The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

2

Jachin-Boaz dreamed every night, and every morning he forgot his dreams. One night he dreamed of the scissorman his mother had told him about when he was a child. The scissorman punished boys who wet their beds by cutting off their noses. Had she said noses? In Jachin-Boaz’s dream the scissorman was huge, dressed all in black, with great hunched shoulders, a long red nose, and a beard like that of his father. Jachin-Boaz had done something terribly bad, and he was to have his arms and legs cut off by the dreadful scissors. ‘It won’t hurt very much at all,’ said the scissorman. ‘Actually it will be a great relief for you to be rid of those heavy members — they’re really too much for you to carry around.’ When he cut off Jachin-Boaz’s left arm the scissors sounded as if they were cutting paper, and there was no pain. But Jachin-Boaz cried ‘No!’ and woke up with his heart pounding. Then he went back to sleep. In the morning he had not forgotten the dream. His wife was in the kitchen making breakfast, and he sat on the edge of the bed trying to remember how many years ago he had stopped waking up with an erection. He could not remember when it had happened last.

A few months later Jachin-Boaz said that he was going on a field trip for several weeks. He packed his map-case, his drawing instruments, his compass and binoculars and the rest of his field gear. He said that he was meeting a surveyor in the next town and that they were going to travel inland. Then he took a train to the seaport.

A month passed, and Jachin-Boaz did not return. Boaz-Jachin opened the drawer where the master-map was kept. It was not there. In the drawer were the deed to the house and a bank-book. The house and the savings account had been transferred to Jachin-Boaz’s wife. Half of the savings had been withdrawn. There was a note in the drawer:

I have gone to look for a lion.

‘What does he mean by that?’ said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. ‘Has he gone mad? There are no lions to be found.’

‘He’s not looking for a lion of that shape,’ said Boaz-Jachin, indicating the door-stop. ‘He means something else. And he’s taken the map that he said he would give me.’

‘He’s taken half of our savings,’ said his mother.

‘If we lived without using the savings before,’ said Boaz-Jachin, ‘we can live without the half that he has taken.’

Boaz-Jachin and his mother took on the management of the shop, and in the hours when he was not at school Boaz-Jachin sold maps and worked on the special orders with surveyors, information-gatherers and draughtsmen. He, like his father, came to know of the many things that people were looking for and the places where they could be found. Often he thought of the master-map that had been promised him.

I sit in the shop like an old man, selling maps to help other people find things, thought Boaz-Jachin, because my father has taken my map for himself and has run off to find a new life with it. The boy has become an old man and the old man has become a boy.

Boaz-Jachin took his old sketch-map from the drawer of his desk and began to work on it again. He spoke to the information-gatherers and surveyors, and he wrote in a notebook whatever seemed useful. He walked the streets and alleyways of the town late at night and early in the morning. He learned more and more about what people were looking for and where they found it. Boaz-Jachin worked hard on his map, but it still looked empty and confused compared to the one that his father had shown him. His lines were dirty and straggling, and lacked the pattern of intelligent purpose. The routes shown in his father’s map had had a clarity and logic that made his own efforts seem poor. He was uncertain of what to seek, and he had little confidence in his ability to find anything. He told one of the surveyors of his difficulties.

‘For years I have sighted and measured and located this point and that point on the face of the earth,’ said the surveyor, ‘and I have gone back to the same places to find my stakes pulled out as boundaries waver and lose accuracy. I sight and I measure and I plant the stakes again, knowing they will be pulled out again. It is not only stakes and boundaries that are lost — this is what there is to know about maps, and I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that? You’re still a boy, so maybe you can’t. Can you understand that?’

Boaz-Jachin thought about the surveyor’s words. He understood the words, but the meaning of them did not enter him because their meaning was not an answer to any question in him. In his mind he saw an oblong of blue sky edged with dark faces. He felt a roaring in him, and opened and closed his mouth silently. ‘No,’ he said.

‘You’re still a boy. You will learn,’ said the surveyor.

Boaz-Jachin continued to work on his map, but without real interest. The places he had thought of going to and the routes by which he had thought to reach those places seemed foolish to him now. The more he thought about his father’s master-map the more he realized that he had not been capable of judging its worth when Jachin-Boaz had shown it to him. It was not simply a matter of neatness and finish — he saw now that the scope and detail of the conception were far beyond him. That map seemed the answer to everything, and his father had taken it away from him.

Boaz-Jachin decided to find his father and ask him for the master-map. He had no idea where Jachin-Boaz might be, but he did not think that the way to find him was to attempt to trace him from town to town, village to village, and across mountains and plains. He felt that there was a place he must find first, and in that place he would know how to proceed in his search.

He walked up and down the aisles of the shop, passing and repassing the maps in the cabinets, the maps on the walls. He stood looking at the crouching iron lion door-stop. ‘“I have gone to look for a lion,’” he said. There were no lions any more. There were no lion-places. ‘A place of lions,’ he said. ‘A place of lions. A lion-place. A lion-palace.’ There was a lion-palace in the desert that he had read of. There was a place where the last king lay in his tomb and his lion-hunt was carved in stone on the walls of the great hall. He looked at a map and saw that the palace was near a town that was only three hours away by bus.

