The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

17

Jachin-Boaz had fainted again when he got to the flat. Gretel called an ambulance, and he was carried to it on a stretcher.

At the hospital admitting office Jachin-Boaz said that he had fallen against a spiked fence while drunk. He told the same thing to the nurse who cleaned his wounds when she questioned him. When the doctor came to sew up the worst cuts he too asked how Jachin-Boaz had got them.

‘Spiked fence,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘It seems to have lashed out at you with tremendous speed and force. Dragged its spikes right down your arm too. One wants to be careful about provoking fences like that.’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. He was afraid that he would be locked up as a lunatic if the truth were found out.

‘It didn’t happen to be a spiked fence near the tiger cages at the zoo, did it?’ said the doctor.

‘I didn’t see any tiger cages when it happened,’ said Jachin-Boaz. For all he knew there could be heavy fines involved, revocation of his work permit, even his passport. But certainly no one could prove that he had been interfering with the tigers.

‘I suppose in your country they have a certain number of strange cults, strange rites,’ said the doctor.

‘I am an atheist,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I have no rites.’

While the doctor stitched up Jachin-Boaz’s wounds an orderly called the zoo to enquire whether there had been any disturbances having to do with tigers, leopards, or other large felines. The zoo had nothing to report.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he was wearing an amulet of some kind,’ said the doctor after Jachin-Boaz had gone, ‘but I didn’t think to look. They come into this country and they take advantage of the National Health Service, but they cling to the old ways among their own.’

The orderly said to his wife that evening at dinner, ‘There are things going on at the zoo that the ordinary citizen knows nothing of.’

‘Among the animals?’ said his wife.

‘Animals and people — how much difference is there if it comes to that?’ said the orderly. ‘Cults, sex orgies, the lot. Our immigration policy wants a good overhauling, and that’s the long and short of it. Our way of life can’t stand up to this foreign influx indefinitely.’

‘But foreign animals, you know,’ said his wife. ‘What’s a zoo without them? Think how the children would miss them.’

Gretel and Jachin-Boaz both stayed home from work that day. Jachin-Boaz rested in bed, his arm wrapped in white bandages. Gretel looked after him with soup, peppermint tea, brandy, custards, strudel. She cooked and baked all day, thumping and banging in the kitchen and singing in her own language.

When Jachin-Boaz had come home all bloody that morning he had fainted without an explanation, and in the ambulance had begged to be excused from going into the matter just then. Gretel had become aware of his early morning departures from the flat, but she had said nothing. If he needed to go out at quarter to five every morning she would not question it. She had been terrified by his bloody return this morning, had listened, unquestioning, to his spiked-fence story at the hospital, and continued to ask no questions. Her no-question-asking stalked through the flat like a tall silent creature that stared at Jachin-Boaz all day.

For most of the day Jachin-Boaz could do nothing but concentrate all his energies on holding himself together. The snaky black and brilliant panic that had surged up in him when he had closed his eyes in the presence of the lion had torn away the sodden rotting cover from a well of terror in him, and into that well his mind dropped like an echoing stone.

He cowered under the covers, hugging himself and shivering with a chill that soup and brandy and peppermint tea could not take away. When he look around the room his eyes could not take in sufficient light. The day, however it varied from sunny to grey, had less than normal light in it. The twilight was appalling. The lamps when lit seemed feeble, unavailing. His terror stood up strong in him while he lay down. What brought him back to here-and-now was worrying about more beafsteak for the lion.

‘Will you be doing any shopping later?’ he asked Gretel casually.

‘I did quite a bit of shopping yesterday,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we need unless you want me to get something for you.’

‘No,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I’m fine. Thank you anyway.’ He began mentally to rehearse different ways of mentioning seven pounds of beefsteak. He couldn’t say, You might pick up seven pounds of beef at the butcher’s. He couldn’t send her out three times for two pounds of beef and once more for one pound. He couldn’t go out and come back with it inconspicuously or in defiant silence.

