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

  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 meager 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.â€� Then he said his father’s name once: “Jachin-Boaz.â€�

  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,â€� 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 calm-faced 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-colored, 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-colored 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, quarreled 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 ghost-roars 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,â€� 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 spectators’ 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.

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

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  It was late at night in the city where Jachin-Boaz lived now. He lay awake looking at the pinky-gray night sky framed in his windows. Always in the night sky here was the reflected glow of the great city. He moved his arm to light a cigarette, and the girl who lay with her head on his chest rolled over in her sleep, trailing her hand down his body. Gretel. He said her name in his mind, leaned over to look at her sleeping face, turned back the blankets to admire the graceful length of her, smiled in the dark, covered her again.

  Jachin-Boaz watched the smoke drift in the dimness of the room. He thought of stories, fairy tales from his childhood, in which a young man went out to seek his fortune in the wide world. Always the father was dead at the beginning of the story, and the young man went out with his few coins, his crust of bread, his fiddle or his sword. Sometimes he found or won some magic thing along the way. A map, perhaps. Jachin-Boaz bared his teeth in the dark but did not smile.

  Now he, Jachin-Boaz, was the old man out in the wide world seeking his fortune, the old man who wanted a new story and would not agree to be dead. The young man was left at home to be a shopkeeper and the companion of his deserted mother. Jachin-Boaz saw in his mind his wife’s face, looked away and saw the face of his son Boaz-Jachin outside the shop window, shaded by the awning, looking into the shadows at his father and smiling.

  Jachin-Boaz got out of bed. Without turning on any of the lights he walked into the next room. His desk was there, and on it lay the master map that he had promised to his son Boaz-Jachin. By the light from the window he could see some of the routes and places marked on it.

  Jachin-Boaz, naked in the dark, touched the map. “There is only one place,â€� he said, “that place is time, and that time is now. There is no other place.â€� He ran his fingers over the map, then turned away. The sky was lighter than before. Birds were singing.

  “I never let him help me with a map,â€� said Jachin-Boaz. “Sometimes he wanted to do a little of the border, but I never let him do it. He showed me little dirty maps that he had made, and he wanted praise. He wanted me to like his music, wanted me to be pleased with him, but I never said what he wanted to hear. And I left him sitting in a shop, waiting for the bell to jingle at the door.â€�

  Jachin-Boaz went back to bed and wrapped himself around Gretel. In the mornings now he woke up with an erection.

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

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  When Boaz-Jachin came back to his town he did not go to his mother’s house. This was Saturday. She would not be expecting him until Sunday evening, and he did not want to go home yet.

  He called up his girl from the bus station, and went to her house. Waiting for her to come to the door he felt again the being-with-the-lion. It was a flash that came and went, full of strangeness. It made him feel apart from his regular life, apart from all the people in his mind and the girl, Lila, whom he waited for now. He felt guilty and uneasy.

  The door opened. Lila looked at Boaz-Jachin’s face. “Is everything all right?â€� she said. “You look strange.â€�

  “I feel strange,â€� he said. “But everything’s all right.â€�

  They walked to the square. The street lamps seemed luminous fruits, bursting with knowledge. Boaz-Jachin tasted their light in his mouth and wondered who he was. He felt strongly the ripe blackness of rooftops against the night sky, the poignancy of roofs and domes of the town fitting into the night sky. The color and texture of the pavement, the substance of it, were intense with flavor.

  He had never been naked with Lila, had never made love with her, had never done it with anyone. His orgasms had been with himself only, rumpled with shame and listening for footsteps in the hallway. He remembered his face in the mirror in the hall of the lion-hunt carvings. Who, he wondered, looked out through the eyeholes in his face?

  “What are you going to do?â€� said Lila.

  “I don’t know,â€� he said. “I thought I would go and look for my father. But I came back. I sat on a hill and it wasn’t time yet. I was waiting for something. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I’m not ready to go yet.â€�

  The slim jet of the fountain went up into the starlight, fell back continually. Dogs met and separated, going their separate ways. Boaz-Jachin and Lila sat on a bench. The palm trees rustled. The street lamps had not changed. His throat ached.

  “I’m waiting too,â€� she said. “They sit in the living room and watch television. The house feels as if it’s crouching over me. On Sundays with them I’m always depressed. I don’t know where to
go.�

  When I go, Boaz-Jachin thought, will you go with me? His throat shaped the words but he did not speak them. He thought of his going, and now the sea was in it. He had been on a ship once, on a summer holiday with his parents. “In the middle of the ocean,â€� he said, “it is green and huge and heaving, and you smell the deepness of it and the salt. Gray fog in the morning, wet on the face, cold in the stomach. The big sea-birds are never lost. They can sit down on the ocean, rocking on the waves.â€� When I go, will you go with me? he thought again, but again did not speak the words.

  “Yes,â€� she said.

  “Where can we go?â€� he said. “Now, I mean. Where can we go now?â€�

  “I don’t know,â€� she said. “Our roof. They were sitting up there after dinner, but maybe they’ve gone down by now. Maybe they’ll be asleep by now.â€�

  Lila and Boaz-Jachin took a blanket up to the roof. The air was warm on their naked bodies. The stars were large and brilliant. She had made love before, and she shaped herself to him, put herself where he was, made him welcome in her. He was overwhelmed by the gift. Behind his eyes everything was lion-colored, sunlit. When the blackness came it was a roaring and an exaltation in him, a losing and a finding of himself. Afterwards he was cool, immensely easy. He was with Lila and with the lion and he was alone. He knew that when he was ready to go he would have to go alone. They slept on the roof until the sky was pale. Then Boaz-Jachin went back to his mother’s house.

  “It’s me,â€� he said, hearing her wake up as he passed her door.

  “Come in,â€� she said. “Say hello.â€�

  He set down the rucksack and the guitar in the hallway. They leaned against the wall. We were going away for good, they said. We came back. The smell of old cooking seemed overpowering to Boaz-Jachin. What if she gets sick and I have to take care of her? he thought. If I’d left now at least I’d have left her healthy. He went into his mother’s room.