“Nothing at all,” said the driver.
The constable walked back to the second car. “What did you see?” he said.
“I saw the car in front of me stop so suddenly that I hadn't time to stop myself,” said the driver.
“Nothing else?” said the constable.
“No, indeed,” said the driver.
The constable took the names, addresses and registration numbers of both drivers, and they drove slowly away.
A polyphonic blaring was heard as a fire brigade pumper, an ambulance, a fire brigade car and a police car, all with flashing lights, arrived at high speed and slammed on their brakes. Armed men came out of the police car.
“Where's the tiger?” said the firemen and the police together.
“What tiger?” said the constable.
“I take a dim view of practical jokers, Phillips,” said the police superintendent. “You called for a pumper and a stout net and an ambulance and some people from the zoo with a cage. Here they are now,” he said as a van pulled up. “Now where's this large carnivore or tiger or whatever?”
“That call must have been made by this chap here impersonating me while I was unconscious,” said the constable. “I was trying to break up a fight between this couple, and in the struggle my head struck the corner of the telephone box with such force that I was rendered totally unconscious for a short time.”
“Did you ring up for all this then, while impersonating a police constable?” the superintendent asked Jachin-Boaz.
“I don't know,” said Jachin-Boaz. “I feel confused.” He was feeling faint. He had taken off his jacket and wrapped it around his arm, and it was now thoroughly soaked with blood.
“What happened to his arm?” the superintendent asked the constable.
“Spiked fence,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“She had a knife,” said the constable. “Best give it me now, madame,” he said.
Gretel gave him the knife. There was no longer any blood on it.
“Are you putting them on a charge?” said the superintendent.
“I believe,” said the constable, “that these people are in a mental state that makes them a danger to themselves and to others, and I think that we had better have them committed for observation under the Mental Health Act.”
One of the men from the zoo came over to Jachin-Boaz. He was small and dark, looked from side to side constantly and seemed to be sniffing the air. “I don't suppose I could have a look at this gentleman's arm?” he said.
The police constable unwrapped the bloody jacket from Jachin-Boaz's arm, peeled away the blood-soaked torn shirt sleeve.
“Yes, indeed,” said the man from the zoo to Jachin-Boaz. “Very mental. How did you come by these particular teeth-marks?”
“Spiked fence,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Knife,” said the constable. “Also, she may have bitten him during the struggle.”
“Regular tigress,” said the zoo man smiling, showing his teeth, sniffing the air.
It was full morning now. The sky had got as light as it was going to be that day. The clouds over the river promised rain, the water ran dark and heavy under the bridges. Cars, cyclists and pedestrians were active on the embankment. The pumper, with horn blaring and light flashing, went back to the fire station. The ambulance, also flashing and blaring, followed with Jachin-Boaz, Gretel and the constable in it. The police car followed the ambulance.
The zoo van stayed where it was for a time while the little dark man walked all around the telephone kiosk, back and forth before the statue of the man who had lost his head for some notion of truth, and up and down the pavement along the embankment. He found nothing.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-25-
The world seemed to be owned by a freemasonry of petrol stations, monster tanks and towers and abstract structures of no human agency or purpose. Wires hummed aloft, giant steel legs stalked motionless on frightened landscapes past haystacks, mute blind barns, wagons rotting by dunghills on tracks to isolation where brown dwellings shrugged up from the earth. We knew it long ago, said huts with grass on the roofs. Hills went up and down, cows grazed on silence, goats stared with eyes like oracle stones. Cryptic names and symbols in strong raw colors flashed signals one to the other across the roofs and haystacks, across the stone and lumber of towns and cities. Flesh and blood spoke ineffectually in little voices of breath, feet hurried, plodded, pedalled. Faces passed on the road asked unanswerable questions. You! exclaimed the faces. Us!
The petrol stations, owning the world, called to their brother monsters. Distant towers flashed lights. The petrol stations kept up their pretense, fuelled cars and lorries, maintained the fiction of roads for humans. Vast pipes slid effortlessly over miles of world. Huge valves regulated flow. Lights flashed at sea. Music played in airplanes. Never did the music name the pipes and petrol stations, the great steel stalking that laughed with striding legs. God is with us, said the valves and towers. With us, said the stones. Cars moved on roads.
Boaz-Jachin felt the miles spinning out behind him. Mina's leg was warm against his. Her leg was named Mina like all the rest of her now. Her someoneness had established itself in him since the nights in her stateroom.
