The Gospel According to Lazarus Read online

  Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors …

  After we sanctify our King with this benediction, Yeshua helps Nahara retrieve her wooden top, which has skittered under the table fronting my oaken trunk. ‘As for what Lazarus has been through today,’ he says on standing back up, ‘I would only say this: “He who restrains his lips often shows great wisdom.”’

  His friends’ ardent amens make it clear that they respect his wishes, though I suspect that a number of them are secretly disappointed that he has nothing more to say. As for me, I see Yeshua’s silence as his way of drawing the Lord’s attention from me.

  You see, Yaphiel, when Yeshua and I were twelve, he nearly drowned in the Jordan, and his mother always believed that it was because he had been so deep in communion with the Lord that he had waded out into the current without recognizing the peril. Once he was safe on the riverbank – and after he and I had had a chance to dry off – she gathered him up into her trembling arms and gripped my hand so hard it hurt. ‘Always remember, my children,’ she told us, ‘there is such a thing as being too near to God. And too closely watched by him.’

  While I am resting, my cousins Ariston and Ion entertain me with the latest tragi-comic escapades of their father, who has always been the insatiable satyr in our family. Mia soon joins us, and I discover that the rip she had made in the neckline of her chiton has now been sewn. While the four of us converse about the wonders of the main Jewish quarter in Alexandria, I find myself studying Yohanon and Maryam. They whisper together beside my window, and the way they avoid my gaze gives me to believe that they are debating how they might best make use of my resurrection. The truth I would tell them if I could do so without their censure is this: I have no awe-inspiring story to tell anyone who would like to hear of Yeshua’s mastery over death. I cannot even say what the afterlife looks like. For I did not see any. I did not return to my body with any prophetic message ciphered in my mind or engraved on my hands. Either my soul was denied admission to Paradise or nothing of what transpired there adhered to my memory.

  Or worse; after we die, nothing of who we are survives.

  This heresy constricts my breathing and seems to cover me in a netting of shame. Ion helps me drink, and my sisters begin to fuss over me, but I wish only to retreat into solitude.

  Terrifying words from Genesis sound inside me even as I speak to my sisters: ‘You are dust, and to dust you will return.’

  The cold sweat pouring down my neck and back is a betrayal of everything I have ever believed, but I lie to my family and friends about what is wrong with me; I blame my legs, which are indeed stiff and painful. Marta insists that I need air and light if I am not to fall ill again, so Yeshua and Yohanon help me into the courtyard.

  I sit on cushions that my grandfather brings me and smile brightly in order to convince him and all the others that I am myself again. But I feel as I did while rushing home through Samaria one winter afternoon when I was nineteen, when the miles of darkening forest around me sent an arrow of terror shooting through the top of my head and I became aware that I had made a misguided and possibly fatal turn somewhere behind me.

  When Yeshua joins me again, he tells me that he must accompany his disciples to their inn. My disappointment in him is like a door closing, because I realize that he will soon become burdened by the duties of his ministry and leave me on my own to contemplate the whys and hows of death and resurrection.

  I try to hide my despair, but, when my old friend reaches for my shoulder, I moan aloud. He places his callused, woodworker’s hand flat against my chest and promises to return after supper. ‘Listen to me, Lazar,’ he says. ‘While I am away, don’t be tempted to run – just walk slowly and carefully ahead.’ Altering a verse from the Psalms, he adds, ‘Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you will fear no evil, for I am with you.’

  7

  In a dream I have had many times since fleeing Bethany, I see Yeshua wade into the brook that nourishes my garden here on Rodos and vanish below its surface. I call his name, but he will not return. I only know that he has become the brook when I notice that it is no longer flowing down to the sea but up into the clutch of pine where I walk when I wish to make believe that I have returned to our homeland.

  Calm is the stream that loves both its banks and the lands it will never reach.

