The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  He wishes to go to bed, so I help him to the ladder, but, even with me pushing and Yirmi pulling, he is unable to make it to the third rung. Irritated and dispirited, he tells me he wishes to be permitted to sit and cry by himself, and, since he will not take no for an answer, Yirmi and I help him to my mat. After he is safely seated, he reaches up to me with clumsy hands and implores me to bring Ayin to him, since he will not be able to sleep, he claims, without the owl guarding him. I bring Ayin down from the roof and stand him on the floor by my window, at a safe distance from Shimon, but straight away the old man crawls to the bird on all fours. ‘What would I do without you?’ he asks, and he presses his lips to the crown of Ayin’s head. ‘The featherless others never understand,’ he says, and he begins to tell the bird the story of his marriage, starting with his wedding. ‘Bityah wore a white dress with golden embroidery to receive me, and when I entered her father’s home …’ Yirmi grimaces and backs out of the room on tiptoe, but I am ever eager to learn more about Shimon’s youth. A few moments later, he lies back against the floor and decides to address the cracks in the ceiling. ‘I was shivering with fear that first night – I admit it. I’d already visited brothels, of course, and when I was sixteen my father and I fucked our way from the Galilee to Alexandria, but this was different.’ He licks his lips. ‘That sweet moist cleft between Bityah’s legs … Oh, dear Lord!’ He turns to me. ‘My goodness, son, how happy a woman can make a man if she just agrees to bend over and stop talking for a little while!’

  Shimon’s delight in my grandmother makes me tingle, as if he has discovered what makes us holy. The body that opens in jubilation is the Lord’s greatest gift to us, I think.

  Soon, however, his voice fades and his eyes flutter closed.

  I go off to fetch him a cup of water, and by the time I return he is snoring with his mouth open. An hour later, after I have put my children to bed, I sit again by him and study the wrinkles by his eyes and whiskered cheeks, and my thoughts return to when he was the benevolent emperor of my childhood.

  ‘What is it the world wants from us?’ I’d once asked him. I must have been eleven or twelve years old at the time.

  ‘The world? It wants nothing from us, son,’ he’d replied. ‘After all, what could the mountains and seas possibly want from us that they don’t already have?’

  At the time, that reply made me shiver, since it seemed to signify that he and I and everyone else were of little worth, but it comforts me now to believe that the universe is not dependent on the ruthless and frivolous beings we are often proven to be.

  I would like to lie beside Shimon, to feel the rise of his warrior’s chest against mine, but I hold myself back and imagine his light going out – and his soul fleeing our realm – since the sharp pain of losing him for ever is the closest I shall ever come to isolating what it means to be the grandson of so beautiful a man.

  I awaken in my children’s room with Gephen lying across my shoulders, nibbling at my ear. I take him in my arms and remind him that I have no wish to be edible, but he is in one of his sullen moods and wriggles free from me with a serpent-like hiss.

  My children’s mats are empty. Dazzling light frames their window shutters.

  A foul and bitter taste in my mouth prompts me to spit into my daughter’s chamber pot, and it’s then that I discover – dishearteningly – that my tunic is again stuck to the wound on my back, which must have bled during the night. As I stand, Gephen leaps on to one of Nahara’s cushions and tests his claws, pricking at the fabric. I ask him to stop, since he will create a rip, but he continues his mischief. After I chase him from the room, the frigid edges of a dream fold around me: I am again at the night-time beach in Alexandria, and my father is with me. Blood covers his hands – from the blade wound in his chest. He pleads for my help, though I know in my heart that nothing I do will be able to prevent his death.

  Now I close my eyes and still my breathing, as I have been taught, and I concentrate on my father – on his agonized countenance – and I extend my hand to him. I sense that he will reveal to me what I can do to ease his suffering in the Underworld if he takes it, but he does not.

  In the courtyard, I discover that my family has already eaten breakfast. Shimon greets me with a hearty embrace, showing no ill effect from his overdrinking except for his stale breath.

  ‘You’re frozen,’ he tells me, rubbing my hands in his.

