The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

13

Jachin-Boaz continued to wake up very early in the mornings, always with the knowledge that the lion was waiting somewhere in the streets for him. But since he had seen him eat real meat he dared not go out until the rest of the world was awake and moving about. He did not see the lion during business hours or in the evening. He was in a state of excitation most of the time.

‘You make love as if you’re saying hello for the first time and goodbye for the last,’ Gretel told him. ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’

‘If there’s a tomorrow for me I’ll be here if here is where I am,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Who could ask for more?’ said Gretel. ‘You’re a reliable man. You’re a rock.’

Jachin-Boaz thought about the lion constantly — how he had eaten real meat, how the young couple had not seen the lion but had seen the meat being eaten. He dared not encounter the lion again without some kind of professional advice.

He spoke guardedly to the owner of the bookshop. ‘Modern life,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘particularly modern life in cities, creates great tensions in people, don’t you think?’

‘Modern life, ancient life,’ said the owner. ‘Where there’s life there’s tension.’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Tension and nerves. It’s astonishing, really, what nerves can do.’

‘Well, they have a system, you see,’ said the owner. ‘When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?’

‘Exactly,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘He could have delusions, hallucinations.’

‘Happens every day of the week,’ said the owner. ‘Sometimes I, for example, have the delusion that this shop is a business. Then I come back to reality and realize that it’s just an expensive hobby.’

‘But people who have hallucinations,’ Jachin-Boaz persisted, ‘powerful hallucinations — what’s to be done for them?’

‘What kind of powerful hallucinations do you have in mind?’ said the owner.

‘Well, say a carnivorous one,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Just for the sake of argument.’

‘A carnivorous hallucination,’ said the owner. ‘Could you give me an example of such a thing?’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Suppose a man saw a dog, let’s say, that wasn’t really there in the usual way, so to speak. Nobody else but the man can see the dog. The man feeds the dog dog food, and everyone sees the dog food eaten by the dog they can’t see.’

‘Quite an unusual hallucination,’ said the owner, ‘to say nothing of the expense of keeping it. What breed of hallucinatory dog is it?’

‘Well, I’m not actually thinking of a dog,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I was speaking hypothetically, just to give an idea of the sort of thing that’s on my mind — the way reality and illusion can sometimes get mixed up and all that. Nothing to do with dogs. What I had in mind was perhaps to consult a professional man about it. Can you recommend someone?’

‘I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist,’ said the owner, ‘if you’re talking about something that has to do with the mind. On the other hand, if it eats real dog food, I don’t know. And he’s expensive.’

‘Actually it’s nothing terribly pressing,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I might ring him up or I might not. Sometimes it’s good to clear up a thing like that rather than have it on your mind.’

‘Certainly,’ said the owner. ‘If you’d like the afternoon off, you know…’

‘Not at all,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I’m perfectly all right, really.’ He rang up the psychiatrist and made an appointment for the next day.

The doctor’s office was in a block of flats, on the top floor of four floors of cooking smells. Jachin-Boaz climbed the stairs, rang, let himself in, and sat on a studio couch in a big kitchen until the doctor appeared.

The doctor was short, had long red hair and a beard, and was dressed like a man doing odd jobs around the house on a weekend. He turned on an electric kettle, made tea in a little Chinese teapot, put two little Chinese cups on a tray with the pot, and said, ‘Come in.’

They went into the room that was his office and sat on facing chairs. There was a studio couch along one wall. By another stood a big table piled with books and papers, a typewriter, two tape recorders, a briefcase, and several huddles of large brown envelopes and file folders. There were more books and papers on smaller tables, on chairs, on the floor, on the mantelpiece, and on shelves.

‘Start wherever you like,’ said the doctor.

‘I’ll start with the lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I can’t afford to come more than once, so I’ll get to the point immediately.’ He told the doctor about his two encounters with the lion, particularly stressing the five pounds of beefsteak.

‘And always I know that just before dawn he will be waiting for me somewhere in the streets,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And of course I know that lions are extinct. There are no lions any more. So he can’t be real. Can he be real?’

‘He eats real meat,’ said the doctor. ‘You saw him do it, other people saw him do it.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And I’m meat.’

‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘So let’s not split hairs about whether he’s real. He can do real damage. He’s a real problem that has to be coped with one way or another.’

