For several days Jachin-Boaz, awaking at the usual time, went back to sleep, sulking, while in his imagination the lion grew thinner daily. Beside him every morning at half-past four Gretel woke up, waiting with closed eyes for him to go out while Jachin-Boaz went back to sleep, dreaming dreams he would not remember.
Jachin-Boaz was dreaming. With a microscope he was looking at an illuminated drop of water. In the water swam a green and spherical form of many-celled animal-algae. Thousands of tiny moving whips on its surface made it revolve its green-jewelled globe like a little world.
Jachin-Boaz increased the magnification, looked deep into one of the hundreds of cells. Closer, closer through the luminous green. Oh yes, he said. The naked figures of his father and mother copulated in the brilliant field of the lens with darkness all around them. So big and he so small. A shoulder turning away within the luminous green world in the drop of water.
The cell withdrew, grew small, receded into the green and turning world that closed up again, its whips propelling it in sparkling revolutions.
Unlike the infinitely ongoing asexual amoeba, said the lecturer, this organism has differentiated within itself male and female cells. Sexual reproduction occurs, followed by another phenomenon unknown to the amoeba: death. In the words of one naturalist, ‘It must die because it has had children and is no longer needed.’ That is why this wheel dies. The invention of the wheel is nothing compared to the invention of death, and this wheel invented death.
Jachin-Boaz increased the magnification again, again looked into the same cell. Darkness in the brilliance. His mother cried out. The lecturer, nodding in a chalk-dusted grey suit, came between him and what was happening in the darkness. This is the wheel that invented death, he said.
Jachin-Boaz hurled himself into the dark and shining tube of the microscope, saw the green wheel bright before him, leaped upon it, holding it to him, trying to stop its turning.
The wheel won’t die, he said, biting it, tasting its wet greenness. This wheel has had children but he doesn’t die. The lions die.
It seems a kind of intellectual suicide, said the lecturer, looking down on Jachin-Boaz who lay in a paper coffin, his beard aimed up at the lecturer whose beard was aiming down at him.
Now you’re dead, said Jachin-Boaz to the lecturer. But the paper coffin lid came down on Jachin-Boaz. No, he said. You, not me. Turn it around. Let the little green cells die instead. It’s always I who die. It was I then and it’s I now. When is it my turn, when the others die?
It keeps turning but it’s not your turn, said the lecturer. Never your turn.
My turn, said Jachin-Boaz. He was walking away from the coffin, looking back at it and noticing that it was much shorter than before. There was no father’s beard sticking up. The hand that held the map was smaller, younger. My turn, my turn, he wept, smelled the lion, wept and whimpered in his sleep.
Gretel woke up, leaned on her elbow, looked at Jachin-Boaz in the dim light, looked at his bandaged arm that he flung over his face. She looked at her watch. Four o’ clock. She turned on her side away from Jachin-Boaz and lay there, awake.
At half-past four Jachin-Boaz awoke, feeling tired. He did not remember his dream. He bathed, shaved, dressed, took meat for the lion, and went out.
The lion was standing across the street. Jachin-Boaz crossed to him, threw him the meat, watched him eat. With the lion-smell in his nostrils he turned and walked towards the embankment, not looking back.
When Jachin-Boaz and the lion had gone some distance down the street towards the river a police constable stepped out from behind a corner of the building where Jachin-Boaz lived. He stepped back as Gretel came out, fully dressed, with a carrier-bag in one hand.
Gretel looked towards the river, then followed Jachin-Boaz and the lion.
The police constable waited a few moments, then followed Gretel.
Jachin-Boaz walked along the embankment on the side away from the river. He stopped at a garden above which rose a statue of a man who had been beheaded after a theological dispute with a king. There was a bench on the pavement. Near it was a telephone kiosk. The sky was cloudy, the before-dawn light was grey, the bridges were black over the quiet river.
Jachin-Boaz turned and faced the lion. Down the street a girl with a carrier-bag stepped into a doorway. Beyond her a man’s dark figure turned into a side street. There was no one else in sight.
Jachin-Boaz sat down on the bench. The lion lay down on the pavement five yards away, his eyes on Jachin-Boaz’s face.
‘Always the frown, like my father,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘How was I to be a scientist, father Lion? Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.’
The sound of his own voice and the words he was saying became boring to Jachin-Boaz. He felt a wave of irritation flooding through him. He didn’t want to say what he was saying. What did the lion want? The lion was real, could kill him, might very well do it at any moment. Jachin-Boaz felt himself disappearing into terror, felt himself coming back, went on.
‘My thoughts are useless to me, and I cannot remember my dreams. I have forgotten more of my life than I remember, and with my forgetting I have lost my being. You expect something of me, father Lion. Maybe only my death. Maybe you are too late for that. Maybe I have beaten you to it. Not that my death belongs to me.
‘One of my teachers said it was an intellectual suicide when I failed my examinations. But science is knowing, and how could I know anything, how make a profession of knowing? Little things, yes. Places on a map.
‘When you kill yourself you kill the world, but it doesn’t die. He’d had a bad heart for some time, so it couldn’t have been my fault altogether. Why did he never talk to me? Why did he seem always to be talking to a space that I hadn’t moved into? Why was he always holding up an empty suit of clothes for me to jump into? He talked to clothes I never did put on. A sleeve with no arm in it struck him down. An empty shoulder turned away from him. He closed his mouth and lay down, but he is more alive in me than I am.
‘I am a coward, and you are patient with me. You are a sporting lion. You want my death to stand up like a man in me before you spring. You have contempt for anything that turns away.
‘But if you kill me I shall then be more alive than ever, strong as the brazen tyre on the wheel. My son will feel me heavy and unfinished on his back, big in his mind.’
Jachin-Boaz was silent for a time, then stood up. ‘Perhaps I too have never spoken to my son,’ he said, ‘but to an empty place where he was not. Now I talk to you, his anger. I will stand before you, look at you. If I did not look at him at least I will look at you, his rage. My rage. Can I roar like you? Can I make a big sound of whole anger?’ Jachin-Boaz tried to roar, broke off in coughing.
The lion crouched, gathering himself, lashing his tail. The lion roared, and the river of lion-sound rolled beside the other river, thunderous under the broken sky.
‘No!’ cried Gretel, running towards the lion from behind. ‘No!’ She had thrown away the carrier-bag, and held the carving knife she had concealed in it. She held the knife in the manner of knife-fighters, with the blade extending the line of her wrist, ready to thrust in and up.