The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  So she was responsible for my being struck down with a sword!

  ‘Do you know anything of what she has told Annas?’ I ask.

  ‘No. As of yet, we don’t have any spies amongst his household staff.’

  In my head, I circle around my sister, trying to understand how she could have fooled me so thoroughly – and why.

  Yaaqov calls my name again, but I do not look up, for I am trying to find some clue to Mia’s betrayal that I might have spotted. When Yirmi comes to my side and puts his hand in mine, I tell him that I shall soon be myself again, though I can tell from the sickness in my gut that that is a lie.

  ‘If you think you can’t be duped by the people you most love, you’re wrong!’ I growl at Yirmi once we get on our way to Annas’ home. ‘Don’t trust anyone!’

  I realize I sound like an embittered drunk, but I cannot stop myself.

  My son asks me what has changed my mood, but I dare not denounce his aunt to him until I have had a chance to confront her. I tell him instead that Yaaqov informed me of the death of a close childhood friend from Natzeret. ‘Her name was Naamah, and she lived in the house next door to ours,’ I add, since these details will convince my son I am telling the truth.

  ‘Have I ever met her?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen her in years.’

  ‘And how did she dupe you?’

  ‘She’s been gravely ill, but in the messages she sent me, she always said that she was well. She never gave me the chance to say goodbye.’

  As we head to the Upper Town, my lie comes to seems a disguised form of the truth, for, if Mia has put me and my son and daughter in danger, then she will indeed be dead to me.

  Might Marta have also learned of Mia’s treachery? I wonder. Perhaps that would explain her curse. If so, then I have blamed the wrong sister all along.

  I plead with Yirmi to return to Bethany as we near our destination, but he refuses. God forgive me, I yell at him to leave me be.

  ‘You’re upset because your friend has died,’ he says meekly.

  ‘I’m upset because I have a wilful son who disobeys me!’

  It’s another lie, and this time we both know it, but I am unable to apologize. Over the rest of our walk, he trails several paces behind me, as though he were a stray dog.

  A plan for learning the nature of my sister’s betrayal comes to me at Annas’ door; I shall find a way to introduce her name into our conversation and mention that I have always counted on her fierce loyalty. If I am in luck, the priest will laugh at me and – to humiliate me – reveal her betrayal.

  His house slave informs me, however, that his master is unable to receive any guests this evening. Additionally, he tells me that the priest has included me on a list of those he shall only speak to after the Sabbath. As I had previously discovered, Annas is sekel, and he has likely realized that his silence will make me suffer more deeply.

  Just after Yirmi and I enter Bethany, our neighbour Weathervane hails us from his window. His head is wrapped in a shaggy flea-bitten fleece, which gives him the appearance of the buffoon in a street performance. ‘Go ahead and laugh,’ he tells my son, even though Yirmi has not even smiled. ‘Wait till you’re my age and then see how enjoyable life is!’

  His harsh words give me a chance to make up for my earlier rudeness, and I hold tight to Yirmi’s hand.

  Weathervane explains in a long-suffering voice that he has a painful ache in both his left ear and jaw. His wife is confined to bed with the same ailment, so he requests that my sisters bring them some soup and bread.

  ‘I’ll send food over later,’ I assure him.

  On hearing me and her brother enter the house, Nahara scurries down the ladder from Grandfather Shimon’s eyrie, followed by the old man himself. Mia rushes in from the courtyard. ‘You gave us a terrible scare!’ she declares.

  Did she believe her treachery had killed me?

  When she embraces me, her familiar lavender scent makes me shudder. ‘We had business to attend to with Lucius,’ I tell her and our grandfather.

  Nahara stands on her toes and reaches up to me until I lift her into my arms. She still wears my mother’s necklace, which is a blessing, since it means that I have done at least one generous and good thing this week.

  ‘Nothing else is wrong?’ Mia asks.

  I have decided to avoid confronting her until I have had time to consider the last few days in my mind – to search for clues to the war against me that she has been waging in secret.

  ‘No, nothing,’ I lie.

