The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  My friends have brought myrrh from the tomb in which I awakened, but its funereal scent sickens me, so, to mask the peculiar stench that accompanies me now, Yirmi and Marta gather wild roses and strands of jasmine and lay them on my table, shelves and clothes trunk. Mia scatters the potent incense she makes of charred thyme leaves around the perimeter of my room.

  After Yeshua requests some time alone with me, he lowers my reed blinds around us. My feet have turned to ice, so he covers them with his cape. The squealing laughter of my daughter playing in our courtyard seems the world’s way of reassuring me that all will soon be as it was, but my heart – spinning outward towards my fears – gives me to believe that whatever has befallen me has changed me for ever.

  Kneeling, Yeshua holds the back of his hand to my forehead and tells me in a pleased voice that the heat of creation is returning to my flesh. When I fail to respond with a smile of relief, he sits with me. ‘Talk to me,’ he says, taking my shoulder.

  ‘I feel as if you and the others have left me behind with Pharaoh. Nobody will tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘You had tertian fever for a week. Mia said that she and Marta piled every cover they could find on top of you, and yet you still shook with chills. You had troubling visions as well. You told everyone you were trapped in snow on the top of Mount Sinai.’

  I am unable to recall any wintry summit, but when I lower my gaze, a feeling of entrapment returns to my arms and legs. And I see a bearded man kneeling before me. He wears the long robes and cylindrical hat of a Persian. His eyes are uneasy, and his hand movements are awkward and agitated. Is it dread that I see in his face?

  ‘Did the Baal Nephesh send a friend to look after me?’ I ask Yeshua, using the title of esteem that my parents long ago gave our physician, who grew up in Babylon.

  ‘No, your sisters told me that he was away. I don’t know who recommended the healer who came to see you.’

  ‘But someone came. I remember him – a Persian with a beard.’

  ‘Apparently so. Marta told me that he brewed herbs for you to drink.’

  I recall a bitter taste in my mouth. ‘What did he give me?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me.’

  I call through my curtains to Mia, who presumes the right to eavesdrop on my private conversations. And since I long ago ceded this point to her, there is no need to pretend otherwise.

  ‘The visitor was a Persian named Kurush,’ she tells me. ‘Lykos recommended him.’

  Lykos is the Baal Nephesh’s assistant. ‘What cure did he prepare for me?’ I ask.

  ‘A decoction of vetch and willow bark.’

  ‘It tasted terrible. Did it do any good?’

  ‘For a time. But then you grew weaker.’

  The effort she makes to fight away tears makes me raise my hand and bless her for looking after me.

  Once Mia is gone, Yeshua continues his explanation: ‘Your nephew Binyamin found me preaching near Pella. He asked me to return to you. But I …’ His expression grows worried.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘I waited two days before coming here. I feared we might quarrel again.’

  ‘I don’t remember any quarrel.’

  ‘The last time we were together, we argued about my plans to defy the priests.’

  As he tells me of our disagreement, I recall growing fearful for his safety and pressing him too vociferously to refrain from challenging the authority of our Temple officials. I am about to apologize when he says, ‘Can you forgive me for taking so long to reach you?’

  Tears squeeze through his lashes, which summon my own. ‘How could I not forgive you?’ I say.

  ‘I need to hear you say the words aloud,’ he tells me.

  ‘I give you all that you might ever ask of me – including my forgiveness.’

  My throat is desperately dry again, so we retreat into silence while I gulp down more water. At length, he stands up and goes to my window. I sense he needs to look into a world beyond our concerns. With Yeshua, there has always been the danger of his descending into too deep a chamber inside himself and never again emerging.

  On turning back to me, he takes a deep breath. ‘Your sisters told me you died while I was making my way here,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You stopped breathing. Apparently you were dead for two days.’

  He clearly believes the truth in what he is telling me, so I do not laugh. When I taste blood in my mouth, I realize that I have nibbled away some crust from my lips.

