The Gospel According to Lazarus Read online

  I test my feeble legs in different ways over the next hour, hoping they will soon relearn the secret of keeping me upright without my having to lean against walls and grasp on to furniture. Mia turns away the friends and acquaintances who come to my door, explaining that I am still too weak for conversation. All this newfound interest in me seems harmless enough until a youth I have never seen before pushes open the shutters on the window by my front door. He leans his head inside and holds out a silver coin. ‘I’ll give you a shekel for a thread from your shroud,’ he says.

  His skin and eyes are yellowish – as if he has been poisoned with weld. He looks no older than sixteen or seventeen.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I … I don’t know where it is,’ I stutter.

  ‘Maybe you could find it for me,’ he says. ‘It’s important, and I’d be very grateful.’

  His beseeching expression moves me, and I manage to locate my shroud in my clothes chest. I pull away a thread for him, and when I hand it to him, he bursts into tears and kisses my hands.

  A number of other strangers soon come to my door, imploring me to relieve their ailments and afflictions, but Mia permits no one inside. Just before supper, my family and I are conversing in my room about our plans for Passover when the noise of feet scrabbling across my roof makes us gaze up fearfully at the ceiling. Two barefoot boys dressed in rags soon drop down into the courtyard. Mia manages to catch the younger of them – a grubby-looking waif with filthy feet – and shoves him back out into the street. The second – with frenetic, terrified eyes – shows my grandfather a nasty-looking blade, however, so I tell Shimon to let the boy steal whatever he wishes. The little thief yanks Mia’s spare robe from the cord strung across our courtyard, makes his way to the front door – his knife held high – and races away.

  While I calm my daughter, who has begun to cry, my sister locks my door again. Binyamin, her fifteen-year-old son – and the only one of her children who still lives with her – goes off to bolt all the doors and windows in their home.

  And so I await Yeshua, wondering how long this siege will continue.

  Unfortunately, we are unable to refuse entrance to two subsequent visitors because we must remain in their good graces. The first is Lucius ben David, the wealthy garum importer who has commissioned me to decorate his home and garden with mosaics. He lives in an opulent villa in Yerushalayim’s Upper Town, and, as he is in fierce competition with his patrician neighbours, he is adamant that my designs must be the most colourful and complex in Judaea. He has also obliged me give my word to have all my work finished by early summer, since the Roman branch of his family will then be visiting for the fairs that follow Ludi Apollinares. In short, I have been labouring like an Egyptian pack-mule since the autumn so that he can strut about Yerushalayim while wearing the crown of the most ostentatious Jew in Judaea.

  Lucius is a heavyset, round-faced man – somewhere near sixty years of age, by my reckoning. His thinning hair has been curled and dyed black and permitted to drape over his ears like a floral ornamentation.

  He enters my alcove ahead of his bejewelled young wife, whom I have never met before. His bodyguard – a blond-haired behemoth with sand-coloured eyelashes and a caterpillar of whiskers on his upper lip – deposits a small amphora of kosher garum on my floor as a present.

  My nephew Binyamin carries in two folding chairs for Lucius and his wife, who appears to be no older than sixteen and who displays an affecting faun-like hesitance whenever I set my glance upon her.

  After I kiss Lucius’ hands and speak the traditional Greek formulae of hospitality, he holds the yellow rose he has been carrying to his nose.

  ‘I’m sorry if my scent is still less than pleasing,’ I tell him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – you smell only a bit more earthy than you always do,’ he replies.

  Does he mean to offend me, or is that simply one more indication of how the Roman Jews despise their cousins from the Land of Zion?

  Lucius keeps his rose by his nose the entire time we converse. We speak in Greek, since my Latin is halting and his Aramaic – even after seven years in Yerushalayim – is hesitant and error-filled.

  Mia and Marta serve palm wine in our amethyst-coloured glasses, which we generally reserve for Hanukkah and other celebrations.

