The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  ‘Can you stop worrying whenever you want?’ he asks with a frown.

  ‘No, but you can try to let me do all the worrying for the two of us.’

  ‘Very well, but I also want to go with you every day to Lucius’ villa.’ He senses that I am about to refuse his request and quickly adds, ‘At least until the end of Passover.’

  Only when everything is as it was shall my son and I find peace.

  That thought seems like the very earth below my feet. ‘No, we need to go back to the way things were,’ I tell my son. ‘I’ll take you to your studies with Rabbi Elad every morning and then go on alone to work.’

  ‘May I at least come with Aunt Mia to escort you home in the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. Anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s all,’ he replies, but then, with a cagey smile, he adds, ‘For now anyway!’

  The pleasure of bargaining with my son is new to me and so gratifying that it makes me take him in my arms again.

  I go to bed with Grandfather Shimon’s old sword by my side, but every footfall on the street makes me picture Goliath and other assassins waiting for me, and it soon becomes clear that, if I am ever to sleep again, I shall have to assure myself that Annas no longer considers me even a minor nuisance, so I light my lamp and fetch my calamus. All my ink is dry, so I drizzle honey into my mortar and mix in a handful of charcoal, and I work this amalgam into a black liquid with my pestle.

  Unless I have your permission, I write, I shall never appear in any square or street or building in Judaea with Yeshua. If you have any doubts, then send for me. I implore you not to hurt anyone else.

  I end my adjuration with a Proverb of Shelomoh: ‘Let not mercy and truth forsake you; bind them about your neck and write them upon the table of your heart.’

  A lesson that writing this note teaches me: courage is a luxury that I shall not be able to afford again until both my son and daughter are grown, with families of their own.

  In bed that night, I listen over and over to all I said to Uriyah as if needing to find a password to redemption. I awaken early the next morning to knocking on my front door. I jump up, but Mia beats me there. ‘Who is it?’ she asks suspiciously.

  ‘A friend of Yeshua’s.’

  My sister and I look at each other curiously because our visitor has a child’s voice.

  The small boy on my doorstep has brown hair cut in a perfect line across his brow – like a young Caesar – and his eyes are obsidian beads. He carries a linden leaf in his hand, and on it is a ladybird.

  ‘Are you Lazarus?’ he asks me, and, as I tell him I am, the ladybird takes wing. ‘They never stay where they’re supposed to,’ he says, but without any resentment, and he tosses his leaf to the street.

  ‘Yeshua wants to speak to you,’ he tells me.

  The boy looks familiar. ‘Do we know each other?’ I ask.

  He folds his lips inside his mouth as if the wrong answer might earn him a scolding. Mia leads him inside. I close the door, place a protective hand on his head and ask him if Yeshua told him anything else.

  ‘He said he can’t risk coming here because … because …’ The boy grimaces.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Mia asks him.

  ‘Yonah.’

  ‘Well, my little dove,’ she says, playing on the meaning of his name, ‘I suggest that you go back to the beginning of what you were instructed to tell us. And go slowly. That’s always best when you’re not sure where you’re headed.’

  The boy gives us a big nod. ‘He said he can’t risk coming here because he is certain that … that … your house is being watched!’ Yonah smiles in triumph. ‘He asks for you to meet him where you used to look for the Guardians of Mosheh.’

  Mia turns to me for an explanation.

  ‘Mosheh summoned ibises to kill the winged serpents that attacked him as he crossed an Ethiopian swamp,’ I tell her, and to our young guest, I say, ‘I’ll meet Yeshua there, but he has to be certain he is not being followed. If he has any doubts, then he must not join me. Do you understand? Will you tell him that?’

  After Yonah memorizes my message, Mia sends him on his way with an almond biscuit, which he sniffs, then eases into his pouch with admirable care.

  ‘Do you want me to come to see Yeshua with you?’ Mia asks as I dress.

  ‘Is Marta back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you better stay for when she returns.’

