Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  A Sabbath when Lazarus and Jesus are thirteen or fourteen years old. The Nazareth sky is bruised and moody, clouds covering the sun, a perfect day for an excursion: into the fields, down the hill, Amos lagging behind. The city of Sephoris is a two hour walk, no more, but Jesus needs convincing—on the Sabbath they should stay at home. This is typical. Jesus looks before he leaps. Lazarus likes to leap.

  ‘See that axe by the tree? No, further down. Race you!’

  They career downhill, arms freewheeling, the world empty except for them. Lazarus makes it first. He picks up the abandoned axe and swings it two-handed into dry soil. Jesus prises the axe loose and does the same. Then Amos catches up and they fling the axe into long grass and wipe their hands and run again.

  The city is deserted. Sephoris is a grand Herodian project, a long-term building site, but on the Sabbath no one works. Even the new amphitheatre has to wait, and the three boys stand awed in the curved shadow of the nearly completed building. They look up at the racks of wooden scaffold rising like the sides of a basket.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Lazarus says.

  ‘You’re not allowed.’ Amos is twelve years old and brown as a walnut. He increasingly has an opinion. ‘Someone might see us.’

  Lazarus steps onto the lowest rung. ‘They’re all at home praying their children stay safe. You wait here. Keep a lookout.’

  Lazarus is scared but he starts to climb, like boys anywhere. He imagines himself as a biblical hero, someone who isn’t scared.

  The wooden scaffold is designed for craftsmen to climb from the inside, in the gap between the building and the poles. From the outside, each level slopes away from the walls, so Lazarus has to climb out as well as up. At the top of each level he lets his legs swing free and hauls himself over onto the next narrow platform.

  He looks down from the first level, assuming Jesus will follow.

  ‘Watch where I put my hands and feet. If I don’t kill myself, copy me.’

  ‘Come down!’ Amos shouts. ‘You’ll fall!’

  ‘Give me a proper funeral!’ Lazarus is moving upwards again. ‘Make sure everyone cries!’

  Jesus follows, and through the wooden poles Lazarus can feel his friend climbing up behind him. The vibrations are in his toes, in his legs, all the way through to his fingers.

  The scaffold creaks like fishing boats.

  It starts to rain. The boys are halfway up the side of the amphitheatre, on the outside of the scaffolding. From the ground, and also from a distance and safely from far far above, they may appear very small.

  Lazarus’s hand slips, but he catches himself with the crook of his elbow. He blinks grey rain out of his eyes, checks back down on Jesus.

  If he falls, he’ll take his friend with him, and no one in Sephoris will be able to save them. Beyond Jesus down on the ground Amos is waving his arms, the rain on his upturned face like tears.

  Lazarus makes a last big reach for the safety of the roof. He grunts, pulls himself up, swings his body over. His arms and legs ache with the effort but he is safe. He shuffles round on his belly and peers over the edge.

  Several feet below him, Jesus is clutching a pole and refusing to move. His eyes are clamped shut and his body is shaking, his wet face jammed against the scaffold to stop his teeth from chattering. A sparrow flies close, hovers, darts away.

  ‘You’re nearly there,’ Lazarus shouts. ‘If I can make it so can you. Grab my hand and I’ll help you up.’

  Jesus clenches his lips together, slowly ungrips a hand. He slips, grabs on hard.

  ‘Come on!’

  Lazarus leans out further, as far as he can go.

  ‘Take my hand. It’s great up here. It’s easy.’

  Jesus reaches up but not far enough, and he falls. His hands and his arms and his body detach from the scaffold and out he goes, into the air, clear space all around him. Lazarus swipes at his clothes and clings on, hauls him up and over and onto the safe flat roof. It is an impossible achievement, an unbelievable rescue.

  They roll onto their backs, panting, swallowing rain, laughing, their doubled heart hammering a hundred times before ordinary breathing resumes. On their hands and knees they look over the edge and wave to Amos below.

  He shouts at them to come back down. They cup their ears and shrug, then take in the godview from the highest building in Sephoris, the damp spread of the city, the big rich villas, fields, a glinting river, brown-black mountains. Swathes of heav­enly light cut through the distant rainshadow, and Lazarus feels an exhilaration so powerful he imagines there is nothing he and Jesus will not do together, nowhere they will not go.

