‘Will you be doing any shopping later?’ he asked Gretel casually.
‘I did quite a bit of shopping yesterday,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we need unless you want me to get something for you.’
‘No,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I’m fine. Thank you anyway.’ He began mentally to rehearse different ways of mentioning seven pounds of beefsteak. He couldn’t say, You might pick up seven pounds of beef at the butcher’s. He couldn’t send her out three times for two pounds of beef and once more for one pound. He couldn’t go out and come back with it inconspicuously or in defiant silence.
While he deliberated Gretel was in and out of the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, filling the flat with domestic sounds, singing incomprehensibly, bringing him coffee, chocolate bars, cleaning, dusting. His silence rose up in him like a pillar of stone while her no-question-asking stalked in and out with her, looking over her shoulder and staring.
After a time Jachin-Boaz said in a strained voice, ‘We’re good together, you and I. These months have been good ones.’
‘Yes,’ said Gretel, thinking, Now it comes: bad news.
‘We can be together, but we can also be alone with each other,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘each with privacy, one’s own thoughts.’
‘Yes,’ said Gretel. Who could be after him? she thought. Brothers of his wife? With knives? What kind of cuts were those on his arm? Not knives.
‘We can tell each other everything, every kind of thing,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘And also we can allow each other to have things that are not told.’
‘Yes,’ said Gretel. Not his wife’s brothers perhaps, she thought. The brothers of some other woman? Some other woman herself? I’m eighteen years younger than he is. Is she younger than I am? Prettier?
‘If I asked you to go out and buy seven pounds of beefsteak and not ask me why, would you do it?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘Yes,’ said Gretel.
‘Thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Take money from my wallet. It’s on the desk.’ He sighed, feeling relaxed and sleepy. Would he, wouldn’t he, go out to meet the lion tomorrow morning? He would think about it later when he woke up before dawn.
Jachin-Boaz took a nap. He dreamed of a lion-coloured plain and himself walking slowly across it with nothing in sight. From the silence behind him he heard a whispering rolling that grew louder, brazen and heavy.
He knew without turning to look that it was the wheel, and the urge to escape became gigantic in him, too big for his body. He could not convert the urge to action because the vastness of the space made running impossible. There was no place to escape to. There was only empty timeless space all around him under a flat blue sky, and he continued to walk slowly while the escape-urge leaped up in him as if it would burst his throat.
The wheel was closer, the sound greater, filling all the emptiness of the plain. Jachin-Boaz felt the studded bronze tyre on his back, crushing him, printing its track upon him, passing over him but not going on, not going away. Again it approached from behind, clamorous with voices, and on its rim now, turning with it, were the coffins of his father and his mother.
The wheel went over him again, splintering the coffins, pressing the bodies into his own body — his father’s maleness, his mother’s belly and breasts that now became those of his wife, and it was her body on the wheel crushing him. He turned and clung to her, face to face and front to naked front as the wheel crushed him. It’s all right, he thought. This is the way back, the wheel will take me back. The world won’t go away now. There’ll be world and me again.
He looked up as the wheel passed over him, saw it pass beyond him, saw spears fly over his head into his son Boaz-Jachin who already had two arrows in him and was leaping up at the wheel.
‘No more other,’ said Jachin-Boaz. No more great dark shoulder-world-wheel turning away. He laughed and felt his naked mother warm above him. ‘It’s all right now,’ he said as she opened her scissor-legs and brought her weight down on him. The blades enclosed his penis as he thrust, safe and cosy, deep into his wife. ‘World again, me again,’ he said. ‘No more other.’
He woke up with Gretel lying partly on him, her head on his chest. Her tears were wet on his skin. How am I here? Who is she? he thought as he kissed her wet face. What am I doing with her? He remembered nothing of his dream. In his mind was a memory of Sunday drives when he sat between his father and his mother, watching the waning sunlight with dread. He always got carsick on those drives.
Gretel cooked dinner and brought it in on a tray. Jachin-Boaz sat up in bed, eating and wondering how he had got to this place and this girl. Gretel sat on the edge of the bed with her plate on her lap and ate in silence.
That night Jachin-Boaz slept well, and he awoke at the usual time. In the dimness of the morning he walked into the living room, to his desk and the master-map spread on it.
Jachin-Boaz ran his finger over the smooth paper. If he poked sharply his finger would make a hole in the map, go through it and come out on the other side without having penetrated anything but the thickness of the paper. So his life seemed now: he could poke himself through the flat paper of the map-city he walked on and he would come out on the other side, having only made a hole in non-reality.
Jachin-Boaz spoke to the map. ‘The man says to the place, “What will you give me?”
‘The place says, “Take whatever you want.”
‘The man says, “What do I want?”
‘The place has no answer for him.
‘The place asks a question in its turn, “Why are you here?”
‘The man looks away and cannot speak.’ Jachin-Boaz touched the map again, then turned away.
He was out in the street with the beefsteak in his carrier-bag before five o’clock. It was dark and rainy, and only when he saw the glistening street was he aware that he seemed to have decided to meet the lion again. Will the lion be wet too? he wondered.
The lion too was wet and glistening. The lion-smell was stronger in the rain. Jachin-Boaz threw him the meat immediately, and the lion ate it, growling. With his bandaged arm Jachin-Boaz felt a little easier than before with the lion, felt comradely with him, as if they had both fought on the same side in a war.
‘Comrade Lion,’ he said. He liked the sound of that. ‘Comrade Lion, you will kill me or you will not kill me. Your frown is the frown I have seen on the face of my son and on the face of my father. Perhaps it is also the one I see in the mirror. Come, let’s walk a little.’
Jachin-Boaz turned his back on the lion and walked towards the river. He went along the embankment, looking back to see if the Hon was following. He was. What does he see? Jachin-Boaz wondered. Does he see only me? Is everything else not there?
He walked past the first bridge to the second with the lion following, walked up the steps and on to the bridge, looking up at the cables and the dark sky, feeling the rain on his face. At the middle he stopped, leaned his back against the parapet. The lion stopped ten feet away and stood with his head lifted, watching him.
‘Doctor Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz, ‘my father used to look at the maps I drew and say that I would be a man of science. But he was wrong. I never became a man of science. The money that he spent on my education was wasted.’ He laughed, and the lion crouched. ‘I am alive and he is dead, and the money was wasted.
‘He used to say, “I can tell by the way he writes, the way he draws, his exactitude, his sense of order, the questions he asks, that this boy will be a scientist. He will not sit in a shop waiting for customers to jingle the bell.”