The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

15

The analogy of the television broadcast stayed in Jachin-Boaz’s mind. He was receiving a lion. The lion was a punishment. His wife and son would of course wish to punish him. Did he want to be punished? Was the lion simply a punishment? He could not arrive at a simple yes or no to either of those questions.

The lion ate real meat. What had it eaten since the five pounds of beefsteak three days ago? Would it be thin now, hungry, its ribs sticking out? If it was a lion that appeared exclusively to him, surely he was responsible for feeding it?

A customer came into the shop and asked for a book on ancient Near-Eastern art. Jachin-Boaz showed him the two paperbacks and the one hardback that were on the shelves and went back to unwrapping the shipment that had come in that morning.

The customer was one of the shop’s regulars, and inclined to be chatty over his purchases. ‘The lions are quite remarkable,’ he said.

Jachin-Boaz stood up from the books, the brown paper and the string, bolt upright and alert.

‘What lions?’ he said.

‘Here,’ said the customer, ‘in the reliefs in the north palace.’ He laid the open book on the counter in front of Jachin-Boaz. ‘I suppose the sculptor was bound by convention in his handling of the king and the other human figures, but the lions have immense distinction — each one’s an individual tragic portrait. Have you seen the originals?’

‘No,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘although I used to live not very far from the ruins.’

‘That’s how it is,’ said the customer. ‘Here’s one of the artistic wonders of the world, absolutely the high point of the art of its period, and when you live next door to it you don’t bother to look at it.’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz, no longer paying attention to the man’s words. He was turning the pages, looking at the photographs of the lion-hunt reliefs. He came to the dying lion biting the chariot wheel.

‘Easy enough to see where the sculptor’s sympathies lay,’ said the customer. ‘His commission may have been from the king but his heart was with the lion. The king, for all the detail and all the curls in his beard, is little more than an ideograph, a symbol referring to the splendour of kings. But the lion!’

Jachin-Boaz stared fixedly at the lion. He recognized him.

‘The king is almost secondary,’ said the customer. ‘The mortal stretch of the lion’s body meets the length of the spears he hurls himself upon, becomes one long diagonal thrust of forces eternally opposed. That thrust is balanced on the turning wheel and the lion’s frowning dying face is at the centre, biting the wheel. Masterfully composed, the whole thing. The king is secondary, really — a dynamic counterweight. He’s only there to hold the spear, and nothing less than a king would be of suitable rank for the death of that lion.’

Yes, thought Jachin-Boaz, there was no mistaking that frown. That was his frown, and the mane grew from the forehead in the same way. The set of shadowy eyes was the same. He had been thinner when he had seen him last, he thought, than he appeared here. And he had given him nothing to eat for days! Was the lion only able to eat food that came from him, Jachin-Boaz? No one else saw him. Did he see anyone else?

Jachin-Boaz seemed with his eyes to be possessing the lion in the picture beyond the possibility of its belonging to anyone else. The customer felt that his cultivated appreciation was being made unimportant. He began to feel protective towards the book he was buying, and made little patting motions on the counter with his hands. ‘I’ll have the book,’ he said, and took out his chequebook.

‘But it’s the wheel,’ said Jachin-Boaz, his eyes fixed on the implacable eight-spoked studded chariot wheel in the photograph, part of it lost in erosion and the weathering of the stone. ‘It’s the wheel. He should understand that. It isn’t the king. Maybe the king doesn’t even want the lion to die. He knows that the lion too is a king, perhaps one greater than himself. It’s the wheel, the wheel. That’s the whole thing. The sculptor knew it was the wheel and not the king. Biting it doesn’t help, but one has to. That’s all there is.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it, of course,’ said the customer. ‘Really,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I must be moving on.’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. Mechanically he rang up the sale and wrapped the book, wondering how many pounds of meat were required to keep a lion in good flesh. And of course there must be something cheaper than beefsteak. Horsemeat? Perhaps if he called the zoo they would be able to advise him — he could say tiger instead of lion. Was it possible that the lion didn’t know that it was the wheel? But he must know — there was such knowledge in his face.

‘Please,’ said the customer, ‘may I have the book?’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz, putting it at last into the customer’s hands and thinking how strange it was that anyone else should carry a photograph of the animal so intimately and oddly connected with him.

He was nervous and jumpy for the rest of the day, putting books in wrong places and forgetting where he’d put them. He moved quickly and suddenly from one part of the shop to another without remembering why he went where he did. His mind darted from one thought to another.

