The sky was pale now, and in the water they saw oranges floating. The trader leaned over and picked up two.
“If the gentleman would like breakfast,” he said, “his table is now ready.”
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-19-
Jachin-Boaz's wife, with her husband and son both gone, now considered the situation in which she found herself. In the first months after Jachin-Boaz's departure she had gone through torments thinking of him in the arms of young and beautiful women. Wherever she looked she seemed to see only girls and young women, all of them so pretty that she wondered how men could choose among them. But she had talked to other women since, and the consensus was that men of her husband's age often did what he had done, that after a few months or a year they yearned for the comforts and habits they had left, and, if allowed to, returned. She was determined to encounter such a possibility from a position of strength. She did not expect her son to come back, and made no effort to trace him. Nor did she attempt to locate his father. She concentrated her energies on the shop. She had long had her own ideas about how to run the business, and now she put them into practice.
She hired a girl to help her. She stocked paperback books, and made lively displays of them in the window. She worked up a line of fortune-telling maps for each sign of the zodiac. She took good-luck charms and cheap jewelry of an occult character on consignment from local craftsmen. She installed a palmist in the parlor above the shop — an elderly lady with jet-black hair and piercing eyes who was clothed entirely in black and turned over to Jachin-Boaz's wife a percentage of whatever she took in. To create an atmosphere around her a coffee machine, tables and chairs were added, and regular coffee-drinkers appeared. A small ensemble of young musicians, playing folk songs and paid by the passing of a basket among the coffee-drinkers, attracted a larger clientele. Soon Jachin-Boaz's wife took in more money in a week than her husband had done in a month.
During business hours she was comfortable, even gay. Sundays were bad. Sundays with Jachin-Boaz had often been depressing. Without him they were frightening. Alone at night she found her thoughts difficult to control. She washed her hair often and took many baths, luxurious with scented soaps and essences, but she avoided looking at her body. She looked at her face often in the mirror and felt unsure of how to compose it, what to do with her mouth. After not having worn her wedding ring for months she put it on, then took it off again. She began to read more than she had for years, and every night took sleeping tablets. Often she dreamed of Jachin-Boaz, and in her waking hours, however she occupied herself, there were thoughts of him most of the time.
Boaz-Jachin was in her mind less often. Sometimes he had seemed a stranger to her. They had not thought alike, had never been as close as she had expected a mother and son to be. Now he seemed less an absent son than an emptiness, an end of something. Sometimes she would be surprised not to hear his footsteps, his guitar, would catch herself thinking of what to cook for him. Sometimes she wondered what he might be doing at a particular moment. His father is in him, she thought. He is lost and wandering, seeking chaos. Sometimes the two of them blurred together in her mind.
She looked at books of poems that Jachin-Boaz had given her when they were young. The inscriptions were full of love and passion. He had found her beautiful and desirable once. She had thought him beautiful, exciting, the young man with whom she would make a green place, a place of strength and achievement. She had sensed greatness in him as a desert-dweller senses water, and she had thirsted for it. She had fallen in love with him, and she had locked herself in the bathroom and cried because she knew that he would give her pain.
Jachin-Boaz and she had met at university. She was in the arts course, he was reading natural sciences, a brilliant scholar. Then unaccountably he had failed his examinations, had left university to work in his father's shop. Soon after that the father had died. Then she too had left university, and they had married, living with Jachin-Boaz's mother above the shop for what seemed long years while the mother throve in chronic ill health until struck down by a bus. If not for that bus she would still be here, thought Jachin-Boaz's wife, surrounded by her medicines, telling me how to take care of her son, telling me what a wonderful life they had when the father was alive, telling me what a wonderful husband the father had been, not telling me about the mistress that everybody knew about but her. Did she know? The wonderful husband. Another one like my father with his green place in the desert. The good place is never here, the man's heart is never here.
When Jachin-Boaz's mother had died his wife had expected him to emerge into a new life. She had never abandoned the conviction she had when she had fallen in love with him that he would be a famous scientist. She had always felt the seeking-and-finding drive in him, his talent for associating seemingly unrelated data. She knew that she could nurture his gifts and help him to develop them.
With his education incomplete, his start in life delayed, she did not expect him to rise fast and smoothly to eminence, but she was confident that he could find a gentlemanly scientific speciality — beetles it might be, or ancient artifacts — and on it build a reputation. She imagined letters from fellow scientists all over the world, papers by her husband read at symposia, printed in journals, international visitors drinking coffee, listening to music, talking late into the night, the lamplight warm on a life of culture, of achievement and significance. Jachin-Boaz went on with his work at the shop and found no scientific speciality.
She tried to encourage him to expand and develop the business. He was content with it as it was.
She tried to interest him in a house in the country. He had no interest.