  ‘I had a bad dream,’ I explain.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I was on my way home at night, racing across Samaria, and I got lost,’ I lie, though it seems as if what I tell him is also – in some sense – true.

  I take my barley broth to my room because I can still feel my father dying inside me. I notice that my beach stones from Alexandria are gone from my shelf. I question Mia about them on returning my breakfast bowl to her, but she has no idea where they might be and has not yet had a chance to search for my mother’s amber beads. And don’t rush me! her expression warns.

  Nahara reaches up to me and pleads to be lifted while Mia and I are conversing about the baby girl she rescued and who is now at the orphanage. My daughter buries her head in the curve of my neck as she does when she is upset. I suspect that she has finally grasped that she will be leaving for Egypt in just four days – on the morning after our Passover supper.

  Mia notices the bloodstain on the back of my tunic as I am distracting my daughter with talk about Gephen. She tells me that she needs to clean the wound. ‘Now!’ she orders when I tell her that I am not yet fully awake.

  A long and delicate operation ensues, involving warm water, ointments, a plentiful amount of blood and – when vinegar is applied – some healthy swearing on my part.

  As Mia is coating me with her fragrant oils, Marta’s daughter Yehudit escorts Onesimos the jeweller into my room. He carries Grandfather Shimon’s tallit, folded into a perfect square. His walk is stooped and his eyes are sunken, which sets fear jumping through me, but I soon learn that I have misread his mood

  ‘Eli, you did it – you saved Ninah,’ he tells me in a hoarse whisper, and the tears in his lashes glisten, and he places Shimon’s prayer shawl before me as though it were an offering to the Lord.

  It is an astonishing thing to hold in your arms a father whose daughter has not died, to feel the ocean of gratitude in which he is drifting – and to be reminded again of the prodigious depth of feeling that is our heritage but that we hide from one another, as if it were shameful to admit that our spirit is made of compassion – racham – and love.

  He reaches into his pouch and hands his daughter’s blood-encrusted molar to me, and, while I turn the tiny four-horned bulb in my hand, he speaks my thoughts for me. ‘It seems wrong that so small a thing could cause so much pain.’ Gazing up at Mia, he says in a reverent voice, ‘Your brother is a man of miracles.’

  ‘It would seem so,’ she agrees, which makes me gaze up at her, and we share a look that acknowledges that we would both like to return to how we lived before my death and revival but never shall.

  Onesimos holds out a slender golden ring to me. ‘For you,’ he says.

  ‘I already accepted one present from you. That was enough.’

  ‘I swore to Elohim that I’d give this band to you if my daughter survived. It was my mother’s. Ninah was named after her.’

  With his ring in my palm, I calculate how many months of Yirmi’s studies its gold would guarantee and arrive at nine. I make a fist around it, and it feels right in my hand, but I shall not steal from a friend. And, for once, I find the right words to express my thoughts. ‘Give your mother’s ring to Ninah,’ I say, ‘so that she may know that her life is special to her grandmother, even though she is not here to tell her so.’

  After Onesimos departs, Yirmi and I make ready for work. Thankfully, Lucius has again sent us Abibaal and his donkey. As we make our way to the Upper Town, I offer benedictions to all those who beseech me, including a deaf Roman dwarf from Antioch who comes to have a promi
nent place in my heart because he teaches me the meaning of a verse from the Book of Names I’d never previously understood.

  The dwarf’s name is Maximus. A joke at his expense? Yes, he admits, his father intended the name as a humiliation. On leaving home at the age of twelve, he stopped concealing it from those he met for the first time, since he discovered that the name had become a sacred lantern that always revealed to him those he could trust and those – giggling at him and pointing – he could not.

  Unfortunately, he has been deaf nearly from birth. His intelligent eyes gaze up at me out of a pale and shrivelled face, and he converses with me with graceful and intricate hand gestures that his son, who is of normal stature, translates into Latin. The young man’s wife, a Judaean, translates his Latin into Aramaic.

