The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  Then, unexpectedly, good fortune hails us one morning on the road north during a cold drizzle.

  A cheerful old man in a donkey cart asks if we need shelter. When I explain about my starving baby, he asks for a look at her and tells me, smiling benevolently, that all-merciful Eleos has brought us together so that she might live.

  He explains that the daughter of the farmer for whom he works has milk enough for Ilana, since her own infant girl died in childbirth just a few days earlier.

  The farm belongs to a wealthy Sidonian named Lycophron. Soon, thanks to his daughter, Dido, Ilana regains her health and joy.

  We are so tired of trudging down the backroads of Zion by then that we decide to ask Lycophron if we might work for him for a time. And so it is that Yirmi becomes his house servant while I labour in his fields from sun to sun, all the way through to the autumn.

  Just after my fellow fieldworkers and I have harvested Lycophron’s generous horizon of barley, he informs me that he will have no work for me over the winter. He is eager to employ my son permanently, however, and his daughter would like to keep Ilana. But I cannot give away my little girl, of course, and I have not laboured since I was sixteen years old to see Yirmi spend his youth scrubbing walls and floors.

  When I give Lycophron my decision, Dido grows so blustery with recriminations and curses that we dare not spend even one more night with her for fear she will have me murdered and steal Ilana. I have bought myself a new vine-knife, and I make ready to use it, but Lycophron disregards his daughter’s pleas and issues us grudging permission to set out again for Halikarnassos.

  It is a wonder that Ilana and I survive the final portion of our journey, since there are days when I can find her no milk, and she fusses and shrieks all night. In one accursed hamlet, the inhabitants refuse me a single day’s supply of ewe’s milk even when I offer my sandals and cloak as payment.

  We live mostly on bread, leeks and wild greens that we gather on riverbanks. On every Greek grave mound we pass I place a stone and pray for the Lord to protect and preserve my children, and, once, I sketch Yeshua from memory on a discarded square of papyrus I find in a dungheap, and every contour and line is a prayer for my old friend to show himself to me again, but he does not.

  As a result, perhaps, I develop the habit of speaking aloud to him as we walk. Do my children regard me as having lost my mind? Very likely they realize that I have no other choice.

  At one terrible moment on our trip, Ilana grows so weak that she is no longer able to cry. Though I coat her lips with olive oil, they bleed. And her neck grows swollen from some foul vapours or spell that I do not know how to combat.

  By this time, I have sold everything I own except for my tunic, so I go everywhere barefoot, and Ilana is so weak with hunger that she is no longer able to cry. I am begging in the square beside the Temple of Athena in Tarsus, in the corner where the mendicant eunuchs come to ask for alms, when a kind-hearted and spritely Phoenician girl named Selene takes pity on us and leads us to the home of her sister-in-law whose name is Europa. That graceful young mother holds my starving infant to her breast without hesitation and whispers encouragements to her as she suckles. Healthy colouring returns to Ilana’s face after only a few hours, and within three days she is smiling again and sleeping through the night.

  Europa, may she be blessed for ever, asks for nothing in return, but Yirmi and I pay for our lodgings and our meals by labouring in the vineyard and orchard that belongs to her and her husband. Even after Ilana is fit for travel, we end up staying with that generous young mother for another several days, because she returns our sense of trust to us.

  And now you know, Yaphiel, why your two sisters are named Selene and Europa.

  A disagreeable surprise greets us when we finally reach Halikarnassos, for, instead of the lustrous and cultured city we have expected, we find a musty and provincial town cursed by clouds of flies, with emaciated, flea-infested dogs snoozing in every shady spot and feral cats hissing at us from the tops of walls. I imagine all the luckless residents whom we pass thinking what Tiresias asks of Odysseus: What brings you here, forsaking the light of day to see this joyless kingdom of the dead?

  The home belonging to Herodotus is, by local tradition if not actual fact, next to the shambling wreckage that was once the city’s theatre, and, to pay our respects, we climb to it over fallen columns and broken statuary. Only one wall remains standing, etched with licentious graffiti in both Greek and Latin.

