The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  A small woman with a drawn face and curious, deep-set eyes leans towards me. She holds a small square of fabric over her mouth and nose, and she peers at me as though endeavouring to solve a complex calculation. She says something unintelligible – in Latin, perhaps – and lifts her brows in an attempt to prompt my reply. I wonder why she doesn’t address me in Aramaic – or in Hebrew or Greek.

  She must be a foreigner. The others, too. And yet nearly all of them wear Judaean dress.

  To my left a stooped old man is weeping, his tallith draped over his shoulders. Beside him is a tall long-limbed woman – forty years old, I would guess – clutching a woollen mantle to her chest as if it might jump from her and scamper away if she were to ease her grip. She has the stricken face of a lost soul who has seen too much, and the collar of her peplos is torn. The small scar on her chin – in the shape of a crescent – seems familiar to me.

  Something furry folds into my right hand. A mouse? Could I have been taken to a den of wild animals and vermin? I am unable to turn my head to get a look. Below my racing pulse stirs the hope that the little creature will not bite me.

  Yaphiel, you might think it comic, but I later discover that the hand of an old friend can feel exactly like a shivering mouse under certain peculiar circumstances.

  My shoulders are gripped from behind, and I am pushed into an upright position. The long-haired youth and the woman with a crescent scar unfold a coarse linen cloth that has been wrapped around my chest and legs. Do I fall asleep while they work? I next remember the tearful old man covering my naked sex with his prayer shawl.

  A wooden ladle is held to my lips by a slender man in a camlet cape and hood. He is patient with me, this stranger with generous and powerful hands, and I gulp at the next ladle he offers me, and the one after that, and … After a time, I split into two persons: an exhausted being desperate to slake his thirst and a distant and curious observer wondering why such a simple act has become so difficult.

  After I have drunk my fill, I notice an amber necklace around my neck. Its beads are a milky yellow. When I try to grip it, tremors strike my hand again.

  Help me.

  My voice will not come, but the long-haired boy reads the desperation in my face and lifts up the necklace for me to see. Could it be the one my mother always wore?

  ‘Give him a look at the talisman!’

  A woman’s emphatic voice prompts him to show me a roundel of parchment that has also been hung around my neck. Four crude figures are designed on it, graced with oval Egyptian eyes. Their angelic names are written above their heads: Mikhael, Gavriel, Uriel and Rafael. Underneath them is a quote from the Psalms in the handwriting of a child: ‘No disaster shall befall you, no calamity shall come upon your home. For the Lord has charged His angels to guard you wherever you go.’

  A flute melody – a Phrygian tune, plaintive and mournful – calls me towards sleep, and the slumber inside me is warm and abundant, like a gently swaying sea.

  Some time later, the man who helped me drink kisses me on the lips. He has taken off his hood. He has red and swollen eyes.

  He has been grieving, I think, and I wish to ask him if a friend of his has died, but I am still unable to find a voice.

  He caresses my cheek. ‘Shalom Aleikem, dodee,’ he whispers. Peace to you, beloved.

  He knows Aramaic, which is a comfort.

  Stubble coarsens his cheeks, and his shoulder-length brown hair is in a tangle. He shows me a weary but contented smile.

  He would like to let himself go and laugh the exhausted laugh of a man who has been weeping, I think.

  The mist of forgetfulness inside me clears at that moment, and I recognize him. Yet he looks older than I remember him – and spent in body. Could he be ill?

  When I reach up to him, intending to test his brow for the heat of fever, he grips my hand and kisses it as if we had been lost to each other for years. ‘I answered you in the hiding place of thunder,’ he says, which is how we have greeted each other since we were boys. It is a quote from our favourite verse of Psalm.

  Where are we? I shape this question with my lips – at least, that is my intent – but for some reason I fail to make myself understood, and Yeshua shows me a puzzled face. ‘You’ll be yourself again soon,’ he tells me. ‘All of us will help you.’

  I scan the countenances around me and count them – fourteen. Standing on each side of Yeshua are my old friends Maryam of Magdala and Yohanon ben Zebedee. Yohanon has had his thick black hair clipped so short that he appears to be wearing an Ionian skullcap. He smiles encouragingly at me through his tears.

