The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  My exasperation prompts me to shout a lie that finally chases them away: ‘The illness that took my life has not yet been cured, and Yeshua ben Yosef told me that it is highly contagious.’

  Just after my son and I pass Bethany’s small synagogue, I spot the Goliath who told me a bit about his ill-fated childhood ducking behind the trunk of a broad sycamore. I give no indication that I have spotted him, and – happily – he does not follow us.

  To demarcate the northern edge of the town – where the roads east and west out of Bethany converge – our elders long ago placed a cracked old millstone etched with protective invocations, and my son and I find the youngest son of our blacksmith sitting on it. His name is Alexandros, and he is twelve years old. He has a sundarkened face and hands, wild brown hair and tiny black eyes that roll back in his head from time to time. He is here nearly every day from dawn to dusk, rocking back and forth, jabbering and humming in a language he alone understands.

  As always, I ease my hand towards his cheek, but he leans away from me, flails his arms and shrieks. After I apologize, I leave a marble tessera on the rim of the millstone. Although I have never seen him pick up one of these tiny gifts of mine, the stone is always gone by the time I return in the late afternoon, so I expect that he has a pile of them at home.

  ‘Why do you keep trying?’ my son asks as we get on our way again.

  ‘Because one day he may let me touch him,’ I say. ‘And, on that day, Alexandros will know that he is not alone.’

  15

  As Yirmi and I make our way to Lucius’ villa in Yerushalayim’s Upper Town, five besotted youths wearing rumpled and stained togas spill out the door of the brothel just ahead of us. Have they been cavorting with Venus and Bacchus all night long? My skin begins to tingle with the dread that only those born in a land ruled by a foreign sword can grasp. Three of the young men are fledglings with downy cheeks, and the other two cannot be more than twenty. Such a number of silly names for their members that they use in their shouted jests – radix, rutabulum, caulis, cauda, root, rake, stem, tail – that a score of passers-by stop to gape at them.

  Though I speak Latin only haltingly, I understand a little of their sexual banter from having read the graffiti on the walls of the bordello that I visit after my children are safely tucked in bed.

  The two eldest youths are wearing garlands around their necks woven of purple lilac and orange wildflowers. Are they truly bridegrooms or are they satirizing the practice of wearing blossoms for some purpose beyond my imagination?

  ‘Say nothing to them or me until we are inside Yerushalayim’s gates,’ I whisper to Yirmi, though he already knows that it is safest to make himself appear as puny as possible in front of those who have colonized Zion. I lead my son between a scruffy goatherd and his foul-smelling trip so that we can cross over the nearby stepping stones to the other side of the street.

  ‘You, the labourer with the boy!’ one of the youths calls out to me, but I do not turn around.

  ‘Hey, Mosheh,’ another one says, ‘come over here and talk to us!’

  I continue to lead Yirmi forward. As we pass a dove-seller sitting by his wooden cages, one of the younger boys yells something about my manhood that makes his friends burst into insolent laughter, and, when I glance over at him, he wriggles his little finger in the air to mock me. The Romans are always amused and astonished by the covenant of circumcision we make with the Almighty.

  At such moments, I know I shall never fully escape the despair bequeathed to me by my father’s early death, for I am suddenly dripping with sweat and short of breath. In a furtive whisper, I remind my son not to let himself be provoked. ‘We do not want to give the youths an excuse to strip us,’ I tell him. Peeling a Jew, our conquerors call that particular indignity.

  The two young men wearing garlands dash across the street to us, mischief burning in their eyes. I recognize the shorter one as Servius, the second son of the Imperial Theatre manager. Though I decorated the courtyard of his family home two years earlier with a mosaic of Pan, he does not seem to recognize me. He asks in a voice made gritty by drink if my son and I would like to sample the pleasures of the bordello girls and boys whose ripe fruit they have just plucked, as he puts it.

  Are such stock phrases meant to be witty?