  ‘All right,’ she says, ‘but listen close, Eli …’ Mia raises a finger to her forehead and taps it twice, which is our childhood signal for don’t take any chances.

  To confound Goliath and any other spies sent by Annas, I climb up to the roof and make my way across the adjoining dwellings, bent low to the roof tiles, and drop down to the cross street at the end of our row of houses. Even at this early hour, Alexandros is already seated on his millstone. As I pass him, an old friend, Onesimos the jeweller, hails me from the road west. He runs across a field of onions to me and tells me that he has been off procuring medicines from a herb-gatherer. He pleads with me to come with him to his home some time that day and bless his daughter, Ninah, who has a tooth abscess and high fever. I promise to visit as soon as I complete my errand and ask him to tell no one he has seen me, then hurry towards the pink-and-gold cavern of sunrise in the east. I take a circuitous route, cutting across two small farms belonging to acquaintances. Stabbing pains – the worst I have ever experienced – shoot up into my hip when I climb over the low wall separating the properties, and for a time I am forced to lie on my back against the dry earth.

  By the village of Barsoum, a shepherd with the blood of birthing on his hands and tunic allows me to drink from his bucket. He tells me of the lambs he has bred for the Passover sacrifice and of a ewe that died in his arms at dawn just after giving birth.

  Do I remember his affectionate and tender eyes as he carried the orphaned lamb to me because everything from that fatal time has taken on the glow of ancient myth? Perhaps I am looking for a sign of the flood that was soon to take my home from me.

  Malakhi. That was the shepherd’s name. He was twenty-two years old and had a red birthmark on his brow. Does he still live in Barsoum, and would he remember the hobbling Galilean who asked to hold the orphaned ewe in his arms?

  Around a bend in the stream that is isolated by massive limestone boulders, in what has long been my preferred spot for observing herons and egrets, stands the gaunt, olive-skinned creature I seek. He is up to his knees in the glistening water, naked except for his Greek traveller’s hat.

  His goat-like ribs make me draw shallow breaths. Shall I bother him by mentioning that he must take more sustenance if he is to lead us into unknown territories?

  When he turns to me, he flaps invisible wings, which in our private language means he needs me to watch over his body while he is with the Lord in the Hekhal ha-Melekh. This makes my heart contract in my chest, for it is a reminder that I am needed to safeguard his well-being. And yet I shall have to tell him that I cannot be seen with him over the coming weeks. Despite the smile I offer him, does he read my despair?

  He steps out of the water, kneels down and searches amongst the stones on the stream bank, and, when he finds the one he wants, encloses it in his fist. As he walks to me, he touches it to his forehead. When he is twenty paces away, he stops and tosses it to me. I catch it effortlessly, for my hands remember the high, challenging arcs of our boyhood games. The stone is smooth and brown, with a white line near its centre – a horizon of grace and benevolence between sea and sky. I hold it to my brow to complete the circle he has begun and then cast it into the stream.

  The trilling of birds turns Yeshua around. He spots them halfway up a nearby terebinth tree and points them out to me: three bee-eaters hiding behind showy red flower clusters, unwilling to reveal themselves to the featherless creatures who trap them in nets and sell them in their marketplaces.

  The iridescent blue and green of their chests and comforting brown of their
backs withhold nothing – and remind me that only men and women are condemned to learn the word modesty.

  I turn in a circle because I sense the future tugging at me, and I want to see the exact shape of the world as it is now before I leave it behind.

  A gust of wind suddenly thrusts up its hands and sets the branches of the terebinth shaking, and the bee-eaters begin to sing again, and their strange, discordant warbling seems to have a purpose just for me, but I do not yet know what it is, and they take wing as I start towards Yeshua, as if to keep me guessing. The vibrating energy I discover inside his arms means that he is chanting hymns in his mind. He leads me into a rocky clearing, and we sit together.

  ‘You told no one, I hope, that you were meeting me,’ I say.

  ‘Only Yaaqov, my brother.’

  I remember then who little Yonah was – Yaaqov’s youngest son.