  That one-line poem came into my mind one morning last year after I awakened – dejected and lonely – from the dream. It made me realize that I – unlike the streams and rivers or our world – will never find lasting peace. And that I do not want to.

  Creatures who mourn. If the Lord should ever ask me to describe how we are distinct from the bats and lizards and all the other myriad creatures of the sixth day, that is what I shall tell Him.

  Perhaps the wounds in Yeshua’s ankles and wrists will finally become mine when I am near death. If only he had granted my final wish!

  I shall tell you something about my old friend that his followers rarely mention, though to me it was the most obvious of all his gifts: when you were with him, he made you certain – through the ease with which he hooked his arm in yours, the empathy in his dark eyes or even one of his boyish jests – that being with you was exactly where he wanted to be. He belonged wholly to you – even if it was just for a quick exchange of greetings. And, because he was yours, you were his as well.

  ‘When you make two into one, you will enter the Kingdom of Heaven,’ he used to tell me, and whenever he repeated that wisdom – whether to a friend or a stranger – he meant it as an invitation.

  You see, Yaphiel, his hands were always open.

  He taught me that a single act of compassion – a hand of blessing on a leper’s brow or a kiss upon the foot of a crippled child – can change the direction of a life.

  I have found that most men and women huddle behind their own heartwalls and only rarely peek outside. We spend thirty, forty, fifty years or more not seeing one another.

  But he looked and saw.

  He taught me this as well: when you meet a person, pay close attention to his first words and his last. Often, he will tell you then what it is he is looking for – and how you may help him.

  ‘The wisdom of the Lord has two faces, and one of them we cannot see,’ he told me when I had trouble accepting his decision to end his Torah studies. I believe now that he meant that a great deal of who he was would for ever remain hidden. Were there landscapes inside him that he had glimpsed only fleetingly? That possibility grows more distinct as I age. And yet I would not wish to solve the mystery of him, since understanding his place in my life more fully might make him shine less brightly on the nights when he rises into my night-time sky to guide me.

  8

  After Yeshua and his disciples leave my home, hunger opens a furrow in my belly. With my obligations to hospitality fulfilled, I entreat my remaining guests to wish one another – and me – a shalom of parting so that I can rest in my room and have a proper meal.

  My children and sisters remain at home with me, along with Marta’s seventeen-year-old daughter Yehudit, who lives with her husband and baby boy in Yerushalayim.

  I am gorging on a steaming patina stuffed with sow thistle and raisins when a delegation of local craftsmen and shopkeepers knocks on my front door. Mia and Marta escort the six men into my alcove. They wear their Sabbath shawls and address me with the deference of worshippers entering the Gate of Firstborns.

  Saul ben David, who owns a fruit stall at the marketplace, hands me a basket of dried apricots and figs, and from his cousin Hector, an importer of ceramics, I receive a drinking cup from Crete decorated with a stupendously endowed Minotaur. Does he believe that my taking a few sips of barley beer from the creature’s hands will increase my potency? Such odd ideas these Judaeans have about widowers and their needs!

  What sets my teeth grinding is that they are certain to expect me – now that I have been obliged by my sisters to accep
t their gifts – to petition the Almighty on their behalf.

  Once they are gone, Mia calms me by explaining that the men also had a more prosaic – and easier to fulfil – motive: they want me to steer future well-wishers and curiosity-seekers to their shops. In short, they are convinced I will create much the same inflow of visitors to Bethany as the two-headed cobra that was put on show in our marketplace the previous spring.

  ‘I don’t think I’d like to be kept in a cage,’ I tell my sister.

  ‘If you agree not to bite anyone, only a lead will be necessary,’ she replies drily.

  Though it is a comfort and relief to laugh with Mia again, the moment our voices cede to silence, death seems to shiver inside me.

  My sisters live in a small old house across our shared courtyard, and, later that afternoon, when my alcove becomes too confining, I limp to Marta’s workroom, since watching her weave may help me regain a measure of composure.