  Maryam’s kohl-ringed eyes look bruised. She is wearing her saffron-coloured robe – a gift from Yeshua – though it looks too large and cumbersome on her. Behind her – dressed in an elegant toga, pinching his nose – stands Nikodemos ben Gurion, one of Yeshua’s benefactors. He peers at me as if I might be an impostor. Could I have changed in some way that makes me seem another man?

  At the back, taller than all the others, are my Alexandrian cousins, the twins Ion and Ariston. Ion, the bolder of the two, waves at me and grins in his boyish way.

  Maryam draws my glance from him when she raises her hands and blesses me. I spot a wine-coloured design of the zodiac on her palm and aim to ask her about it, but all that emerges from me is a dry ratcheting sound.

  At length, I grow anxious to find my mother and father, but they do not seem to be with us.

  I know that I am crying only when I taste salt on my lips. The long-limbed woman – whom I now recognize as my sister Mia – takes my hand and places it over her face, breathing in deeply on the scent of me, though she soon starts coughing. When we were children, she used to say that I smelled like warm barley bread. I remember that now, and my name, but many other things still escape me. Might we have all gathered together for my father’s funeral?

  ‘Where are our parents?’ I manage to ask her in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘Everything will be all right,’ Mia replies. ‘You mustn’t worry yourself.’

  She puts her arm around the old man next to her. ‘Grandfather Shimon risked leaving the house to be with you,’ she tells me in a cheerful voice. She points then to the small tired-looking woman holding a piece of fabric over her mouth. ‘And Marta is here, of course. Many friends have come. And your son and daughter.’ She summons my children to her with a wave.

  Nahara is trembling. She looks as she does when she has been chased out of sleep by thunder. Yirmiyahu, her older brother – the long-haired youth with anxious eyes – lifts her up to me.

  Nahara throws her arms around my neck. Blessed be the kindness of the Lord; as she sobs, I still the shaking in my hand long enough to comb her soft brown hair, though my touch only makes her cry harder.

  If I’m unable to calm her, then Leah will …

  Before finishing my thought, I recall that my wife’s life ended six years before, at the same moment that our daughter’s began. My mind also locates my parents’ graves in a suffocating corner of my memory I rarely visit.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so weak,’ I whisper to my daughter.

  As she sobs, Yirmi eases her despair with endearments, then leans down and presses his lips to both my eyes, which seems his way of linking the three of us together – and an extremely mature gesture for a youth who only reached manhood a few months earlier.

  Yeshua returns to me then. He places his hand on top of my head and presses down, as he does when he wishes to heal a supplicant. ‘“The season of singing has come,”’ he quotes from the Song of Shelomoh.

  He begins to chant, and I flow towards his voice, which I know as well as my own, and, when he lifts his hand from me, I follow its absence beyond the borders of my flesh, and I am in the air now, held aloft by the sound of his words in Hebrew, and I remember my father telling me that our ancestors gather around us when we intone our hymns, and …

  ‘Do you think you can stand, dodee?’

  Yeshua’s question brings me back in
side my body. I shake my head, for I am unable to feel my legs.

  ‘But you know now who I am?’ he asks.

  A silly memory makes me grin. ‘Sometimes a teacher and sometimes bitter trouble,’ I whisper.

  It is an answer I invented when we were students in order to put him in his place when he grew too full of himself. It is a play on words: morah means bitter trouble and moreh means teacher.

  I expect Yeshua to laugh; instead, he speaks to me in a down-hearted voice. ‘No, I’m the one who pushed you off the wall and into the talons of the Lord of the Sky. Though maybe I …’ Before he can complete his sentence, his eyes flood with tears and he squeezes my hand. ‘Can you forgive me for coming too late?’ he asks.

  Too late for what? I wonder.

  4

  After my cousins lift me on to a wooden bier and carry me into the daylight, I realize I had been lying inside one of the rock-cut tombs just off the road north to Anathoth.

  Yeshua and Maryam, walking together, lead our small group out of the necropolis towards the road south to Bethany. Bread and fruit have been left before many of the entrances to the tombs, summoning clouds of flies.

  When my grandfather lifts the back of my head to slip a small cushion underneath, I ask him why I was brought here.

