The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  A familiar Phrygian melody starts up behind us – intoned by distant voices – and then seems to catch up, like a wave yearning for the shore.

  Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord. That is the start of the Psalm that the faithful offer to the sky and earth and everything in between.

  Love’s voice will accompany us today, I think, and, after I sing a first verse, I hold my breath as if I am about to submerge into frigid waters. Remember the shiver of truth that shook you, I tell myself, for you will one day need to tell others what it was like to have been here on the day that everything changed.

  Thousands have been waiting for us inside the walls of our capital. A surprising number of them carry palm leaves and citrons, as if this were Sukkoth. Perhaps they wish to remind us that, although the Passover will free us from Pharaoh, we still might be forced to wander in a Roman desert for many years to come.

  From rooftops and windows well-wishers call out praises and prayers to Yeshua. Dozens cluster around me for healing, and Shaul and Uriyah are no longer able to keep them from jostling and bickering. An ancient rebel with a knife scar across his cheek and livid red sores disfiguring his face causes me to stumble when he grabs my collar in his fist. He begs me to grant him a quick death, adding in a voice choked by emotion that his life has been a worthy adventure but that he is suffering too greatly to continue. And so, in the prayer I speak over his bent head, I ask the Lord of Mercy to call him home.

  Many of those who come to me reveal their poor understanding of our mission by referring to Yeshua as our melekh – king – but it is easy to forgive them, for in their acclaim is their longing for a ruler who has come from their midst and whose crown will not glisten with the gold of earthly riches but shine instead with the crimson of divine justice.

  After Yeshua pulls on the reins and brings Iason to a halt, he turns around to measure the length and breadth of the crowd with his eyes, and his gaze passes over me, and, for a tense, throbbing moment, I feel his thoughts brush over mine, and what he is thinking is this: I must find a way to show them the path to a place they have never been before and the existence of which they may doubt.

  Over the next two hours, he leads his donkey and the five thousand men and women who have anointed him with their hopes through the streets, alleyways and squares of the city, on a route that follows its ancient walls, and even those who are not familiar with the concept of an eruv sense – in the very soles of their feet, most probably – that there is a higher purpose to the perimeter he traces.

  Twenty-four Roman foot soldiers do not suspect his arcane and invisible purpose, however, and they keep vigil over what they likely regard as a degenerate mob. They march by our side in the broader streets and ahead of us through the narrower passageways. Youths on rooftops taunt them with insults about their masculinity.

  I would venture to say that most of the faithful are able to forget that the Romans are observing us; we Jews have become adept at looking above and around what we would prefer not to see.

  Once we have walked the perimeter of the capital, Yeshua leads us to the Synagogue of the Woodworkers. Annas, Caiaphas and seven other priests await us there, alerted by Yehudah, perhaps, as to the place where the troublesome preacher from the Galilee will address his friends and supporters. Do they understand that he will also consecrate it as the centre of the holy territory he has created – of his divine eruv? They stand with several score supporters, including a number of influential Pharisees well known to Yeshua and me. A large retinue of guards cordons them off from the people.

  Caiaphas is dressed in his ceremonial robes. The golden seal on his turban reflects the sun, and, as he turns towards an assistant, a nymph of light races across the square, climbs up Iason and perches on one of the houses opposite.

  I know the secret purpose behind his formal attire, but Shaul – the boy from Natzeret guarding me – does not. ‘How could any of us trust a man who dresses like a peacock to receive a crowd of pilgrims and labourers?’ he asks me with a snarl in his voice.

  Apotropaios? Would he understand my Greek? I doubt it. And I do not dare speak to him of matters that would pose a danger to him. ‘Remember how Aaron ended the plague’ is all I tell him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

  Maryam has overheard our conversation and gives Shaul information that I would have preferred to withhold. ‘His priestly robes are not merely a covering for the body, just as his breastpiece is not a decoration. He dresses that way to safeguard himself from all he cannot see or hear or even conceive and that would compromise his power – and from Yeshua’s magic, most of all.’

