The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

16

It was evening, and Boaz-Jachin was still on the road. In the last town he had stopped at he had earned a little money playing his guitar and singing, had bought some bread and cheese, and had slept in the square. I can always get through every night into the morning, he had thought while sitting on a bench looking at the stars.

Now he was tired, and the twilight seemed a lonelier time than night. Always the road, said the twilight. Always the fading of the day. The look of moving headlights on the evening road under a sky still light made Boaz-Jachin’s throat ache. He remembered how there used to be a house he slept in every night, and a father and mother.

An old dented van, puttering unevenly, petrol-and-farm smelling, slowed down and stopped beside him. The driver was a young man with a rough unshaven face, squinting.

He leaned out of the window, looked at the guitar-case, looked at Boaz-Jachin, cleared his throat.

‘You know any of the old songs?’ he said.

‘Which ones?’ said Boaz-Jachin.

‘The Well?’ said the farmer. He hummed the tune off-key. ‘The girl is at the well waiting for her lover and he doesn’t come. How many times will she fill her jug? say the old women in the square. And the girl laughs and says the vessel will not be filled until there comes to her that young man with his smiling face …’

‘I know it,’ said Boaz-Jachin. He sang the refrain:

Black is the olive, black are his eyes,

Sweet are his kisses, sweeter his lies,

Dark is the water, deep is the well,

Who will give tomorrow’s kisses none can tell.

‘That’s it,’ said the farmer. ‘Also The Orange Grove?’

‘Yes,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I know that one too.’

‘Where are you going?’ said the farmer.

‘The port.’

‘Take you another day at least. You want to earn some money? I’ll drive you to the port afterwards.’

‘How do I earn the money?’ said Boaz-Jachin.

‘Making music for my father,’ said the farmer. ‘Singing songs. He’s dying.’ He opened the door, Boaz-Jachin got in, the van started up.

‘Tractor went over him, smashed him all up,’ said the farmer. ‘He’d stopped on a slope, forgot to put the handbrake on, got down to fix the harrow hitch. Tractor rolled back on him. He’s all smashed up. Wheel went right over him, broke half his ribs and he’s got a punctured lung. He was haemorrhaging inside for a long time before anybody went out to look for him.

‘It’s his own goddam fault. He never had his mind on what he was doing any more. All right. So that’s how it is. He’ll hear the songs Benjamin used to sing and he’ll die and that’ll be that.

‘By now he can’t talk, you understand. He’s lying there having a big struggle just to breathe. Can’t move his right arm at all. With his left arm, with a finger of his left hand, he makes on the table the name Benjamin. Benjamin I can’t give him. I figure I’ll give him at least the songs. Maybe he won’t know the difference. Son of a bitch.’ He began to cry.

My second crying driver, thought Boaz-Jachin. ‘Who’s Benjamin?’ he said.

‘My brother,’ said the farmer. ‘He went away ten years ago, when he was sixteen. We never heard from him again.’

He turned off into a bumpy dirt road. The headlights looked at stones and dirt, the sound of crickets came in through the open windows. There was cow dung on the road, pastures on either side, the smell of cows. The sparse grass, pale in the headlights, seemed to have been dragged unwilling from the earth blade by blade.

The van bumped and jolted until there were lighted windows ahead, went in through a gate, pulled up by a shed with a corrugated metal roof. There was a barn behind it, a house to one side. The house was squarish and ugly, made of cement blocks with a tiled roof. In the doorway, silhouetted against the light, stood a woman, a bulky dark figure.

‘Is he still alive?’ said the farmer.

‘Certainly he’s still alive,’ she said. ‘He’s been dying already for quite a few years. Why should he rush the job now just because a tractor ran over him? Who’s this? You decided this is a good time to bring company home for dinner, or you’re opening a youth hostel?’

‘I thought, let him hear some music,’ said the farmer.

‘Wonderful,’ said the mother. ‘That’ll cheer everybody up. We’ll have a nervous breakdown together while your father dies. With ideas like this you should work in a resort, a hotel. You should be a social director.’

‘Would you feel better if we stood out here all night or may we come in?’ said the farmer.

‘Come in, welcome, have a good time, enjoy yourselves,’ said the mother. She left the doorway and went into the kitchen.

‘Probably our guest wouldn’t say no to something to eat,’ the farmer called after his mother.

‘Anything you want,’ she said. ‘Twenty-four hours a day. Serving you is my supreme joy.’