  While watching this time-consuming but captivating process, I understand the verse from the Book of Names where Mosheh tells us, ‘The people saw the sounds’, for I come to recognize – and hear inside my head – several of the words Maximus speaks with his hands!

  The little man tells me that he lost his hearing as a five-year-old boy after a period of aching in both his ears. Watching him speak, I recall a visual prayer that Rabbi Elad taught me, and I sense that my recollection of it is no coincidence, so, after he finishes his explanation, I draw a circle in the air above him – representing creation – and picture the two of us at its centre. I compel the circle to expand inside my mind, and, when it surrounds Yerushalayim and Bethany and finally all of Zion, I ask Abibaal to take a drop of blood from my back on to his fingertip and trace it around each of the little man’s ears. I then recite a prayer from Samuel that I heard Yeshua use to restore the hearing of a Galilean cobbler. ‘“In my distress, I called upon the Lord. And from his temple, He heard my voice. And my cry for help came into His ears.”’

  Although Maximus’ hearing is not immediately restored, he thanks me with graceful, kind-hearted gestures. Abibaal watches me suspiciously while I am saying my farewells to him, as though he has just realized that I am not the simple artisan he has always taken me to be.

  The elderly slave wears a handsome white turban today, and, as we enter Yerushalayim, he tells me it is because Lucius’ right elbow has been aching, as it does whenever we are about to have rain. It’s then that I notice that thick grey clouds have indeed rolled in from the east.

  As I turn away from the sky, I sense the intimate connections between myself and the world as trembling in my chest. Had I never been born, I think, I wouldn’t have been able to learn from Maximus or help save Ninah’s life. Everything would have been different, which means that the life or death of a single person may have consequences we cannot predict.

  Can you grasp what I am tell you, Yaphiel? You and I are connected to the men and women who lived a thousand years before us, as well as those who will be born a thousand years into our future.

  How to express this truth?

  At the time, I am unable to do so. Indeed, only many years later, after another flash of insight, would I hear Yeshua tell me again what he had said after I lost my faith: the sea whispers that the separateness of islands is an illusion.

  34

  As soon as we arrive at work, I realize that in my mosaic Ziz ought to be holding a royal staff in his claws. How is it that so important a detail escaped my notice until now?

  I make his sceptre with exactly ninety red-granite tesserae, the numerical value of the word melekh – king – in Hebrew. I use the last of my Egyptian diorite – a sacred stone that is mottled black and white – to create a wheel of the zodiac at its tip, since even the king of the birds must be subject to the rules of time. Once I’m finished, I gaze down from the rim of the pool, and I realize – as though the future has just perched on my shoulder – that this was the last detail I needed to find. After Yirmi and I fill in the remaining gaps in the sky with white marble and lapis lazuli, the design will be what it is and what it shall evermore be.

  ‘Completing the mosaic makes you sad, doesn’t it?’ Yirmi asks me when I tell him what I’ve discovered.

  ‘Yes, a bit,’ I tell him, ‘but mostly I’m surprised.’

  ‘Surprised?’

  ‘By what it has become.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve found that my greatest challenge is to understand what the stones want to become – and to obey their desires as best I can.’

  He shows me a puzzled countenance, so I take his shoulder and explain. ‘Desire flows out of the stone – out of their shapes and colours – and enters me. The tesserae themselves determine how I come to alter my original plan.’

  He shakes his head, still unsure of my meaning, so I tell him that all will become clear as he acquires more experience.

  ‘What will we work on next?’ he asks, with boyish eagerness lighting his eyes.

  ‘The inner courtyard of the villa.’

  ‘Do you have a plan?’

  ‘Of course – I’ll show it to you tonight.’

  In the afternoon, the heavens open for a time, so Yirmi and I work on the sky above Ziz to the restful sound of rain drumming on our awning. In my daydreams, I watch Yeshua preaching to paupers assembled in the wilds of Judaea. The downpour leaves him soaked, but he sends away his followers who try to shield him with sackcloth, for he wishes to inhabit the rain, so that those who seek his help may become the fertile fields of Zion.