  Servius then speaks to me so quickly that I am unable to decipher his Latin. When I entreat him to address me more slowly, he mocks my Aramaic accent. ‘If your son is a virgin,’ he adds in a mixture of Latin and Greek, ‘I’ll pay you to watch him do some pounding! Or be pounded, if that’s what he’d like!’

  It is best to play the ignorant labourer at such times, so I bow subserviently and apologize for being but a poor Jew unable to speak the language of the Empire: Paenitet. Iudaeus pauper. Non dicere linguam Imperii.

  I add that we have work to do and must get on our way, but, as I take Yirmi’s hand, Servius closes on me and pushes me in the chest. ‘You’re going to be late for work today, Mosheh,’ he says menacingly.

  In his deep-set black eyes there is no empathy that I can find. Could my son and I make it safely to the tanners’ synagogue just inside the Fountain Gate?

  Across the street, a crowd has gathered to watch us. The only person I recognize is Goliath, who must have decided to track me after all. With the beating in my chest swaying me from side to side, I stammer an appeal to Servius for mercy, but, before I get very far, a big-bellied Roman gentleman with the bald head of an Egyptian priest strides up to me and barks an order for me to keep my Jewish mouth quiet.

  ‘And you, stop this nonsense!’ he commands the youths.

  ‘Somnias!’ Servius replies, meaning, I suppose, You must be dreaming! In a more serious tone, the young man uses a well-known idiom to tell his elder that I am only pretending not to speak the language of Rome: in Iudaea etiam arbores Latine loquuntur – in Judaea even the trees speak Latin.

  My fear of the violence I sense in the youth makes me reach into my pouch to check for my knife. By now, the three younger boys have joined us. One of them – no more than fourteen or fifteen – clears his throat and spits at me, hitting me in the neck and cheek.

  How could a boy spit at an elder? It seems so impossible to me at the time that I can find no reply equal to my astonishment.

  Across the street is a fair-haired woman carrying her baby on her back, in the Greek fashion. I know I will always remember her because she has seen my shock and humiliation and begun to weep.

  While wiping the spittle from my face, my need to teach Servius and his cohorts a lesson makes my hands tremble. I decide it best to make an appeal to the higher nature of big-bellied aristocrat, however, and I tell him that I am a simple craftsman who wishes only to avoid trouble. I add that I am in the employ of Lucius ben David, since my being in the service of an important Jewish Philoromaios – admirer of Rome – ought to win my son and me some protection.

  As soon as I mention Lucius, however, Servius charges forward and bulls up into me. I find myself lying in the street with a badly scraped knee and hand, and fighting for air. Yirmi rushes to me, tears in his eyes.

  While I am getting my breath back, I notice Goliath watching me from a few paces behind Servius. He looks disappointed. Would he prefer for me to use my fists and end up with a knife in my gut?

  ‘Porci!’ Servius growls at me and my son; it is the most common epithet the Romans use to try to provoke us, since they know that we are not permitted to eat pork.

  Did he attack me because he suddenly recognized me and feared that I would speak of my having worked for his father in front of his friends?

  Now that I am wounded, the boys let us get on our way with a few final jests. While Yirmi brushes the dust from my tunic, the Roman gentleman, from whom I expect a few words of solidarity, looks me up and down as though I am covered with manure and curses me.

  Infuriating? On the contrary, it is the perfect reminder that we must never count on men who believe that honest labour is a misfortune and povert
y a contagious disease!

  One of Lucius’ house slaves opens his garden gate to me and my son. I hope to avoid discussing my debasement with Yirmi and start to tell him of the work I have in mind for him, pretending enthusiasm, but he refuses to look me in the eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ I finally confess, and, to cheer his mood, I tell him that he can add a design of his own choosing to the mosaic on which I am currently working, but he makes his lips into a slit of forced silence, exactly as he does when he wishes me to know that I have punished him unjustly. I realize then – falling into gloom – that he is likely hiding a secret no boy wishes to have: that he is ashamed of his father.

  My own guilt is no less cumbersome, of course. And I, too, am hiding a secret – one that proves the near uselessness of the strategy of servility I adopted with our foes: Servius seems to have badly bruised – perhaps even fractured – one of my ribs.

