Jachin-Boaz lay with his ear to the pillow, listening to the beating of his heart. The map, he thought. The map of Boaz-Jachin’s future that I stole, the future that I cannot have. I’ll stop smoking.
He lit a cigarette, got out of bed, stood against the wall. As soon as I feel a little better, he thought, I’ll stop smoking. My father with his cigars. Why did she have to tell me about the mistress? She found out from her aunt in the dramatic society, but why did she have to tell me?
He thought of Sunday afternoons in childhood, smelled the car upholstery, looked out through the windscreen at the waning sunlight, felt his father on one side, his mother on the other, himself between them, sick. I haven’t been committing suicide, he thought. Suicide has been committing me.
All of his unremembered dreams seemed to walk silently behind him, passing one by one between him and the wall, smirking over his shoulder at invisible phantoms in front of him. If I turn very quickly, he thought, and turned. Something very big, something very small, whisked around the corner of his mind. Either way, said the answer in the wall that faced him: betrayed or betrayer. Betrayed and betrayer.
‘Be reasonable,’ said Jachin-Boaz quietly to the wall. ‘I can’t be everybody.’
Loss unending, said the wall. Dare to let go?
‘I don’t know,’ said Jachin-Boaz.
Suppose, the wall said, sometimes he laughed away from home. What then? You owe her nothing. He wants to rest. If you stand up they lie down. Follow your noes.
‘Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz silently, only shaping the word.
Oh yes, the wall said. Play with yourself.
Jachin-Boaz turned away. Everyone else was going to dinner. The thought of food sickened him, the smell from the dining area was offensive. The lion was still outside, no doubt. He would be waiting all the time now until the end. Everybody would want to feed him, look at him, share him. No, no, no.
The tightly furled man had taken his plate to the door near the french windows. ‘Pss, pss,’ he called, making the sound one makes for a cat. Three others came and stood near, looking over his shoulder. One of them, a man with a round white face, looked back at Jachin-Boaz and said something to the others. Everyone laughed.
Jachin-Boaz felt immensities of rage in him, infinities of NO. Crying, he burst into the group by the door, flung them in all directions, and rushed out on to the lawn.
31
Boaz-Jachin had arrived in the city and was staying with friends of the blonde woman. When he told them that his father was likely to be selling maps they advised him to advertise for Jachin-Boaz in the book trade weekly, which he did.
Boaz-Jachin bought such clothes as he needed and a cheap guitar, and every day he went into the underground stations and sang and played. The money he had earned on the cruise ship would keep him for several months, but he wanted to be able to support himself for as long as he needed to remain in the city.
His advertisement would not appear until the next week, and while he waited he played his guitar and sang in two different stations every day. He timed his arrival so that he would be at one when people went to work and at the other when they went home. Each day he went to new stations in the hope of seeing Jachin-Boaz. Each station had its own sound and its own feel. Some felt as if Jachin-Boaz was not to be found in them, others seemed full of probability. Boaz-Jachin made a list of the latter. If there was no answer to the advertisement he would keep only those stations on his guitar route as time went on.
The advertisement appeared, but there were no telephone calls or letters for Boaz-Jachin at the house where he was staying. He went on with his guitar route, trying new stations daily. He made enough money to live on cheaply, found a room for himself, and settled down to stay until he found his father. He no longer asked himself whether he knew or how he knew that Jachin-Boaz was in this city. He felt it as a certainty. Every day he inquired for letters or telephone calls, and every day there was nothing.
Boaz-Jachin’s ear became attuned to the roar of trains arriving and departing, the constant numberless footfalls approaching, receding, voices and echoes. He sang the songs of his country, sang of the well, of olives, of sheep in the hills, of the desert, of orange groves, his voice and his guitar echoing in the corridors and stairways under the ground in the great city.
Boaz-Jachin inserted another advertisement, subscribed to the trade weekly, and went on to new underground stations with his guitar. He became known to his regular clientele. At each station the same faces smiled at him day after day as coins dropped into the guitar case. He smiled back, said thank you, but said nothing else to anyone. In the morning he saw the daylight and in the evenings he saw the fading of it. Above him the city was immense with all that the lines on the master-map led to. Bridges crossed the river, birds flew up circling over squares, and Boaz-Jachin lived underground, singing in corridors and stairways. He had not spoken aloud the word lion since the ride to the channel port with the van driver.
Boaz-Jachin found that he was thinking less in words than he used to. His mind simply was, and in it were the people he had been with, the times he had lived. Sounds, voices, faces, bodies, places, light and darkness came and went.
He had no sexual appetite, wanted no one to talk to, read nothing. Often in the evenings he sat quietly in his room doing nothing. Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness.
Sometimes at night he walked in the streets. The leaves of the trees rustled in the squares. Lights shone on statues. Often he seemed to be without thought. It ceased to matter to him who was looking out through the eyeholes in his face and it ceased to matter who was looking in. He had no amulet to wear around his neck, no magic stone to hold in his hand. He held nothing. He was. Time passed through him unimpeded.
One day Boaz-Jachin took his guitar to an underground station, put the open case on the floor beside him, and tuned the instrument. But he did not begin to play immediately.
Faces passed him. Footsteps echoed, pattering like rain. Trains came and went. Boaz-Jachin listened past the footsteps, past the trains and echoes to the silence. He began to play music of his own, improvising on themes that he had composed in his room. He was unwilling to let the music out of him but unable to make himself stop.
He played the shimmer of the heat on the plains and the motion of the running flickering on the dry wind, tawny, great, and quickly gone. He played the silence of a ghost roar on the rising air beneath a shivering honeycoloured moon.
He played lion-music, and he sang. He sang without words, sang only with the modulations of his voice rising and falling, light and dark in the dry wind, in the sunlit desert under the ground in the great city.
Beyond the footsteps, beyond the trains and echoes he heard a roar that flooded the corridors like a great river of lion-coloured sound. He heard the lion.
32
No lion. Nothing. A faint smell of hot sun, dry wind. The green lawn darkening, empty in the twilight. Ha ha, said the twilight. Fading, fading.