  I sit by her side without interrupting. To see her skilful, darting fingers uniting strands of wool into white and black dolphins leaping out of a friendly blue sea is to know that she was truly made in the Creator’s image.

  As she moves her shuttle between the warps, I realize I have a secret motive for coming to her. But I cannot tell her. And I see that in another, easier world I would not have to ask her to embrace me.

  It baffles me now how all the time I’d been in my tomb the sun had continued to rise and the moon to set.

  Yeshua had preached in Pella and neighbouring towns.

  Gephen had hunted for mice.

  And Marta had added a hundred new rows to the rug she is making.

  Yet I had not been aware of any of these things.

  No one who has died knows that he is dead. I keep repeating that truth to myself, but it does not seem to fit inside my head. So, once I am back in my room, I face west, towards the Temple, and chant the first six verses of the Torah, since six is the number of cardinal directions when added to up and down. In this way, I am hoping to find a map leading back to myself in scripture.

  As though to make me suffer further for my heretical thoughts, Melech ben Aaron, the ancient wheelwright who lives next door, decides to visit. He has become a mop-haired skeleton and prankster since his wife’s death, and his bulbous, pock-marked nose starts twitching like an Egyptian hound as he moves downwind of the supper I’ve just eaten. Despite our own meagre resources, Mia hasn’t the heart to turn the hungry man away, and she fries him an egg with onion and summons him into our courtyard to eat it. All too soon, however, he shuffles into to my room. While he is licking the last traces of his meal from his knobby fingers, he drops down beside me, places a cushion on his lap – as though intending to stay for hours – and whispers in my ear, ‘Eli, my boy, so who’s this enemy you’ve made?’

  His calid, pungent breath makes me lean away. ‘What kind of enemy?’ I ask.

  He slaps my leg. ‘A witch or sorcerer – some filthy night-hag who might’ve put a spell on you! Or who slipped a viper’s egg in yer food.’

  I sometimes believe I can hear what people would most wish to confide to me if they dared, and here is what Melech’s mischievous, too-eager glance now tells me: My wife prevented me from doing what I most wanted to do, which was why I greeted her death with dancing, and it is to make my friends and neighbours as disgruntled as I am, and I accomplish it by reminding them not to trust anyone, not even their families, and, though it is thankless work, I do it with an invigorating sense of purpose.

  To consider the hidden matters raised by Melech would only draw me into morbid territories where I would not wish to walk with him. ‘For the last five months,’ I tell him, ‘I’ve worked from dawn to dusk laying mosaics in Lucius ben David’s villa. I don’t have time to turn anyone against me.’

  After Mia manages to lure Melech out of the house with a handful of dried figs, the possibility of my having been cursed sets in motion a cascade of conjectures that leads me back to my original doubts about the story I’ve been told.

  We have all heard of powerful potions that can bind a person in an inert state of dormancy, and I begin to consider it possible that the decoction of vetch and willow bark that I drank slowed all my bodily workings to imperceptible levels and that its effect on me might have begun to wear off just prior to Yeshua’s visit to my tomb. Laying his hands on my chest might have been enough to rouse me.

  I’d have no memory of any afterlife because I was never actually dead!

  Relief makes me laugh aloud, but, when I summon Marta to me, she swears that she tested my breathing twice and on both occasions detected nothing.

  ‘How much time did you wait between the first and second time you checked?’ I ask.

  ‘Eli, I don’t appreciate you talking to me as if I were a fool.’

  ‘Marta, please just answer my question.’

  ‘I checked you twice – maybe a quarter of an hour apart.’

  When I summon Mia to me, she confirms Marta’s estimate.

  To my great disappointment, both my sisters confess that they did not enquire of the physician from Persia what effect his elixir would have on me.

  Guessing at my thoughts, Mia says, ‘I placed my ear to your chest when I first felt your soul leave your body. There was no beating. And Marta checked your breath a second time, as she just told you.’

  ‘This Persian who treated me … Kurush. Was he a Zarathustrian?’

