The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

25

The world seemed to be owned by a freemasonry of petrol stations, monster tanks and towers and abstract structures of no human agency or purpose. Wires hummed aloft, giant steel legs stalked motionless on frightened landscapes past haystacks, mute blind barns, wagons rotting by dung-hills on tracks to isolation where brown dwellings shrugged up from the earth. We knew it long ago, said huts with grass on the roofs. Hills went up and down, cows grazed on silence, goats stared with eyes like oracle stones. Cryptic names and symbols in strong raw colours flashed signals one to the other across the roofs and haystacks, across the stone and lumber of towns and cities. Flesh and blood spoke ineffectually in little voices of breath, feet hurried, plodded, pedalled. Faces passed on the road asked unanswerable questions. You! exclaimed the faces. Us!

The petrol stations, owning the world, called to their brother monsters. Distant towers flashed lights. The petrol stations kept up their pretence, fuelled cars and lorries, maintained the fiction of roads for humans. Vast pipes slid effortlessly over miles of world. Huge valves regulated flow. Lights flashed at sea. Music played in aeroplanes. Never did the music name the pipes and petrol stations, the great steel stalking that laughed with striding legs. God is with us, said the valves and towers. With us, said the stones. Cars moved on roads.

Boaz-Jachin felt the miles spinning out behind him. Mina’s leg was warm against his. Her leg was named Mina like all the rest of her now. Her someoneness had established itself in him since the nights in her stateroom.

Words came to his mind unbidden, unresisted. They were there like a smell that carries memory or like a change in the temperature of the air: the father must live so that the father can die. Boaz-Jachin groaned inwardly. Tiresome reversals somersaulting in his brain. Found and lost, always and never, everything and nothing. Where had these new words come from? What was wanted of him? What had he to do with such things?

No longer subtle as air, but now like sudden men in armour, implacable, cold with the night wind of a road hard ridden, barbarous with savage unknown meaning useless to resist: the father must live so that the father can die. Quickly! What quickly? Hot waves of irritation leaped in Boaz-Jachin like flames. He sweated, ignorant and anxious.

‘Petrol stations own the world,’ said Mina. ‘Tanks and towers signal one to the other in strong raw colours. Goats have eyes like oracle stones.’

‘That’s very well observed,’ said her father. ‘They do. Urim and Thummim.’

Stop telling me everything, thought Boaz-Jachin. Stop presenting the world. I’ll see the goats and the petrol stations or I won’t. Let them be whatever they’ll be to me.

‘Isn’t anybody but me hungry?’ said Mina’s mother.

‘There’s a book you have to read,’ said Mina to Boaz-Jachin. ‘It’s a poet’s notebook.’

No, I don’t have to read it, he thought. Quickly. What quickly? A breathless sense of hurry rose in him like a whirlwind.

‘That part about the uncle’s death or the grandfather’s death, how it was so strong in him and took so long,’ said the father. ‘Unforgettable.’

‘I know,’ said Mina. ‘And the man who walked funny that he followed in the street.’

‘I’m starving,’ said the mother.

‘Take a look at the guide,’ said the father. ‘Where are we on the map?’

‘You know how I am with maps,’ said the mother. ‘It takes me a long time.’ She unfolded the map clumsily.

‘Look,’ said the father, pointing with his finger on the map. ‘We’re over here somewhere, heading north.’

‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ said the mother. ‘And I wish you’d stop driving so fast. We passed a place about five miles back that looked good, and it was gone before I could tell you to slow down.’

‘There,’ said Mina.

‘What?’ said the father.

‘It had an orange tree in a red clay courtyard,’ said Mina. ‘There were white doves.’

‘I can turn round,’ said the father.

‘Never mind,’ said Mina. ‘I’m not even sure it was a restaurant.’

‘Where are we?’ said the father. ‘Have you found us on the map yet?’

‘You make me so nervous when I have to look at a map that my hands shake,’ said the mother.

The rented car hummed to itself. Whatever happens is not my fault, said the car. From ahead the miles surged towards them in numberless sharp-focused grains of road that rolled beneath the wheels and spun out behind. Boaz-Jachin felt stifled in the car with Mina and her parents. He drew deep breaths, expelled them slowly. He wished that he had not accepted their offer of a lift. He wished that he had a guitar again and were travelling alone and more slowly. But he felt compelled to hurry. Emptiness leaped forward in him, rushing towards something.

’That road!’ said the mother. ‘There! About five miles down there’s an old inn, five forks and spoons in the guide. We’ve passed it now. You simply refuse to slow down.’

The father swung the car around in a U-turn, sideswiped a van just then overtaking him, slewed off the road, up a bank, and crashed into a tree. Broken headlights tinkled. Steam drifted from the smashed radiator. All was silent for a moment. Not my fault, said the car.

It’s her fault, thought the father.

It’s his fault, thought the mother.

It’s both their faults, thought Mina.

It’s the kind of thing that can be expected from this family, thought Boaz-Jachin. I’ll be lucky if I get away from them with my life.

The petrol stations, the valves and towers, the giant steel legs that strode across the landscape said nothing.

Everyone looked at everyone else. No one seemed injured.

‘My God,’ said the mother.

‘Right,’ said the father. ‘Very good. We can walk to the goddam famous old five-fork-and-spoon inn.’

‘My God,’ said the mother. ‘My neck.’

‘What’s the matter with your neck?’ said the father.

‘I don’t know,’ said the mother. ‘It feels all right now, but sometimes you don’t get the full effects of backlash until months later.’

‘But it feels all right now,’ said the father.

‘I don’t know,’ said the mother.

‘You could have killed us all, the two of you,’ said Mina.

The father got out of the car to talk to the driver of the van. The van had a dent in the side and several long scrapes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That was my fault. I didn’t see you coming.’

The van driver shook his head. He was a large man with a gentle face and a drooping moustache. ‘These things happen,’ he said in his own language. ‘You’re from another country, not used to these roads.’

‘The fault is mine,’ said the father in the same language. ‘I do not look, I do not see. I regret.’

‘Now we have to fill in forms with details of the accident,’ said the van driver. He and the father exchanged licences, insurance cards, made notes.

‘I knew something was going to happen,’ said Mina to Boaz-Jachin. ‘I could feel it. If my mother and father were sitting in a perfectly stationary box with no wheels and no motor they could make it crash by psychokinesis.’

The car could no longer be driven. The van driver took them and their luggage to a petrol station. Arrangements were made for towing away the car and renting a new one.

‘We might as well go to the five-fork-and-spoon place now,’ said the father. The van driver offered to take them there, and everybody got into the van but Boaz-Jachin.

‘You’re invited, you know,’ said the father. ‘And we’ll be going on to the channel port as soon as we get another car.’ Please, said the father’s eyes, don’t leave us yet. Love my daughter for a while. Let her be beautiful for you.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘You’ve been very generous, but now I want to travel alone again for a while.’

Stay, said the mother’s eyes. She can’t have her father but she can have you.

Boaz-Jachin kissed Mina goodbye, shook hands with her father and mother while looking away from their eyes. Mina wrote her home address on a piece of paper, tucked it into Boaz-Jachin’s pocket. He walked down the road away from the petrol station.

‘How do you manage to do it?’ he heard Mina ask her parents just before the van started up. ‘How do the two of you make everything not be there all of a sudden?’