That Friday afternoon Boaz-Jachin told his mother that he was going to visit a friend in another town for the weekend. She gave him some money for his travel expenses, and when she was not in the office at the back of the shop he took more money from the cash box. He packed some clothes in a rucksack, took his guitar and his unfinished map, went to the bus depot, and bought a one-way ticket.

There were boys and girls of his own age on the bus, laughing, talking, eating lunches they had brought with them, fondling one another. Boaz-Jachin looked away from them. He had a girl that he had never made love with. He had not said goodbye to her. He sat next to a fat man who smelled of shaving lotion. As the bus left the town he looked out the window at petrol stations and shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Out in the country he watched the dry brown land, the meagre hills, the passing telephone poles. Sometimes people stood waiting with cheap suitcases. Once the bus stopped to let a flock of sheep cross the road. The sky darkened until he saw only his own face in the window.

When the bus reached the town the petrol stations were bright, harshly lit, and closed. Everything else was dark except for a few cafés, yellow-and-red-lit, with a thin wail of music and a smell of stale grease. Dogs trotted through the empty streets.

The man at the ticket window in the bus station said that the palace was three miles outside the town and that the next bus would be at ten o’clock in the morning. Boaz-Jachin weighed himself, bought a chocolate bar, and walked out to the road.

The yellow lamps were far apart, with blackness in between. There was no moon. Few cars passed, and between their passing he heard the chirping of crickets and the distant barking of dogs. Boaz-Jachin did not try to get a lift, and nobody offered him one. His footsteps on the stones of the roadside sounded far away from everything.

It seemed a long time before he came to the chain-link fence around the citadel where the palace had been dug out of the desert. Not far from the locked gates he saw the fluorescent-lit window of a low building where the guards sat drinking coffee.

Boaz-Jachin threw his rucksack over the fence and heard it thump on the other side. He took off his belt, buckled it around the handle of his guitar-case, slung the case from his shoulder, climbed the fence, scraping his fingers and tearing his trousers on the wire-ends at the top, and dropped heavily to the ground on the other side.

He could see well enough in the starlight to find the building that housed the ruins of the great hall and the lion-hunt carvings. The door was unlocked, so he knew that the guards would be coming through it on their rounds. Boaz-Jachin saw skylights above him, but the inside of the building was much darker than the night outside. He carefully felt his way along. He found a cupboard that smelled of floor wax, felt mops and brooms in it. He made a space for himself on the floor so that he could sit leaning against the wall. He fell asleep.

When Boaz-Jachin woke up he looked at his watch. It was a quarter past six. He opened the cupboard door and saw daylight in the building. He walked past the carvings, not looking at them yet. He looked down at the floor until he came to the end of the hall and the corridor where the toilets were. When he had relieved himself he washed his hands and face and looked at himself in the mirror. He said his name three times: ‘Boaz-Jachin, Boaz-Jachin, Boaz-Jachin.’ Then he said his father’s name once: ‘Jachin-Boaz.’

He walked back through the hall, not looking at the walls on either side, but keeping to the middle by looking up at the skylights. When he was ready, he stopped and looked to his left.

Carved in the brownish stone was a lion with two arrows in his spine, leaping up at the king’s chariot from behind, biting the tall chariot wheel, dying on the spears of the king and the king’s spearmen. The horses galloped on, the beard of the calm-faced king was carefully curled, the king looked straight out over the back of the chariot, over the lion biting the wheel and dying on his spear. With both front paws the lion clung to the turning wheel that pulled him up on to the spears. His teeth were in the wheel, his muzzle was wrinkled back from his teeth, his brows were drawn together in a frown, his eyes were looking straight out from the shadow of his brows. There was no expression on the king’s face. He was looking over the lion and beyond him.

‘The king is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ said Boaz-Jachin. He began to cry. He ran to the cupboard, closed the door, sat down on the floor in the dark, and wept. When he had finished crying he left the building by the exit that was not visible from the guards’ hut and hid behind a shed until the first bus brought sightseers whose presence allowed him to walk about freely.

Boaz-Jachin went back into the hall. Before going back to the lion he had seen first he looked quickly at the other lion-hunt reliefs. There were many lions being killed by the calmfaced king with arrows, spears, even with a sword. None of the other lions mattered to Boaz-Jachin. For a long time, while voices chattered around him and footsteps shuffled past, Boaz-Jachin looked at the dying lion biting the chariot wheel.

Then he went outside again and walked among the excavated ruins of the several palace buildings, the courtyards, the temples and the tombs. The sky was pale and hot. Everything was lion-coloured, low, tawny, broken, preserved in forgottenness, found so that its lostness might be fixed and made permanent, fenced-in, broken-toothed, stripped naked of time and earth, humbled, refusing to say a word.

At some distance from the palace ruins a sign identified a high mound as the artificial hill on which spectators had stood while the lions, released from cages on the plain below, were hunted by the king.