  ‘I can fly,’ he says. He has already saved Jesus, so why not another miracle? ‘I’m going to jump.’

  He kneels upright, arms out like wings.

  Jesus heaves him back and they tumble laughing into the warm rainpools glistening across the roof.

  ‘We should go back down,’ Lazarus says. ‘Before Amos tries to follow.’

  They lie on their backs, hair wet with rain. Jesus turns his head, asks if Lazarus can keep a secret.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He isn’t old enough to know if he’s trustworthy. ‘Tell me and we’ll find out.’

  But Jesus pretends to lose interest, or decides it doesn’t matter.

  Lazarus closes his eyes for the touch of raindrops on his eyelids. They will do anything for each other. There is no other secret, and nothing else needs to be said.

  In the Temple before sunrise the enclosed Courtyard of the Israelites glimmers with oil lamps. The light is diffused by incense and the dawn, flames reflecting from the rounded gloss of marbled pillars. A bench is built into one wall, reserved for the old and frail. Their voices merge with those of the younger priests, standing and rocking on their heels, closing their eyes and reciting cautionary scriptures.

  The priests have black leather boxes bound to their arms or foreheads, phylacteries containing extracts from the Psalms or the Book of Judges, reminding them of the supremacy of priests or the promise of the One to come. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky.

  Lazarus stands in the centre of the room, and the nearer priests wince, and draw back. Lazarus has walked from Bethany in the dark, before the heat of the day, but there is a smell around him which is both distinctive and hard to place. It is not a pleasant smell.

  The Sanhedrin ruling council has seventy-one members. Lazarus estimates that most of them must be here. The room grows quiet. Isaiah steps forward.

  ‘For you, Lazarus, this is a great honour,’ he says.

  ‘And a great responsibility,’ someone adds.

  ‘But for us this is a solemn duty. As you know, the penalty for blasphemy is death.’

  Lazarus is uncertain of his scripture—as a child he’d been busy making other plans—and he isn’t sure what counts as blasphemy. He knows he isn’t perfect, but shaving and cheating are minor offences at worst.

  ‘Your friend in the Galilee is becoming a disruptive influence,’ Isaiah continues, ‘and we the Sanhedrin are committed to keeping the peace. There is a problem. Jesus has staged an event that some witnesses are calling a miracle. The news spreads. The more impressionable believers claim him as the messiah, the king of the Jews. That’s dangerous. The Romans don’t like the idea of an unofficial king, and the Romans can be oversensitive. Like ourselves, they’re always alert for impostors. When was the last time you saw your friend?’

  Lazarus looks at different faces, but in the lamplight expressions are difficult to read. He sees many earnest men with beards. ‘Not so long ago. Quite recently, in the grand scheme of things.’

  He’d like to please them so they buy his sheep. He wishes he knew what they wanted to hear. ‘Though at the same time, in human terms, I haven’t seen him for ages.’

  ‘Thirteen years,’ Isaiah reminds him. ‘Not since you arrived in Bethany. Is Jesus planning to visit Jerusalem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is he?’

  A blind priest seat
ed along the wall taps his stick against the flagstones, insists on being heard. ‘I saw him once. Years ago, a child. He sat on the steps outside and we talked with him. He had an astonishing grasp of the scriptures.’

  ‘He was lost,’ adds another voice. ‘I was there too. How could a genuine messiah get lost?’

  ‘Because on his own he’s hopeless,’ Lazarus says. ‘I wasn’t here to watch out for him. He was twelve years old and lost in Jerusalem. Anything could have happened.’

  ‘He did know his scriptures, though.’

  ‘Yes, so I heard a million times from Joseph when they arrived back home in Nazareth.’ Lazarus senses he is talking out of turn, but these are resentments he has never been able to express. He wants his opinions about Jesus heard. He knows the man better than anyone, and he remembers Mary telling him again and again how wonderful Jesus was for speaking so confidently with the priests. ‘She overreacted. So did Joseph. They were anxious parents relieved their son was safe. If you want the truth, these days I rarely think about him. We lead very different lives.’