Gone. Nothing. Dry wind in the desert. The pattern of the carpet of her childhood came into her mind, and she shuddered. Here she was. A different carpet. In the square the palm trees rustled in the light of the street lamps. The globes of the lamps were like great blind eyes, the street was empty below the window, a dog trotted past with a black trotting shadow. Here she was and he was gone, the middle-aged man who had turned away from her in bed or made love feebly, made her feel less than a woman, incapable of giving or taking pleasure. And she had seen how he looked at girls. In the shop, in the street, wherever he was.
All that he had not been with her when naked he would try to be with someone new. New and young. But false. False to his abandoned talents. False to the best in him that would be forever lost now, forever lost. How strange that he should have left it all so soon, so young, so long ago. How strange that all these years he had been busy with maps, with paper ghosts of finding, with finding-masturbation, and all the finding in him dead! There was nothing left for him to do but die now, really. Poor fool, poor mad failed son and husband. She took her wedding ring out of the drawer, threw it on the floor, stamped it out of shape, put it back in the drawer.
Jachin-Boaz's wife no longer cared where Jachin-Boaz was, but she felt a strong need to write a letter to him. She reasoned that he would certainly be working at a map shop or a book and map shop wherever he might be. From the information-gatherers who worked on the special-order maps she obtained the names and addresses of the principal journals of the book trade in five foreign capitals. In each of the journals she placed an advertisement notifying Jachin-Boaz that there was a letter for him to be had at the box number given. To each journal she sent a copy of her letter to him:
Jachin-Boaz,
What are you looking for with your master map that you stole from your son, with your savings that you stole from your wife and child? What will your map show you? Where is your lion? You can find nothing now. For you there never were, never could be, lions, failed man. Once you had talent, power of mind and clarity of thought, but they are gone. You have taken yourself away from all order, you have hurled yourself into chaos. What was fresh and sweet in you has gone stale and sour. You are the garbage of yourself.
You will wake up one morning and realize, whoever is besi
de you, what you have thrown away, what you have done. You have destroyed me as a woman and you have destroyed yourself, your life. You have been committing slow suicide ever since you failed your examinations, and soon you will come to the end of it.
Your father with his cigars, his theatrics, his mistress that you never knew about until I told you — your father, the great man, died at fifty-two. His heart was bad, and he died of it. You are now forty-seven, and you too have a bad heart.
You will wake in the night — whoever lies with you cannot hold back death — and you will hear the beating of your heart that moves always towards the last beat, the last moment. Wherever you are, whomever you are with; you have only a few years left to you, and suddenly they will all be gone. The last moment will be now, and you will know what you have lost, and that despairing thought will be your last.
You will want to come back to me, but you cannot come back. You can go only one way now — to the end you have chosen.
These are the last words you will ever have from
the woman who was
once your wife.
When Jachin-Boaz's wife had posted off the five copies of the letter she felt fresh and clear and clean. As she walked back from the post office (she could have trusted no one else with that errand, had felt that she must see with her own eyes the letters disappear into the slot) it seemed to her that she saw the sky, felt the sunlight and the air on her face for the first time in months. A burst of pigeons upward from the square was like the winging up of her spirit in her. Her step was youthful, her eyes bright. A man younger than she turned to look at her in the street. She smiled, he smiled back. I will live long, she thought. I have strong life in me.
At the shop she hummed songs that she had not remembered for years. An old man came in, stains on his clothes, flecks of tobacco and dandruff. He won't live to be as old as this one, she thought.
“Stroller's map?” the old man said. “New one out yet?”
“Voyeur's map, you mean?” said Jachin-Boaz's wife with a bright smile.
“I don't speak French,” said the old man, and winked.
She went to a cabinet, opened a file drawer, took out cards. “Two alleys crossed off,” she said. “The servant girl at the bedroom window has gone, and the new one draws the curtains. The house where the two girls always kept the lights on is up for sale and empty now. The revised map isn't ready yet.”
The old man nodded as if it were nothing to him one way or the other, and pretended to be interested in paperbacks.
“Let me show you a pasture map,” said Jachin-Boaz's wife. “You can watch sheep and cows. You've no idea what goes on at farms.” She was laughing. The old man became red in the face, turned and left the shop, stumbling against the lion door-stop at the open door. Through the shop window Jachin-Boaz's wife watched him going down the street. Dogs trotted past without looking at him.
Later that day the surveyor who had told Boaz-Jachin what he knew about maps came in. He was tall, with a weathered face and an aura of distance, desert wind in open spaces. He gave Jachin-Boaz's wife the special-order maps he had been working on.
“Some people,” he said when they had finished their business, “don't need maps. They make places for themselves, and they always know where they are. To me you seem such a person.”
“I don't need maps,” said Jachin-Boaz's wife. “Maps are nothing to me. A map pretends to show you what's there, but that's a lie. Nothing's there unless you make it be there.”
“Ah,” said the surveyor. “But how many people know that? That you can't learn — either you know it or you don't.”
“I know it,” she said.
“Ah,” said the surveyor. “You! I'll tell you something — with a woman like you my whole life might have been different.”