Boaz-Jachin climbed the hill and sat there, looking out over the lion-coloured plain, dotted now with children and grown-ups photographing one another, eating sandwiches and drinking soft drinks. The grown-ups looked at maps of the citadel and pointed in various directions. The children spilled food and drinks on their clothes, quarrelled among themselves, ran, walked, and jumped violently and at random. Their voices rose in a thin haze like the smell of old cooking in a block of flats. The heat shimmered over the plain, and Boaz-Jachin fancied that he could see in the air the running of the lions, tawny, great, quickly gone. He felt in him the dying lion biting the wheel. By letting go of everything else he could let himself be with the lion.

And being with the lion he tasted in him, raging, the memory of the trap and the fall, the blue oblong of sky above him, the dark faces looking down into the pit, the heavy corded meshes of the net that came down over him and clung and smothered and made impotent his rage. Dark of the pit, blue of the sky, and the peering dark faces of little dark men who were outlanders everywhere, the little dark men who read the wind, who read the earth they walked on. When they hunted they looked from side to side and sniffed the air. In the invisible air that held the spirits of beasts living and dead they felt with quick strong fingers, and they pulled out like a long thread the spirit of the animal they would trap. The lion could kill them with a blow of his paw if they would stand before him, but they were too cunning. The lion was as a child to them.

The memory of the heavy cage-wagons was in Boaz-Jachin, the jolting and the dryness and the thirst. Then the wooden cages on the plain and the other little cages atop them in which the little dark cunning men perched like birds. With poles they opened the cage doors and sent the lions out in the heat of the day to the place of their death.

The lions came out of the cages slowly, snarling and lashing their tails. They crouched, growling while the beaters and their dogs advanced to make them go forward to be hunted by the king. The dry wind offered chaos only. The dry wind sang the hunter hunted, the last kill far behind. The dry wind roared and raged, clashed spears on shields, bayed in the mastiff throats, sang in bowstrings death, death, death.

The lions were out on the plain. Beaters and dogs and spearmen and men with shields made walls they could not break through, could not overleap. The chariots were rolling on their tall wheels and the king was shooting arrows, sending death among the lions.

The lions were brave, but there was no chance for them. If they had had a king he would have led them against the king of the chariots and horses. But they had no time to choose a lion-king. The chariots were among them, with spearmen and bowmen to guard their king and give death to every lion.

The last lion alive was the one whom the others would have made their king if they had been allowed to. He was large, strong, and fierce, and with two arrows deep in his spine he was still alive. The arrows burned like fire in him, his sight was fading, the blood was roaring in his ears with the rumble of the chariot wheels. Before him and above him, racing away, the glittering king was calm in his chariot, his spear poised, his spearmen beside him. The dying lion-king leaped, clung to the tall and turning wheel that brought him up to the spears. Growling and frowning he bit the wheel that lifted him and bore him on to darkness.

The lion was gone. Where the lion had been was a sudden empty giddy blackness, like the sensation produced by straightening up too quickly after bending down for a long time.

Boaz-Jachin was aware of people again, taking photographs, eating sandwiches, drinking soft drinks. He listened for ghostroars behind the voices, heard only the seethe of absence in the hollow of the silence, as one might hear the sea in a shell.

‘There are no lions any more,’ said Boaz-Jachin.

He thought about his father and the map that he had taken away. What might have been his for the finding if Jachin-Boaz had not taken the beautiful map for himself! He, son of the map-seller, map-maker, map-lover, had no talent for maps, could not make one that was not stupid and ugly and disfigured, and this was his father’s way of punishing him — to leave him mapless and alone with his deserted mother, stuck in a dark shop like an old man, waiting for the bell to jingle at the door, waiting to sell the means of finding to other seekers.

Boaz-Jachin had in his rucksack, along with his clothes and his unfinished map, a pencil, some paper, and a small ruler. He went back to the hall of the lion hunt, alone among the people all around him. He measured carefully the dying lion who was leaping up at the king’s chariot. He measured the visible parts of the arrows in the lion, measured also the spears of the king and the king’s spearmen. In another part of the same relief was an arrow that transfixed a dying lioness. Both ends of the arrow being visible, Boaz-Jachin was able to measure its full length. He wrote down all his measurements, folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket.

He left the lion-hunt hall and went out to the high mound, the spectator’s hill. There he sat for a long time. When Boaz-Jachin had taken the money from the cash box in the office he had thought that he would not be coming back to the shop. He had seen himself, a lone wanderer, playing his guitar in the street, the case open on the pavement for passers-by to drop money into. But in the wordless refusal of the ruins about him, in the remembered sound of last night’s roadside stones under his feet, he had heard the silence of unreadiness.

He had been with the lion. He had that. That had come to him, and something had made him measure the image of the lion and the images of the spears and arrows. He did not know why he had done it. Something more might come to him. He had come to this place to find what to do next, and at least he had found what not to do next: he would not search for his father now. He would go back to the shop for the present.

At the souvenir stand near the gates Boaz-Jachin bought a photograph of the lion-hunt relief that showed the dying lion leaping up at the king’s chariot and biting the turning wheel. Then he bought a sandwich and an orange drink. When the bus came he went back to the town, and from there he took the next bus back to his town.