  One lesson that our journey to Halikarnassos teaches me: no matter what their religion or geographical origin, young men are nearly always be eager to engrave comments about how mighty their phallus is and with whom it was last put to use.

  We spend only a few hours in the abominable town, and, because of its pestilent vapours and mists, spend that night sleeping in the surrounding hills beside a shepherd’s hut. Mosquitoes keep me cursing the gods of Olympus most of the night, and, in the morning, a representative of the town council tells me that there have been complaints about our trespassing on Roman-held properties. He demands that we leave as quickly as possible.

  That morning, a fisherman with an ulcerous ear, speaking the hard-to-fathom local dialect, ferries us to the island Rodos for a small payment. We decide to try our fortune there because we have been told that the island’s winds are always fresh and health-giving and that a modest Jewish community has flourished there for centuries.

  We find the island blessed with turquoise waters and enterprising citizens. The fish are so plentiful in the bays that no one goes hungry. The public gardens are planted with beds of colourful flowers and magnificent sycamores.

  That same week, a Jewish stonemason named Nikas – whose family, he says, came from the Galilee three centuries earlier – offers us two long-neglected rooms at the back of his house. Just next door lives a wealthy family that has made their fortune cultivating fields of the local orkhis plant, whose roots are used to make a frothy drink that Yirmi in particular grows to appreciate. They take to my children straight away, and the elder daughter in the family – Zoe – watches over Nahara and Ilana when my son and I are working.

  At this time, I permit Nahara to become a girl once again.

  After seven months as Nikas’ assistant, I receive my first commission for a mosaic from a local aristocrat. With my profits, I rent my own storeroom and workspace near the port.

  During my first weeks in my new place of business, my loneliness becomes a stalking presence, standing beside everyone I speak to, even my children. As a result, perhaps, I begin to write down everything I can remember about my final week with Yeshua. Over the next two months, I make more than three thousand notes and commentaries on papyrus. Indeed, compiling a corpus of details, impressions and speculations about what has happened seems a mitzvah I must fulfil or I will not be able to rejoin my life.

  Over our first five years on Rodos, Yirmi studies with a youthful rabbi named Georgious who has a deep knowledge of Greek philosophy but who understands it from right to left, so to speak, since he insists – comically at times – on giving the works of Antisthenes, Zenon of Kitieus and many other Greek luminaries distinctly Jewish interpretations. Did you know that the Fallen Angels are none other than the Greek Titans? And that the Babylonians who built their prideful tower were simply copying the Aloadae?

  Three years after our arrival, I purchase a small home on a graceful sun-blessed hillock overlooking the bay. It requires extensive repairs and smells of the urine of the abundant feral cats living in the vicinity, but a jasmine vine has taken over the roof and pink mallow bushes grow amongst the weeds in the garden, and all that beauty seems a very favourable omen.

  Ayin grows ill shortly after we move in and, one chilly autumn day, he closes his golden eyes for the last time. We bury him in our garden, and I spend my week of grief soaking in wine, as is my wont, though neighbours tell me that it is improper for me to weep over what they call a mere bird.

  It has long astonished me th
at so many Jews and Greeks alike reach adulthood without coming to see that we have same capacities and traits as all the creatures of the field and forest and sea and sky. Is that not, after all, the unspoken message of the animal-headed gods that the Egyptians worship?

  Do our new neighbours and acquaintances believe me when I tell them that I am an Ionian born in a secluded hamlet half a day’s walk from Miletus? In general, the inhabitants of Rodos ask few questions of foreigners, since they consider themselves far superior to all visitors. When anyone does try to take my lyre from its locked case, I tell them that, just prior to reaching the island, I suffered the death of both my wife and a sister and that I am incapable of discussing my past without weeping.

  Nahara is only seven years old when we reach Rodos, and over our first three or four years there she occasionally reveals more than she ought to about our lives in Judaea, but, by the time she is twelve, she has learned to keep our past in a secret hiding place.