  Only a small crowd waits for me when I return to Bethany in the afternoon. When Mia opens our door to my knocks, she is holding my mother’s amber necklace in one hand and my beach stones in the other.

  ‘You found them!’ I exult.

  She slips the necklace over my neck and hands me the stones. ‘You need to talk to Nahara,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were concealed under her mat.’

  ‘She stole them?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘Did you ask her why?’

  ‘No, but I already know why.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Eli, she doesn’t want to go to Alexandria. The start of the Sabbath is only two evenings away, and after that …’ Mia shakes her head gravely. ‘A six-year-old girl has fears you can only guess at.’

  ‘But why steal my things? How will that help?’

  ‘She’s confused. If I’m right, she thinks you’re the one who is leaving. And she wants to make you stay with her by hiding what’s precious to you.’

  I find Nahara in Shimon’s upstairs eyrie. She is seated opposite her great-grandfather, her legs crossed in imitation of him. They look as though they have been engaged in a deep philosophical debate, which gives me a good laugh. Shimon says he has been giving her lessons in arithmetic.

  She laughs hard when I swoop down and lift her into my arms. ‘Listen, Naha,’ I say, ‘my beach stones and my necklace went missing for a while. Do you know where Aunt Mia found them?’

  She gazes away from me and makes no reply, so I assure her that I will not punish her. ‘I understand you had a higher motive for your theft,’ I say.

  Still she says nothing. ‘I’ll join you in Alexandria as soon as I can,’ I try, and I sense that she is about to reveal her fears to me, but, when I smile at her encouragingly, her face peels open to tears.

  Shimon covers his ears with his hands; he has never been any good around sobbing children. With Nahara in my arms, I go down the ladder, and, once we are in my alcove, I sit my daughter on my lap and kiss her eyes and give the end of her foot a squeeze, so that everything I remember of my subsequent conversation with her is filtered through the salt taste of her tears and the feel of her tiny toes snuggling into my hand.

  I do not know why, but I soon recall the ring offered me by Onesimos, and I know then how I shall help my daughter. ‘Would you like to keep my mother’s necklace as proof that we’ll all soon be together again?’ I ask.

  Nahara looks up – a squirrel stirred by the sound of a falling acorn.

  I hold out the necklace. ‘It’s
pretty, isn’t it?’

  She nods warily, as if I have set a trap for her

  ‘I have to warn you that the necklace is dear to me,’ I say. ‘I’d never give it to you unless I was certain that I would see it again very soon. Do you understand?’

  ‘I can … can keep it?’ she asks, sitting up as tall as she can, as though to see out over a field of hopes.

  I put the amber beads around her neck. ‘It’s yours now,’ I say.

  ‘For ever and ever?’ she asks, holding its curve in her tiny, joyful hands.

  ‘Yes, for ever and ever.’

  35

  Blustery winds rattle the doors and roofs of Bethany that night as though searching every dwelling for a runaway slave. Or, more likely, for a man who has cheated death …

  Who they find, however, is Akiva, the nimble little sprite who is always asking me to hold him up by the ankles and twirl him in crazy circles.

  ‘No, God, no!’ he wails over and over that night.

  I lean my head against my shutters as against the Gate of Compassion and pray that his father, Alon the tailor, will not break his bones again.

  God forgive me, I also pray for Alon’s death.

  I remember once Marta telling me that Akiva’s beatings sounded far worse than they were, to which I replied, ‘The human voice does not make the sounds of torture unless that is what is happening.’

  About a year earlier, Alon even burned Akiva’s feet over coals.

  Does the little boy plead with me twirl him upside down so that he can be sure there is at least one adult he can trust?

  ‘“He who withholds the rod hates his son,”’ Alon quoted to me when I saw the seared flesh on the boy’s feet. I told him that I would raise Akiva if he did not want him, but he just laughed at me.

  While the boy wails, I drape my cape over my head and chant Queen Ester’s prayer, which we speak aloud only when all other options have been exhausted: ‘“My Lord, who is my only King, help Akiva, for he is in desolation, and he has no one else to whom he can turn.”’