The farmer and Boaz-Jachin sat down in a parlour with ugly pictures on the walls, a bowl of fruit on a sideboard, a short-wave radio, some books, some ugly vases. The spaces between things in the room separated them rather than connected them.

‘Maybe we better have a look, see what kind of shape he’s in,’ said the farmer. ‘If he’s dead it’s no use singing for him.’ He got up, led the way upstairs. Boaz-Jachin followed with his guitar, looking at his back, the frayed shirt with the sweat dried into it, the heavy dragging trousers with a rusty bolt sticking out of one pocket, a coil of wire in another.

‘Even if he’s dead it might be nice for him to have a song,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘If nobody would mind.’

Upstairs the father lay in a strong dark bed while the room stood up around him. The chairs stood up, the wallpaper stood up, the windows stood up in the wall, the night stood up outside the windows.

A chromium-plated pole with a crossbar stood up beside the bed, a plastic bottle hung on a hook from the bar, a plastic tube fed the big vein in the father’s arm.

There were white bandages across his chest and over his right shoulder. The skin of his neck and chest that was usually exposed by his collar opening was creased and dark and weathered. Elsewhere the skin was white and inexperienced-looking. His eyes were closed, his head lay back on the pillow, his beard pointed like a cannon from his chin. His breath whistled in and out, fluttered, broke, went on unevenly.

His wrist, coloured like his neck, came out of his thin white arm, presented itself as the wrist of a boy. Forget the years, said the wrist. This is how I used to lie on the coverlet when someone else was the man and I was the boy. I had nothing in my hand then, I have nothing in my hand now.

The doctor sat in a chair by the bed. He wore a dark suit, open sandals over dark socks, looked at his watch, looked at the father’s face.

‘The hospital’s twenty miles away,’ said the farmer to Boaz-Jachin. ‘The ambulance was out, couldn’t get here for hours. The doctor came, did what he could right here, said not to move him now.’

The farmer looked at the doctor, pointed to Boaz-Jachin’s guitar.

The doctor looked at the father’s face, nodded.

The mother came in with coffee, fruit and cheese, while Boaz-Jachin tuned his guitar. She poured coffee for the doctor, for her son and Boaz-Jachin, then sat in a straight-backed chair, her hands in her lap.

Boaz-Jachin played and sang The Well:

By the well in the square

See her waiting daily there …

The sound of the guitar, round and expanding, moved out from him to the standing-up walls, came back into the centre of the room, said to the walls, Not you. Beyond you.

The father’s breath whistled in and out unevenly the same as before. When Boaz-Jachin sang the refrain the mother walked to the window and stood before her reflection on the night:

Dark is the water, deep is the well,

Who will give tomorrow’s kisses none can tell.

Boaz-Jachin sang The Orange Grove:

Where the morning sees the shadows

Of the orange grove, there was nothing twenty years ago.

Where the dry wind sowed the desert

We brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow.

‘Did you bring in the tractor?’ said the mother to the son.

‘It’s in the shed,’ he said. ‘His eyes are open.’

The father’s eyes, large and black, looked straight up at the ceiling. His left hand was moving on the bedside table.

The son stood over his father’s moving hand, watched the finger spelling on the dark wood of the night table.

‘F-O-R …’ he read. The finger kept moving. ‘“Forgive,”’ said the son.

‘Always the humorist,’ said the mother.

‘Benjamin he forgives,’ said the son. ‘Always.’

‘Maybe he meant you,’ said the doctor.

‘Maybe he’s asking,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘For himself.’

Everyone turned to look at him while the father died. When they looked back at the father there was no sound of breathing, the eyes were closed, the hand on the table was still.

Boaz-Jachin spent the night in the room that had been Benjamin’s. In the morning the mother made the funeral arrangements and the son drove Boaz-Jachin to the port.

They travelled all day, stopping halfway for lunch in a café. The son had shaved and was wearing a suit and a sports shirt. It was evening when they came to the port. The sky showed that they were at the sea.

They went down steep cobbled streets towards the water, came to the open cobbled quayside of the harbour, and cafés with red and yellow light-bulbs strung outside. Lights of ships and boats tied up at piers and lights of quayside buildings were reflected in the water.

The farmer took folded money from his pocket.

‘No, please,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘There shouldn’t be money between us. You gave me something, I gave you something.’

They shook hands, the van pulled away, climbed the cobbled streets back to the road away from the port.

Later, when Boaz-Jachin marked his map, he found that he had only the name Benjamin to give to that family.