  We speak of the boy and of his father as a way of easing into deeper matters. Or so I believe. At the first Gate of Silence that meets us, however, Yeshua stands and walks back to the stream. He splashes his face and arms with water and seats himself by an ancient olive tree that we have known for years and that must have belonged to a farm that was once here. He prays aloud while keeping his eyes on me.

  I’ve misunderstood his needs, I think. He is having trouble returning to our world from the Hekhal ha-Melekh and is using me to light his pathway home.

  Yeshua locks eyes with me while chanting a hymn to the Lord of Hosts. Neither of us looks away, even for a moment. And when he comes to me this time, his steps are more secure; he has returned in body and spirit to our world. He sits opposite me, and, as we speak of his entry into Yerushalayim and of the thousands who followed him, his eyes open wide with excitement. I tell him that I felt our future take flight towards the Promised Land when he released his two doves.

  ‘We shall finally obey Shelomoh’s instructions,’ he says, referring to the Proverb, To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.

  Our conversation turns then to Uriyah, and he tells me, fighting tears, that, when he removed the boy’s anklets, he discovered that his bones had been stunted and deformed by his fetters.

  He uses the word qalat for deformed, adding that he removed the curse of bondage from Uriyah – his qelalah – while anointing his legs and feet.

  Qalat and qelalah … Does Yeshua mean to remind me of their likeness because he has realized that there is always a deformity of the soul where there is slavery?

  After he tells me of the hopes he had for Uriyah, I sense that the time has come for me to speak to him of my decision. ‘I’m convinced that Annas had the young man murdered to send me a message,’ I begin.

  ‘Which makes it a message for me as well,’ he says. ‘Lazar, Maryam and Yohanon told me what you’ve decided,’ he adds, which saves me the difficulty of speaking aloud of the choice I was forced to make.

  ‘Are you angry with me?’ I ask.

  ‘Angry? No. How could I be angry with you?’

  ‘I can’t take risks with the lives of my children. If Leah were alive, I would proclaim my allegiance to you from the steps of the Temple. But without her my children … they have only me, which means that the way to you is blocked to me right now.’

  The finality in the words, the way to you is blocked, has too much meaning for me, and when he squeezes my hand – to convey his acceptance of my decision – I must look away from him. ‘I’m sorry about all these tears,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me of late.’

  ‘I asked you to come here so that I can help you,’ he says.

  With our hands joined, I become what is most generous in me, so I speak of how proud I am of him and that I am filled with hope. ‘Is now the time?’ I ask, meaning, Will justice finally come to Zion?

  ‘I can do nothing on my own but only what the Lord asks me to do,’ he says.

  His vague reply is an indication that he wishes once again to withhold his plans from me. Still, I question him about how he intends to use the eruv he constructed. He speaks of the archons he has stationed at Yerushalayim’s gates and of the angelic language with which he sealed the borders of his garden, which is how he calls his eruv, and of other matters that are beyond the frontiers of my knowledge. Does he believe I am wider and deeper than I am? It occurs to me then that he is still watching me from somewhere above, and, from that perspective, my borders must flow and mingle into his own, like dyes running into each other.

  Does he see my keen fondness for him as easily as I see the scars on his feet? What shape and colour does my love have in the Throne World?

  ‘You must be lonely at times,’ I tell him, because I am thinking that there is much he cannot discuss with anyone.

  Adapting the words of Yehoshua to this moment, he shrugs and says, ‘I am lonely only when I forget that the Lord my God is in every letter and word.’

  Is that as close as he will ever come to admitting that there are times when he wishes a companion might ascend on the Chariot with him?

  My bad leg is throbbing, so I stand up and stretch at the edge of the stream, and from there, with my feet tingling from the chill of the water, I question him about what he told Caiaphas before releasing his doves. He tells me that he reminded the High Priest that we have brothers and sisters who are living in misery and hunger and whom we leave behind each Passover, but that this year – a few days hence, when we leave Pharaoh behind and cross over to the Promised Land – he will ask the meekest amongst us to join him before any others. ‘I shall feed the poor and dress their wounds, just as you ought to do,’ I told Caiaphas.