  My room has been swept and straightened, since all evidence of leavening must be removed from our houses to celebrate Passover. After I thank Mia for performing this mitzvah, Yehudit brings me my supper in my room and agrees to take some barley soup and bread to Weathervane.

  Guilt has clearly made Mia attentive to my needs, and she has prepared a favourite meal for me, our mother’s recipe for moretum.

  Marta sees me only briefly. She comes to me in my alcove to tell me she will be eating that night at the house of a friend. Might she be avoiding not me but Mia?

  Mia dresses the wound on my back just before I go to sleep. I know I ought to send her away, but she would regard it as suspicious if I were to reject her. She tells me of her work at the orphanage and we discuss the mosaic I have just completed, but when she questions me about the sketches I’ve done for the inner courtyard of Lucius’ villa I tell her I am too tired to converse, which is soon proven true.

  I awake in darkness.

  Nahara is asleep at my side, on her belly. Her head is underneath her cushion, as she prefers. Do other fathers always make sure their sleeping children are breathing before they do anything else? I cover her with my cape and stand up.

  Will I have to kill Annas and Caiaphas to free myself?

  That is the first of many impatient questions that crowd around me over the next hour.

  Ayin hops to me when I join him on the roof. I stand him on my shoulder, and he surveys our town’s last copse of ancient cedars, saved from the Roman shipbuilders by the stubbornness of their owner. I close my eyes and listen to the yelping of jackals in the distance, and there, in my inner darkness, the snowflakes of a particularly frigid winter evening begin to fall on to the intimate, moonlit streets of Natzeret, and I remember the moment I learned that my parents were mortal.

  My father and I had been talking about how I had been made b’tselem Elohim – in the Lord’s image – when he coughed into his sleeve, leaving behind flecks of blood. It was the way he studied them – like a hunter examining the tracks of his prey – that became a fist around my throat.

  My father never mentioned the flecks – and neither did I – but I had glimpsed his fear of something far greater than his own blood.

  Ayin and I walk to Yerushalayim and back, and the cool wind is comforting to us both.

  On returning to my street, I spot three figures standing outside my home. One of them is Yirmi, but the other two … ? I must start or give Ayin another cause for apprehension; with a screech, he opens his wings and bats them against my cheek. ‘Everything’s all right,’ I tell him, and I take him in my arms to calm him.

  Yirmi comes running towards me. ‘It’s Yeshua!’ he calls out in desperation. ‘He’s been arrested. Annas and Caiaphas have him.’

  The sense of falling inside me makes me reach out to my son as soon as he reaches me. When I look past him, I see Yohanon and Maryam of Magdala rushing towards me, and I surprise myself by thinking, My whole life has been a preparation for this moment – saving him from drowning, most of all.

  39

  Do I pass Ayin to my son as Maryam and Yohanon rush towards us? I must have, but I am unable to recall. If I close my eyes, I can see Maryam’s desolate face and her hands straining out for mine.

  Leaves and dirt are stuck to the right side of her robe. Her hair is mussed. She begins to explain what happened to Yeshua – cautiously, gazing down, as though to avoid a snare – but a violent shudd
er soon overwhelms her. I sit her down by my front door. She hugs her knees and covers her head with her hands.

  In the mosaic I have made of that day for my prayer room, Maryam is shipwrecked in a cove of despair. Each of the raindrops falling on the two of us is in the shape of a yod, which is the letter that unites the heavens to earth, since all that night and the next day I had the sensation that what was happening to us was taking place in the Kingdom of Heaven as well.

  Pilgrims awakened by our conversation ask for us to still our voices, so we walk down my street to Bethany’s old abandoned well. Maryam drops down at its base. I ask Yirmi to put his arm around her so that she will know that we shall safeguard her from all harm.

  My conversation with Yohanon is bordered by the image of Maryam being comforted by my son and encircled by all that I should not have had to ask of so young a boy.

  Here and there. Inside and outside. God and creation.

  In between the words we speak, I see that Yeshua’s arrest has joined together worlds that are usually separate. And I see now that my questions of Yohanon were also a kind of excavation; an effort to find the seam between the Throne World and my unimportant little street in Bethany.