  After we stop walking, Yeshua brushes the dust from his tunic and sandals. His awkward gestures tell me he did not expect to be met by Caiaphas. With dread in my heart – like blood spilling – I wonder what his next move will be.

  Is it our decades of training in scriptural interpretation that leads his thoughts to the third book of the Torah? Here is the verse he must have already recited to himself: ‘When anyone amongst you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock.’

  Just after he sets off towards the rickety stalls of the marketplace opposite the synagogue, a naked little boy breaks though the line of guards brought by the priests and runs to him as if dashing towards a gift of which he has long dreamed. The child’s hair is a tangled mop and his feet are filthy.

  My old friend lifts him high into the air and says something that prompts the boy to giggle. Has he asked for the tyke’s blessings? The boy presses places both his hands on to Yeshua’s head and shouts the prayer we use before eating bread, which sets the faithful laughing and cheering.

  Has this moment of grace been planned?

  I am about to conclude that it has when his mother – taut anger twisting her face – rushes up to Yeshua and grabs back her son, slapping him hard on his bottom, which sets him shrieking and wailing.

  When I turn back to Yeshua, I spot Goliath standing twenty paces behind him, to the side of a stall belonging to a rug-seller. His eyes are fixed on Yeshua, who has started walking towards an elderly bird-seller.

  The frantic beating in my chest tells me that there is a tether stretched between Goliath, Yeshua and me, and I slip my knife from my pouch. If he takes even one step forward, I intend to rush out to him, but he does not move; he watches Yeshua step up to the haggard-looking bird-seller, who shows him a pinched, suspicious face. Go away – I want no trouble, she tells him with her resentful eyes.

  After he takes a coin from his scrip and hands it to her, she stands and goes to a large cane-work basket overstuffed with doves.

  Goliath continues to observe, his head above all others. I hold my mother’s amber necklace in my hand and pass the beads through my fingers, but even their smooth and generous roundness – the shape of thirty years of a mother’s apprehension – is unable to keep me from picturing him charging Yeshua with murder on his mind.

  The bird-seller wears two silver anklets on her right leg and a heavy carnelian charm around her neck. Her robe is a patchwork of remnants and rags sewn hastily together. The two birds that she withdraws are slender and grey, with a thin band – a graceful calligraphic stroke of black – around their necks. They are bound with twine.

  Yeshua and the bird-seller speak for a time, but prayers and pleas shouted around the square cover their words. After she cuts the twine with her knife, she hands the doves to him, and he takes a bird in each hand.

  Yeshua walks to the priests, intending, it would seem, to pay his respects by offering the doves for sacrifice. He speaks to Caiaphas with his head slightly bowed, and yet his message must be defiant; the High Priest ornaments his replies with frowns and abrupt hand gestures that would seem to indicate that he believes he has been insulted.

  Goliath, still just watching, begins to bite his lips.

  When Caiaphas turns his back on Yeshua and steps away, the golden bells sewn into the hem of his rob
e sound in my ears like a signal of attack, and an upsurge of fear sets me rushing forward until one of our bodyguards grabs my arm in his fist.

  ‘My orders are to keep you with us!’ he says gruffly.

  ‘Let me go! Something very bad is about to happen,’ I tell him.

  But I am soon proved wrong; neither the priest’s guards nor Goliath advance on Yeshua.

  My old friend still holds his doves. Has Caiaphas refused his offering?

  Yeshua starts back towards his followers but then halts abruptly at the centre of the square, as if he has just remembered an important duty. He holds out his doves out to us.

  His gestures seem spontaneous, but it occurs to me that this moment might have been planned for years – in a place where he has longed ventured alone.

  In the High Priest’s outraged countenance, I read a single thought: If I do not win this battle, this insolent Galilean will turn me out of my Temple, and I shall become as wretched as he is.

  Yeshua faces east, towards the sun. From the Book of Enoch, he shouts, ‘“For the chosen there will be light and joy and peace, and they will inherit the earth.”’