He dreaded the lion, trembled and went cold at the thought of him, but at the same time craved the sight of him. The feeding of the lion now seemed his responsibility, his peculiar obligation, and he worried about the expense of it.

Jachin-Boaz rang up the zoo, said that he was doing research for a magazine article, and asked how much meat a full-grown tiger would require daily. He waited while the young lady at the zoo made inquiries. When she returned to the telephone he was told that the tigers each received a twelve-pound joint six days a week and were starved for one day.

‘Twelve pounds,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

Well, actually that included the bones, she said. The meat in such a joint might be six or seven pounds.

How long could a lion … tiger, he meant to say, go without food?

Another absence from the phone. Five to seven days, she said on her return. Tigers in a wild state might consume forty to sixty pounds at one time, then go hungry for a week. Certainly one could say that they were able to go without eating for five to seven days.

Where did they buy the meat for the tigers?

They bought condemned meat, he was told, and was given the name of the butchers who sold it.

Condemned meat! thought Jachin-Boaz after he had rung off. The thought made him uncomfortable. Condemned meat, no. He would economize somewhere else.

Then he became preoccupied with the wheel again. He saw his life as the wheel’s track printed on the desert, left behind by that inexorable and monstrous onward rolling. He wanted to make the lion understand that the wheel that forever bore the unscathed king away from him bore the king away from himself as well. However many wheels there were, there was in reality only one wheel. The wheel on the cage-wagon that brought the lion to the place of his death was the chariot wheel that hurried the king to his own death farther on its track. There was only one wheel, and nothing and no one had power against it.

Jachin-Boaz took another copy of the art book from the stockroom and looked at it several times during the afternoon. Often he was on the verge of weeping. He wanted to buy the book, but thought of the cost of beefsteak and borrowed it instead. When the shop closed he hurried home with the book, stopping on the way to buy meat.

At the butcher’s he looked at the carcases hanging on hooks, stared at their nakedness.

All evening he sat at his desk, silent with the book before him, looking at the picture of the lion biting the wheel. Gretel had come to know his moods by now and was accustomed to them. She did not ask Jachin-Boaz why he had particular expressions on his face at certain times.

He knew that he would go out to meet the lion before dawn. He felt like a condemned man, and was surprised to find that he wanted to make love. There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management.

Afterwards he lay looking at the glow in the night sky over the city. He fell asleep, dreamed that he was running on an enormous master-map with the bronze-studded tyre of the chariot wheel rolling behind him, scraping his back, tearing flesh from his back as it pursued him.

At half-past four he woke up remembering nothing of his dream, bathed, shaved, dressed, and went out carrying the meat for the lion.

Jachin-Boaz saw the lion as soon as he came out of the building. He was lying on the pavement across the street, the light from the overhead lamp making harsh black shadows under the frowning brows.

He knows now that I know who he is, thought Jachin-Boaz. We are countrymen. Jachin-Boaz’s legs became weak, and there was coldness in the pit of his stomach. He wanted and did not want to go towards the lion, and he felt his body advancing while his mind sat like a passenger inside his head, looking out thorugh his eyes and seeing the lion grow larger as the distance between them lessened.

The lighted red telephone kiosk was only a few yards to his left, and he moved in that direction as he walked diagonally towards the lion. When the telephone kiosk was ten feet away and the lion was twenty feet in front of him Jachin-Boaz stopped. Again he smelled the hot sun, the dry wind, the lion-smell.

The lion got slowly to his feet, stood watching him. He was thin, Jachin-Boaz saw.

Jachin-Boaz moved forward a little farther, threw the meat to the lion. The lion pounced, tore at the meat as he held it between his paws, ate it quickly, growling. He licked his chops, looked at Jachin-Boaz, his eyes like steady green fires.

‘Lion,’ Jachin-Boaz heard himself say, ‘we are countrymen, you and I.’ His voice seemed loud in the empty street. He looked up at the dark windows of the flats behind the lion. ‘Lion,’ he said, ‘you have come out of the darkness into which the wheel took you. What do you want?’

For answer his mind showed him lion-coloured desert, singing silence in the heat of the sun, taloned sunlight opening endlessly in the eyes of his mind, lion-sunlight, golden rage, blackness.