‘How?’ said Jachin-Boaz, looking at his watch. He was paying for fifty minutes of the doctor’s time, and ten of them were gone.

‘Try to remember the night before you saw the lion for the first time,’ said the doctor. ‘Is there anything at all that comes to mind? Any dreams?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘The day before the night before?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Anything happen at work? You said on the telephone that you work at the bookshop.’

‘Nothing happened at the bookshop. There was a lion door-stop at the other shop, my own shop where I sold maps before I came to this country.’

‘What about the lion door-stop? Anything come to mind?’

‘My son said that my map wouldn’t show where to find a lion.’

‘What about your son?’

‘Boaz-Jachin,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘That was my father’s name too. He started the business, the map shop. He ran away from his father. I ran away from my son. From my wife and son. My father said that the world was made for seeking and finding. By means of maps everything that is found is never lost again. That’s what my father said. But everything that is found is always lost again.’

‘What have you lost?’

‘Years of myself, my manhood,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘There is only one place, and that place is time. Why do I keep the map that I promised him? I don’t need it. I could have left it for him. I could send it to him.’

‘To your father?’

‘My father’s dead. To my son.’

‘Why didn’t you give it to him?’

‘I kept it for myself, kept it for finding what I’d never found.’

‘What was that?’

‘I want to talk about the lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz looking at his watch.

The doctor lit a pipe, using up almost a minute, it seemed to Jachin-Boaz.

‘All right,’ said the doctor from behind a big cloud of smoke. ‘What’s the lion? The lion is something that can kill you. What’s death?’

‘Have we got time to go into that?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘What I mean is, what’s death in this context? Is it something you want or something you don’t want?’

‘Who wants to die?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘You’d be surprised,’ said the doctor. ‘Let’s try to find out what being killed by the lion would be for you.’

‘The end,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Would it be, say, a reward for you?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Would it be, well, what’s the opposite of reward?’

‘Punishment?’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘For what?’

‘My wife and son could tell you that at great length,’ said Jachin-Boaz looking at his watch again. ‘And meanwhile the lion is waiting out there every morning before dawn.’

‘Does he come into the flat or follow you to work?’ said the doctor.

‘No. But he’s there, and I know he’s there.’

‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘But the choice is yours whether you meet him or not, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what we’re talking about is that you’re afraid you’ll go out to meet the meat-eating lion. You’re afraid you’ll accept the punishment.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘What kind of people get punished?’ said the doctor.

‘All kinds, I suppose.’

‘The jury goes out to deliberate,’ said the doctor. ‘The jury comes back in. The judge says, “How do you find the defendant?”’

‘Guilty,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘But where does the lion come from? Explain that.’

‘All right,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll go as far as I can with it. But you have to remember that not only don’t I have all the answers but I don’t even have most of the questions where you’re concerned. Let’s forget the technicalities. The lion is something extraordinary, but whether he eats meat or plays the clarinet is academic.’

‘He wouldn’t kill me with a clarinet,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘The lion’, continued the doctor, ‘is capable of a real effect on you. But that’s not much stranger than television, for instance. Right now coming through the air are pictures of people talking, singing, dancing, maybe even pictures of lions. With a television receiver in this room we could see those images. We could hear voices, music, sound effects. We could in reality be emotionally affected by them even though the images would only be images.’

‘That’s not quite parallel to my lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Also, everybody with a television receiver can see the programmes you’re talking about. But nobody but me can see my lion.’

‘Suppose,’ said the doctor, ‘that you were the only person in the world who had a receiver that could pick up this particular broadcast.’ He looked at his watch. ‘A guilt and punishment receiver.’

Jachin-Boaz looked at his watch. Less than a minute remained. ‘But where’s the lion coming from?’ he said. ‘Where’s the transmitter?’

‘From whom are you expecting punishment?’

‘Everybody,’ Jachin-Boaz was surprised to hear himself say as his mother and father unexpectedly rose up in his mind. Love us. Be how we want you to be.

‘That’s as far as we can get now,’ said the doctor, standing up. ‘We’ll have to stop there.’

‘But how can I turn off the programme?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Do you want to?’ said the doctor, opening the door.

‘What a question!’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Do I want to!’ But as the door closed behind him he was adding up the cost of daily beefsteak for the lion.