  Once we are settled, Lucius makes several jests about the odd and archaic customs of Judaean Jews, possibly because he knows that, as a Galilean, I have often been maligned and derided by the long-time inhabitants of Yerushalayim. What he says may very well be amusing in Latin, but in his Greek translations these attempts at wit fall between us like dead seagulls. Perhaps my ordeal of death and revival has dulled my powers of deduction, for it takes me some time to understand that this tidal wave of false mirth is down to Lucius’ discomfort at being in my home; though I studied the Torah of Mosheh and the epics of Homer throughout my youth and though my Greek is more fluent than his – owing to my apprenticeship in Alexandria – he considers me a common craftsman, and the Latinized Jews, like their Roman masters, regard men who earn a living with their hands as only one small step above brigands and bandits.

  As we converse, neighbours and pilgrims keep coming to my front door to receive my blessings. Others bang on my shutters. One half-made man, who identifies himself as a rug-maker from Tzor, stands outside my closed window calls out a list of his ailments to me. To my astonishment and that of my guests, he does not seem to mind all of those in the vicinity knowing that he has dropsy, bleeding haemorrhoids and an infestation of Persian lice.

  We do not ask him to leave us be; Marta and Mia decide that silence is our best strategy.

  Blessed be the Lord who bestows patience upon the weary … After Marta serves Lucius and his wife a plate of dried figs and apricots, my guest finally speaks of his reason for visiting me. ‘We lost a week while you were ill,’ he tells me in an injured voice. ‘I’ll expect you back at work tomorrow.’

  To emphasize the unfairness of his demand – and even perhaps win from him some admiration for my wit – I apologize for dying at an inconvenient moment, but he is either too Roman or slow-witted to catch my irony.

  ‘Apology noted,’ he says. ‘And delays like this one’, he adds, fixing me with a withering look, ‘are why I’ve urged you to hire an apprentice. He might have been making progress while you’ve been … been …’

  He glances away and searches for a euphemism for dead and in your tomb.

  ‘Absent,’ I suggest.

  ‘Exactly.’

  His young wife chooses that moment to reposition her legs and sigh; her dull eyes tell me that she is far away in her thoughts – and that she finds her husband as tiresome as I do. I don’t blame him for his protruding belly and ridiculous hair, I imagine her telling me, for time disfigures us all. But if he lives much longer, I will die of boredom.

  Once our business is settled, I expect Lucius to leave, but he embarks instead on a serpentine story of a friend of his who died after an illness drawn to him by the noxious humidity of Nicaea. At length, I realize that he wishes to take the lyre from my locked chest, as we say in the Galilee – to convince me to share my thoughts with him about a private matter without his actually having to ask for them. As best I can guess, he would like an answer to the following delicate query: where exactly did my soul go after my death – to the afterlifes envisaged by those who worship the Greek and Roman gods or to the rather more vague and undefined Eden of the Jews?

  I am trying to steal the lyre from his locked chest – to find out which of these futures he would prefer – when I am rescued by the unlikeliest of saviours, Annas ben Seth, our former high priest. Short and frail, with an impressive grey beard that reduces his lips to a judgemental slit, he is clothed in a white linen robe belted with a wide purple sash. He hobbles into my alcove ahead of his daughter, Sara, wife of the current high priest, Yosef Caiaphas. By then, twilight has given way to nightfall.

  Marta flees across the courtyard to her workroom just after
ushering Annas into my alcove. She cannot abide the Temple priests and refers to them – when we are alone – as our palace eunuchs, though she saves her sharpest barbs for Caiaphas, whom she delights in calling Kakíaphas, which is Greek for what is evil or to be avoided. Why such nastiness? Seventeen years earlier, when she was unable to give her husband David a child, Caiaphas instructed him to choose another woman to receive his seed. David selected their Nabataean servant, and a baby girl was born to her eight and a half months later, and he named her Yehudit after his grandmother. Though Marta raised her as her own, whenever she looks at her daughter – to this day – she feels the barren hollow in her belly that lost her the loyal affection of her husband and rendered her useless in the eyes of her own family.

  Annas requests that I refrain from kissing his hands or touching him, for I have been in a tomb and must not, therefore, have any contact with a priest. Lucius offers him his armchair and sits on a bench that Binyamin carries to him. A few moments later, Mia brings in two more glasses of palm wine.