  ‘Fear is a remarkably useful emotion,’ I tell my son.

  He looks up at me with a hard, accusatory expression, and I see then that it may take some time for so young a boy to forgive the frailties of his father – and his limitations.

  ‘It’s God’s way of making sure you seek protection,’ I add. ‘Why were we not stripped and further humiliated – or beaten? Because we listened closely to the Lord speaking inside us. Though I would not blame you for wishing that we could’ve taught those drunken imbeciles a lesson.’

  When he shows me a judgemental frown, I tell him then how I learned to pay close attention to my fear when a Roman aristocrat named Felix Marcus Octavianus – may even his shadow be erased from history! – paid for my father to be murdered in order to avoid having to pay us what he owed us for the stonework we had completed on his villa in Sepphoris, where we were then living. Yirmi has never before heard my version of his grandfather’s murder, and, when I tell him how I discovered my father’s blood-soaked body in his bed, the boy’s judgemental coldness breaks and he sits close by me. I must be in a confessional mood because I tell him that we never learned the identity of the spy who informed Octavianus that his assassin would find my father at home with a high fever and not at work. I mention, as well, that my mother permitted the Roman to pay a condolence call on us after the funeral and that when I asked her how she could permit such a criminal inside our house she replied, ‘Because I still have a son and two daughters, and I plan to do everything I can to make sure that they outlive me by many years.’

  There is a great deal more I would like to tell Yirmi about how to survive in a Roman colony, but tears gush in his eyes when I tell him that my father’s funeral was the worst day of my life, and he presses into me as though he had withheld his love from me for weeks.

  As I console him, he says, ‘Papa, your hand is still bleeding.’

  ‘It’ll stop soon,’ I say, tousling his hair. ‘And it doesn’t hurt.’

  When our shared intimacy grows too much for my son, he steps to the red granite fountain at the centre of the garden, leans over the rim and studies the playful fishes – their skin turned to gold by the sunlight – who, improbably, live out their entire lives inside a circle of stone. Two hoopoes are preening on the walkway leading to the grape arbour, fanning out their black-tipped crown feathers as if to reveal their hidden majesty.

  Unfortunately, the beautiful birds take wing the moment I point them out to my son.

  The delicate and mysterious vibration of life hiding in the trees and bushes, and in the air itself … It is all around us – and inside us as well. Could that not be enough for me? Perhaps it is too much to ask to be certain that God is watching over us.

  My son looks at me while swirling his hand in fountain, and I see that he wants to remain with me all day, but he does not wish to risk angering me by asking my permission.

  ‘Listen, Yirmi,’ I say when I go to him, ‘would you mind if I kept you with me today and put you to work? It would be good to have your help.’

  ‘Of course I’ll stay with you. But what about my lessons?’

  ‘We ought all to permit ourselves one day each week when we ignore what other people think of our behaviour. And today shall be ours!’

  His smile is what I picture in my mind all that morning to keep the pain stabbing into my chest from making me abandon my work. But if the rib is indeed fractured, I do not know how I shall continue earning a living for my family. Might this bad fortune be my punishment for doubting God’s existence?

  My son and I start work on the base of the blue menorah that I have designed for the floor of Lucius’ swimming pool. The candelabra is four paces of a man in height and seven in width, and I have placed it as an exuberant crown on the head of Ziz, the mighty griffin whom the Creator chose as King of the Birds. Above him I have depicted the winged chariot of Yechezkel soaring through an amber-coloured sky. The griffin’s hooked beak is open because he is speaking to the first woman and man, Havvah and Adam, who are huddling together beneath three date palms at the bottom left. I have made the outlines of the first man and woman with tesserae of polished obsidian as a reference to the glassy protection with which the Lord originally covered their bodies before it was reduced – at the time of their exile from Eden – to the nails on their fingers and toes.

  I have used tesserae of lapis lazuli for the stem and six branches of the menorah. The candle flames are black and made of onyx.

