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

‘Yes,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘What are you doing with the knife?’

‘Opening letters,’ she said. She paused, then said, ‘Don’t hate your father. He’s sick in his mind, sick in his soul. He’s mad. There’s something missing in him, there’s an emptiness where there should be something.’

‘I don’t hate him,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I don’t think I feel anything for him.’

‘We married too young,’ she said. ‘My house, the house of my mother and father, seemed to be crouching over me. I wanted to get away. Not to the place in the desert where the money went, not to that place that was a lie, that place that would never be green. They sat in the living room listening to the news on the radio. On Sundays the pattern of the carpet filled me with despair, became a jungle that would swallow me up.’ She passed her hand across her eyes. ‘We could have made our own green place. I wanted him to be what he could be. I wanted him to be the most and the best that he could be, wanted him to use what was in him. No. Always the turning away, the failure. Always the desert and the dry wind that dries everything up. I’m not ugly even now. Once I was beautiful. The night that I knew I loved him I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I knew that he would make me unhappy, give me pain. I knew. Your father is a murderer. He killed me. He took away your future. He’s mad, but I don’t hate him. He doesn’t know what he’s done. He’s lost, lost, lost.’ She went out, closing the door behind her. Boaz-Jachin listened to her footsteps going irregularly down the hall, down the stairs to her room.

He finished the second drawing and went down to the shop to get another sheet of brown wrapping-paper. Most of the maps on the walls had been slashed with a knife. Drawers had been pulled out and maps scattered on the floor.

Boaz-Jachin ran up the stairs to his mother’s room. The knife lay on the bedside table. Beside it stood an empty sleeping-tablet bottle. His mother was asleep or unconscious. He had no idea how many tablets had been in the bottle.

‘Biting the wheel is not enough,’ said Boaz-Jachin as he called the doctor.

Jachin-Boaz dreamed of his father who had died when Jachin-Boaz was in his first year at university. In the dream he was at his father’s funeral, but he was younger than university age. He was a little boy, and with his mother he walked up to the coffin among flowers whose fragrance was strong and deathly. His father lay with closed eyes, his face rouged and smoothed-out and blank, his brows unfrowning, his beard pointing out from his chin like a cannon. His hands were crossed on his breast, and the dead left hand held a rolled-up map. The map was rolled with its face outward, and Jachin-Boaz could see a bit of blue ocean, a bit of land, red lines, blue lines, black lines, roads and railways. Lettered neatly on the border were the words For my son Jachin-Boaz.

Jachin-Boaz dared not reach for the map, dared not take it from his father’s dead hand. He looked at his mother and pointed to the map. She took a pair of scissors from inside her dress, cut off the end of the dead man’s beard and showed it to Jachin-Boaz.

‘No,’ said Jachin-Boaz to his mother who had changed into his wife. ‘I want the map. It was in his left hand, not his right. Left for me.’

His wife shook her head. ‘You’re too little to have one,’ she said. It was dark suddenly, and they were in bed. Jachin-Boaz reached out to touch his wife, found the coffin between them and tried to push it away.

The bedside table fell with a crash, and Jachin-Boaz woke up. ‘Left, not right,’ he said in his own language. ‘Left for me.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Gretel, sitting up in bed. They always spoke English. She could not understand what he was saying.

‘It’s mine, and I’m big enough to have it,’ said Jachin-Boaz, still in his own language. ‘What map is it, what ocean, what time is there?’

‘Wake up,’ said Gretel in English. ‘Are you all right?’

‘What time are we?’ said Jachin-Boaz in English.

‘Do you mean what time is it?’ said Gretel.

‘Where is the time?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Quarter past five,’ said Gretel.

‘That’s not where it is,’ said Jachin-Boaz. His dream had gone out of his mind. He could remember none of it.

Boaz-Jachin’s mother had her stomach pumped, and she stayed in bed for two days. ‘I don’t know what all the excitement was about,’ she said at first. ‘There were only two tablets left in the bottle. I wasn’t trying to kill myself — I just hadn’t been able to sleep, and one tablet never helped.’

‘How was I to know?’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘All I saw was what you’d done in the shop and then the knife and the empty bottle.’

Later his mother said, ‘You saved my life. You and the doctor saved my life.’

‘I thought you said there were only two tablets left in the bottle,’ said Boaz-Jachin.

His mother tossed her head, looked sideways at him darkly. What a fool you must be, said the look.

But Boaz-Jachin did not know which to believe — the two-tablet story or the dark look. There’s no knowing what she might do now, he thought. She might very well turn into some kind of invalid and I’ll have to take care of her. The bell jingling at the door and her voice calling from upstairs. He’s run away and left me to clean up after him. Boaz-Jachin stayed home from school for the two days that his mother spent in bed, and Lila came to the house in the evening and cooked for them.

Boaz-Jachin made love with Lila in the dark shop at night, on the floor between the map cabinets. In the darkness he looked at the dim gleam of her body, its places that he knew now.

‘This is one map he can’t take away from me,’ he said. They laughed in the dark shop.

Boaz-Jachin made a third drawing: again the dying lion leaping up at the chariot, biting the wheel. But now both arrows were out of him, both arrows were lying on the ground under his feet. The two spears were still at his throat.

He made a fourth drawing: both arrows and one of the spears under the lion’s feet.

He made a fifth drawing in which both arrows and both spears lay on the ground under the lion’s feet, and he took the evening bus to the town near the ruins of the last king’s palace. He carried nothing with him but the rolled-up drawings.

Again he walked from the bus station out to the silent road under the yellow lights. This time the crickets, the distant barking of the dogs, the stones of the roadside under his feet no longer had the sound of being far from everything: they were the sounds of the place where he was.

When he came to the citadel he threw the roll of drawings over the chain-link fence and climbed over it as before. Again the guards were drinking coffee at the fluorescent-lit window. In the moonlight he went to the building where the lion-hunt reliefs were. As before, the door was unlocked.

Boaz-Jachin opened the door, and the lion-hunt hall with the moonlight coming through the skylight was now a place where he had been. It was a place of his time, a home-place. Here he had awakened and come out of a dark cupboard, had wept before the lion-king and the chariot-king. Here he had spoken his name and the name of his father. He knew the place, the place knew him.

Boaz-Jachin walked formally down the middle of the hall in the light of the moon that shone in through the skylights. He stopped in front of the dying lion-king silvered with dim moonlight, leaping up at the chariot that for ever bore the king away.

Boaz-Jachin unrolled his drawings, took stones out of his pocket to hold them flat on the floor.