  My old friend studies me closely. I expect him to speak within me, as he sometimes does when voicing his thoughts aloud might endanger or compromise us, but he says nothing.

  ‘My sisters told you this?’ I ask.

  His eyes grow glassy. ‘Yes, they said your fever worsened and that you became so weak that you were unable to move. Mia said she was rubbing your feet with oils when felt the tremor of your soul leaving your body. She checked on your breathing, and there was none.’

  ‘Given that I’m here now, she must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Marta confirmed that you were dead.’

  ‘That … that’s very hard to believe.’

  ‘Yet that’s what happened. You were gone, and then you returned to us.’ He nods as if no other conclusion is possible. Echoing the Psalms, he says, ‘As you know, I have always filled my quiver with the unlikely and improbable.’

  That’s true enough, I think, and yet … ‘Are you certain?’ I ask.

  After he confirms that I was dead, I imagine the man I’d been only a moment before standing behind me, observing me, unwilling to come forward and join me. I am tempted to turn to face him, but I hold up my hands instead, and I open and close them, testing what it feels like to be alive. I study my calluses, which are thicker than I remember them, and, as I listen to my hesitant breathing, questions that I suspect I shall never be able to answer begin rattling inside my mind: How can I still be here? Has every part of my soul returned to my body? If this is possible, then what is … ?

  ‘Lazar, you need not walk this path alone,’ Yeshua says. ‘And together, we shall –’

  I have not told Yeshua to be quiet in at least a decade, but I do so now, because what has happened is beyond my grasp, and I sense that it always will be, and all I want to do is find a plot of land inside my mind where I can bury what I now know and continue where I left off a few days earlier.

  After Yeshua sits down beside me, I recall what a little boy asked me as we made our way home from the necropolis. When I turn to my old friend, he opens his arms to welcome my words – and to assure me that he took no offence at my requesting silence. ‘If I were an ibbur inhabiting this body,’ I tell him, tapping my chest, ‘then I wouldn’t be me – I wouldn’t have any of my memories of you or my sisters or anyone else.’ Speaking to myself as much as him, I add, ‘It’s obvious that I’m here in the flesh. But if I had died, then I’d have surely been …’ I stop speaking because what I was about to say has vanished from my mind.

  Marta carries in a bowl of steaming soup before Yeshua can address my apprehensions. She puts it on the low table by my mat and gathers up the protective talisman I’d removed from around my neck, which makes me realize what ought to have been obvious – that she made it for me.

  ‘Eli, stop talking – you need to eat,’ she says in a concerned tone.

  Could you simply hug me and listen to my fears? I ask her in my mind. Aloud, I say, ‘It’s very kind of you, Marta, but I don’t think I can eat a thing.’

  She crosses her arms over her chest, ready for a fight, so I take a first sip and tell her it is delicious.

  ‘All of it!’ she warns.

  ‘Of course, Marta, but it’s too hot at the moment.’

  She looks at Yeshua as if I am being difficult and says, ‘Make sure he finishes it.’ Eyeing him suspiciously, she adds, ‘And don’t you dare eat it for him!’

  Yeshua smiles at how well Marta understands the two of us
– and because he believes it will gratify her. I can tell from his expression that he is hoping, too, that she will go back to our courtyard without further delay, but he has miscalculated; his acknowledgement of her wit and intelligence only serves to irritate her, and she asks him what he means by his smile, and to free himself from that glare of hers that is like a boot on your chest, he tells her that it was meant to be appreciative and nothing more. To get her to leave, he asks her to bring him a cup of wine. The instant she is gone, he closes his eyes and shakes his head, recalling, most likely, how Marta has created tangled complexities for us many times in the past. As though to comfort himself, he reaches for my bowl of soup.

  ‘Don’t!’ I snap. ‘I might not be completely cured!’

  ‘No, I told you, you’re perfectly fine now,’ he assures me. After taking a sip, he drizzles some water into the broth to cool it and hands the bowl to me with a solemnity that seems at first to be misplaced.

