“I don't know.”
“And what did this unknown person or persons say to you?”
“I don't know,” said Jachin-Boaz. By now the situation felt familiar. The doctor, like the father long ago, was holding up an empty suit of clothes for him to jump into. Jachin-Boaz was too tired not to jump. “This is what he said,” he told the doctor, and tried to roar. It was not the sound of real anger because he felt no real anger, only a sad and defeated fretfulness, defeated in the foreknowledge that his anger was of no consequence. His feeble roar ended in a fit of coughing. He wiped his eyes, found that he was crying.
“Right,” said the doctor. “Very good.” He signed the commitment order. Then Jachin-Boaz was taken outside to wait with the constable while Gretel went into the office with the doctor.
“What is your relationship to this man?” said the doctor.
“Close.”
“And your status is what exactly?”
“Working-class. I'm an assistant in a bookshop.”
“Marital status, I mean.”
“I haven't any. I'm a spinster.”
“Do you and this man live together?”
“Yes.”
“Cohabitant,” said the doctor, writing the word as he spoke. “And what precisely were you doing with the knife?”
“I was co-walking with it.”
“Did you in fact attack this man with the knife?”
“No.”
“Please describe what took place.”
“I can't.”
“Had he been running around with some other woman?”
Gretel stared at him levelly. Her manner of looking at the doctor was like the way she had held the knife that morning. She belonged to a man who had fought with a lion and she carried herself accordingly. The doctor reminded himself that he was the doctor, but felt himself to be less impressive than he would like to be.
“You see two foreigners and immediately the picture is simple for you,” said Gretel. “Women instead of ladies. Sex, passion, fighting in the street. Hot-blooded foreigners. Bloody cheek!”
The doctor coughed, fleetingly imagined himself involved with Gretel in sex, passion, and fighting in the street. “Then perhaps you'll tell me what the situation is,” he said with a red face.
“I'm not going to tell you anything at all,” said Gretel, “and I've no idea what you want with me.”
The doctor reminded himself again that he was the doctor. “You will allow, madame,” he said stiffly, “that going about with a knife is rather a dodgy business: one never knows who's going to be injured. I think it might be just as well for you to have some peace and quiet for a few days and think this whole thing over calmly.” He signed the commitment order.
While they waited for the van that would take them to the hospital Jachin-Boaz and Gretel sat down on a bench, and the police constable tactfully walked a few steps away.
Jachin-Boaz sat with tears running down his face. He looked at Gretel, looked away again. His head began to ache. This was somehow her fault. If she hadn't attacked the lion . . . No. Before that even. Would the lion have appeared to him if he had not . . . No. And of course the lion was in any case his . . . what?
The map. Not here. At home, on the desk. In another desk, in the shop where he had once been Jachin-Boaz the map-seller, was a notebook. Were there recent notes in it that were not incorporated in the master map? The map was on the desk. Were the windows closed? The desk was near the window, and if it rained . . . And who would feed the lion?
His mind raced on but he was too tired to pay attention to it any longer. He sat on the bench with both arms bandaged and tears running down his face. Gretel leaned against him, saying nothing.
The police constable indicated that the van was at the door, and they got into it. Another constable joined them, and the two constables sat across from Jachin-Boaz and Gretel as the van moved away through the daytime streets. Around them flowed the traffic of the ordinary day. Cars and lorries, vans and buses herded together. People on motorcycles and bicycles threaded the narrow spaces between. People walked the pavements, passed in and out of shops, ascended and descended the stairs of underground stations. Airplanes flew calmly overhead. Jachin-Boaz sat up straight, craned his neck once to look through the small rear window. A greengrocer in overalls stood under an awning filling a brown paper bag with oranges.
The van stopped, the door opened. Green shrubbery and lawns appeared around a handsome old red brick building with a white cupola and a gilt weathercock.
Jachin-Boaz and Gretel came out of the van, blinked in the sunlight, walked into the hospital, and were in turn admitted, undressed, examined, drugged, and taken to a men's ward and a women's ward that had the names of trees. In the corridors a smell of cooking wandered like a minstrel of defeat.
Jachin-Boaz, wearing pajamas and a robe, lay down on his bed. The walls were cream-colored, the curtains were dark red with yellow-and-blue flowers. There was a long line of beds down each side of the room and french windows that opened on the lawn. The sunlight slanted gently down the walls, not with the harshness of the streets outside. Sunday sunlight. Give up and I'll go easy with you, said the sunlight. Jachin-Boaz fell asleep.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-27-
Boats sink under me, thought Boaz-Jachin. Cars get smashed. At a farm he leaned against a fence and looked into the eyes of a goat. “What?” he asked the goat. “Give Urim or give Thummim.” The goat turned away. Goats turn away, thought Boaz-Jachin. The father must live so that the father can die. It became a tune that his mind sang, hurrying him on.
