Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  Under the skin they burrow an S or Z shape, and inside this tunnel the mite eggs hatch. The larvae start to move, and their activity produces a vivid discoloration of the skin and intense itching. The itching is the worst part—‘scabere’, Latin for itch.

  Lazarus’s most visible infestations spread a scarlet rash along the inside skin of his arms, and at night he lies on his back, eyes wide open, willing himself not to scratch. No need to panic. Leviticus specifies a procedure.

  Cassius sends out frequent patrols to Bethany. Since Jesus returned from the Jordan to Galilee his friend Lazarus has rarely been seen in the city. Jesus has gone quiet, and Lazarus has, too. Apparently he is ill, a feeble excuse if he has something to hide. Cassius looks for the connection—he assembles his information.

  Several months ago Lazarus travelled to Jerusalem and appeared before a dawn council of Sanhedrin priests. Cassius has spies almost everywhere, but not yet in the Sanhedrin itself, and he suspects they were plotting, talking about Jesus and the Romans.

  Since that meeting Lazarus has been spending money on sacrifices, sending in many pairs of sheep from Bethany. This is unusual behaviour for him. The animals could be a way of covertly delivering messages, but Cassius hasn’t worked out how the system might function.

  Either that, or the sacrifices are part of a broader ploy. Lazarus wants people to believe he’s genuinely ill (thirty-two years old, regular walker, never a day sick in his life—the Roman informers have asked around), but Cassius is not so easily deceived. He senses there is some kind of plan in action, a longer-term design he can’t quite decipher, and he is not entirely displeased. At some point in this scheme Jesus will come to Jerusalem. Cassius will be waiting, and he will take this chance to get noticed in Rome.

  He needs to place a spy close to Lazarus.

  Absalom examines his younger friend, first one arm then the other.

  ‘You have a rash,’ he says. ‘But it could be worse. You’re not dying.’

  Absalom sighs for his departed mother. He still can’t understand why she had to die, any more than he can conceive of an all-seeing god who creates bacterial parasites.

  ‘You’re unclean,’ he says. ‘You need to purify yourself.’

  Medically, the cleansing procedure described in the Book of Leviticus remains sound. Lazarus must wash his clothes and his bedding and not leave his house for seven days except for ritual immersion in the village bath.

  He wraps himself in a blanket and shambles across the square. For a few seconds the fury of the sun blinds him. It is high summer, with unforgiving sunshine day after day, but slowly the village buildings emerge from the light. A Roman patrol rests and drinks by the well, the soldiers hazed and floating in the heat. Lazarus shivers and heads for the mikveh, a carved pool inside a cave below the village.

  He feels his way into the gloom, drops his blanket. Water drips and echoes. Steps are cut into the rocks, and the tepid water soothes his ankles, his shins, his knees, slaps against his thighs. There is a raised shelf to his left for the inflow, and to his right a flat overspill. The water is always gently moving, slowly refreshing itself from a higher source.

  Lazarus walks to the far wall, swishing the water with his thighs and hands. He turns and lowers himself onto the smooth stone floor, the water reaching his chin. He breathes out, setting off a skin of ripples, works his arms one way and then the other, checks himself over. The rash spreads down both inner arms, it discolours the top of his legs and his feet. He flexes his toes and fingers. The water eases the itching.

  He can see his ribs. Is he getting thinner?

  Lazarus loves his body. He does not want it to perish.

  He stretches out, rests his head on the ledge behind him. He pictures Lydia naked.

  This is not so much a question of why, as why not?

  Few men admit to visiting prostitutes but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, either the women or their clients. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible lists two prostitutes, fifteen whores and forty-two harlots. There are more harlots in the bible than tax collectors, more whores than doctors.

  Lazarus is unmarried. He lives in Bethany with his sisters, but is frequently away on work in Jerusalem. He is making decisions in an era before the influence of Christianity—good men are not yet finding their goodness by striving to imitate Jesus—and paying for sex escapes the sanction of divine punishment. Or so Lazarus believes. It must do, or he’d have fallen ill long before now.