  I want to continue speaking of my feelings to him, but my panic has turned into too tight a knot at the back of my throat. I hold my face in my hands.

  ‘“Arise and eat, for the journey has been too great,”’ Yeshua tells me. It is a quote from Elijah.

  From the seriousness of his expression, I realize that sharing our food is a ritual that he believes will help me, so I take a long sip of the soup while holding his gaze. On handing it back to him, I whisper the instruction from the prophet Yeshayahu that Yeshua gives to those who wish to help him in his work: ‘“Share your food with the hungry and open your homes to the homeless.”’

  Exchanging scripture with my old friend restores a measure of comfort to me. I realize then that I am dripping with sweat. Perhaps God meant this to happen, and I am exactly where I ought to be, I think.

  And yet a tremor shakes me when Marta returns to my alcove with a bowl of charoset and Yeshua’s wine. She sets the paste of almonds and dates down on my mat. ‘You’ve always been able to eat more sweets than anyone I know, so give this a try,’ she says.

  After my sister hands Yeshua his cup of wine, he thanks her and brushes her arm affectionately, hoping, no doubt, to win back her good graces, but she pulls away from him and shouts at him to leave her be.

  Yaphiel, my beloved, now that I am at an age when rumours about my moral failings and those of my sisters can do me little damage, I shall tell you a secret: both of your great-aunts were caught in a sandstorm while they were crossing the desert of adolescence, and the sandstorm was Yeshua. As for their younger brother, I shall leave it for you to decide how he fared in that same dizzying and – as it turned out – life-altering tempest.

  ‘The colour is returning to your face,’ Yeshua tells me when we’re alone again. ‘Do you want me to go on speaking to you of what happened when I returned to you?’

  After I nod, he takes a quick sip of wine and presses his hand over his heart, as he does when seeking the approbation of the Lord for what he is about to say. ‘As soon as I arrived in Yerushalayim,’ he tells me, ‘I went straight to your tomb. I rolled aside the stone blocking its entrance with the help of the others. Your sisters pleaded with me to stop. Marta even started cursing me – she told me she’d never forgive my wickedness, as she called it.’ In a conspiratorial whisper, he adds, ‘Her insults drew a crowd. And I knew I was behaving badly. But I also knew I needed to see you again. After I removed the sudarium from your face and wiped your cheeks and eyes, I kissed you, and the emptiness in your expression … the departure of all that had made you who you were …’ Yeshua rubs a tense hand back through his hair and takes a steadying breath. ‘I was crushed. I found myself high up on the edge of a cliff, and that cliff was all I’d failed to do for you. As I apologized for coming too late, you came to life in my mind, as you’d been when we were last together, and I asked you if you would forgive me.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You wouldn’t reply to me. So I placed my hands on your chest and began to recite a lamentation over you, and I’m not sure what came to pass, but my voice became a wind carrying me far from myself.’ Yeshua holds his hands over his head to give thanks to the Lord. ‘Ahead of me, in the distance, rose up the shimmering walls of the Palace of the King,’ he continues. ‘I shed my cloak and tunic and sandals, since they were no longer needed, and, as I passed through the central gate, I spoke a verse from the Psalms, and then … then I discovered that I was back in the tomb, standing over you.’

  ‘Which verse did you recite?’ I ask.

  ‘“Although you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth, you will again bring me up.”’

  Yeshua starts to sing the familiar melody, but a hissing sound from the courtyard draws his attention. At the window, he finds my daughter chasing Gephen, our cat, whose name means grape vine.

  ‘Tell Nahara to leave the poor creature alone!’ I say in too impatient a voice.

  Yeshua passes on my message more softly, then leans down into the courtyard and whispers encouragements to Gephen, who leaps on to the sill beside him. I nibble on the charoset, which tastes sweet and soft – and like all the Passovers I have ever celebrated.

  Once Yeshua has our cat cradled in his arms, his eyes close and his breathing slows. He does not speak or move for some time.

  When his eyes open again, he rubs his hand over his face and looks down at me questioningly.