  I vow never to return – or permit my children – to return to Zion.

  During our first years on our island, I keep to myself and make no close friendships. When loneliness threatens to drive me screaming from my prayer room, I visit the quietest and most comfortable of the brothels by the port.

  To compare every man and woman you meet to your dead loved ones is a particularly seductive curse. Indeed, I have been able to make only one true friend over the course of nearly thirty years on Rodos. I shall call him Agapetos. He is a talented ceramicist and also wise and amusing and exceedingly kind to me and my children. I have confided my true identity only to him and his widowed younger sister, who shares his home.

  Yaphiel, it occurs to me now that you may not know that our neighbours used to call your mother Thetis, the Nereid who was mother to Achilles. Indeed, she spent entire months of her childhood playing in the gentle waves of our coastline with her little friends and elder siblings, and she swam like a dolphin by the time she was nine or ten. In the summer, the sun browned her skin to the colour of cedarwood.

  How many times I had to tug her from the summer waters even after the sun had been swallowed by sea!

  She always shared my bed at night when she was small, and to this day I sleep better if there is a fragrance of sand and salt around me.

  If you ever become a father, dearest grandson, as I hope you will, then you will know the amaranthine joy of holding a tiny daughter in your embrace and feeling the unstoppable growth of the world working through her.

  I also wish you to know your mother saved me from the life of bitter and angry recrimination, for she was Yeshua’s last gift to me and to gaze at her was also to gaze at him – and to know that he still wanted something from me.

  When Ilana was small, she and I would often walk by the sea, and, with her little hand in mine, I would wonder how everything had changed so completely in my life. One moment I was living with my sisters in Bethany, without any expectations of having another child, and the next I was in Rodos, seated in the sand with a five-year-old, telling her all that Grandfather Shimon had taught me about the constellations.

  Sometimes, seated in my prayer room, facing Yerushalayim, I would speak to Yeshua about Ilana. Once he told me that I had always been meant to be a grandfather to many children, which was a shock to me.

  Do other men hear the voice of the dead as plainly as I do? There are times I think I have been blessed by having only the slenderest borders – the width of a night-time whisper – between my thoughts and those whose souls have ascended.

  54

  Your father’s parents first broached the possibility of his marriage to your mother when she was eight years old. Unfortunately, they spoke to me as if they were granting me a monumental favour by considering Ilana for their son, since she and I were of dubious lineage. And yet they patronized me with such eager and seething delight in their eyes that the patient birdwatcher in me couldn’t help but admire them as perfect examples of the tiny provincial finches one encounters the whole world over.

  I concealed a far more serious doubt about them, however, for although your grandfather Heracles had studied philosophy and was a successful exporter of the Rodian wine that is flavoured with pine resin, I was quite certain that he had never read anything more insightful than his own marriage contract. I apologize if that sounds unkind to you, but it is the truth, and, as you now have reason to understand, I have always been overly protective of your mother. I would never have permitted her to marry into a family in which learning was held in contempt.

  I gave Heracles to understand my doubts, and straight away he countered by ridiculing my foreign ways then proclaimed in a smug, censorious voice that he would never come to the home of so insolent a labourer again, which was confirmation that my strategy had been … a perfect success!

  Some four years later, however, your father introduced himself to me one day near the Temple to Athena and asked permission to converse with me. Under the shade of the beneficent sycamores shading the nearby square, sitting on one of the marble benches, he vowed that he would never prevent Ilana from continuing her study of philosophy and mathematics, even if his parents disapproved.

  At this time, your father was a strong-willed youth of sixteen years and already a renowned musician. Indeed, he never left home without his cithara, and he kept it on his lap as we talked, which charmed me. He was a tense and vibrant young man, quick of speech and movement, and I was struck immediately by his unusual face, with its large and magnificent Dorian nose, which made him look like a proud young hawk.