‘Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. He was humbled by the lion-feeling his mind had given him, he was dominated by the lion’s commanding presence, found it difficult to go on. ‘Lion,’ he said, ‘who am I that I should speak to you? You are a king among lions, I see that plainly. I am not a king among men. I am not your equal.’ While he spoke he watched the lion’s face, his feet, his tail. He kept his eyes on the lighted telephone kiosk and edged a little closer to it.

‘But it is you, lion, who have sought me out,’ he continued. ‘I did not seek you.’ He paused as he heard himself say that. The lion had come out of the wheel’s turning darkness. Had not he, Jachin-Boaz, entered that darkness, seeking with his map?

The sky was paling quickly. As on the first morning, a crow flapped slowly overhead, settled on a chimney pot. Perhaps the same crow. Jachin-Boaz, thinking of the turning darkness from which the lion had come, wanted to close his eyes and enter it, but was afraid to.

Then words imprinted themselves on his mind, large, powerful, compelling belief and respect like the saying of a god in capital letters:

TO CLOSE ONE’S EYES IN THE PRESENCE OF A LION

He felt, as in a dream, the layered meanings of the words that stood upright in his mind as if carved in the stone of a temple.

Jachin-Boaz closed his eyes, felt the darkness slowly rise up in him, felt its turning endlessly revolving through him, rested on its constant motion. He saw sunlight in his mind again, rich patterns of colour mottled with falling gold, sunlight as on oriental carpets.

He remembered the darkness with a smile. Yes, he thought comfortably in the sunlight, turning always. One way. No way back. The blackness surged up through the sunlight, bright with terror, snaky, brilliant. One way. No way back. I shall cease to exist at any moment, he thought. No more world. No more me.

He dropped through blackness, sank through time to green-lit ooze and primal salt, to green light through the reeds. Being, he sensed, is. Goes on. Trust in being. He rested there, prostrate in his mind, awaiting his ascent.

From the green light and the salt he rose, opened his eyes. The lion had not moved.

‘My lord Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I trust in being. I trust in you. I fear you and I am glad that you exist. Respectfully I speak to you, and who am I that I should speak?

‘I am Jachin-Boaz, trader in maps, maker of maps. I am the son of Boaz-Jachin, trader in maps before me. I am the father of Boaz-Jachin, who now sits in the shop where I have left him. He has no love for maps, I think, and none perhaps for me.

‘Who am I? My father in his coffin lay with his beard pointing like a cannon from his chin. While he lived he praised me and expected much of me. From my early childhood I drew maps of clarity and beauty, much admired. My father and my mother wanted great things from me. For me. Wanted great things for me. Which of course I wanted also.’ Jachin-Boaz felt a tightening in his throat — a sound, formed and ready and aching for utterance, a high-pitched single note, a wordless plea. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa,’ he sounded it, a naked, wanting sound. The lion’s ears went back.

‘They wanted,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I wanted. Two warnings. Not the same. No. Not the same.’

The lion crouched quietly, the green-fire eyes fixed always on Jachin-Boaz’s face.

‘What is the sound of not wanting, my lord Lion?’

The lion rose to his feet and roared. The sound filled the street like a river in flood, a great river of lion-coloured sound. From his time, from the tawny running on the plains, from the pit and the fall and the oblong of blue sky overhead, from his death on the spears in the dry wind forward into all the darknesses and lights revolving to the morning light above the city and the river with its bridges the lion sent his roar.

Jachin-Boaz swam in the river of the sound, walked in the valley of it, walked towards the lion and the eyes now amber in the morning.

‘Lion,’ he said, ‘Brother Lion! Boaz-Jachin’s lion, blessed anger of my son and golden rage! But you are more than that. You are of me and my lost son both, and of my father and me lost to each other for ever. You are of all of us, Lion.’ He moved closer, a heavy taloned paw flashed out and knocked him off his feet. He rolled upright, fell towards the telephone kiosk and was inside it closing the door, waiting for the shattering of glass, the heavy paw and its talons and the open jaws of death. He fainted.

When consciousness returned to Jachin-Boaz the sun was shining. His left arm hurt terribly. He saw that his sleeve hung in blood-soaked shreds, his arm was bloody, there was blood on the floor of the telephone kiosk. Blood still ran from the long deep cuts of the lion’s claws. His watch was smashed, stopped at half-past five.

He opened the door. The lion was gone. There was very little movement in the street, nobody waiting at the bus stop. It must still be early morning, he thought as he staggered back to the flat leaving a trail of blood behind him.

He had wanted to tell the lion about the wheel, and he realized now that he had forgotten it completely.