Jachin-Boaz said that he was going on a field trip for several weeks. He packed his map-case, his drawing instruments, his compass and binoculars and the rest of his field gear. He said that he was meeting a surveyor in the next town and that they were going to travel inland. Then he took a train to the seaport.

A month passed, and Jachin-Boaz did not return. Boaz-Jachin opened the drawer where the master-map was kept. It was not there. In the drawer were the deed to the house and a bank-book. The house and the savings account had been transferred to Jachin-Boaz’s wife. Half of the savings had been withdrawn. There was a note in the drawer:

I have gone to look for a lion.

‘What does he mean by that?’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. ‘Has he gone mad? There are no lions to be found.’

‘He’s not looking for a lion of that shape,’ said Boaz-Jachin, indicating the door-stop. ‘He means something else. And he’s taken the map that he said he would give me.’

‘He’s taken half of our savings,’ said his mother.

‘If we lived without using the savings before,’ said Boaz-Jachin, ‘we can live without the half that he has taken.’

Boaz-Jachin and his mother took on the management of the shop, and in the hours when he was not at school Boaz-Jachin sold maps and worked on the special orders with surveyors, information-gatherers and draughtsmen. He, like his father, came to know of the many things that people were looking for and the places where they could be found. Often he thought of the master-map that had been promised him.

I sit in the shop like an old man, selling maps to help other people find things, thought Boaz-Jachin, because my father has taken my map for himself and has run off to find a new life with it. The boy has become an old man and the old man has become a boy.

Boaz-Jachin took his old sketch-map from the drawer of his desk and began to work on it again. He spoke to the information-gatherers and surveyors, and he wrote in a notebook whatever seemed useful. He walked the streets and alleyways of the town late at night and early in the morning. He learned more and more about what people were looking for and where they found it. Boaz-Jachin worked hard on his map, but it still looked empty and confused compared to the one that his father had shown him. His lines were dirty and straggling, and lacked the pattern of intelligent purpose. The routes shown in his father’s map had had a clarity and logic that made his own efforts seem poor. He was uncertain of what to seek, and he had little confidence in his ability to find anything. He told one of the surveyors of his difficulties.

‘For years I have sighted and measured and located this point and that point on the face of the earth,’ said the surveyor, ‘and I have gone back to the same places to find my stakes pulled out as boundaries waver and lose accuracy. I sight and I measure and I plant the stakes again, knowing they will be pulled out again. It is not only stakes and boundaries that are lost — this is what there is to know about maps, and I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that? You’re still a boy, so maybe you can’t. Can you understand that?’