  If anything, he feels blessed. Jerusalem is a city of eighty thousand souls, and the traffic in slaves and soldiers brings in every latest disease. Within living memory (as reported by the Jewish historian Josephus) an epidemic has decimated the city, probably smallpox. This among other invisible demons is always creeping from house to house, and every illness is lethal. And also not lethal. Some people are struck down and die, and some are struck down and do not.

  Lazarus, so far, has remained untouched—even god, it seems, approves of Lydia.

  He sinks his head underwater, and hears his beating heart loud in a pulse behind his ear. By following religious procedures he is giving god a chance to make him well. He is a reasonable man.

  He lets his face up for air, scratches an itch on the outside of his ankle—not the scabies but a mosquito bite. He takes the skin off the top. Sinks again, waits, rises up, breathes. His nails are too long. He picks off a fingernail and flicks it away into the slowly moving water.

  Overhead, on the greenish roof of the cave, moisture gathers in blisters. One of these fills out, elongates, detaches and aims with focused intention directly at the centre of Lazarus’s forehead. He blinks at the last moment and it hits him below the eye.

  5.

  Leviticus works. If it didn’t, the rules would never have been written down.

  By the end of a seven-day quarantine his scabies rash is fading. His groin sometimes itches, and his head can hurt, and he hasn’t sold a sheep in a week, but Lazarus feels sufficiently recovered to attempt the walk into Jerusalem. He has a question to ask Isaiah about the betrothal ceremony, now only a month away. He wants to know if Isaiah will pay for the wine.

  At the tombs Faruq is dismantling a sheep-pen. Lazarus greets him and the two men squat on their heels. They face each other silently, and this is business so neither rushes to speak.

  ‘Faruq, are you my friend?’

  ‘Everyone is your friend.’

  Lazarus leans his weight forward, elbows on knees. His fingers brush the fading rash along his inner arm.

  ‘My cousin knows a healer,’ Faruq says. ‘At Jericho.’

  ‘I’m fine. The worst is over.’

  Lazarus glances at the pens. Faruq has sold half his midsummer stock, but not to Lazarus. Like everyone, Faruq needs to live—friendship can only go so far.

  ‘I’ll negotiate higher prices,’ Lazarus says. ‘I haven’t been well.’

  Faruq’s eyes are orange like those of his sheep, his face the colour of hardwood scratched and polished by every outdoor season. He nods his head. He watches Lazarus stand up, turn, walk past the tombs and round the corner. Slower than he used to be. Faruq detaches a rail from a fence.

  We’ve established that Lazarus’s illness is so familiar that the bible doesn’t need to describe it. Also that Lazarus falls sick at the exact moment the water at the wedding in Cana becomes wine. None of the diseases common in the region at the time, however, fit the one-year interval between infection and death.

  The incubation periods don’t add up, and in this area the story of Lazarus needs some attention to make it credible. Even outside the story, beyond time, with the benefit of hindsight and foresight, it can be difficult to fit every factor together.

  It is therefore worth searching out more detailed evidence of the disease that plays its part and will eventually kill him.

  “Nearly all his life he suffered from a weak heart, then he was cured, as everyone in Bethany could testify, and now he was dead.” José Saramago cla
ims that Lazarus had chronic heart trouble, and died peacefully in his sleep.

  Equally absurdly, the Czech writer Karel Čapek (Lazarus, 1949) thinks Lazarus died of a chill—‘it was the cold wind that got me, that time when—when I was so ill . . .’

  Not so. The story demands that Lazarus suffer. The more hideous his death the more impressive his revival. When the time comes, Jesus needs everyone to believe that Lazarus has truly come back to life. But they first need to believe, without reservation, that he died.

  The most effective way to publicise his death in advance is to make his physical decline visible. His sickness should be horrific, definitive, undeniable. It should be both recognisable and worse than anything anyone has ever seen.

  Yes, this is how it was done. Lazarus did not die from one of the seven prevalent illnesses of ancient Israel. Not enough. He has to contract them all.

