The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

8

Boaz-Jachin’s mother had her stomach pumped, and she stayed in bed for two days. ‘I don’t know what all the excitement was about,’ she said at first. ‘There were only two tablets left in the bottle. I wasn’t trying to kill myself — I just hadn’t been able to sleep, and one tablet never helped.’

‘How was I to know?’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘All I saw was what you’d done in the shop and then the knife and the empty bottle.’

Later his mother said, ‘You saved my life. You and the doctor saved my life.’

‘I thought you said there were only two tablets left in the bottle,’ said Boaz-Jachin.

His mother tossed her head, looked sideways at him darkly. What a fool you must be, said the look.

But Boaz-Jachin did not know which to believe — the two-tablet story or the dark look. There’s no knowing what she might do now, he thought. She might very well turn into some kind of invalid and I’ll have to take care of her. The bell jingling at the door and her voice calling from upstairs. He’s run away and left me to clean up after him. Boaz-Jachin stayed home from school for the two days that his mother spent in bed, and Lila came to the house in the evening and cooked for them.

Boaz-Jachin made love with Lila in the dark shop at night, on the floor between the map cabinets. In the darkness he looked at the dim gleam of her body, its places that he knew now.

‘This is one map he can’t take away from me,’ he said. They laughed in the dark shop.

Boaz-Jachin made a third drawing: again the dying lion leaping up at the chariot, biting the wheel. But now both arrows were out of him, both arrows were lying on the ground under his feet. The two spears were still at his throat.

He made a fourth drawing: both arrows and one of the spears under the lion’s feet.

He made a fifth drawing in which both arrows and both spears lay on the ground under the lion’s feet, and he took the evening bus to the town near the ruins of the last king’s palace. He carried nothing with him but the rolled-up drawings.

Again he walked from the bus station out to the silent road under the yellow lights. This time the crickets, the distant barking of the dogs, the stones of the roadside under his feet no longer had the sound of being far from everything: they were the sounds of the place where he was.

When he came to the citadel he threw the roll of drawings over the chain-link fence and climbed over it as before. Again the guards were drinking coffee at the fluorescent-lit window. In the moonlight he went to the building where the lion-hunt reliefs were. As before, the door was unlocked.

Boaz-Jachin opened the door, and the lion-hunt hall with the moonlight coming through the skylight was now a place where he had been. It was a place of his time, a home-place. Here he had awakened and come out of a dark cupboard, had wept before the lion-king and the chariot-king. Here he had spoken his name and the name of his father. He knew the place, the place knew him.

Boaz-Jachin walked formally down the middle of the hall in the light of the moon that shone in through the skylights. He stopped in front of the dying lion-king silvered with dim moonlight, leaping up at the chariot that for ever bore the king away.

Boaz-Jachin unrolled his drawings, took stones out of his pocket to hold them flat on the floor.

Boaz-Jachin laid his first drawing on the floor before the lion-king. In his drawing, as in the relief before him, the lion had two arrows in him, two spears at his throat.

‘The arrows burn like fire and our strength is fading,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘The spears are sharp and killing. The turning wheel bears us on to darkness.’

He took the second drawing, laid it over the first.

‘One of the arrows is drawn,’ he said. ‘The flesh that bled is whole, unhurt.’

He laid the third drawing over the second.

‘The second arrow is drawn,’ he said. ‘The darkness is fading. Strength is coming back.’

He laid the fourth drawing over the third.

‘The first spear lies under our feet. The spearman of the king is empty-handed,’ he said.

He laid the fifth drawing over the fourth, then stepped back. In the moonlight the lion-king’s eyes looked out at him from the shadow of his brows.

‘The second spear, the last weapon, the spear of the king, lies under our feet,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘We rise up on the turning wheel, alive and strong, undying. There is nothing between us and the king.’