  Through troubled stops and starts, Yohanon tells me that, just after supper, Yeshua invited his friends to spend the night with him in the olive field at Gat Smane, in the Valley of Yehoshafat. There is no need for me to ask Yohanon why his mentor chose that spot, since it was there, twelve years earlier, during the dawn of Tu BiShvat, that he renewed his covenant with the Creator by planting a juniper, a cedar and a cypress.

  On that cold but sunlit day, we had each taken turns digging holes for the spindly saplings in the rocky soil, ten paces apart. Yosef, Yeshua’s father – blessed be his memory – had directed our work, since he had grown up on a farm near Natzeret and still possessed the wisdom of roots and branches in his callused hands. Yohanon was there, and Loukas, Mattiyahu and many other dear friends. When we had finished planting, Yeshua raised his cup and recited from the Book of Yeshayahu: ‘“The juniper, the cedar and the cypress are now together, and their beauty shall fill the sanctuary we shall make for Him.”’

  Yohanon tells me now that he and the other disciples sat before those same trees the night before and prayed for all of creation. ‘Our voices were much as they were all those years ago,’ he tells me, ‘and yet the trees around us were so changed – so tall and strong! – that we all became aware, I think, of the forward movement of our lives. I can’t speak for the others, but I was filled with hope – and so, I think, was Yeshua.’

  As he speaks, I watch Yirmi lifting a damp strand of hair off Maryam’s cheek and smoothing it back in place. It seems a very adult gesture for a boy. Perhaps this week – with all its trials – has brought him to the end of his childhood. Too soon, most likely.

  ‘What a joy it was to chant under the moonlight!’ Yohanon exults. ‘But soon … soon everything came undone.’ He makes and unmakes his fists. ‘Yehudah of Kerioth was the first to hear the regiment of soldiers filing down the hillside from the Temple Mount. He called out a warning and then –’

  ‘Roman soldiers came for Yeshua?’ I interrupt.

  ‘Yes. Annas trailed behind them with his bodyguards.’

  My heart convulses, for I now see the cleverness of the priest’s strategy: he convinced the Roman governor to help him and had the soldiers wait for Yeshua to leave the city – his eruv – before arresting him. Annas also thereby avoided the uproar – and perhaps even violent protests – that his followers inside Yerushalayim would have made.

  Yohanon takes up his story again: ‘Yehudah entreated us to flee the moment he saw them coming, but Yeshua said that he had no fear of the Kittim and that Passover was not yet upon us, so it was not yet time for us to make our way to the Promised Land. And then –’

  ‘He used the word Kittim?’ I interrupt.

  ‘Yes, why? Do you see some special significance in that?’

  As a designation for the Romans, Kittim is used only in the Book of Daniel, which is why I whisper to Yohanon, ‘He has seen that he is Daniel’s heir. That must be why he has been quoting from our scriptural writings about him so often of late.’

  If true, this would mean that Yeshua envisaged – or was told by the Lord of Hosts – that he would be confined in the lion’s den before being delivered from death, just as we read in the Torah: For the Lord of Heaven sent his angel to seal the mouths of the lions set to devour Daniel … And the men who had accused Daniel were cast into the den of lions – along with their children and their wives. And the great beasts assumed mastery over them and broke all their bones in pieces …

  ‘Some of our friends ran off straight away,’ Maryam tells me. ‘Yeshua told Annas that he wouldn’t make any trouble if the Romans let them escape – and if they let the rest of us remain free.’

  ‘So no one else was taken captive?’

  ‘No.’

  Which means that he wished to face this trial alone, I think.

  ‘But why did Yehudah warn Yeshua?’ I ask.

  ‘He may have had second thoughts about his betrayal,’ Yohanon answers.

  ‘Yehudah of Kerioth is helping Annas?’ Yirmi asks.

  ‘That’s what Yeshua told me.’

  Maryam gets to her feet with my son’s help. As she brushes off the last of the leaves from her robe, I ask if anyone else was hurt.

  ‘Only one of the brutes guarding Annas,’ Yohanon replies. ‘A scuffle broke out because he tried to drag Maryam away from Yeshua.’