  In a small cell low in the Antonia Fortress, Cassius is questioning a young man stopped by a routine patrol at the Damas­cus Gate. He was leaving Jerusalem with a message for Jesus from the house of Lazarus.

  Lazarus is too clever to have sent the message himself. It is an appeal from his sister Mary asking Jesus to pray for his sometime childhood friend, who is ill. He has been ill for months and is not getting better.

  With a little Roman encouragement, the messenger is persuaded to continue on his way to Sidon without stopping off in the Galilee.

  ‘We will know,’ Cassius warns him. ‘We will be watching. There is nothing we Romans don’t see.’

  Cassius, like any ambitious speculatore, tries to identify a pattern. Lazarus is either ill or pretending to be ill. He is in contact with his friend Jesus, who has a talent for drawing crowds. This is a situation with potential, because for some time Cassius has been developing an idea to impress the consuls in Rome. He’s searching for a Roman client messiah.

  Romans everywhere make life better for foreigners who have yet to become Romans. In Palestine it will be no different, and the secret to this corner of the empire is hatred. The rich hate the poor and the poor hate the rich. Cassius has studied their scriptures. The smooth men hate the hairy men. The Judaeans hate the Galileans who hate the Samaritans, and everybody hates the Idumeans. Periodically, they come to hate how much they hate each other, making them hungry for a messiah who can teach them how to love.

  Their hope is their weakness. Rome allows them self-government, as long as Rome can select their king. Now Cassius wants to take this imperial principle one step further. A messiah is the future that Judaeans expect and a messiah, like a king, can be compatible with the Roman project. As long as Rome decides who that messiah shall be.

  Standard pathology, on this occasion, will not apply. Remem­ber that Lazarus is fated to come back from the dead. If there is divine intervention on the frontier between life and death, then natural law can equally be suspended elsewhere. Lazarus can have all seven diseases at the same time, but the progress of each will depend on his special circumstances.

  Return again to the sources.

  There is a thriving folk memory of a sick and diseased Lazarus, usually attributed to the moment he reappears from his tomb. He has a greenish tinge to his head, among other gruesome details. Sholem Asch remembers ‘a skeleton . . . the skull was covered with a sort of skin, but the colour of it was neither human nor animal: ashen, bluish and lifeless . . . the naked, bony throat and neck’.

  The parchment skin, a strange-coloured head, recessed staring eyes—over the years this description of the living Lazarus has migrated (as in Asch) to the time after his death. It is as if the resurrected Lazarus were only half alive, half brought back. The horror is vividly remembered, but incorrectly placed. The recollection of an agonised Lazarus comes not from after his resurrection, as Asch mistakenly assumes, but before.

  ‘We saw two yellow arms,’ Nikos Kazantzakis writes in The Last Temptation (1961), ‘cracked and full of dirt; finally the skeleton-like body.’

  Before, not after. Lazarus in the last months of his life will become quite a sight. His ruined body will become a public curiosity, his illness a combination of the harshest symptoms of the worst illnesses sent to try the Israelites.

  This solution makes divine sense. Lazarus is about to die. To his family, and to all his friends except one, his suffering will seem to come from nowhere, with no obvious cause. This makes him the same as everyone else. Nature is indiscriminate. It can warp the human body in terrible ways and at any time, and remember that Jesus wept. In the bible he weeps on this one occasion only, and there must be a reason for Jesus weeping, which has never been adequately explained.

  Lazarus must suffer extremely. Though not suspiciously so. Nobody should guess that divine forces are at work, because that would lessen the impact of the eventual miracle. As far as possible the rules of cause and effect must apply. However abrupt his deterioration may appear, every change will have its clearly determined catalyst.

  Though not yet, even if on his latest journey to Jerusalem the city has never seemed further away.

  Lazarus is light-headed long before he reaches the second valley, and only vaguely returns greetings from acquaintances he ought to acknowledge. He feels grey from his tongue through his innards to his anus. He doesn’t stop to contemplate the Bethesda pool, not today, but stumbles forward, eyes fixed ahead.

