She would be artful and tigerish, would please him in ways unknown to him before, and he would give to her because it was unfair always to take without giving. He would be her stranger, and she his. He would appease the hungry ghost of the lorry driver by his generosity to this woman. It would cost him a few days — she would not want to part with him quickly — but they would both be enriched by it.
Boaz-Jachin thought of the parts of her body that might not be tanned by the sun, how the scent of her flesh would be and the taste of her. He was getting an erection, and crossed his legs discreetly.
Afterwards she would offer him money. He would not accept it of course, although he needed money very badly. On the other hand, he asked himself, was there any difference morally between that and taking money for playing the guitar and singing?
The wind lessened, the music was louder, the car stopped. Boaz-Jachin looked all around for a hotel or motel but saw none. There was a road going off to the right.
‘I just remembered,’ said the woman, ‘I have to turn off here. I’d better drop you now.’
Boaz-Jachin picked up his guitar and his rucksack and got out. The woman closed the door, locked it.
‘When a boy your age looks at me the way I think you were looking at me,’ she said, ‘then one of us is in bad shape. Either I shouldn’t think that way or you shouldn’t look that way.’
The little red car pulled away, playing music, going straight ahead towards the seaport.
15
The analogy of the television broadcast stayed in Jachin-Boaz’s mind. He was receiving a lion. The lion was a punishment. His wife and son would of course wish to punish him. Did he want to be punished? Was the lion simply a punishment? He could not arrive at a simple yes or no to either of those questions.
The lion ate real meat. What had it eaten since the five pounds of beefsteak three days ago? Would it be thin now, hungry, its ribs sticking out? If it was a lion that appeared exclusively to him, surely he was responsible for feeding it?
A customer came into the shop and asked for a book on ancient Near-Eastern art. Jachin-Boaz showed him the two paperbacks and the one hardback that were on the shelves and went back to unwrapping the shipment that had come in that morning.
The customer was one of the shop’s regulars, and inclined to be chatty over his purchases. ‘The lions are quite remarkable,’ he said.
Jachin-Boaz stood up from the books, the brown paper and the string, bolt upright and alert.
‘What lions?’ he said.
‘Here,’ said the customer, ‘in the reliefs in the north palace.’ He laid the open book on the counter in front of Jachin-Boaz. ‘I suppose the sculptor was bound by convention in his handling of the king and the other human figures, but the lions have immense distinction — each one’s an individual tragic portrait. Have you seen the originals?’
‘No,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘although I used to live not very far from the ruins.’
‘That’s how it is,’ said the customer. ‘Here’s one of the artistic wonders of the world, absolutely the high point of the art of its period, and when you live next door to it you don’t bother to look at it.’
‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz, no longer paying attention to the man’s words. He was turning the pages, looking at the photographs of the lion-hunt reliefs. He came to the dying lion biting the chariot wheel.
‘Easy enough to see where the sculptor’s sympathies lay,’ said the customer. ‘His commission may have been from the king but his heart was with the lion. The king, for all the detail and all the curls in his beard, is little more than an ideograph, a symbol referring to the splendour of kings. But the lion!’
Jachin-Boaz stared fixedly at the lion. He recognized him.
‘The king is almost secondary,’ said the customer. ‘The mortal stretch of the lion’s body meets the length of the spears he hurls himself upon, becomes one long diagonal thrust of forces eternally opposed. That thrust is balanced on the turning wheel and the lion’s frowning dying face is at the centre, biting the wheel. Masterfully composed, the whole thing. The king is secondary, really — a dynamic counterweight. He’s only there to hold the spear, and nothing less than a king would be of suitable rank for the death of that lion.’
Yes, thought Jachin-Boaz, there was no mistaking that frown. That was his frown, and the mane grew from the forehead in the same way. The set of shadowy eyes was the same. He had been thinner when he had seen him last, he thought, than he appeared here. And he had given him nothing to eat for days! Was the lion only able to eat food that came from him, Jachin-Boaz? No one else saw him. Did he see anyone else?
Jachin-Boaz seemed with his eyes to be possessing the lion in the picture beyond the possibility of its belonging to anyone else. The customer felt that his cultivated appreciation was being made unimportant. He began to feel protective towards the book he was buying, and made little patting motions on the counter with his hands. ‘I’ll have the book,’ he said, and took out his chequebook.
‘But it’s the wheel,’ said Jachin-Boaz, his eyes fixed on the implacable eight-spoked studded chariot wheel in the photograph, part of it lost in erosion and the weathering of the stone. ‘It’s the wheel. He should understand that. It isn’t the king. Maybe the king doesn’t even want the lion to die. He knows that the lion too is a king, perhaps one greater than himself. It’s the wheel, the wheel. That’s the whole thing. The sculptor knew it was the wheel and not the king. Biting it doesn’t help, but one has to. That’s all there is.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it, of course,’ said the customer. ‘Really,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I must be moving on.’
‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. Mechanically he rang up the sale and wrapped the book, wondering how many pounds of meat were required to keep a lion in good flesh. And of course there must be something cheaper than beefsteak. Horsemeat? Perhaps if he called the zoo they would be able to advise him — he could say tiger instead of lion. Was it possible that the lion didn’t know that it was the wheel? But he must know — there was such knowledge in his face.
‘Please,’ said the customer, ‘may I have the book?’
‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz, putting it at last into the customer’s hands and thinking how strange it was that anyone else should carry a photograph of the animal so intimately and oddly connected with him.
He was nervous and jumpy for the rest of the day, putting books in wrong places and forgetting where he’d put them. He moved quickly and suddenly from one part of the shop to another without remembering why he went where he did. His mind darted from one thought to another.
He dreaded the lion, trembled and went cold at the thought of him, but at the same time craved the sight of him. The feeding of the lion now seemed his responsibility, his peculiar obligation, and he worried about the expense of it.
Jachin-Boaz rang up the zoo, said that he was doing research for a magazine article, and asked how much meat a full-grown tiger would require daily. He waited while the young lady at the zoo made inquiries. When she returned to the telephone he was told that the tigers each received a twelve-pound joint six days a week and were starved for one day.
‘Twelve pounds,’ said Jachin-Boaz.
Well, actually that included the bones, she said. The meat in such a joint might be six or seven pounds.
How long could a lion … tiger, he meant to say, go without food?
Another absence from the phone. Five to seven days, she said on her return. Tigers in a wild state might consume forty to sixty pounds at one time, then go hungry for a week. Certainly one could say that they were able to go without eating for five to seven days.