Words came to his mind unbidden, unresisted. They were there like a smell that carries memory or like a change in the temperature of the air: the father must live so that the father can die. Boaz-Jachin groaned inwardly. Tiresome reversals somersaulting in his brain. Found and lost, always and never, everything and nothing. Where had these new words come from? What was wanted of him? What had he to do with such things?
No longer subtle as air, but now like sudden men in armor, Implacable, cold with the night wind of a road hard ridden, barbarous with savage unknown meaning useless to resist: the father must live so that the father can die. Quickly! What quickly? Hot waves of irritation leaped in Boaz-Jachin like flames. He sweated, ignorant and anxious.
“Petrol stations own the world,” said Mina. “Tanks and towers signal one to the other in strong raw colors. Goats have eyes like oracle stones.”
“That's very well observed,” said her father. “They do. Urim and Thummim.”
Stop telling me everything, thought Boaz-Jachin. Stop presenting the world. I'll see the goats and the petrol stations or I won't. Let them be whatever they'll be to me.
“Isn't anybody but me hungry?” said Mina's mother.
“There's a book you have to read,” said Mina to Boaz-Jachin. “It's a poet's notebook.”
No, I don't have to read it, he thought. Quickly. What quickly? A breathless sense of hurry rose in him like a whirlwind.
“That part about the uncle's death or the grandfather's death, how it was so strong in him and took so long,” said the father. “Unforgettable.”
“I know,” said Mina. “And the man who walked funny that he followed in the street.”
“I'm starving,” said the mother.
“Take a look at the guide,” said the father. “Where are we on the map?”
“You know how I am with maps,” said the mother. “It takes me a long time.” She unfolded the map clumsily.
“Look,” said the father, pointing with his finger on the map. “We're over here somewhere, heading north.”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” said the mother. “And I wish you'd stop driving so fast. We passed a place about five miles back that looked good, and it was gone before I could tell you to slow down.”
“There,” said Mina.
“What?” said the father.
“It had an orange tree in a red clay courtyard,” said Mina. “There were white doves.”
“I can turn around,” said the father.
“Never mind,” said Mina. “I'm not even sure it was a restaurant.”
“Where are we?” said the father. “Have you found us on the map yet?”
“You make me so nervous when I have to look at a map that my hands shake,�
�� said the mother.
The rented car hummed to itself. Whatever happens is not my fault, said the car. From ahead the miles surged towards them in numberless sharp-focused grains of road that rolled beneath the wheels and spun out behind. Boaz-Jachin felt stifled in the car with Mina and her parents. He drew deep breaths, expelled them slowly. He wished that he had not accepted their offer of a lift. He wished that he had a guitar again and were traveling alone and more slowly. But he felt compelled to hurry. Emptiness leaped forward in him, rushing towards something.
“That road!” said the mother. “There! About five miles down there's an old inn, five forks and spoons in the guide. We've passed it now. You simply refuse to slow down.”
The father swung the car around in a U-turn, sideswiped a van just then overtaking him, slewed off the road, up a bank, and crashed into a tree. Broken headlights tinkled. Steam drifted from the smashed radiator. All was silent for a moment. Not my fault, said the car.
It's her fault, thought the father. It's his fault, thought the mother. It's both their faults, thought Mina. It's the kind of thing that can be expected from this family, thought Boaz-Jachin. I'll be lucky if I get away from them with my life.
The petrol stations, the valves and towers, the giant steel legs that strode across the landscape said nothing.
Everyone looked at everyone else. No one seemed injured.
“My God,” said the mother.
“Right,” said the father. “Very good. We can walk to the goddam famous old five-fork-and-spoon inn.”
“My God,” said the mother. “My neck.”
“What's the matter with your neck?” said the father.
“I don't know,” said the mother. “It feels all right now, but sometimes you don't get the full effects of backlash until months later.”
“But it feels all right now,” said the father.
“I don't know,” said the mother.
“You could have killed us all, the two of you,” said Mina.
The father got out of the car to talk to the driver of the van. The van had a dent in the side and several long scrapes. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That was my fault. I didn't see you coming.”
The van driver shook his head. He was a large man with a gentle face and a drooping moustache. “These things happen,” he said in his own language. “You're from another country, not used to these roads.”
“The fault is mine,” said the father in the same language. “I do not look, I do not see. I regret.”
“Now we have to fill in forms with details of the accident,” said the van driver. He and the father exchanged licenses, insurance cards, made notes.
“I knew something was going to happen,” said Mina to Boaz-Jachin. “I could feel it. If my mother and father were sitting in a perfectly stationary box with no wheels and no motor they could make it crash by psychokinesis.”
The car could no longer be driven. The van driver took them and their luggage to a petrol station. Arrangements were made for towing away the car and renting a new one.