While he deliberated Gretel was in and out of the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, filling the flat with domestic sounds, singing incomprehensibly, bringing him coffee, chocolate bars, cleaning, dusting. His silence rose up in him like a pillar of stone while her no-question-asking stalked in and out with her, looking over her shoulder and staring.

After a time Jachin-Boaz said in a strained voice, ‘We’re good together, you and I. These months have been good ones.’

‘Yes,’ said Gretel, thinking, Now it comes: bad news.

‘We can be together, but we can also be alone with each other,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘each with privacy, one’s own thoughts.’

‘Yes,’ said Gretel. Who could be after him? she thought. Brothers of his wife? With knives? What kind of cuts were those on his arm? Not knives.

‘We can tell each other everything, every kind of thing,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And also we can allow each other to have things that are not told.’

‘Yes,’ said Gretel. Not his wife’s brothers perhaps, she thought. The brothers of some other woman? Some other woman herself? I’m eighteen years younger than he is. Is she younger than I am? Prettier?

‘If I asked you to go out and buy seven pounds of beefsteak and not ask me why, would you do it?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Yes,’ said Gretel.

‘Thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Take money from my wallet. It’s on the desk.’ He sighed, feeling relaxed and sleepy. Would he, wouldn’t he, go out to meet the lion tomorrow morning? He would think about it later when he woke up before dawn.

Jachin-Boaz took a nap. He dreamed of a lion-coloured plain and himself walking slowly across it with nothing in sight. From the silence behind him he heard a whispering rolling that grew louder, brazen and heavy.

He knew without turning to look that it was the wheel, and the urge to escape became gigantic in him, too big for his body. He could not convert the urge to action because the vastness of the space made running impossible. There was no place to escape to. There was only empty timeless space all around him under a flat blue sky, and he continued to walk slowly while the escape-urge leaped up in him as if it would burst his throat.

The wheel was closer, the sound greater, filling all the emptiness of the plain. Jachin-Boaz felt the studded bronze tyre on his back, crushing him, printing its track upon him, passing over him but not going on, not going away. Again it approached from behind, clamorous with voices, and on its rim now, turning with it, were the coffins of his father and his mother.

The wheel went over him again, splintering the coffins, pressing the bodies into his own body — his father’s maleness, his mother’s belly and breasts that now became those of his wife, and it was her body on the wheel crushing him. He turned and clung to her, face to face and front to naked front as the wheel crushed him. It’s all right, he thought. This is the way back, the wheel will take me back. The world won’t go away now. There’ll be world and me again.

He looked up as the wheel passed over him, saw it pass beyond him, saw spears fly over his head into his son Boaz-Jachin who already had two arrows in him and was leaping up at the wheel.

‘No more other,’ said Jachin-Boaz. No more great dark shoulder-world-wheel turning away. He laughed and felt his naked mother warm above him. ‘It’s all right now,’ he said as she opened her scissor-legs and brought her weight down on him. The blades enclosed his penis as he thrust, safe and cosy, deep into his wife. ‘World again, me again,’ he said. ‘No more other.’

He woke up with Gretel lying partly on him, her head on his chest. Her tears were wet on his skin. How am I here? Who is she? he thought as he kissed her wet face. What am I doing with her? He remembered nothing of his dream. In his mind was a memory of Sunday drives when he sat between his father and his mother, watching the waning sunlight with dread. He always got carsick on those drives.

Gretel cooked dinner and brought it in on a tray. Jachin-Boaz sat up in bed, eating and wondering how he had got to this place and this girl. Gretel sat on the edge of the bed with her plate on her lap and ate in silence.

That night Jachin-Boaz slept well, and he awoke at the usual time. In the dimness of the morning he walked into the living room, to his desk and the master-map spread on it.

Jachin-Boaz ran his finger over the smooth paper. If he poked sharply his finger would make a hole in the map, go through it and come out on the other side without having penetrated anything but the thickness of the paper. So his life seemed now: he could poke himself through the flat paper of the map-city he walked on and he would come out on the other side, having only made a hole in non-reality.

