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  • Lion
  • Wil Weitzel (bio)

When the old man died, I laid him out in the bathtub because he was small and neatly fit. I took him by the ankles first and then, moving slowly toward his neck, gently scrubbed him down. I lifted him at the back and washed his ribs all the way around until he was like an old moist cigarette. Then I dressed him the way he always dressed, in a corduroy suit—this one was a dun brown—and laid him in his bed and called his wife.

No one had been able to tell me why they lived apart. She was the one, most of them said, who insisted upon it. She needed relief from their intimacy, or she’d never loved him at all, or she was someone who thought only of herself. There were many reasons thrown about by the people who’d known the old man when he was young and teaching at the university or by others who cared for him now in his home as a paid occupation.

They were all women, these people of the house, who had keys and came in and out and bought food and delivered it and even ate some of it, standing in the narrow pantry and gazing at the shelves. Pickled artichokes and Sicilian olive oil and healthy breads from the best, the purest, companies would come to rest in the cupboards. Often I would eat with them, and they would talk of the old man in his presence as though he were only partially there.

He was only partially there. He was as old as old trees, their bark haggard or worn, that have survived the succession of the forest and long seasons of shade and then the drought years of bone-dry springs and catastrophes of wind. He had long, tired memories that flowed in and out of events just like the wind. And up until the end, he had great gaps like any dry forest where he knew nothing at all about his life and it was as though it had never happened.

While I was attending my classes at the graduate school, he’d invited me through a colleague—as a favor to his former department and because I [End Page 97] was an international student—to live with him. It was an honor to live with such a one. There were rumors of his teaching, of how he’d reached people, even the most remote, and left a mark on their lives. He had survived atrocities, it was said, while still a young man and was not supposed to be alive. To me, though, he appeared only a sad, old lord or a herald of brighter times which had faded until he had faded.

“More soup, I see,” he would say over our bowls in the low, dark living room that creaked like a boat with uneven boards at the floor and his books hovering above us as though they were preparing to fall from the walls. “More soup and more soup.”

“It’s wholesome soup,” I’d tell him, encouragingly. “You should have more.”

He would only grunt in such moments and reply, “So they say,” then slurp his canned pea soup as if he were suddenly the ocean and it was a great turbulent river he was swallowing from the hills.

Once, during the last year I lived with the old man—when my program of study was nearly complete and I was preparing to shove off again to points unknown—I told him the story of the lion, about a young boy in southern Africa who’d grown up on polished tile floors in a household of tutors and money with a lion cub. They had been forced to release the lion into the bush, when he had become so powerful and strong that even the boy, who loved him, could not in good conscience hold him any longer inside the courtyard.

Years went by and the lion allegedly flourished at first under the eyes of authorities, until they lost track of him in the wild. They thought he had perhaps migrated to the north...

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