The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973) Read online

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

  by Russell Hoban(1973)

  TO GUNDEL

  Thou huntest me as a fierce lion: and again thou shewest thyself marvellous upon me.

  Job 10:16

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  -1-

  There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

  There were no chariots any more. The chariots, wind-bereft and roadless in the night, slept with their tall wheels hushed in the tomb of the last king.

  The ruins of the king’s palace had been dug out of the ground. There was a chain-link fence all around the citadel where the palace buildings, the courtyards, the temples and the tombs had been excavated. There were a souvenir shop and a refreshment stand near the gates.

  The columns and the roof beams, fallen and termite-hollowed, had been labelled and cleared away. Jackals hunted among them no more. Where snakes and lizards had sunned themselves the daylight came through the skylights in the roof of the new building that enclosed the great hall where the hunting of the king was carved in stone.

  The images of horses and men, chariots and lions, were stained by weather, worn by rain, pocked and pitted by the dust that had stung them when the dry wind howled. New walls were around them now, a new roof was over them. The temperature was controlled by a thermostat. An air-conditioner made a whirring silence.

  Jachin-Boaz had a wife and a son, and he lived in a town far from the sea. Pigeons flew up from the square, circled above it, and came down to perch on clay walls, red roof tiles. The fountain sent up a slim silver jet among old women in black. The dogs knew where everything was, and went through the alleyways behind the shops like businessmen. The cats looked down from high places, disappeared around corners. Many of the women did their washing in stone sinks near the town pump. Tourists going through the town in buses looked out through the windows at the merchants who sold brass and ivory and rugs drinking coffee in the shade of awnings. The vendors of fruit and vegetables smoked in the street.

  Jachin-Boaz traded in maps. He bought and sold maps, and some, of certain kinds for special uses, he made or had others make for him. That had been his father’s trade, and the walls of the shop that had been his father’s were hung with glazed blue oceans, green swamps and grasslands, brown and orange mountains delicately shaded. Maps of towns and plains he sold, and other maps made to order. He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day. He sold husband maps and wife maps. He sold maps to poets that showed where thoughts of power and clarity had come to other poets. He sold well-digging maps. He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sickness-and-accident maps to physicians, money-and-jewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police.

  Jachin-Boaz was at the age called middle life, but he did not believe that he had as many years ahead of him as he had behind him. He had married very young, and he had now been married for more than a quarter of a century. Often he was impotent with his wife. On Sundays, when the shop was closed and he was alone with her and his son through the long afternoon, he tried to shut out of his mind a lifelong despair. Often he thought of death, of himself gone and the great dark shoulder of the world forever turning away from the nothingness of him forever in the blackness. Lying beside his sleeping wife he would twist away from his death-thought, open-eyed and grimacing in the darkness of the bedroom over the shop. Often he dreamed of his dead mother and father while sleeping in their bed, but very seldom could he remember his dreams.

  Sometimes Jachin-Boaz sat alone in the shop late at night. The green-shaded lamp on his desk threw his shadow on the maps behind him on the wall. He felt the silent waiting of all the seeking and finding that lived in the maps hung on the walls, stacked in the drawers of the cabinets. He would close his eyes, seeing clear lines in different colors that marked the migratory paths of fish and animals, winds and ocean currents, journeys to hidden sources of wisdom, passes through mountains to lodes of precious metals, secret ways through city streets to secret pleasures.

  Behind his closed eyes he saw the map of his town in which the square, the town pump, the stone laundry sinks, the street of the merchants and he himself were fixed and permanent. Then he would rise from his desk and walk up and down in the dark shop, touching maps with his fingers and sighing.

  Jachin-Boaz had for a number of years been working on a map for his son. From the many different maps that passed through his hands, from the reports of his information-gatherers and surveyors, from the books and journals that he read, from his own records and observations, he compiled a great body of detailed knowledge, and that knowledge was incorporated in the map for his son. He added to it constantly, revising and making the necessary corrections to keep it always current.

  Jachin-Boaz had said nothing about the map to his wife or his son, but he spent most of his spare time on it. He did not think that his son would follow him in the shop, nor did he want him to. He wanted his son to go out into the world, and he wanted him to find more of a world for himself than he, Jachin-Boaz, had found. He had put aside some money for the boy’s inheritance, but the map was to be the larger part of his legacy. It was to be nothing less than a master map that would show him where to find whatever he might wish to look for, and so would assure him of a proper start in life as a man.

  The son of Jachin-Boaz was named Boaz-Jachin. When he became sixteen years old his father decided that he would show him the master map.