  Lazarus doesn’t add that his is more impressive. At an early age Jesus had lost himself to the what will be will be. He’d sunk into the rut of doing what was expected, doing what his father did. Lazarus had escaped Nazareth. He worked hard. If Jesus had ever made the effort to visit Bethany he’d have found his friend rich and respected beyond reproach. Only Jesus never came.

  ‘He had a good touch around animals,’ Lazarus adds. He doesn’t want to sound unkind. ‘But honestly, as a boy he cast a shadow. When he was scratched by thorns he bled. He got scared. I know. I was there.’

  1.

  There is no gospel according to Lazarus, and if any such document suddenly came to light, scholars would question its authenticity. They would have encountered references or fragments before now in the many available texts from the early centuries after Lazarus died, was buried, and on the fourth day returned to life.

  These references do not exist. We therefore have no direct access to Lazarus’s version of the story, but without a biographer’s overview he is unlikely to have realised the significance of his performance in that slow dawn before the start of the Temple day. His answers to the Sanhedrin postponed the death of his friend. Probably. If Lazarus had remembered in the boy Jesus something divine, the priests would have acted quickly and without mercy. God on earth was blasphemy, and the most efficient way to disprove a messiah was to kill him.

  After his interview with the Sanhedrin at the Temple, Lazarus is rewarded with an invitation to the largest downstairs room of Isaiah’s house in the Upper City. Servants scuffle in and out.

  ‘Look me in the eye,’ Isaiah says. He puts both hands on Lazarus’s shoulders. ‘Marriage is a beginning, not an end.’

  ‘I agree utterly,’ Lazarus says.

  Saloma has yet to make an appearance. Her mother and her aunts and uncles, all her family including Isaiah, are very polite about the smell. Lazarus washed when leaving the Temple, washed again before coming into the house, but even he can smell the rancid odour that persists on his skin. The smell may be connected to his cough, and the frequent headaches. By the middle of every day the whites of his eyes are pink.

  ‘I cry a lot,’ he explains to Saloma’s mother. ‘From happiness.’

  Another symptom is self-doubt. He finds himself questioning his plan to marry, despite the virtue of his motives. He wants to establish the Lazarus family at the heart of Jerusalem life. Not for personal gain, but for the sake of Mary and Martha. He is about to remind himself of some further benefits of marriage when the aunts and uncles make way for Saloma herself.

  She is heavily swathed in robes, a headscarf, a veil. This is unusual for the traditional viewing of the bride before an engagement. A chair is placed in the middle of the room. Lazarus sits on it. Saloma will walk around him seven times.

  Her eyes, the only part of her face he can see, are soft and dark but slightly lopsided. One is bigger than the other. She walks once around his chair. She has a limp.

  ‘Close your mouth, darling,’ Isaiah says. He clasps his hands together and stands up on his toes. ‘There’s a good girl.’

  An aunt detaches the veil. Saloma has a heavy jaw. Her mouth is twisted. One of her eyes, vivid with terror, skews to the level of Lazarus’s chest. He coughs. She flinches.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, then holds up his hands in apology for saying sorry. ‘Sorry.’

  Lazarus has a growing blockage of mucus in his nose. He puts his head on one side, to try and shift the load between nostrils, and this gives him the appraising look he uses when judging sheep. Saloma’s mother nods her head, impressed by his serious approach.

  The further benefits: he’ll have an exclusive contract to deliver sheep at the Temple. His sisters will become part of an established Sanhedrin family, and if anything happens to him they will not be left abandoned. He glances at Saloma’s lumpen face. She will live in comfort for the rest of her days. Everyone will be happy.

  Saloma has two more tours of his chair to go, each slower than the last. The foot on the end of the leg that makes her limp is now dragging on the floor.

  Her father encourages her. Lazarus remembers Abraham and Job, husbands and fathers heroic for enduring dismay. Saloma grips the back of his chair to help with the last half of the last circuit. Then they will be engaged, exactly as Lazarus had planned.

  When I get home, he thinks, I’m going to cut my hair.

  6.

  6.

  The Romans know about Lazarus long before his return from the dead.