  As you know, Yaphiel, you resemble your father quite closely – with your glorious beak-like nose and quick sunlit smile – though you have also been blessed with Ilana’s soft physical grace and comical gifts. If you will permit me a more intimate tone, you also have something of your mother’s need for solitude. Often, I have seen you walk away from your cousins when they are keen to include you in a game – as though you had to safeguard your loneliness.

  How I greatly respect you for not running from silence!

  On my initial two visits to your grandparents’ home, I was moved and impressed by the jubilant melodies that your father coaxed from his cithara and the bee-like swiftness of his fingers. When I invited him to my home, he spoke to Nahara, Ilana and me about the career as a musician that he envisaged for himself. At the time, Ilana was a twelve-year-old Nereid with slender hips; she had not yet stepped into the sunrise of womanhood. She told me that evening that she found your father endearing but odd, and, when I asked for a more fulsome assessment, she giggled as though embarrassed by her own feelings. That seemed a sideways admission of interest, so I invited him to journey with me to Ephesus to visit your Uncle Yirmi, since you can learn much that is hidden about a person when you travel with him. Also, I wished to have my son’s opinion of him.

  Kassandros proved himself a cheerful and considerate companion, and, in each town we visited, his cithara made him the friend of one and all. We stayed mostly at modest inns on our journey, and on each night he played me to sleep with tender-heated Lydian melodies, which proved the cure to my lifelong insomnia.

  I decided to give my consent to the marriage while staying with Yirmi, who became an older brother to your father over the course of that week together. All that was left was Ilana’s agreement, since I had long ago vowed to my sister Mia that I would never force a husband upon my first daughter, and I saw no reason to change that wise policy with my second.

  Yirmi, who had already journeyed into the hinterlands of Parthia, had introduced in Ilana his wanderlust, and, since she knew that she would not be able to spend more than a few days away from home while her children were small, she asked to be able to put off her marriage until she was fifteen and to travel with me whenever possible over the coming three years. With that agreement in hand, all the marriage details were settled quickly with your father’s parents, and, over the next three years, I took your mother with me on trips to as far as Cemenelum in the west and Babylon i
n the east. Just before her wedding, we invited Kassandros and his mother along with us to Alexandria, so that he might get to know Ion and Ariston and my aunt Esther.

  On our journey, I revealed to Kassandros my true name and told him of my past. I explained why my children and I had been forced to flee Bethany and take on new identities. My confessions shocked him, of course, but he reassured me that he understood our reasoning and agreed to keep our past a secret – even from any children that he and Ilana would have.

  ‘We will explain to them as they come of age,’ I assured him.

  Just prior to our first supper in Alexandria – of the Egyptian-style lamb stew for which my aunt is renowned – I enquired after our friends and enemies in Zion, and my cousins gave me the glorious news that both Annas and Caiaphas were dead.

  Never again would I have to lock every door and window in my house and wonder when and where my children might be confronted by an assassin.

  As for Pilatus, he had been called back to Rome a few years after my departure. My cousins knew nothing more of him or his astrologer Augustus Sallustius. To my tearful relief, however, they assured me that Ehud had survived his wounds and was living in the Galilee with his family.

  As I had long expected, Yehudah of Kerioth had come to a sad end; my cousins informed me that he had hanged himself in the garden of Gat Smane shortly after Yeshua’s crucifixion. Though they could not say whether he had chosen one of the trees he had helped us plant twelve years before, I felt certain that he must have.

  I could find no one in Alexandria who knew anything of the fate of Lucius, so I sent off correspondence to him without delay and asked him to reply to me care of my cousins, and after I returned to Rodos I received a letter that Abibaal had dictated to a scribe. In it, the old slave told me that my former patron had died several months after my flight from Bethany. Apparently he had taken ill after a festive supper one summer’s evening – at which there had been a great many aristocratic guests, including several Roman dignitaries – and had died in his sleep. Poisoning? Abibaal made no speculations in that regard, but I read into his words that Annas might have discovered Lucius’ allegiance to Yeshua and had had him murdered.