“You talk as if your whole life's behind you,” she said. “You're not that old.” She leaned forward over the counter. He leaned towards her. Music drifted down from the coffee shop upstairs. The assistant rang up a sale and rattled money in the till. The lion at the door seemed to smile as customers came in, went out. She kept the door open most of the time now. “A man like you,” said Jachin-Boaz's wife, “could be of great value to oil companies, foreign investors. A monthly newsletter, for instance, with the latest information on property and development trends. Who knows what you might do if you cared to? A man who knows what's what, who sees what can be done and puts his hand to it . . .” She saw bright offices, large windows overlooking the sea, charts on the walls, teletypes clicking, conferences, telephones with many pushbuttons, international visitors, articles in business magazines. She picked up the maps he had brought in, laid them down again. “Boundaries,” she said. “Wells. Water wells. Did you ever hear of a water millionaire? How are water shares doing on the stock exchange?” They both laughed.
“You see what I mean?” said the surveyor. “I think little thoughts, you think big ones. Ah!” They leaned towards each other across the counter, both humming the tune that was drifting down from the coffee shop. “Perhaps we could have dinner this evening?” he said.
“I'd like that,” said Jachin-Boaz's wife. That afternoon she left the assistant to close the shop, and went upstairs early. She lay in the bathtub for a long time, steeping in the silky heat of the steaming water, smelling the scented bubbles, feeling back to the youth still somewhere in her, the excitement of an evening out. She remembered painting quiet landscapes when she was at university, afternoons of sunshine and her hair blowing in the wind. She would get her paintbox out of the cupboard. She would paint again, sit in quiet places in the sun, feel the wind. Green places.
She dressed, made up her face carefully, practiced relaxing her mouth in front of the steamy mirror. In the twilight she went up to the roof, looked at the palms in the square darkening in the fading light. She remembered a song that her father used to sing, sang it softly to herself while the evening breeze stirred her hair:
Where the morning sees the shadows
Of the orange grove, there was nothing twenty years ago.
Where the dry wind sowed the desert
We brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow.
She had bent her wedding ring back into a circle and put it on, and she touched it now. She remembered Boaz-Jachin as a baby laughing in his bath in the sink, remembered herself singing in the kitchen and Jachin-Boaz young. She shut the memories out of her mind. She thought of the five copies of the letter she had posted, and smiled. Pigeons circled the square, and she cried.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-20-
A mighty fortress is our God, sang Gretel in her mind, hearing the voices of the choir in the church of the town where she had been born as she stood behind the counter in the bookshop. Painted on the wooden gallery-front were Bible pictures, pink faces, blue and scarlet robes, too much color, leaving a taste of marzipan in the eye. The three crosses on Golgotha, black sky, gray clouds. The Resurrection with many golden beams of light, Jesus in white gooseflesh. Potiphar's wife, lusty, opulent, clutching at Joseph.
From deep despair I cry to thee, sang the choir in her mind. The dead nobles in the crypt beneath the altar were only acoustics now. Sound-absorbers, however gauntleted and sworded, fierce in battle and the chase, dead wives virtuous beside them. Silent they were below the altar, but clamorous in stone monuments in the sanctuary, praying in stone effigy, noisy with stone silence in the hymn. From deep despair I cry to thee, Lord God hear thou my call. The street outside the shop moved slowly in its daily march of buses, cars, pedestrians. “Do you sell ball-point pens?” a lady asked.
“No,” said Gretel. “Try the newsagent at the corner.”
“Greeting cards?”
“No,” said Gretel. “Sorry, books only.” Apple cores came into her mind. Why apple cores, what apple cores? Brown apple cores in the autumn in a neighbor's garden. Yellow leaves and she scuffling among them, squatting to eat the apple cores dro
pped there by someone else. Baskets of apples at home. Why had she wanted someone else's brown cores? How old had she been? Five, perhaps, or six. Her earliest memory. What did Jachin-Boaz dream of? What waited for him in his sleep? What waited for him outside in the early morning? How could he go out into the street and come back with claw-marks on his arm? What was the meat for? Something that he was afraid of. Something that could kill him. Something that he wanted to be killed by? A man could not be completely a liar in his love-making. Jachin-Boaz made love like a man who wanted to live, a man who wanted her. How could he be so full of life and so full of despair? His face above her in bed was easy and loving, the morning face before the dawn was haggard, haunted.
“Perhaps we could have lunch one day soon?” That was what he had said to her that first time, after buying a book on string quartets. She had had another man at the time. Wednesdays and weekends. It isn't that I don't want to marry you, he said. It would kill my mother if I married a girl who wasn't Jewish. Right. Here's another one. Perhaps we could have lunch one day soon. Yes, let's have lunch. My people killed six million of you. He had brought her a single rose. A yellow one that day, red ones later. She had talked about her dead father. No one else had asked about her father, invited him from the silence. He had kissed her hand when he said goodbye outside the shop. This was not, she had felt, going to be Wednesdays and weekends. She wanted to belong wholly to a man, and this man's quiet face was claiming her and she was afraid.