  He enters Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate, but ignores the most direct route to the Temple. He avoids the street that leads to Isaiah’s house.

  Lazarus has choices, and options. He is in charge of his own life, and amid the disorder of the city he changes his mind. Anyone can change their mind.

  4.

  Lydia works in the Lower City in a narrow building jammed between alleys. Her windowless room is beneath a sloping roof, reached by a tapered ladder that rises to a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling. This is Lydia’s idea. If a man can’t climb the ladder, if he’s that tired or drunk, she doesn’t want his custom.

  Halfway up the ladder Lazarus rests and swallows a gulp of air, ignores the ticking in his inner ear, shakes his head. The rash on his arms flares up. He climbs another rung.

  Lydia has beautiful feet. The soles of her feet are waxy and clean, as if she never walks on common ground. He sees her feet, then the curve of her lower legs. The rest of her is wrapped in a length of purple cloth tied beneath her arms, and the skin of her shoulders is burnished by lamplight, the flames reflecting in the broad silver bracelet on her upper arm.

  ‘If it isn’t Lazarus.’

  She is unprepared for the paleness of his face, the tightness of the skin across the bones. And the smell. She hides her wince, tucks her legs beneath her, picks up a cushion which she hugs to her chest.

  Lazarus hauls himself over the rim of the opening. He lies still, his cheek crushed into the softness of a heavy rug, his staring eyes level with the cushions landscaping the floor. He flops over onto his back. The walls are softened by Persian drapes, and their swaying rounded shadows.

  ‘I’ve been ill,’ Lazarus says, eyes open to the furnishings.

  ‘I know. I’ve missed you.’

  Lydia’s room is like a version of heaven, somewhere Lazarus and other men would like to come instead of dying. He climbs onto his knees and tilts the trapdoor. It balances on its hinges, then falls shut.

  I want to clear up the business of the smell. Lazarus will die and his death will confuse the issue, but for two thousand years the Lazarus story has been associated with an unpleasant smell. This is largely Martha’s fault.

  ‘ “But Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days” ’ (John 11:39).

  Or as the smell is forcefully recalled in the mystery plays (The Raising of Lazarus, the Hegge Cycle, 1451): ‘He stynkygh ryght fowle longe tyme or this.’

  The standard explanation for the smell involves Martha’s pragmatism. Lazarus will die six months from now, in the Judaean spring, when seasonal temperature
s begin to rise. Her brother’s body is a body like any other. Inside the tomb the corpse will rot, and organic decay does not smell good.

  This is not why Martha mentions the smell. She is confused by Jesus heading towards the tomb—she can’t understand what he’s doing, and gabbles the first thing that enters her head. She is buying herself time to think, because she prepared the body herself. Lazarus is wrapped in sweet-smelling herbs and perfume and linen, Martha having doggedly observed every ritual of cleansing, every bitter gesture of interrupted love.

  Martha does not take shortcuts. It is not in her character. Therefore the corpse of Lazarus will not smell, not if it was prepared by Martha, not after only four days. The memory of the smell, like the memory of his decaying body, comes from the period before the death of Lazarus.

  He scratches a fresh mosquito bite on the bone of his wrist. He shivers, even though it is warm in Lydia’s attic. The bite itches. He scratches. It bleeds.

  It itches.

  He sits back on his heels, sinks into a rug. He’d expected to feel more alive than this. He slaps the side of his neck.

  ‘I hear you’re engaged,’ Lydia says. She hadn’t meant to say anything. It was unprofessional. ‘Was that because you were ill? Probably you weren’t thinking straight.’

  ‘We’ve set the date for the betrothal. Two months from now.’

  Lydia takes another cushion and stacks it on the first. She finds a loose stitch. ‘Nothing is set in stone.’

  ‘I should have told you. I’ve been ill. You know that.’

  ‘I heard the news at the Temple. Did you think I wouldn’t be interested?’