  ‘Thoma and Philippus and some of the others rushed forward to help me,’ she tells me, ‘and Shimon struck the man a blow on the side of the head. He was led away, bleeding badly from his ear. The Romans –’

  ‘Which bodyguard was it?’ I cut in.

  ‘We were told his name is Malchus.’

  Those who plough iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same! I think, and the justice in my mind seems a plough digging into rich soil.

  And then – who can say how? – an epiphany is born of that same fertile earth: Yeshua has a secret friend working with Annas who will help him escape!

  To test my theory, I ask Yohanon and Maryam how Yeshua seemed on submitting to arrest.

  ‘He was concerned only for the safety of the rest of us,’ Maryam replies.

  ‘He must have known that Annas would have him arrested,’ Yohanon adds. ‘I saw it in the expression on his face – in his ease of bearing and calm. He knew what was going to happen.’

  Because he knows most things before they come to pass.

  Yohanon does not need to tell us that; we have long known that he is convinced that Yeshua is able to foresee all that is important. But I know from Torah that even a prophet is not always privy to the Lord’s intentions, and I have witnessed events that proved Yeshua’s prescience both incomplete and fallible.

  ‘What if he wanted to be arrested?’ Maryam asks.

  ‘But why?’ I question.

  ‘To force the people of Judaea to choose between him and the priests. The Father must have told him that the time has finally come for us to decide our future. We shall make our own Eden or not have it at all.’

  Has Maryam grasped Yeshua’s purpose more deeply than any of us?

  In that case, the truth brings me precious little solace – then or now. For it invariably raises a question that only he himself might have answered:

  Was there no other way?

  40

  Yohanon, Maryam and I rush to the farm belonging to an elderly friend where Yeshua’s allies are meeting. We find five of them standing in the barn squabbling over tactics: Mattiyahu, Loukas, Bar-Talmai, Philippus and Nathaneal. Amongst those missing are Yehudah of Kerioth, who has vanished; Shimon, who is consulting with Nikodemos; Yaaqov, who is informing his family of his brother’s arrest; and Andreas and Thoma, who are watching Annas’ home in the event that Yeshua is either released or transferred.

  In years to come, I shall see us as we
would have looked and sounded to an outsider: a fellowship of ragged, hollow-cheeked Judaeans and Galileans, speaking in dazed and desperate voices, standing around the hay-strewn floor of a barn whose previous occupants – a flock of sheep, judging from stench of manure and fleece – have been led to the city for sacrifice earlier in the day. We could not see the profound affinity between all of us, but, even if we had, we would not have guessed – and would have been displeased to know – that it had been bequeathed to us by the Romans. We were, after all, a generation born in captivity and living under constraints so familiar to us that we were only vaguely aware that any other way of living was possible.

  If you wish to understand Yeshua, then it would do you well to remember that he, too, was part of that same generation.

  It soon becomes clear Mattiyahu and Loukas are counting on Nikodemos, who has long served on the Sanhedrin, to win Yeshua’s release. They are convinced that he will bend the ruling council to his will if he lets it be known that for as long as Yeshua remains in prison we shall foment rebellions in every city and town in Zion.

  No one hints at any spy that Yeshua may have in the priesthood or Annas’ household. So if that is the case, he probably shared his plan with no one.

  Yohanon argues that appealing to the Sanhedrin will do us no good and adjures that we plead our case directly to Pilatus, the Roman governor. ‘Annas and Caiaphas have demonstrated absolute control over the Sanhedrin on numerous occasions,’ he points out. ‘What’s more, since their livelihoods and status are at stake in this conflict, they’re unlikely to be cowed by any threats. We shall lose precious time if we limit our efforts to the priesthood. It is urgent that we send a delegation of elders to petition the Roman authorities for clemency.’

  His words ring in my ears like a hymn to reason, but Mattiyahu accuses Yohanon of wishing to endanger us all by inviting our conquerors to join what he calls ‘an internal conflict’.

  ‘But they’re already involved!’ Yohanon counters. ‘Have you already forgotten that Roman soldiers took our brother prisoner?’