  As I watch my sister’s deft and deferential movements, it amuses me to think that if my life were a Greek farce she would have handed Annas my Cretan cup decorated with the impressively endowed Minotaur, and my sisters and I would find ourselves accused of idol-worship and hauled off to prison.

  Lucius’ constricted voice brings me back to myself. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he tells us sadly, ‘but I must be going. A father with young children is never truly free to socialize.’

  Young children? The sons he has by his first wife are already married, and his new bride – according to the gossip I have heard – has had difficulty becoming pregnant.

  At the front door, Lucius dangles his hand before me so that I might kiss it again and reminds me I have given him my word to start work again the next day.

  ‘Honourable Annas, if you’ll permit me a question, to what do I owe the unexpected pleasure of your visit to my home?’ I say on returning to my alcove.

  ‘I’ve heard tell that you’ve undergone an exciting transformation today,’ he replies.

  His pursed smile and mocking tone set my feet itching. ‘I’m afraid I did not witness what happened,’ I reply.

  ‘No?’

  ‘They tell me I was dead, but I was not aware of anything. When I awoke, it seemed I had been with fever just a moment earlier.’

  ‘What awakened you?’

  My mouth is suddenly as dry as the desert. ‘I am not sure,’ I say, taking a rushed drink of water. ‘I did not hear any voices or stirring. I apologize for my ignorance.’

  As though making a first move at senet, he says cagily, ‘I understand that Yeshua ben Yosef entered your tomb.’

  ‘He was there when I awoke – that is true,’ I reply.

  ‘Are you in the habit of consorting with heretics?’ Annas raises his eyebrows challengingly. The sagely kindness in his demeanour has vanished.

  ‘I do not regard Yeshua as a heretic,’ I tell him.

  ‘But I do!’

  Then I would strongly suggest that you refrain from befriending him, is the reply that I would make if I did not fear his wrath.

  He gets to his feet with the unsteady effort of his age and eyes me scornfully down the line of his nose.

  Such loathing is for far more than just me and Yeshua, I think.

  ‘Are you aware of whom you’re talking to?’ he demands.

  ‘The blessed and honourable Annas ben Seth, former high priest. To whom I now apologize if I have given offence.’

  ‘I ask you now,’ Annas says, as though drawing a line beyond which I may not cross, ‘what sort of evil magic did Yeshua use to summon you back from the arms of death?’

  I have dealt with such accusations of sorcery against Yeshua before and give him my carefully worded answer: ‘You have been misinformed, honourable Annas, for Yeshua has never resorted to necromancy, devilry or bewitchment to heal those who come to him.’ I then raise my hand palm out to warn him that, although he may steer this conversation where he likes, there are betrayals he will not be able to force on me. ‘The Lord has conferred on him his special abilities, and I shall never say otherwise.’

  He fixes me with another bemused look – to let me know, most likely, that he cherishes this undeclared war between us. Does he feel the blood of a hunter flowing through his veins? From the way he smooths his hand across the waistline of his robe and shifts his prayer shawl, it seems that the stiffness of his youth may be returning to him.

  ‘That isn’t what I’ve been told, Eliezer ben Natan,’ he tells me. ‘Apparently your friend chanted an incantation over your body: “From the depths of the earth, you will again bring me up.”’

  Fear beats its wings by my ears; a traitor amongst those who grieved over me must have visited Annas and told him the exact verse of the Torah spoken by Yeshua.

  ‘My teachers always gave me to understand that no man of honest faith could confuse the words of the Lord for a mere incantation,’ I say. ‘And in any case, as I’ve now told you twice before, I did not observe my own resurrection. I heard nothing that Yeshua may have said to me.’

  He sucks in an exasperated breath. ‘Men do not return from death of their own accord.’

  ‘Please, dear Annas, take your chair again. I fear you are uncomfortable standing.’

  ‘I shall sit again when I’m ready! Now tell me who awakened you?’

  ‘The Lord must have wished for me to live again,’ I reply, and, to fend him off, I reach for a shield of Torah: ‘“I and I alone am God; no other god is real. I take life and I give it.”’

  Annas flinches; my knowledge of scripture has astonished him. And it is the shock in his eyes that convinces me that I have discovered how I shall defend myself.