  When Lucius first studied my sketches, he thought it was inappropriate to place a menorah under water. ‘Absurd and foolish!’ was his pompous proclamation, and he ordered me to remove Ziz and substitute Leviathan and a school of friendly bream, as is the standard for pools and fountains amongst the Roman Jews. I won our dispute only when his regal elder sister Eliana assured him that my mosaic’s originality and daring would impress their family and friends far more than what she called the usual fishy mess. As to why I truly designed a menorah burning under water, I was not at first sure, since the idea came to me in a fleeting vision, but Yeshua later told me that he believed it was the Lord’s way of reminding us both that even an ocean cannot put out the flame of tsedeq – justice – once it has been lit.

  As Yirmi and I work, the dry, sharp, metallic clink of my son’s hammer against our slab of lapis lazuli makes me think of all the years of patience and effort it has taken me and my sisters to create our modest life – and of how easily it might be destroyed by Annas. Before the spring sun of Judaea can singe our winter-pale skin, I unfurl the canvas awning over the pool. A few hours later, when the bell for our midday meal is rung, we climb to the surface and wash the stone dust off our faces and hands in the channel of icy water that irrigates the garden. Affection for Lucius comes to me as I refresh myself. I realize that this quiet enclave of trees, flowers and birds is a child’s dream given form, and that he – some fifty years earlier – must have been that dreaming child.

  My son and I are served lunch by an elderly Idumaean house-slave named Siron. We sit under the marble colonnade at a wooden table painted with seven insatiable satyrs and an equal number of ravished nymphs. Yirmi studies their urgent and acrobatic coupling whenever he is certain I am looking the other way, pressing down hard on his own desires. Ought I to take him to my preferred brothel one day soon or wait until he asks to come along with me?

  As a treat, I permit my son to take a few hearty sips from my wine cup, which makes him as drowsy as Noach, just as I had hoped; he has laboured enough for one day.

  While we are eating our almond cakes, Lucius’ young wife appears in an upstairs window of the villa, watching me with curious eyes, which turns me into the eighth satyr at our table – and the only one lacking a consort. Blessed be Dionysos, for he soon sets my son snoring with his head on our table, which allows me to return to the bottom of the swimming pool under the concealment of the awning.

  Pity the solitary widower who is travelling alone towards old age; as soon as my virile fantasies reach their climax, my fear of my own mortality takes hold of my mind and spirit
. Will visitors to this pool a hundred years from now know that my life was as real to me as theirs is to them?

  I am reworking Havvah’s light-filled eyes – making them Leah’s – when a drowsy Yirmi starts down the ladder to me.

  As I put down my hammer, a revelation opens inside me: we need the Lord because He alone has no yesterday, today or tomorrow. Our only chance to dwell in a perpetual present is to cleave to Him.

  16

  Will men and women ever live out their lives without coming to recognize the scent of burning human flesh?

  While walking home to Bethany, Yirmi and I encounter an unruly crowd of several hundred that has gathered below Methuselah’s Hill. Above us, on the summit, where the grand old patriarch’s tomb is said to have been before the Great Flood carried it away, three naked men have been bound to crosses.

  A fourth victim, tied to a pole, has become a smouldering mass of melted flesh and bone. The sulphurous stink of the flaming pitch the executioners poured on him forces me to breathe only through my mouth, and I advise Yirmi to do the same. A fifth victim has been nailed to a cross that is taller than the others, and he is just a boy, fair-haired, slender and long-legged. Blood from the scourging he has been given is splattered over his shoulders and hips.

  I suspect the Romans have chosen today for such a spectacle because of the impact it will have the thousands of pilgrims already in Yerushalayim; these visitors will return to their towns and villages in lands as far away as Lusitania and Persia with word of how useless it is to defy the Emperor.

  The crucified men plead for the clemency that they will never receive, for the very concept of mercy connotes weakness in the benighted language of Caesar. The force and tenacity of their shrieks mean that they were bound to their crosses but a short time earlier and are still many hours from death. I hear the boy’s despair-filled cries most piercingly of all. Need you ask why? Do you not see my son beside me?