‘Where are you going?’ said the driver.
‘To the seaport,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Get in,’ said the driver.
Boaz-Jachin got in and put his rucksack and guitar on the shelf behind the seat.
‘What’s in the guitar-case?’ said the driver, raising his voice above the roar and rattle of the lorry as they pulled away.
‘A guitar,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘It doesn’t hurt to ask,’ said the driver. ‘It could be a machine-gun. You can’t tell me that everybody with a guitar-case is carrying a guitar. The laws of probability are against it.’
‘In the films I think the gangsters use violin cases,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘That’s in the films,’ said the driver. ‘Real life is something else. Real life is full of surprises.’
‘Yes,’ said Boaz-Jachin, yawning. He leaned his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes, smelling the petrol, the oranges, and the orange-crate wood.
‘Films,’ said the driver. ‘Always the films are full of men with guns. Why do you think that is?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘People like excitement, violence.’
‘Always in the film posters,’ said the driver, ‘the hero is pointing with a gun, shooting with a gun. Because we men feel ourselves to be gunless. You follow me?’
‘No,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘I’ve talked to professional men — scholars, lecturers,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a widespread emotional condition. We men feel ourselves to be weaponless. You know what I mean?’
‘No,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
The driver put his hand between Boaz-Jachin’s legs, gripped him firmly, took his hand away before Boaz-Jachin could react.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said the driver. ‘A man’s weapon.’
Boaz-Jachin took his rucksack from the shelf behind the seat and put it in his lap.
‘Why’d you do that?’ said the driver. Boaz-Jachin said nothing.
The driver nodded his head bitterly, looking at the road, both hands on the steering-wheel.
‘They should rather make films about the women who take away our guns,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants the truth.’
‘You can drop me off in this town we’re coming to,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I have an uncle here that I have to see before I go to the port.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said the driver. ‘You didn’t say anything about your uncle when I picked you up.’
‘I forgot,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘But I have to see him. I have to get out here.’
They were almost at the edge of the town. The lorry, roaring and rattling, did not slow down.
‘I can stick my head out of the window and yell for help,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Go ahead,’ said the driver. ‘You look like a runaway to me. If you make trouble I can always turn you over to the police.’
The town flew by on either side: chickens, dogs, children, houses, petrol pumps, awnings, shops, vans, cars, lorries, soft-drink machines, a barber pole, a cinema, petrol pumps, houses, children, dogs, chickens. The lorry roared and rattled. The town grew small in the rear-view mirror.
‘You are cruel,’ said the driver. ‘You are cruel like all the young. You come out into the world, you want this and that. “Take me here, take me there,” you say to the world. You don’t look at the people who offer friendship along with the ride or the food or whatever you hold out your hand for. You don’t see their faces. For them you have no feelings.’
‘If I’d known you were going to get so worked up over giving me a ride I wouldn’t have taken it,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘You’re going to the seaport,’ said the driver. ‘What will you do there?’
‘Work my passage on a boat if I can,’ said Boaz-Jachin, ‘or earn money so I can pay for it.’
‘Doing what?’ said the driver.
‘I don’t know. Playing the guitar. Waiting on tables. Working on the docks. Whatever I can do.’
‘Where are you going with the boat?’
‘Why do you have to know everything?’
‘Why shouldn’t I know everything I can find out? Is it a big secret where you’re going with the boat?’
‘To look for my father,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Ah-h-h!’ said the driver, as if he had finally worked a bit of meat out of the tooth it was stuck in. ‘To look for the father! The father ran away?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your mother has a new man and you don’t like him?’
Boaz-Jachin tried to imagine his mother with someone other than his father. His mind gave him pictures of the two of them together. When he took his father out of the pictures he had nothing else to put there. Would his father have a new woman? He took the mother out of the mind-pictures. The father simply looked alone, subtracted from. He shook his head. ‘My mother hasn’t got anyone,’ he said.
‘What do you want from your father, that you’re looking for him?’
Boaz-Jachin thought the word map, and it became a no-word, a word that he had never seen or heard, a sound without meaning. Something very big, something very small, seemed present in his mind, but in his mind there seemed no place for him. He squirmed in his seat. The lorry driver in his strange hat with his face that had too much expression suddenly seemed a no-person. Lion, thought Boaz-Jachin, but felt only the emptiness where something had gone out of him. He saw the map of Lila’s body spread on the floor in the dark shop. Gone. No map.
‘Well?’ said the driver.
‘He promised me something,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Money, property, an education?’
‘Something else,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Something else,’ said the driver. ‘Something private, noble, sacred even, such as can only be between men. And what will you bring him?’
‘Nothing,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘There’s nothing he wants from me.’
‘You’re a real giver,’ said the driver. He sighed heavily. ‘Parents are a mystery. Sometimes I think about my father and mother for ten or fifteen miles at a stretch. My father was a prosperous and well-known man, an intellectual. Every morning he read the newspaper from front to back, straight through, and said many profound things. My mother was a whore.’
‘What was your father?’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘A pimp,’ said the driver, ‘and a homosexual as well. Classical profession, classical principles. Sometimes he made love with my mother as a special favour, but he never intended to have children. I represent the triumph of whoring over pimping.
‘My mother always said that fatherhood broke my father’s spirit. He left us when I was five. I grew up among black silk underwear, pink kimonos, the smell of last night’s drinks in smeary glasses, ash trays full of dead cigarettes, and antiseptic.
‘Be your own father and your own son is what I always say. That way you can have many long talks with yourself, and if you’re often disappointed you’re no worse off than every other father and son. Black silk underwear is very smooth against the skin when you’re alone.’
Underwhere, thought Boaz-Jachin. Under our where we wear our underwhere. I have no underwhere. The road to the citadel, the roadside stones, the hill, the lion-coloured plain, the tawny motion, the lion-king, the emptiness where he has gone from. I have underwhere, thought Boaz-Jachin. ‘I think my father was disappointed in me,’ he said.
‘More likely in himself,’ said the driver. ‘You should make love with strangers whenever you can.’
‘What’s that got to do with my father?’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Nothing. Your father isn’t the only thing in the world.’
‘Why with strangers?’ said Boaz-Jachin.