‘Because that’s the only kind of person there is,’ said the driver. ‘When you get to know a face or a voice or a smell you think the person isn’t a stranger, but that’s a lie. With an unknown face and the nakedness of an unknown body the whole thing is purer.’
Boaz-Jachin was silent listening to the noise of the lorry and smelling the petrol, the oranges, the orange-crate wood.
‘I go back and forth on this road all the time,’ said the driver. ‘Always there are new unknown faces on it, new faces coming out into the world, heading for the port. I go to the port, come back again always.’
Boaz-Jachin hugged his rucksack to himself in silence.
The lorry slowed down, the roar separated into individual putterings, rattles, and squeaks. The driver pulled into a layby, stopped the lorry, shut off the motor. He put his hand on Boaz-Jachin’s knee.
‘Don’t,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Just for a little while,’ begged the driver. ‘On the road between the past and the future. Just for a little while give me your strangerhood, your strangeness and your newness. Give me some of you. Be my father, my son, my brother, my friend. Be something to me for a little while.’
‘No,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
The driver began to cry. ‘I’m sorry I bothered you,’ he said. ‘Please leave me now. I need to be alone. Go away, please.’ He reached past Boaz-Jachin and opened the door.
Boaz-Jachin took his guitar from the shelf behind the seat and got out. The door slammed shut.
Boaz-Jachin wanted to give the lorry driver something. He opened his rucksack, looked for something that could be a gift. ‘Wait!’ he called above the roar of the engine as the lorry started up again.
But the driver had not heard him. Boaz-Jachin saw his face still crying under the old black brimless hat that was not a skullcap and not a fez as the lorry, trailing its aroma of petrol, oranges, and orange-crate wood, pulled out into the road and away.
Boaz-Jachin closed the rucksack, buckled the flap. There was nothing in it that could have been a gift for the lorry driver.
13
Jachin-Boaz continued to wake up very early in the mornings, always with the knowledge that the lion was waiting somewhere in the streets for him. But since he had seen him eat real meat he dared not go out until the rest of the world was awake and moving about. He did not see the lion during business hours or in the evening. He was in a state of excitation most of the time.
‘You make love as if you’re saying hello for the first time and goodbye for the last,’ Gretel told him. ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’
‘If there’s a tomorrow for me I’ll be here if here is where I am,’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Who could ask for more?’ said Gretel. ‘You’re a reliable man. You’re a rock.’
Jachin-Boaz thought about the lion constantly — how he had eaten real meat, how the young couple had not seen the lion but had seen the meat being eaten. He dared not encounter the lion again without some kind of professional advice.
He spoke guardedly to the owner of the bookshop. ‘Modern life,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘particularly modern life in cities, creates great tensions in people, don’t you think?’
‘Modern life, ancient life,’ said the owner. ‘Where there’s life there’s tension.’
‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Tension and nerves. It’s astonishing, really, what nerves can do.’
‘Well, they have a system, you see,’ said the owner. ‘When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?’
‘Exactly,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘He could have delusions, hallucinations.’
‘Happens every day of the week,’ said the owner. ‘Sometimes I, for example, have the delusion that this shop is a business. Then I come back to reality and realize that it’s just an expensive hobby.’
‘But people who have hallucinations,’ Jachin-Boaz persisted, ‘powerful hallucinations — what’s to be done for them?’
‘What kind of powerful hallucinations do you have in mind?’ said the owner.
‘Well, say a carnivorous one,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Just for the sake of argument.’
‘A carnivorous hallucination,’ said the owner. ‘Could you give me an example of such a thing?’
‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Suppose a man saw a dog, let’s say, that wasn’t really there in the usual way, so to speak. Nobody else but the man can see the dog. The man feeds the dog dog food, and everyone sees the dog food eaten by the dog they can’t see.’
‘Quite an unusual hallucination,’ said the owner, ‘to say nothing of the expense of keeping it. What breed of hallucinatory dog is it?’
‘Well, I’m not actually thinking of a dog,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I was speaking hypothetically, just to give an idea of the sort of thing that’s on my mind — the way reality and illusion can sometimes get mixed up and all that. Nothing to do with dogs. What I had in mind was perhaps to consult a professional man about it. Can you recommend someone?’
‘I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist,’ said the owner, ‘if you’re talking about something that has to do with the mind. On the other hand, if it eats real dog food, I don’t know. And he’s expensive.’
‘Actually it’s nothing terribly pressing,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I might ring him up or I might not. Sometimes it’s good to clear up a thing like that rather than have it on your mind.’
‘Certainly,’ said the owner. ‘If you’d like the afternoon off, you know…’
‘Not at all,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I’m perfectly all right, really.’ He rang up the psychiatrist and made an appointment for the next day.
The doctor’s office was in a block of flats, on the top floor of four floors of cooking smells. Jachin-Boaz climbed the stairs, rang, let himself in, and sat on a studio couch in a big kitchen until the doctor appeared.
The doctor was short, had long red hair and a beard, and was dressed like a man doing odd jobs around the house on a weekend. He turned on an electric kettle, made tea in a little Chinese teapot, put two little Chinese cups on a tray with the pot, and said, ‘Come in.’
They went into the room that was his office and sat on facing chairs. There was a studio couch along one wall. By another stood a big table piled with books and papers, a typewriter, two tape recorders, a briefcase, and several huddles of large brown envelopes and file folders. There were more books and papers on smaller tables, on chairs, on the floor, on the mantelpiece, and on shelves.
‘Start wherever you like,’ said the doctor.
‘I’ll start with the lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I can’t afford to come more than once, so I’ll get to the point immediately.’ He told the doctor about his two encounters with the lion, particularly stressing the five pounds of beefsteak.
‘And always I know that just before dawn he will be waiting for me somewhere in the streets,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And of course I know that lions are extinct. There are no lions any more. So he can’t be real. Can he be real?’
‘He eats real meat,’ said the doctor. ‘You saw him do it, other people saw him do it.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And I’m meat.’
‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘So let’s not split hairs about whether he’s real. He can do real damage. He’s a real problem that has to be coped with one way or another.’
‘How?’ said Jachin-Boaz, looking at his watch. He was paying for fifty minutes of the doctor’s time, and ten of them were gone.
‘Try to remember the night before you saw the lion for the first time,’ said the doctor. ‘Is there anything at all that comes to mind? Any dreams?’