The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

by Russell Hoban

  “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.

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

  -5-

  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.

  With maps he was of course remarkable. He had a way of unfolding a map that was nothing less than erotic, a cartographical seduction. People bought from him stacks of maps and whole atlases of places to which they would never travel, because Jachin-Boaz had made the colored images of oceans and continents, roads, cities, rivers and ports irresistible to them.

  Jachin-Boaz was gay and tireless at his work, and he looked forward eagerly to each evening with Gretel. At that time they needed very little sleep, made love greedily, talked for hours and took long walks late at night. To Jachin-Boaz the street lamps seemed luminous fruits bursting with knowledge. He tasted their light in his mouth and marveled that this was he, Jachin-Boaz, tasting the night and the love he had found in the great city. He felt strongly the ripe blackness of rooftops against the night sky, the poignancy of roofs and domes of the city fitting into the night sky. The colors and textures of the pavement, the substance of it, were intense with flavor. His and Gretel's footsteps on the bridges over the river sounded miraculous with truth.

  Gretel was nearly twenty years younger than Jachin-Boaz, and he had begun to fall in love with her when he heard her talk about the father she had never known.

  Jachin-Boaz's father had been a tall handsome man who had built up his map business from nothing, smoked expensive cigars, directed plays in the local dramatic society, had a beautiful mistress, wanted his son to be a scientist, and died when Jachin-Boaz was still a student.

  Jachin-Boaz's wife's father had been a grocer in the town who owned a place in the desert that he wanted to make green with trees and orange groves. For years he impoverished his family by sending money to the desert place. It was not yet green when he took his wife and children there and died. They came back to the town.

  Gretel had grown up without a father, had never seen him. He had been killed in the war when she was less than a year old. Her mother had never married again.

  Jachin-Boaz had met Gretel when buying books at her shop. He was a regular customer, and in time he invited her to lunch. She was a tall fair blue-eyed girl, full of country freshness. She was as rosy, as sweet and pretty as a lady on a cigar-box lid. They spoke of the places they had come from. Gretel's town was only a few miles away from a famous camp where thousands of Jachin-Boaz's people had died in gas chambers and had risen in smoke from the chimneys of crematoria. Gretel told Jachin-Boaz about her dead father who had been a soldier in the medical corps.

  She had only a few things to tell. He had been a market gardener, and her mother and her brother continued in that business. He had drawn a little. There was a charcoal drawing of a heath at home that she had looked at and thought about. He had played the violin. She had seen music exercise-books of his. She had spoken to a pianist friend of his who remembered playing sonatas with him. He had been an amateur astrologer, and had himself cast the horoscope that foretold his death in the war.

  Jachin-Boaz listened to her speak softly about the dead man whom she had not known. He wondered in what features of hers, in what gestures and movements, her father survived, in what thoughts and recognitions. He had never known a woman to hold a man so gently in her mind as Gretel held her unknown father. He had never before known a woman with such a gentle mind. She had never known a man with whom she felt so much herself, felt that her essential self mattered so much, was so valued. They fell in love.

  The first time they made love Jachin-Boaz was almost beside himself with the achievement of it. This tall fair girl, the daughter of warriors, naked under him, looking up at him in fear and joy, delight and proud submission! He, the son of scholars, bent-backed men in black, generations of studious fugitives. My seed into your womb, he thought. My seed in the warrior-girl's belly. At the same time it was as if he was taking the most hotly desired girl of his boyhood, unapproachable then and a middle-aged woman now, into the bushes of carnal innocence and joy. He was her strong and cunning old man. Jachin-Boaz was enormously pleased with himself.

  He was delighted to find that he did not love Gretel for any reason that he might have thought good in the past. Not for intelligence or accomplishments. Not for anything that she did. He loved her simply because she was. What a thing, thought Jachin-Boaz. Love without purpose.

  He hired a small van, triumphantly moved her belongings from her room to his flat. She asserted her domestic status by cleaning it. Cautiously she approached the clutter on his desk that Saturday while he was taking a nap. This could be dangerous, she thought, but I have to do it. I can't hold back.

  Jachin-Boaz, unsleeping, heard her move every object and all the papers on the desk as she dusted. I don't care, he thought. Even if she throws everything out of the window, I love her.

  Gretel had examined the master map in her cleaning. “I don't think that you made that map for your son,” she said when he told her about it. “I think you made it for yourself.”

  “Do you really think that?” said Jachin-Boaz.

  “Yes. And the map brought you to me, so I'm well please
d with it.”

  Jachin-Boaz touched the smooth skin of her waist, traced with his finger the curve of her hip. “It's astonishing,” he said. “For eighteen years I was alive and you weren't even in the world yet. You were one year old when I got married. You're so young!”

  “Make me old,” said Gretel. “Use me up. Wear me out.”

  “I can't make you old,” said Jachin-Boaz. “But you think you can make me young, eh?”

  “I can't make you anything,” said Gretel, “except maybe comfortable sometimes, I think. But I don't think there ever was a young Jachin-Boaz until the old one took his map and ran away. So now there's a Jachin-Boaz that never was before, and I have him.”

  Sometimes, riding in the underground trains, he would see from the corner of his eye the headlines of newspapers being read by other passengers. JACHIN-BOAZ GUILTY, they said. When he looked again the words changed to the usual affairs of the world.

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

  -6-

  Boaz-Jachin had completed his first drawing. It was an accurate full-size copy of the dying lion and the two arrows and the two spears that were killing him.

  Now by transferring the lines of that drawing to another sheet of brown paper he made a second drawing. It was the same as the first except that one of the arrows was no longer in the lion. It lay on the ground under his hind feet as if it had missed him.

  As he looked at the photograph from time to time Boaz-Jachin began to pay more attention to the wheel. He remembered the stillness of the original stone under his eyes and under his fingers when he had touched it. Always and always the leaping dying lion never reaching the splendid blank-faced king forever receding before him, forever borne away in safety by the tall wheel forever turning. It made no difference that the king was now as dead as the lion. The king would always escape.

  “The wheel,” said Boaz-Jachin aloud. Because it was the wheel, and the wheel was the wheel. The sculptor had known it and now it made itself known to Boaz-Jachin as its turning took away his father and his map and brought the dark shop and the bell and the door and the waiting. Boaz-Jachin was sorry that the wheel had made itself known to him. He wished that he had not recognized the wheel.

  Boaz-Jachin shook his head. “Biting the wheel is not enough,” he said.

  The door of his room was open, and his mother appeared in the doorway. Her hair was disarranged and she seemed unable to compose her face. There was a knife in her hand. “Still the school project?” she said.

  “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.

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

  -7-

  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.

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

  -8-

  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.