“We might as well go to the five-fork-and-spoon place now,” said the father. The van driver offered to take them there, and everybody got into the van but Boaz-Jachin.
“You're invited, you know,” said the father. “And we'll be going on to the channel port as soon as we get another car.” Please, said the father's eyes, don't leave us yet. Love my daughter for a while. Let her be beautiful for you.
“Thank you very much,” said Boaz-Jachin. “You've been very generous, but now I want to travel alone again for a while.”
Stay, said the mother's eyes. She can't have her father but she can have you.
Boaz-Jachin kissed Mina goodbye, shook hands with her father and mother while looking away from their eyes. Mina wrote her home address on a piece of paper, tucked it into Boaz-Jachin's pocket. He walked down the road away from the petrol station.
“How do you manage to do it?” he heard Mina ask her parents just before the van started up. “How do the two of you make everything not be there all of a sudden?”
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-26-
Jachin-Boaz was taken to the same hospital where his wounds had been dressed before. The same doctor saw him and led him away from the nurse at the admissions desk, beckoning to the police constable to follow. Gretel stayed in the waiting room with another constable.
“This is no surprise to me at all,” said the doctor. “I knew it would be a matter for the police sooner or later. I suppose that spiked fence has been after you again, has it?”
“Yes,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Very well, then,” said the doctor. “I'm going to be blunt with you, my good man. If you expect to stay in this country you'll jolly well have to learn our ways. This mucking about with large carnivores won't do. Those animals at the zoo are laid on for the enjoyment of the general public, and not for the deviant religious practices of the foreign element.” He turned to the police constable. “This is the second time he's come in this way, you know.”
The police constable did not want to be drawn into a discussion of large carnivores. “There's a young lady with him,” he said.
“Of course,” said the doctor. “'Look for the woman,' eh? Not to put too fine a point on it, there'll be sex at the bottom of this sort of thing nine times out of ten.” He snipped off the remnants of Jachin-Boaz's shirt sleeve and swabbed the wounds with antiseptic.
“Burns a bit, eh?” he said as Jachin-Boaz went pale. “You've got some jolly deep bites in you this time, mate. I don't mind telling you I consider this a shameful abuse of the National Health Service. I hope there's going to be an inquiry,” he said to the police constable as he medicated and bandaged the wounds.
“Well, we're having him committed for observation of course,” said the constable.
“Use up a little more of the state's money, eh?” said the doctor. “Everything laid on. Here's this fellow with his cult and his women and his practices . . .” He paused, unbuttoned Jachin-Boaz's shirt, looked for an amulet, found none, and went on, “And you fetch him in, with a motorcycle escort I shouldn't doubt, and I patch him up, and now he'll have a free holiday in the loony bin. Probably make a few converts there, too. Where'd you find him, and what was going on at the time?”
“On the embankment,” said the constable. “The lady had a knife.” He met the doctor's eye for a fraction of a second, looked away, encountered Jachin-Boaz's face, looked away again.
“You're not putting me on now, are you, old boy?” said the doctor. “You're not trying to tell me that the lady's knife produces large-carnivore teeth-marks, upper and lower jaws?”
“As you say, this whole thing's got to be looked into,” said the constable. “If you've finished with him now we'd better be going.”
“Quite,” said the doctor. “You don't mind giving me your name and number, do you? I'd like to ring up sometime just to find out what develops.”
“Not at all,” said the constable. He wrote down his name and number, gave them to the doctor, and took Jachin-Boaz and Gretel to the police station.
At the police station another doctor appeared with a folder in his hand. Gretel waited with the constable while he took Jachin-Boaz into a little office. “Well, old man,” said the doctor, looking at Jachin-Boaz's bandages, “been having a little domestic trouble?”
“No,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“What about foreign trouble then?” said the doctor. “Who's Comrade Lyon?”
“Comrade Lion?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“That's right,” said the doctor. “A lady who lives on your street reported that she was awakened quite early one morning by your shouting. You were having an argument with Comrade Lyon. He was gone by the time she got to the window, but she's described you accurately. What about that?”
“I don't know,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Perhaps it was someone else having the argument?”
“I don't kno
w.”
“Hadn't you made a suicide attempt not long before that?”
“Suicide attempt,” Jachin-Boaz repeated. His wounds were very painful, he was very tired, and he wanted more than anything else to lie down and go to sleep.
“The young couple who saw it described to the police a man very like you,” said the doctor. “They were quite concerned. Actually we ought to have had a talk with you then. Did Comrade Lyon have anything to do with that?”
“There's no Comrade Lion,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Then whom were you shouting at?”
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