  ‘We didn’t ask,’ Mia replies, and Marta adds, ‘Lykos, the Baal Nephesh’s assistant, said he was a friend, and we didn’t think we needed to ask anything more.’

  ‘Lykos said he was a friend or claimed it?’ I question in a hectoring voice.

  Marta makes an irritated, guttural sound and looks to Mia to reply for them both. He’s your problem now, she is saying in their sisterly language. At such times, it seems that it has always been two against one in my family.

  ‘If you’re asking if we believed Lykos,’ Mia tells me, ‘then the answer is yes.’

  ‘Did you see the ingredients he used?’

  ‘That’s it – I have work to do!’ Marta announces, and she flees the room with her hands over her ears.

  After she is gone, Mia drops down next to me, and we listen to women’s voices coming from the street, discussing where to purchase the best lambs for sacrifice.

  ‘It’s hard to believe that it’s nearly Passover again,’ she tells me.

  ‘God blinks and a year goes by,’ I reply.

  She takes my hand. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says, frowning, ‘but do you really think the Persian wished to imprison you in a trance? Why would anyone want you to appear dead?’

  9

  After I call Yirmi to me and ask him to return to Lykos – our physician’s assistant – to find out all he can about Kurush of Persia, Mia sits with me again in my room, leans back against the wall and squeezes her eyes closed as if she has no plans to open them any time soon.

  A few minutes later, however, when she notices me studying her, she takes my hands in hers and swings them between us until they become – for the children inside us – an ark of polished cedar, exactly three hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits high. ‘Two of every kind shall come to you,’ she says in a sing-song voice.

  ‘I am sorry, Mia, but I don’t want to play right now,’ I tell her.

  ‘If Mama were here …’

  My sister says that because we used to play this game with our mother after every Sabbath supper.

  ‘Mama died long ago,’ I say.

  ‘Two of every kind,’ she repeats, squeezing my hands.

  ‘Later.’

  ‘The sacred ibises and finches,’ she continues, and the ruthlessness in her squint makes it plain that I have no choice but to cede to her wishes.

  ‘And the butterflies and bats,’ I say, obeying the formula we have known nearly all our lives.

  ‘And the cats and mice,’ she replies.

  ‘And the jackals and lions.’
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br />   ‘And the snakes and crocodiles.’

  We end with our voices joined, as it must be: ‘And the two of us as well.’

  Having transported a pair of each of God’s creatures to safety, we unlock our fingers. A moment later, I catch a glimpse of the pale and isolated life I’d have had if Mia had not tugged me out of my gloom following our father’s death, which had ended any chance I had once had for a life of study and travel.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ she tells me as she gets to her feet.

  Soon she returns with her jars of fragrant oils, and she informs me – no dissent permitted! – that she can wait no longer to cleanse me. ‘I’ll try to be gentle,’ she says, and then, inexplicably, cupping a hand over her mouth, she succumbs to girlish giggles.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I ask.

  ‘Boaz said the same words to me on our wedding night,’ she says, adding amidst her laughter, and in a confidential whisper, ‘Except that the hairy little beast wasn’t gentle at all!’

  Despite their divorce, Mia is still in love with Boaz, though she has never admitted that to anyone but me. He took up with a young Judaean courtesan a few years earlier and lives with her and her children near the salt mines beyond Qumran.

  This time, my skin welcomes Mia’s sponges and strigil without pain or protest, and in less than an hour she has removed the fetid layers of sweat and tomb-dust from me. To my itchy scalp she applies a mixture of ash and sulphur water. It’s the same wash that we use to take off the tainted patches of skin from Grandfather Shimon’s diseased face and back.

  And so – glistening and perfumed, with my hair combed back over my ears – I once again resemble the man I was before my illness and burial.

  ‘You know, from a certain angle,’ Mia says, tilting her head far to the side and showing me an astonished expression, ‘I might even mistake you for a handsome man!’