Jachin-Boaz spoke to the map. ‘The man says to the place, “What will you give me?”

‘The place says, “Take whatever you want.”

‘The man says, “What do I want?”

‘The place has no answer for him.

‘The place asks a question in its turn, “Why are you here?”

‘The man looks away and cannot speak.’ Jachin-Boaz touched the map again, then turned away.

He was out in the street with the beefsteak in his carrier-bag before five o’clock. It was dark and rainy, and only when he saw the glistening street was he aware that he seemed to have decided to meet the lion again. Will the lion be wet too? he wondered.

The lion too was wet and glistening. The lion-smell was stronger in the rain. Jachin-Boaz threw him the meat immediately, and the lion ate it, growling. With his bandaged arm Jachin-Boaz felt a little easier than before with the lion, felt comradely with him, as if they had both fought on the same side in a war.

‘Comrade Lion,’ he said. He liked the sound of that. ‘Comrade Lion, you will kill me or you will not kill me. Your frown is the frown I have seen on the face of my son and on the face of my father. Perhaps it is also the one I see in the mirror. Come, let’s walk a little.’

Jachin-Boaz turned his back on the lion and walked towards the river. He went along the embankment, looking back to see if the Hon was following. He was. What does he see? Jachin-Boaz wondered. Does he see only me? Is everything else not there?

He walked past the first bridge to the second with the lion following, walked up the steps and on to the bridge, looking up at the cables and the dark sky, feeling the rain on his face. At the middle he stopped, leaned his back against the parapet. The lion stopped ten feet away and stood with his head lifted, watching him.

‘Doctor Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘my father used to look at the maps I drew and say that I would be a man of science. But he was wrong. I never became a man of science. The money that he spent on my education was wasted.’ He laughed, and the lion crouched. ‘I am alive and he is dead, and the money was wasted.

‘He used to say, “I can tell by the way he writes, the way he draws, his exactitude, his sense of order, the questions he asks, that this boy will be a scientist. He will not sit in a shop waiting for customers to jingle the bell.”

‘One day when I was still a little boy, still playing with toy guns, he brought home for me two presents to choose between. One was a western cowboy suit, like those worn in the films, splendid in black and silver, with a sombrero, with a leather waistcoat, with great flapping leather trousers with silver bosses, with a cartridge belt and two shining pistols in black and silver holsters.

‘The other was a microscope and a box of scientific equipment and materials — slides, test tubes, beakers, retorts, graduates, chemicals, a book of experiments. “Choose,” he told me.

‘I wanted the black-and-silver leather, the sombrero, the shining pistols. I chose the microscope and the test tubes. Are you looking at your watch, Doctor Lion? The sky is dark, but it is almost daytime now.’

Jachin-Boaz walked towards the lion. The lion backed away, growling. Jachin-Boaz shouted, ‘I TOLD YOU OF SOMETHING THAT I WANTED ONCE. ARE YOU BORED, LION? ONCE I CLEARLY WANTED SOMETHING, NOT A VERY BIG THING. IS YOUR TIME TOO VALUABLE FOR YOU TO LISTEN ANY LONGER?’

The lion had turned his back on Jachin-Boaz, and now walked off the bridge, down the steps, and was out of sight behind the parapet of the embankment.

Jachin-Boaz followed. When he got to the embankment there was no lion. Only the rain, the pavement and the street wet and glistening, the hiss of tyres on the road.

‘YOU WEREN’T LISTENING!’ shouted Jachin-Boaz to the empty air, the rain. ‘THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WANTED SOMETHING AND I KNEW WHAT IT WAS. I WANTED A BLACK-AND-SILVER COWBOY SUIT WITH TWO PISTOLS.’

‘Cheer up, mate,’ said the police constable with whom Jachin-Boaz collided while going down the steps. ‘Perhaps Father Christmas’ll bring you one. You’ve plenty of time till December.’