  ‘So you remember nothing, my boy?’ he questions.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  My son raises a palm frond over my head to shade me. ‘What’s your last memory, Father?’ he asks.

  With my eyes closed, I see myself seated on a mosaic of a bird, surrounded by the tools of my trade. ‘I was repairing the floor of our courtyard,’ I reply. ‘I think it was this morning.’

  The boy grimaces as if I have given him bad news.

  His aunt Mia eases him out of the way. ‘We’ll talk at home, Eli,’ she says. ‘Just rest for now.’

  ‘At least tell me who died and whose tomb I was in.’

  ‘The tomb belongs to Nikodemos.’

  ‘But he’s right over there.’ I lift my hand and gesture towards him; he is walking ahead of us, alongside Shimon bar Yona, another of Yeshua’s close friends.

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ Mia agrees, but she says nothing more.

  Frustration makes me wish to shout, but my words come out as a desperate croak.

  My sister calls to Yeshua. ‘Speak to my brother,’ she tells him, which confirms my earlier suspicions that he has been directing this conspiracy against me.

  My old friend comes to the left side of my bier, as though to counterbalance the emotional weight of my sisters, who walk on my right. ‘Lazar, just be patient. All will be clear in a little while,’ he tells me, using his childhood name for me to win my compliance. He pats my arm and implies with his constrained expression that he’d prefer to talk to me only when we have a chance to be alone.

  Fortunately for him, I am too weak to argue. Also, an unruly throng has gathered around us, and Ion and Ariston have found themselves forced to thrust their way forward through tightly packed clusters of men and women who stare and gape at me.

  The crowd soon parts for a tall man with tight hyacinth curls in his fair hair, a style favoured by the Judaean aristocracy, for they are ever eager to imitate our conquerors. He wears a porphyry-coloured robe embroidered at the collar with golden thread. An armed bodyguard walks beside him.

  ‘I’ve been warned about you, Yeshua ben Yosef!’ the man snarls, and he glares at my old friend as though cursing him in his mind.

  At the time I thought that this interloper was simply an angry stranger, but it occurs to me now that news of what had happened to me in my tomb might already have reached the Temple. If so, then he might have been a messenger sent by the High Priest to dissuade Yeshua from using his healing powers again in so astonishing a manner. Indeed, that possibility seems a likelihood now.

  ‘May peace yet find you on this beautiful morning,’ Yeshua tells him, holding up his hands to show that he carries no weapon.

  ‘We’ll have peace when you and your companions return to your homeland!’ the aristocrat retorts.

  Yohanon steps beside Yeshua. ‘What exactly were you told about us?’ he asks.

  ‘That you would bring your evil sorcery to Judaea, and that your sinister words –’

  ‘I cast no spell,’ Yeshua cuts in. ‘It was the Lord who chose life for my friend.’

  The man spits by Yeshua’s feet. ‘And yet a filthy stench accompanies you everywhere. All who stand downwind of you and your friends know that the Lord has abandoned you.’

  ‘Stop wasting our time and step aside!’ my grandfather shouts.

  The unpleasant Judaean tells him to mind his own business in an imperious tone and turns again to Yeshua. ‘If you didn’t steal this man out of the arms of death, then who did? Give me the name of the necromancer who would play at such dangerous games!’

  ‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,’ Yeshua answers.

  ‘So you insist that your trickery is the work of God?’ the man says with a sneer.

  ‘No, you’ve misunderstood me. What I’m saying is something different – that the Lord has reminded us today of the profound and hidden things in our world and His.’

  The stranger gives no indication that he recognizes these words as coming from the Book of Daniel, which gives me to believe that he is ignorant of scripture – though I realize now that he might have wished to keep us from guessing that he was in league with our priests.

  ‘Not even a heretic like you could believe that God wishes for cadavers to take to their feet and prowl our streets!’ he declares.

  ‘All I know is that the Lord has brought my friend back to us. And I’m grateful.’ Yeshua smiles down at me – his eyes moistening – and he again cites Daniel, but this time, only to me and in a whisper, as though to tell me that he and I shall soon need to broach difficult and secretive matters: ‘“The Lord knows what is in the darkness, though the light dwells in Him.”’