  ‘Now I know why he turned away from you with such an angry expression!’

  Yeshua replies with a bemused smile and comes to me in the water. He helps me take off my tunic and leads me into a deep cold pool, where we talk of trifles for a time. Only when we are back on land and drying off does he tell me that he sees the Angel of Death beside me at all times.

  ‘He is standing between you and me even now,’ he tells me.

  ‘And until I know where we go when we die, I fear he’ll remain with me,’ I reply.

  Yeshua speaks to me again of when we first met, and the affection in his voice and hands and eyes assures me that I am exactly where I need to be and that it does not matter if I shall one day vanish, because we are together now.

  Is that one of my old friend’s most astounding gifts – the ability to assure whoever he is talking to that death is of no importance?

  He blesses me and asks me to join him at the edge of the stream. When he begins to pour water over me with his cupped hands, I understand why he summoned me.

  After my hair and shoulders are soaked, and while I am on my knees and shivering, he summons the Holy Spirit to us by chanting a chayot hymn that Yohanon ben Zechariah taught us. Then, on his request, we exchange places, and I drip water over his head while reciting the same verses.

  After he stands, he comes around behind me, puts his coarse hands on my shoulders and presses down. Twice he orders the Angel of Death to leave me, shouting, ‘Malak Malach!’ The third time, he whispers that same command in my ear, and his breath, warm, seems to scatter my thoughts away from me and up through the top of my head.

  I am gone for a time. And I dream that a hand is covering my eyes, and its fragrance is sweet and pungent – something like the thyme sprigs that Mia chars as incense.

  When the hand comes away, I find myself in my bedroom, seated on my mat, though that seems impossible. I wish to speak, but I do not wish to disturb the silence, since it seems holy. Yeshua is seated opposite me. You are always with me, he tells me inside my mind, and he smiles with bemused affection.

  And then a sense of rapid descent – of free fall – makes me call out to him for help, and I awaken for real, and Yeshua removes his hand from my eyes, and I see that I am sitting under the terebinth tree where we spotted the bee-eaters.

  ‘You are the resurrection,’ he whispers, ‘and I
am the life.’

  Yeshua and I put our tunics back on, and I am at ease with myself – at home in my flesh – for the first time since my revival. He sees the change in me and shows me a relieved smile, so I risk telling him that his mother came to me.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Friends told me.’

  ‘So now you’re the one spying on me!’ I say, doing my best to look outraged.

  I expect him to grin, but his eyes close again as if he has heard a summons from far away. ‘Let’s go back a different way,’ he tells me, and, when we come to a split in our trail, we walk south instead of west, which will take us to the villages east of Bethany, and, as we make our way across a small farm, four women appear from behind a copse of oaks a hundred paces ahead, wearing tattered robes, three of them barefoot, dark mantles concealing their heads and shoulders. They cry out tamê in anguished voices and hold their hands over their faces in case we throw stones at them.

  Did Yeshua see them on his way to the stream and wish to comfort them? Very probably, but I understand now that he was also anxious to teach me a final lesson that I might not otherwise have ever learned.

  A breeze sends their putrid smell of decay to us, and I cup my hand over my nose. Still, Yeshua leads us closer, and, after he assures them that we shall do them no harm, they beseech us for food.

  I remain thirty paces away. The tightness at the back of my throat is the physical form of my cowardice and shame, but I dare not go to them, for, if their affliction were to adhere to me, I would never be able to hold my children again.

  Yeshua embraces each of the leper-women and gives them bread from his pouch. They lead him by the hand to an elderly man seated in the shade of the broadest of the oaks, unable to walk. Yeshua kneels and lays his hands on the sores along his skeletal legs, speaking prayers, pressing his healing into the ruined flesh. When the man removes his hood, the other lepers turn away. Yeshua takes his shoulders and presses his lips to his crusted forehead, then to each of his blinded eyes.