  He repeats the quotation three more times, facing north, south and west, and, when his eyes close, he chants an incantation from Yeshayahu: ‘“Yerushalayim, you shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the open hand of your God.”’

  He then brings the two doves together, slowly and purposefully. Later, I will realize that he sealed the ends of his eruv together the moment they touched.

  Have his actions summoned a visitor?

  Yeshua scans the horizon, and when he spots who – or what – he is looking for, his eyes open wide with awe and he holds the birds high over his head.

  ‘It’s not sacrifice I seek but mercy and racham!’ he calls out.

  Yeshua turns in a slow circle, still holding the doves over his head, and he repeats his invocation to mercy and compassion three more times.

  The same angel who saved Isaac has come to witness this moment.

  I do not know how I know that, but I do.

  And his message? The Lord wishes no more sacrifices, not even of doves.

  And if that is the case, then I know that Yeshua is in for the battle of his life; without our rituals and rites of bloodletting, the Temple will cease to function as the centre of our lives, and the priests will no longer rule over us.

  ‘“Ask now of the wild animals and they will teach you,”’ Yeshua calls out to us, citing the Book of Job. ‘“Or speak to the Earth, for she will guide you.”’ He kneels, and the worshipful voice that comes from him is one that I seem to have known all my life. ‘All the birds of the air will also tell it to you.’

  He tosses the doves skywards.

  It is time for their own flight to freedom – their own Passover – and those sleek, strong, graceful birds flap around the square in two rising circles.

  Freedom is what they are announcing with each wingbeat.

  It is a shock, of course, to see how easily Yeshua has released two creatures whose blood would have redeemed us before the Lord, and some in the crowd have prostrated themselves to ask forgiveness of the ruthless tyrant that they know from the Book of Job. Yet it makes me laugh in spirit to watch how the doves defy their terror – and all the limitations that men and women might impose on them.

  Nothing can tie us to the earth when we lose our fear, I think.

  One behind the other, the doves disappear over the rooftops, heading east, towards the birthplace of the sun.

  When I look down again for Yeshua, he is threading his way through the crowd to my left.

  An elderly shepherd with a white beard makes him pause by handing him his wooden goad. ‘I’ve had this for forty years, and I am never without it, but I want you to have it now,’ the man says.

  Yeshua thanks him with a kiss but hands it back. ‘Blessings to you who came into being before being born,’ he says, which I take to mean that the man’s generosity and goodwill are far more important than the gift itself.

  Perhaps the shepherd and I have made the same interpretation; he smiles excitedly and lays his tattered, fur-lined cape on the ground before my old friend. ‘Our king has come at last!’ he cheers.

  25

  Lucius is nowhere to be seen when I arrive at his villa, which is a blessing, since he gives me long, hectoring lectures on those occasions when I come late to work. While I prepare my tools, I endeavour to keep my thoughts earthbound, but they keep slipping free of me. They carry me high above my perfect Alexandria, to the crown of the lighthouse, where perching cormorants and cranes tell me of the wonders of Siracusa and Epidauros and all the other glorious places they have visited.

  In comparison with these colourful fantasies, my mosaic comes to seem a static thing – servile, devoid of dignity. To smash all the tesserae to powder would seem my best option. And yet I do not take my hammer to them; I have learned there is a message worth reading in every failure, though finding it is not always an easy task.

  Lying on my back and gazing up at the canvas awning that blocks the merciless sun from me, I consider what my mosaics would reveal about myself and the world if I had the courage to defy all expectations – if I could free what has been marked for sacrifice in my own self. Because that is, after all, Yeshua’s message, even if only a handful of us have heard it.

  After my midday meal, Lucius comes to see me at the bottom of his swimming pool. His brow is ribbed with worry, and his toga has been draped in a hasty manner by his personal slave. Without a word of greeting, he tells me in an outraged voice that he just received news that I accompanied Yeshua ben Yosef on his entry into Yerushalayim, which he calls a shameful display of moria, meaning stupidity or foolishness.

