He packed his rucksack, put his map in it, took his guitar. He left a note for his mother:
I am going to find my father and get my map.
He went to Lila’s house and slipped a note under the door:
I thought that I would ask you to come with me but I have to go alone.
Boaz-Jachin walked out through the sleeping town, past the palm trees and the square where the jet of the fountain continually rose and fell, past dark shops and houses and dogs that went their several ways, past bright closed petrol stations. He walked out to the road, heard the stones of the roadside rolling under his feet, felt the night in the road and the morning that was coming.
11
The taxi driver had winked when Jachin-Boaz paid him. So he didn’t see the lion, thought Jachin-Boaz. He saw that I was a foreigner and thought that I was drunk, and he was making fun of me.
The lion was not at the bookshop when Jachin-Boaz got out of the taxi, nor was there any sign of him that day. Jachin-Boaz had been in mortal terror when the lion was stalking him, but there was a strange joy in him afterwards. Lions were extinct. There were no lions any more. But he had a lion. ‘I thought it was yours,’ the taxi driver had said, having his joke with the foreigner he thought was drunk.
He is mine, thought Jachin-Boaz. There is a lion, and that lion, real or unreal, has the power to accomplish my death. I know it. But he’s my lion and I’m glad that he exists, even though I’m in terror of him.
Jachin-Boaz went to a nearby coffee shop and walked back and forth in front of it like a sentry until it opened. Thinking about the lion he felt himself walking differently, set apart from other men, marked out for a danger, possibly a death, that was unique. He carried himself with melancholy pride, like an exiled king.
When the café opened he sat drinking coffee and looking out at the people who passed. He felt new and sharply defined, newly found by himself and fatefully alone among millions, as if he had just stepped from an aeroplane. Everything that is found is lost again, he thought for the first time. And yet nothing that is found is lost again. What is a map? There is only one place, and that place is time. I am in the time where a lion has been found.
All day in the bookshop the lion lived in his mind. He had no doubt that the lion would appear again and he wondered how he, Jachin-Boaz, would comport himself at the next encounter. He did not know whether the lion was real in the sense that he himself and the shop and the street were real. But he knew that the lion could kill him.
At home that evening he was very gay, and made love with Gretel suavely and greedily, feeling like an international traveller, a man of wealth, a connoisseur of wines. He went to sleep with the figure of the lion in his mind as he had seen him last — head uplifted in the first light of day, stern and demanding, like a patriotic duty silently calling.
Again he woke up at half-past four. Gretel was sleeping soundly. Jachin-Boaz bathed, shaved, and dressed. From the back of the shelves under the larder where he had hidden it he took a paper-wrapped package, put it into a carrier bag. Then he went out.
He walked down the street to the road along the embankment, stopped at the corner and looked back. He saw nothing.
Jachin-Boaz crossed to the river side of the road and walked beside the parapet looking at the river and the boats rocking at their moorings. He passed the next bridge, and the sky through its webwork was brightening.
It was this bright when I looked back at him through the taxi window, thought Jachin-Boaz. I wonder if he stops being there when it’s broad daylight.
The sky over the river was massed with dark clouds and dramatic lights, like skies in marine paintings. The river ran lapping and gurgling by the wall. The road along the embankment awoke to cars in twos and threes, a cyclist, a running man in a tracksuit, a young couple walking, holding last night’s darkness between their close-together faces, their long hair mingled.
Jachin-Boaz was tired, he had had too little sleep, his expectation seemed foolish now. He turned and walked back the way he had come.
The young couple who had passed him were sitting on a bench, embracing sleepily. On the pavement beside them sat the lion, looking at Jachin-Boaz.
Jachin-Boaz had been looking at the river, and was no more than five yards from the lion when he saw him. The lion’s head came forward. He crouched, lashing his tail. His eyes were mystical, luminous, infinite. Jachin-Boaz smelled the lion. Hot sun, dry wind and the tawny plains.
Jachin-Boaz dared not move a single step. Never taking his eyes from the lion he reached into the carrier bag for the package that was there, let the bag fall so that both hands would be free. With shaking hands he unwrapped the five pounds of beefsteak he had brought with him. He threw it to the lion, almost falling as he did it. The meat landed with a wet and solid smack.
The lion, still crouching, came forward and ate the meat, growling and staring at Jachin-Boaz. When Jachin-Boaz saw the lion eating the meat all courage left him. He would have fainted if the lion had not moved.
The lion finished the meat and sprang at Jachin-Boaz. Jachin-Boaz, with a scream, flung himself over the parapet and into the river.
He came to the surface choking and retching from the filthy water he had swallowed, and looked up as the current carried him swiftly on. He saw the two pale faces of the young couple above the top of the parapet, bobbing up and down and moving along with him. No lion.
Jachin-Boaz swam close to the wall, letting the current carry him along to the concrete steps that came down to the water. There he dragged himself ashore, staggered up the steps, and stopped at the locked gate that shut the steps off from the pavement. He looked in all directions but did not see the lion.
The young man and the girl were standing before him, faces pale, wild hair wilder than before. They reached forward to help him over the gate but Jachin-Boaz, still trembling violently, was able to climb over it by himself.
‘You all right?’ said the young man. ‘What happened?’
‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz in his own language. ‘What did you see?’
The young man and the girl shook their heads apologetically, and Jachin-Boaz said again, in English, ‘Thank you. What did you see?’
‘We saw you stop near us, unwrap some meat, and throw it on the pavement,’ said the girl.
‘Then the meat jerked and jumped about,’ said the young man, ‘and it tore itself up and disappeared. Then you screamed and jumped into the river. What happened?’
‘That’s all you saw?’ said Jachin-Boaz.
‘That’s all,’ said the young man. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Don’t you need help? What happened to the meat? How did you make it do that? Why did you jump into the river?’
‘Are you a hypnotist?’ said the girl.
Jachin-Boaz, foul-smelling from the river and standing in a spreading puddle, shook his head.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Thank you very much.’ He turned and walked home slowly and weakly, stopping often to look behind him.
12
Boaz-Jachin stood at the roadside. His rucksack was on his back. His black guitar-case, hot from the sun, stood leaning against him. The road shimmered in the heat. He was no more than fifty miles from home, and he wondered if his mother had sent the police after him. Cars whined past like bullets, followed by long stretches of emptiness and silence.
An old humpbacked-looking open lorry loaded with oranges came puttering up and stopped with a mingled reek of petrol, oranges, and orange-crate wood. The driver leaned out of the window. He wore an old black felt hat from which the brim had been cut. What remained was too big for a skullcap and too small for a fez. His face had too much expression.