  ‘Do you claim to speak for Elohim?’ he asks angrily.

  ‘No, I’m just an ignorant mosaic-maker. But I do know this: if the Lord wished me dead, I would be.’ Closing my eyes for reverential emphasis, I raise my shield again: ‘“Trust in the Almighty with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”’

  Dismissing my solemn tone with a displeased grunt, he says, ‘I begin to suspect that you are no God-fearing man but only a fool who sounds like one!’

  ‘“Blessed is the man who fears the Lord and delights in his commandments,”’ I quote from the Psalms.

  Annas reaches for a dried fig and pops it in his mouth, pleased with himself for a reason that eludes me. Perhaps he is convinced that, no matter how apt my quotations from Mosheh, he will leave me bloodied and battered in the end. Is he aware, however, that he chews his fig not like a lion but from side to side like a ewe – and that I have discovered that I am no longer afraid of him?

  ‘You can’t really want a war with Rome,’ he says, sounding conciliatory, though we both know that he is merely changing his tactics.

  ‘No, I’ve seen what Caesar can do,’ I say.

  ‘Have you?’ he asks, and he sits back down. ‘When was that?’

  ‘We lived briefly in Sepphoris when I was a young man, and it was still in ruins.’

  He leans back in his chair. ‘The sons of Esau will do the same to the Temple and to all of Yerushalayim if Yeshua provokes them too far.’

  ‘Believe me when I tell you, honourable Annas, that I’ve long wished for more … influence over my friend, but, in truth, I have little.’

  Annas joins his crooked hands in his lap, preparing for a new round of sparring with me. ‘Tell me about the journey of your soul after your death,’ he says mildly, pretending to be motivated by mere curiosity, but I sense his sly grin hidden under the word nefesh – soul.

  If I say I glimpsed even the tiniest shadow of the Almighty or one of the seraphim, Annas will accuse me of heresy for presuming to be the equal of Mosheh. Yet if I admit the truth – that I recall nothing – he may rightfully condemn me for denying the existence the Lord.

  ‘I beheld a stone,’ I finally say, though I do not know why. And yet after the word is spoken, it forms t
he image in my mind of a blue gemstone, and it is sitting in my hand, waiting for me to describe its purpose.

  Do any of us know from which hidden corner of our mind such spontaneous replies come? Unless … It occurs to me now that Yeshua might have been observing me from the Hekhal ha-Melekh – the Palace of the King – and drawn it from me.

  ‘A stone? What are you talking about?’ Annas questions.

  ‘A sapphire,’ I reply, and, a second later, I am jolted by the certainty that my long practice at word games has at last become useful. ‘It was sitting in the palm of my hand – shining with the light of creation,’ I continue. ‘Yet, after a few moments, it changed and became something … much more valuable. You see, it was no longer a sapphire but a Torah scroll. The sappir was, in truth, a sefer.’

  ‘My goodness, man, do you expect me to be awe-struck by this semantic trick of yours?’ he asks with a sneer.

  ‘All I know, honourable Annas, is that during the brief time that my soul dwelt in the Palace of the Lord, He graced me with an insight – that the greatest and most valuable jewel of all is Torah!’

  The priest’s daughter thrusts her hands over her mouth and speaks a blessing for having received a revelation. Given this small triumph, I permit myself to imagine that our conversation will now shift to a safer road. Instead, Annas glares at his daughter. ‘Child, I would warn you not to embarrass your father again!’

  The priest shows me his mocking smile and says in a sarcastic tone, ‘The constellations have favoured you, Eliezer! Your story has impressed a woman. But I’m growing weary of you. Now, as you know, rumours of miracles spread fast amongst the rabble. Though I’m powerless to prevent that, I can do this …’ Stepping forward, he holds his shrivelled hand over my head. ‘In the name of the Lord our God,’ he says, ‘I forbid you to speak a word of what took place in your tomb this day. And if you disobey me, Eliezer ben Natan, your soul shall be chained to a rock in the wilderness, and the night wind will take away your voice, and the sun will blind you, and …’

  While Annas threatens me, I chant the Shema to myself to form a battlement in my mind.