  “Everyone in the world is looking for something,â€� said Jachin-Boaz to Boaz-Jachin, “and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again. Centuries of finding are on the walls and in the cabinets of this shop.â€�

  “If everything that is found is never lost again, there will be an end to finding some day,â€� said Boaz-Jachin. “Some day there will be nothing left to find.â€� He looked more like his mother than like his father. His face was mysterious to his father, who felt that if he tried to guess his son’s thoughts he would be wrong more often than not.

  “That is the sort of thing that young people like to say to annoy their elders,â€� said Jachin-Boaz. “Obviously there are always new things to find. And as to what has already been found, would you prefer that all knowledge be thrown away so that you might be ignorant and the world new? Is that what they teach you at school?â€�

  “No,â€� said Boaz-Jachin.

  “I am glad to hear that,â€� said Jachin-Boaz, “because the past is the father of the present, just as I am your father. And if the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.â€�

  Boaz-Jachin looked at the maps on the walls. “The past is not here,â€� he said. “There is only the present, in which are things left behind by the past.â€�

  “And those things are part of the present,â€� said Jachin-Boaz, “and therefore to be used by the present. Look,â€� he
said, “this is exactly what I mean.� He took the master map out of a drawer and spread it on the counter for his son to look at. “I have been working on it for years,� said Jachin-Boaz, “and it will be yours when you are a man. Everything that you could wish to look for is on this map. I take great pains to keep it up to date, and I add to it all the time.�

  Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, at the cities and towns, the blue oceans, the green swamps and grasslands, the delicately shaded brown and orange mountains, the clear lines in inks of different colors that showed where all things known to his father might be found by him. He looked away from the map and down at the floor.

  “What do you think of it?â€� said Jachin-Boaz.

  Boaz-Jachin said nothing.

  “Why won’t you say anything?â€� said his father. “Look at this labor of years, with everything clearly marked upon it. This map represents not only the years of my life spent upon it, but the years of other lives spent in gathering the information that is here. What can you seek that this map will not show you how to find?â€�

  Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, then at his father. He looked all around the shop and down at his feet, but he said nothing.

  “Please don’t stand there saying nothing,â€� said Jachin-Boaz. “Say something. Name something that this map will not show you how to find.â€�

  Boaz-Jachin looked around the shop again. He looked at the iron door-stop. It was in the shape of a crouching lion. He looked at his father with a half-smile. “A lion?â€� he said.

  “A lion,â€� said Jachin-Boaz. “I don’t think I understand you. I don’t think you’re being serious with me. You know very well there are no lions now. The wild ones were hunted to extinction. Those in captivity were killed off by a disease that traveled from one country to another carried by fleas. I don’t know what kind of a joke that was meant to be.â€� As he spoke there opened in his mind great mystical amber eyes, luminous and infinite. There blossomed great taloned paws, heavy and powerful. There was a silent roar, round, endless, an orb of reflection imaging a pink, rasping tongue, white teeth of death. Jachin-Boaz shook his head. There were no lions any more.

  “I wasn’t making a joke,â€� said Boaz-Jachin. “I was looking at the door-stop and I thought of lions.â€�

  Jachin-Boaz nodded his head, put the map back into its drawer, went to the back of the shop and sat down at his desk.

  Boaz-Jachin went to his room on the top floor over the shop. He looked out through the window at the clear twilight, the darkening red-tiled roofs and the tops of the palm trees around the square.

  Then he sat down and played his guitar. The room grew dark around him, and for a time he played in the dim light that came from the lamps in the street. Not here, said the guitar to the walls of the room. Beyond here.

  Boaz-Jachin put away his guitar and lit the lamp on his desk. From a drawer he took a sheet of paper on which was a roughly sketched map. Many of the lines had been erased and drawn over. The paper was dirty and the map seemed empty compared to the one that his father had shown him. He began to draw a line very lightly from one point to another. Then he erased the line and put the map away. He turned out the light, lay on his bed, looked at the lamplight from the street on the ceiling and listened to the pigeons on the roof.

  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)

  -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,â€� 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.â€� 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!â€� 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?â€� said Jachin-Boaz’s wife. “Has he gone mad? There are no lions to be found.â€�

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

  “He’s taken half of our savings,â€� said his mother.

  “If we lived without using the savings before,â€� said Boaz-Jachin, “we can live without the half that he has taken.â€�

  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 draftsmen. 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,â€� 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?â€�

  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,â€� 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,’â€� he said. There were no lions any more. There were no lion-places. “A place of lions,â€� he said. “A place of lions. A lion-place. A lion-palace.â€� 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.