Why am I hurrying? he thought. I've got nothing to do with his living or dying. But hurry was in him. He had no rucksack, no guitar, nothing to carry now. His passport had been in his pocket when the Swallow sank. That and the money he had earned on the cruise ship, the new map he had drawn, a toothbrush and the clothes he wore were all he had now. He walked down the road with long strides, going fast, signaling for a ride as he went. Who now? he wondered. Cars, vans, lorries, motorcycles whined, roared, hummed and puttered past.
The van that had taken Mina and her parents to the inn pulled up beside him. The large gentle face of the driver looked out of the window, spoke as a question the name of a channel port. Boaz-Jachin repeated the name, said, “Yes.” The driver opened the door and he got in.
In his own language the driver said, “I don't suppose you speak my language.”
Boaz-Jachin smiled, lifted his shoulders, shook his head. “I don't speak your language,” he said in English.
“That's what I thought,” said the driver, understanding the gesture rather than the words. He nodded, sighed, and settled down to his driving. Ahead of them the numberless grains of the road flowed into sharp focus, rolled beneath the wheels, spun out behind.
“All the same,” said the driver, “I feel like talking.”
“I know what you mean,” said Boaz-Jachin, understanding the voice but not the words. Now he spoke not English but his own language, and his voice was more subtly inflected. “I feel like talking too.”
“You too,” said the driver. “So we'll talk. It'll be just as good as many of the conversations I've had with people who spoke the same language. After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
“After all,” said Boaz-Jachin, “it won't be the first time I've spoken to someone who couldn't understand what I was saying. And when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
They looked at each other, shrugged, raised their eyebrows.
“That's how it is,” said the driver.
“That's how it is,” said Boaz-Jachin.
“Empty space,” said the driver. “There's a funny thing to think about. The back of the van is full of empty space. I brought it from my town. But I've opened the doors several times since I left. So i
s it still empty space from my town or is it now several different new empty spaces? This is the sort of thing one thinks about sometimes. If the back of the van were full of chairs the question wouldn't arise. One assumes that the space between the chairs remains the same all through the trip. Empty space, however, is something else.”
Boaz-Jachin nodded, understanding not a word. But the driver's voice, large and gentle like the rest of him, was agreeable to him. He felt very conversational with him.
“I offered the drawings,” he said, surprised to hear himself saying it but pleased with what he was saying. “I offered the drawings. I burned the drawings. Something went out of me, leaving an empty space in me. Sometimes I feel myself hurrying towards something up ahead. What? I'm a rushing empty space. The father must live so that the father can die. Are you a father? Certainly you're a son. Every man who is alive is a son. Dead men as well are sons. Dead fathers too are sons. No end to it.”
“You're young,” said the driver. “Your whole life is ahead of you. Probably you don't think about such things. Did I when I was your age? I can't remember. Yet I suppose there must be empty space in you. What will you put into it?”
“The space wasn't always empty,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Only after the offering of the drawings. Now I'm hurrying. To what? Why? I don't know. Lion. I haven't said that aloud very often, that word, that name. Lion. Lion, lion, lion. What? Where?” He leaned forward, leaning into the forward speed of the van. “That he took the master map he'd promised to me, what's that to me? I don't need it. Maps.” From his pocket he took the new one he'd sketched on the cruise ship, opened the window, started to throw it away, put it back in his pocket, closed the window. “I'll keep it the way people keep diaries, but I don't need maps for finding anything.” He ground his teeth, wanted to roar, wanted to do violence to something.
“Years and years,” said Boaz-Jachin. “My eyes only as high as the edge of the table. 'Let me help,' I said. 'Let me work on a little corner.' No. Nothing. He wouldn't let me. I couldn't make clean beautiful lines. Always he had to do the whole thing. He looked at me but he spoke to a place where I wasn't. 'You will not follow me into the shop,' he said. 'For you there is the whole world outside.' Fine. Good. Go into the wide world. Go away. I wasn't good enough to work with him. So now he goes into the wide world. The shop for him and the world for him. For me nothing.” He ground his teeth again. “I have to . . . What? What do I have to do? I have to tell him . . . What? What do I have to tell him? Benjamin's father wrote forgive. Forgive whom what? What is it to forgive? Who has forgiveness to give? He held up a suit of clothes for me to jump into: the wanderer. Here's your map. Then he ran away with the map. I jumped into the wandering clothes. Is he happy now?” Tears streamed down Boaz-Jachin's cheeks.
“Name of God,” said the driver. “What an outburst! After all that surely there must be empty space inside you. My word. There's something about a road. One thinks, one talks. The van eats up the miles, the soul eats up the miles. At the port I'm picking up some wooden crates. In the crates is the machinery for a new press for the local newspaper. The editor's wife ran off with a salesman. So he needs new machinery. That's reasonable. With his new machinery he will print the news. This one is born, that one died, so-and-so is opening a bakery. Maybe even the news that he is married again. All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths in this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out. It's a pleasure talking with you. It's doing me a lot of good.”
