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

Jachin-Boaz got out of bed. Without turning on any of the lights he walked into the next room. His desk was there, and on it lay the master-map that he had promised to his son Boaz-Jachin. By the light from the window he could see some of the routes and places marked on it.

Jachin-Boaz, naked in the dark, touched the map. ‘There is only one place,’ he said, ‘that place is time, and that time is now. There is no other place.’ He ran his fingers over the map, then turned away. The sky was lighter than before. Birds were singing.

‘I never let him help me with a map,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Sometimes he wanted to do a little of the border, but I never let him do it. He showed me little dirty maps that he had made, and he wanted praise. He wanted me to like his music, wanted me to be pleased with him, but I never said what he wanted to hear. And I left him sitting in a shop, waiting for the bell to jingle at the door.’

Jachin-Boaz went back to bed and wrapped himself around Gretel. In the mornings now he woke up with an erection.

When Boaz-Jachin came back to his town he did not go to his mother’s house. This was Saturday. She would not be expecting him until Sunday evening, and he did not want to go home yet.

He called up his girl from the bus station, and went to her house. Waiting for her to come to the door he felt again the being-with-the-lion. It was a flash that came and went, full of strangeness. It made him feel apart from his regular life, apart from all the people in his mind and the girl, Lila, whom he waited for now. He felt guilty and uneasy.

The door opened. Lila looked at Boaz-Jachin’s face. ‘Is everything all right?’ she said. ‘You look strange.’

‘I feel strange,’ he said. ‘But everything’s all right.’

They walked to the square. The street lamps seemed luminous fruits, bursting with knowledge. Boaz-Jachin tasted their light in his mouth and wondered who he was. He felt strongly the ripe blackness of rooftops against the night sky, the poignancy of roofs and domes of the town fitting into the night sky. The colour and texture of the pavement, the substance of it, were intense with flavour.

He had never been naked with Lila, had never made love with her, had never done it with anyone. His orgasms had been with himself only, rumpled with shame and listening for footsteps in the hallway. He remembered his face in the mirror in the hall of the lion-hunt carvings. Who, he wondered, looked out through the eyeholes in his face?

‘What are you going to do?’ said Lila.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought I would go and look for my father. But I came back. I sat on a hill and it wasn’t time yet. I was waiting for something. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I’m not ready to go yet.’

The slim jet of the fountain went up into the starlight, fell back continually. Dogs met and separated, going their separate ways. Boaz-Jachin and Lila sat on a bench. The palm trees rustled. The street lamps had not changed. His throat ached.

‘I’m waiting too,’ she said. ‘They sit in the living room and watch television. The house feels as if it’s crouching over me. On Sundays with them I’m always depressed. I don’t know where to go.’

When I go, Boaz-Jachin thought, will you go with me? His throat shaped the words but he did not speak them. He thought of his going, and now the sea was in it. He had been on a ship once, on a summer holiday with his parents. ‘In the middle of the ocean,’ he said, ‘it is green and huge and heaving, and you smell the deepness of it and the salt. Grey fog in the morning, wet on the face, cold in the stomach. The big sea-birds are never lost. They can sit down on the ocean, rocking on the waves.’ When I go, will you go with me? he thought again, but again did not speak the words.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Where can we go?’ he said. ‘Now, I mean. Where can we go now?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Our roof. They were sitting up there after dinner, but maybe they’ve gone down by now. Maybe they’ll be asleep by now.’

Lila and Boaz-Jachin took a blanket up to the roof. The air was warm on their naked bodies. The stars were large and brilliant. She had made love before, and she shaped herself to him, put herself where he was, made him welcome in her. He was overwhelmed by the gift. Behind his eyes everything was lion-coloured, sunlit. When the blackness came it was a roaring and an exaltation in him, a losing and a finding of himself. Afterwards he was cool, immensely easy. He was with Lila and with the lion and he was alone. He knew that when he was ready to go he would have to go alone. They slept on the roof until the sky was pale. Then Boaz-Jachin went back to his mother’s house.

‘It’s me,’ he said, hearing her wake up as he passed her door.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Say hello.’

He set down the rucksack and the guitar in the hallway. They leaned against the wall. We were going away for good, they said. We came back. The smell of old cooking seemed overpowering to Boaz-Jachin. What if she gets sick and I have to take care of her? he thought. If I’d left now at least I’d have left her healthy. He went into his mother’s room.

Boaz-Jachin’s mother looked at her son in the dawn light in the room. ‘You’re home sooner than I expected,’ she said. ‘You look strange. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ he said. ‘I feel fine. I’m going down to the shop. I left some schoolwork there.’

Boaz-Jachin put back the money he had taken from the cash box. He heard his mother’s footsteps overhead, felt a wave of hotness pass through him, then a surge of desperation. Stay here, the footsteps said. I have nothing now. Don’t leave me. Boaz-Jachin ground his teeth.

When his mother came to his room later to call him for breakfast he was kneeling on a sheet of brown wrapping-paper that he had taken from the roll in the shop. The paper stretched across the full width of the floor, and he had ruled it off into large squares. On it lay the photograph of the relief of the dying lion biting the wheel. On a sheet of transparent acetate over the photograph he had ruled small squares. Now, by making what he drew in each large square on the brown paper correspond to what was in each small square on the photograph, Boaz-Jachin was developing an accurate copy that was the same size as the lion he had measured. He did not include the chariot and the king in his copy: he was drawing only the lion, the two arrows in him and the two spears at his throat that were killing him.

‘What are you doing?’ said his mother.

‘It’s for school,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

Boaz-Jachin let the being-with-the-lion come to him. He did not have to remember it — it came when he opened himself to it. He felt the lion-life, the weight and power and the surge of it like a river of violence, calm and huge. He felt the lion-life rush into the death that came on to darken it, and he was at a moving point of balance in between. He drew his lines delicately in pencil at first, then went over them firmly with a felt-tipped pen. His lines were strong and black. The brown paper was clean and unsmudged.

Gretel, who worked in a bookshop, had helped Jachin-Boaz find a job as an assistant in another shop. His salary was small and the owner was delighted with him. There was about Jachin-Boaz an aura of seeking and finding that customers responded to. People who for years had not looked for things in books found new appetites for knowledge when they spoke to him. To someone who came in asking for the latest novel he might sell not only the novel but a biological treatise on the life of ants, an ecological study of ancient man, a philosophical work, and a history of small sailing-craft.