  At the time, I see no particular importance in Yeshua’s focus on the Book of Daniel.

  ‘Do you really expect me to believe that the Almighty is working through a Galilean peasant?’ the quarrelsome stranger demands.

  Yehudah of Kerioth steps beside Yeshua. ‘Enough of this silly argument,’ he says to the aristocrat. ‘We’ve got to get our friend home. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Who is it you think you’re addressing, young man?’

  ‘I’m addressing a man who ought to let us get on our way!’ Yehudah replies in a seething tone. His green eyes are lit with rage.

  The stranger’s bodyguard unsheathes his sword, but Yeshua pleads for calm, then takes the arm of our belligerent enemy and leads him a few paces away. As I watch them conversing in lowered voices, a barefoot tyke with a much-soiled face, reeking of filth, manages to squeeze between my two sisters. ‘Was an ibbur inside you?’ he asks me in an eager voice.

  Before I can find out why he would pose such a silly question of me, an old woman with a squashed and wrinkled face grabs Ion’s arm. ‘Let’s have a good look at him!’ she cackles.

  When the crowd surges, my cousin loses his grip on the front of the bier, which lands with a thud on the packed earth of our roadway. I tumble off but do not suffer anything more painful than a bump on my shoulder thanks to the quick reflexes of my son, who cushions my fall.

  The crone shakes a filthy rag at me, spraying a greasy liquid over my chest and face. ‘Now we’re gonna see what you are!’ she shouts.

  Later, my sister Marta, who has long studied the curious arts in a secret circle of local women, will speculate that the fluid was designed to reveal my true form as a demon and that the old woman probably expected me to sprout horns and a tail.

  As Mia wipes my face, the sunlight presses like hot metal against my closed eyelids. Thankfully, Yirmi soon has me shaded again with his palm frond, and my cousins lift me back on to my bier. This time, I feel Ion’s strong grip around my ankles, which means that sensation is returning to my legs.

 
Marta spreads my shroud over my belly and legs as a protective covering.

  After Yeshua comes back to us, he tells me in an apologetic voice that he has to leave me again for a short while. I quickly lose sight of him, and it is while I am looking for him in the multitude that a sumptuously dressed woman carrying a strand of pearls in her hand asks me if her servant might be permitted to slice off a piece of my shroud.

  I am at a loss as to how to reply, but Yohanon intervenes. He speaks with the woman in hushed tones, then comes to me. ‘Her eldest daughter is a leper,’ he whispers behind his hand. ‘She believes that even just a thread of your shroud might cure her.’

  So it is that I give my permission for her servant to take a piece.

  Yeshua’s forearm is bleeding when he returns to me. I ask him about it, but he tells me it is of no importance. He parts the crowd by waving his staff before him.

  Just before starting off again, Mia smears ewe’s fat on my lips, which must be crusted and cracked, for her fingertip comes away with blood. Judging from the low angle of the sun, it is late afternoon. Swallows are slicing through the air above us, playful and exuberant, possessed of all the energy and grace that I now lack.

  All these clues from nature tell me that it is springtime, and, as we enter Bethany, the dusty streets overflowing with pilgrims remind me that Passover is at hand – and the reason that my Alexandrian cousins are with us.

  It seems to me that our pilgrims have begun arriving in Yerushalayim earlier and earlier in recent years. Or did I somehow miss the start of Passover? When I ask my grandfather, he pats my hand reassuringly. ‘No, my boy, our Seder is still a week away.’

  Sitting in a donkey cart by a clothing stall in the marketplace is a young mother with plaited hair, her baby at her breast, and seeing them together reduces my thoughts to a single lost hope: if only Leah were able to meet me at our door and explain to me what has happened.

  5

  On reaching home, I discover that my legs are still unsteady, so my cousins carry me to the alcove that serves as my bedroom, ease me down on to my mat and prop me up with cushions. Marta insists on going to the courtyard to heat up some lentil soup for me, though I tell her I am not at all hungry. After Mia helps me slake my continued thirst, she sets about removing the grime from my face with her strigil, but my skin feels as if it has been burned, and her scraping, no matter how gentle, makes me shudder.