Boaz-Jachin wiped his eyes, blew his nose. “It's a pleasure talking with you,” he said, “It's doing me a lot of good.”
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban(1973)
-28-
The man in the bed next to Jachin-Boaz was sitting up crosslegged, writing on a foolscap pad a letter to the editor of the city's leading newspaper. “With our Sanitation Department on the job regularly cleaning the streets,” he wrote, "is it not astonishing that so far no measures have been taken towards resolving the problem of image accumulation? The private citizen, however diligently he may divest his home of mirrors and however carefully he may cover windows and polished tables, has daily to encounter public mirrors, shop windows, and innumerable reflecting surfaces from which decades and scores of years of faces, his own and those of strangers, peer out impertinently to mock him.
“As a law-abiding citizen and ratepayer . . .” He stopped writing. He had been aware of figures moving past his bed towards the french windows, and now he looked up. Three patients were standing at the windows looking out at the lawn. Two male nurses who had been sitting in chairs stood up, looked out, and sat down again.
The letter writer got out of bed and walked over to the group at the window, sensing at once that they shared a secret from which the nurses were excluded. He too looked out for a time at the lawn that was green and golden in the afternoon sunlight. Then he came back and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at the sleeping Jachin-Boaz. He stared at him fixedly, and after half an hour Jachin-Boaz opened his eyes.
“Is it yours?” said the letter writer. “It must be — you're the only new arrival.” He had a small aristocratic moustache and goatee. His eyes were pale blue and very sharp. “What do you feed it?”
Jachin-Boaz smiled and lifted his eyebrows interrogatively. The powerful tranquilizing-drug dose had left him sluggish, and the question did not immediately make itself clear to him.
“The lion,” said the letter writer, and saw Jachin-Boaz look somewhat more alert. “It is your lion, isn't it? It seems to have arrived with you.”
“It's here?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Walking about on the lawn,” said the letter writer.
“Everybody sees it?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Only a few of us. Those who did and were on the lawn when it appeared came inside directly. Some of the staff and a number of pseudo-nuts are still outside with it, quite blind to its existence. I must say it seems a well-behaved animal. It isn't bothering anyone.”
“I don't think it takes notice of everybody,” said Jachin-Boaz.
“Naturally not. Who does?” said the letter writer. “As I was saying, what do you feed it?”
Jachin-Boaz became wary and sly. Hold on to everything you have, said the sunlight slanting down the wall. He didn't want anyone else to know what or how much his lion ate. “How do you know it eats?” he said.
The letter writer's face flushed. He looked as if he had been struck. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I beg your pardon.”
In a flash Jachin-Boaz understood that it was as if one duke who owned a rare and expensive motorcar had been rude to another duke who happened not to own such a car. He blushed. “Forgive me,” he said. “He should have six or seven pounds of meat a day, six days a week. I've been feeding him beefsteak, but not regularly.”
“Something of a supply problem,” said the letter writer cosily. “I don't suppose that he could accustom himself to shepherd's pie and toad-in-the-hole? Meat is a bit thin on the ground here.”
“I don't know,” said Jachin-Boaz. “Actually, it may even be possible that he can do without food altogether. He's real enough, but not in the ordinary way.”
“Quite,” said the letter writer stiffly, as between dukes to whom such things need not be explained.
Jachin-Boaz fell silent. He did not want to see the lion just now, and he began to think about the other people who could see it. Already this other man wanted to feed it. Jachin-Boaz began to get a headache. “Why can they see it, the others?” he said, speaking to himself but saying the words aloud.
“Sorry about that, old man,” said the letter writer. "But you've got to expect that sort of thing here. After all, why have they put us in the fun house? The straight people agree that some things are not allowed to be possible, and they govern their perceptions accordingly. Very strong, the straight
people. We're not so strong as they. Things not allowed to be possible jump on us, beasts and demons, because we don't know how to keep them out.
“Others here can see my faces and they can see your lion, even though you may want to hug it to yourself like a teddy bear. If your lion weren't possible you'd be happy to share the impossibility. But people get very possessive about possibilities, even dangerous ones. Victims become proprietors. You may have to grow up a little. Perhaps you'll even have to let go of your lion one day.”
“And your faces?” said Jachin-Boaz.
“They accumulate faster than they can be taken away,” said the letter writer smugly. “There'll always be more.”
“Lovely,” said the man who had just returned to the bed on the other side. Empty-handed and in bathrobe and pajamas, he appeared to be fully and impeccably dressed and carrying a tightly furled umbrella and a respectable newspaper. “Lovely,” he continued. “Lovely wife, children, home, weather, central heating, career, garden, shoelaces, buttons and dentistry. All modern conveniences, or nearest offer. Lovely bank lessons, music account, lovely miles to the gallon. Lovely 'O' Levels, 'A' Levels, eye levels, level eyes. Lovely level eyes she has and sees through everything but.”