  ‘You were telling me about seeing me in my tomb,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, and I looked at you for a long time, lying there motionless, wrapped in your shroud. And I heard a voice speak your name and say, “You shall return to me.”’

  ‘Whose voice was it?’ I asked.

  ‘The one we hear when we have joined the Lord.’ He fixes me with a challenging look. ‘No, it didn’t matter whether the voice was God’s or my own, for at that moment we were together on the heavenly chariot.’

  I voice no protest, since I have long been accustomed to Yeshua’s mode of speaking.

  As soon as he puts Gephen down, the cat bounds to me and climbs on to my belly. His front paws reach up to my chest, and he shows me a determined look, as though I have become the wall that he must jump over to reach his goal. I pat his bottom encouragingly, thinking, Yes, it is your affection I need right now, and, in a single bound, he is up on my shoulder and scratching his soft white face against the stubble of my cheek, so that his musty scent – of earth and weeds, along with a faint trace of blood – is inseparable in my mind from the next question I pose to Yeshua and the rest of my conversation with him.

  ‘And then what happened?’ I ask.

  Yeshua tells me that a red-glowing presence entered the room, and, when an image of me appeared in his mind, he realized it was my soul and that it had descended through the Sha’ar ha-Rahamim of the heavenly Yerushalayim into our world to reclaim my body, and, as soon as it crossed the borders of my flesh, my right arm twitched. ‘And when I took your hand, your eyes fluttered open,’ he says, shaking his head, still amazed by my revival. Gephen races to him and curls luxuriously around his ankle, asking with the slow curve of his back be lifted into our visitor’s arms, so Yeshua gathers him up and cradles him again against his belly. ‘Some of the others gasped and cried out,’ he continues. ‘Mia spoke to you first, but you didn’t understand her, so I raised my hand over you and blessed you, and your mouth opened and you tried to speak, but your soul had not yet resumed command over your voice.’ He kneels beside me and takes my hand. ‘I held you tightly while you put on again the garments of your earthly body lest you come to feel a stranger in a strange land.’

  6

  Unfortunately, I am given no time to ask Yeshua any more questions about my return to life; my children are unwilling to wait any longer for reassurance that my soul has found its way back to my body.

  Once Nahara has absorbed enough of my kisses to put the depth back into her large moon-bright eyes, and after her elder brother has had a chance to tell me – sunken-voiced – about h
is two sleepless nights of orphanhood, my sisters inform me that it would be inexcusably impolite not to welcome the rest of our friends and family into my room.

  Holding Nahara’s slender fluttering chest in my tight embrace, I make no reply; I am silenced by how her little body is being shaped by the unstoppable will to grow – and by how close I came to losing my chance to watch her and her brother become adults. All that seems important now is that I remain with her and Yirmi.

  ‘Well? Marta prompts.

  I caress Yirmi’s cheek to show my sister what my words may fail to convey and say, ‘For now, I just want to be with my family.’

  ‘Oh, Eli, stop making a fuss,’ she replies. ‘You only need to give our guests a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘A miracle!’ Yohanon calls out as he greets me. He raises his fist in triumph, as though I have now been conscripted into his sacred battle against the idol-worshippers who rule the Land of Zion.

  As I munch on the warm matzoh that Mia has handed me, my guests speak in reverent tones of the proof of God’s omnipotence that they have seen this day – proof that everyone in the room witnessed except for me. Yehudah, Andreas and some of Yeshua’s other disciples cast expectant looks at their mentor, eager to hear how he will characterize my return from the dead, but he pretends to be busy with Gephen, who crouches on the windowsill, preparing to launch himself into the courtyard. Maryam of Magdala kneels beside me, and the scars on her right cheek – four deep furrows only partially hidden by the drape of her hair – seem sad reminders of the wounds we give ourselves. She asks me in her welcoming, Galilean-accented voice to join her and her companions in a prayer.

  Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melech ha’olam, she’asa nisim la’avoteinu ba’yamim ha’heim ba’z’man ha’ze.