  ‘Please, let’s not quarrel,’ I tell him, and, getting to my feet, I add, ‘I’ve got a great deal of work I need to do today if I’m not going to fall behind schedule.’

  ‘He offended Caiaphas!’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘You know he did!’

  ‘I didn’t hear a word they said to each other. I was too far away.’

  ‘So you admit you were there!’

  ‘Of course I was there. I’ve never tried to hide from you that I’ve been friends with Yeshua since we were boys. But all I saw was him releasing two doves.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘I know you’re not a halfwit, Eli, but I must say that you’re doing a perfect imitation of one at the moment!’

  The amused pride he takes in his jest prompts me to laugh.

  ‘Eli, Eli, Eli,’ he says with a long sigh, as though calling for a truce, ‘we all know the point he was making to the rabble.’ He throws up his hands. ‘The way they all follow that emaciated Galilean everywhere, as if he were draped in a golden fleece … It never ceases to amaze me.’

  Lucius uses the word ochlos for rabble. His guttural pronunciation makes it sound as if he is speaking of peasants who ought to be cast into the nearest dungheap.

  I take my time sitting back down, hoping to keep the terse, angry reply that is hiding under my tongue from coming out and losing me my back wages.

  ‘Did you really think I’d be pleased with your behaviour?’ he asks.

  I open my hands and show him a questioning look that means, Can you take the truth?

  ‘Go ahead,’ he tells me.

  ‘My companions and I were not part of any rabble,’ I say.

  ‘What word would you have me use?’

  I take a marble tessera in my hand and squeeze it, considering how honest I can be. Looking him the eye, I risk the truth. ‘I would say citizens.’

  ‘Citizens!’ he shouts back at me, then bursts out laughing.

  Lucius becomes a little boy when he is bemused. While he is giggling with his hand over his mouth, I toss my tessera at the wall of the swimming pool, and it skitters back across my mosaic as if it, too, has been unable to find the exit out of this quarrel.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he tells me
after he has regained his composure.

  ‘No, I’m pleased that I keep you in high spirits. Though I believe I deserve an additional payment for improving your mood.’

  He dismisses that suggestion with a snort. ‘Listen, Eli, your dear friend Yeshua told these citizens of yours that the priests and their sacrifices are of no importance.’

  It’s my turn to sigh. ‘I just want to get on with my work, Lucius. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘Yes, Eli, it is. Because an acquaintance of mine who saw you with Yeshua just accused me of hiring a lestes to decorate my home!’

  I hold up my callused and powdery hands. ‘Do I look like a lestes?’

  ‘As you well know, rebels come in a multiplicity of guises.’

  ‘As do citizens!’ I snap.

  ‘Well played!’ says Lucius, and he does his best to loosen the pinched fit of the toga over his hip while he thinks of an adequate reply.

  More and more I have come to understand that Lucius respects only those who push him back. To block his next move, I say, ‘The last thing I want is bloodshed.’

  ‘Can you say the same for the Emperor in Rome?’ he asks, lifting his brow.

  ‘I try never to speak for Tiberius,’ I tell him, ‘especially since I am a very poor ventriloquist.’

  As he laughs again, the rancour between us withdraws a few paces. He flashes me a fearful look and says in a hushed, tension-filled voice, ‘I’ve been warned that they may be looking for an excuse to crush us again. And they will turn the Temple to rubble this time! You’re too young, Eli, but I remember only too well when two thousand of our young men were crucified.’ Spitting behind him, he says, ‘Their stench still spoils far too many of my dreams.’

  Lucius’ reference is to the brief struggle for independence that took place around the time of my birth, after the death of the King of Judaea, Herod I. Varus, the Roman general who crushed the rebellion, decided to celebrate his victory – and give thanks to Mars – by decorating the hillsides around Yerushalayim with crucified Jewish warriors.