  He is the friend of Jesus.

  For at least a decade the Roman consul Sejanus has argued that knowledge should be treated as power. Legions alone will never be enough to control the empire, and Sejanus formalises the idea that information is intelligence. The Romans, for their own safety, need to collect and collate every available scrap of information.

  Sejanus therefore invents two new categories of soldier, the speculatores and the exploratores, and he attaches these units to the army. The exploratores are scouts. The speculatores are more like spies. They are licensed to listen and to think freely. Often they work out of uniform, but always with a clear objective: to identify and prevent unrest.

  High in the Antonia Fortress, Cassius pulls aside a gauze curtain. He has flat blond hair and blue eyes, into which this far south nobody can read any meaning. Afternoon sunlight floods the mosaic on the floor of his room—a woman carrying a basket of apples.

  Below the fortressed walls he sees the roof of the Holy of Holies, the Temple courtyard, then a drop to Jerusalem’s mazed houses and alleys. The Fortress is the highest point in the city, and on its way to heaven the smoke from burnt offerings rises past the garrison windows.

  The smell of blackened fat reminds Cassius that whatever the Romans provide, it is never enough. These people want something more, and their prayers are insistent with invocations, horns and trumpets, the howl of dying beasts.

  The Judaean people are waiting for the One. This one, that one, anyone. He’s coming and he’ll save them all, yet Rome, in truth, is the saviour. Messiahs pull rank. They appeal directly to a higher authority, making Cassius confident they register as trouble.

  He has been tracking Jesus since his first move south towards John the Baptist at the river.

  ‘He’s harmless,’ the local informants said.

  ‘And the crowds?’

  ‘The man was a long time in the desert. He doesn’t talk much sense.’ The riverside spies also reported that Jesus had no obvious strategy. ‘He’ll run out of ideas. He’ll go back home to the Galilee.’

  They were right. Cassius rewarded his informers with tax exemptions and gifts of Spanish leather. The carrot, as recommended by Sejanus, not the stick.

  Now Cassius is wondering about Lazarus. In his Galilee backwater Jesus has disciples. He has followers, none of whom register as threats, but the one man he calls friend is dangerously local to Jerusalem and in regular
contact with Sanhedrin priests at the Temple.

  Cassius has not been commissioned to believe in coincidence.

  After his engagement to Saloma, Lazarus stops taking risks with his health.

  That was two months ago, but he sees no measurable improvement. During the day fatigue overcomes him, and his head can ache as if clamped in a carpenter’s vice. He is sometimes cold, shivering in June daytime temperatures of up to thirty-five degrees. Or so hot in the chill nights that sweat slicks the backs of his hands.

  He continues to offer sacrifices, not as many as when he needed to influence Isaiah, but often enough to harm his business. He picks out the best of Faruq’s animals with the softest velvet ears, those he’d usually have reserved for Jerusalem’s most penitent grandees.

  ‘We can’t afford this,’ Martha warns. ‘You’re sacrificing lambs you should be selling. And we still have to pay Faruq.’

  ‘I can’t afford to be ill. I’ve got a lot coming up, and I have to look after you two. When I’m feeling better I’ll earn the money back. Don’t worry. All will be well.’

  He develops a nasty rash.

  It is safe to envisage the rash: the Book of Leviticus is a manual for acting correctly before the eyes of god, and two entire chapters are devoted to skin infections. For a long time these skin diseases were collectively mistranslated as ‘leprosy’ (a disease of the nerves, not the skin), but Old Testament skin problems are more likely to have been caused by the widespread incidence of scabies. A visible rash also signifies the first phase of smallpox, which explains why Leviticus stipulates strict measures requiring prompt action: smallpox could devastate a community.

  Lazarus has eight months to live. That much we know, but smallpox would have killed him quicker than that. His rash at this stage must therefore be scabies, caused by parasitic mites beneath the skin.

  The mite Sarcoptes scabiei clusters on bedding, clothing and other household objects. Impregnated female mites wait for contact with human skin, then seek out the folds of the body. They make a home in the softness between fingers and toes, inside the elbow or behind the knee, between the buttocks or in the red heat of the groin. They start tunnelling.