Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  ‘A man without a wife is incomplete.’

  ‘That’s what they say. Unlike a whore without a husband.’

  ‘Don’t. I didn’t come here to argue.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know why you came. I’ll find the best oils, to celebrate.’

  ‘I don’t do this with just anyone,’ Lazarus says.

  ‘I know.’

  She knows what he wants, and out of habit they act out their roles. Lazarus has always insisted that they’re special, both of them. He is Lazarus, king of the Jews; she is his queen. Lydia unstops a flask of nard, one of the first luxuries for which they’d developed a taste together: Lazarus preferred it to the smell of sheep. So did she.

  Lazarus unpeels the purple cloth and Lydia stretches out flat on her stomach on the rugs, hands limp above her head. He admires her back and buttocks, and instantly believes he feels better. Only he, Lazarus, has ever truly appreciated her stunning nakedness.

  He takes the perfumed oil and rubs a handful into her back. She is crying silently, a tear trapped in the flare of her nostril, but she doesn’t understand. With more money he’d have made her exclusively his.

  ‘This is the last time,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He’ll live a chaste life in return for his health. He’ll stop making visits to Lydia, honestly he will. Anything to avoid living obsessed by sickness, like an old man scared of death.

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ she says. She wipes the tear away with her knuckle, sniffs once, twice, rests her cheek on her hands.

  Lazarus swallows a cough. He holds his breath with his fingers on his chest.

  Lydia turns and reaches out to him.

  He holds up one hand, his face turning red.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s often the last time.’

  He aims to fend her off but instead grabs her hair. He pushes her face away so she doesn’t have to smell him, but then it overwhelms him, a coughing fit that sets Lydia free and has him bucking on his knees with his weight on his arms.

  The effort exhausts him. He collapses onto his side and drops a forearm across his face. He is so hot, but the worst is over, is probably over. It hurts to close his eyes.

  The Lazarus smell is possibly the only instance in classical painting of smell as a recurrent motif. It insinuates itself into image after image, such as a Limbourg brothers’ illumination in the Très Riches Heures (1416). A clean-shaven Lazarus is shown emerging from the tomb, and of the fourteen bystanders four are covering their noses, three with their hands and one with the bunched front of his tunic.

  The onlookers expect a man who has been dead for four days to smell. Martha has actively directed their attention to this possibility, even though the idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Jesus can bring a man back to life he can erase the evidence of decomposition. If not, the miracle is half achieved—the work of a messiah with limitations, so no messiah at all.

  Lazarus must emerge from the tomb free of the stink of death and decay.

  The smell, however, cannot be ignored. The evidence of the ages strongly suggests that a nasty smell is part of the story, and indeed it is. It belongs with the descriptions of a rotting, half-alive Lazarus: from the time before his death and not after.

  His living body is fizzing with a compendium of diseases awaiting their divine signal, but the timing has to be right. Instead of multiplying and overrunning the host organism, the viruses and bacteria in Lazarus mark time and fester, embittering the blood. The full symptoms of his illnesses are for now repressed, but this stench that seeps from his every pore is the stink of calamity on standby.

  It is the smell of divine intervention. There are side effects. No god can act directly in a world such as ours without unfortunate consequences.

  3.

  Now is as good a time as any. Several months have passed since the first of the seven signs of Jesus, the water-into-wine at the wedding in Cana. A second sign at this stage will not be out of place.

  Jesus’s second miracle, as recorded by John, also takes place in Cana when Jesus is approached by a nobleman. The nobleman’s son is sick, and Jesus is asked to leave immediately for Capernaum to heal him. This is a powerful display of optimism because Capernaum is about twenty miles from Cana, or a day’s walk. Jesus stays where he is. He heals the boy at a distance.

  Mary hears this story in the Bethany square, and rushes inside to share the news with Lazarus. He staggers outside to the cistern, stares at his clean-shaven reflection in the water, then plunges his head into the barrel.

  The healing of the nobleman’s son is the second sign that Jesus has been sent by god. Lazarus takes a turn for the worse, exhibiting the early symptoms of every common ailment of the age. He has a generalised rash from the scabies crawling beneath his skin, now accompanied by reddish spots on his tongue and inside his mouth. These spots contain the smallpox virus, Variola, and because Lazarus must suffer he has both deadly variants, Variola Major and Variola Minor.

  From early-onset tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) he has chest pains and a wet cough that doubles him up, bringing the smallpox lesions on the top of his tongue into sharp contact with those on the underside of his palate. The aerobic tuberculosis bacteria have invaded his lungs, where they divide and replicate every twenty hours.

  The nausea induced by the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum comes at him in waves. Often it competes with the abdominal cramps caused by the shigella bacteria responsible for bacillary dysentery.

  Which Lazarus also has, and which provokes vomiting and acute diarrhoea.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he tells his sisters. ‘Stop your endless fussing.’

  For a certain amount of the rest of his life, his first life, Lazarus will be confined indoors, and it is worth providing a fuller picture of how his house may have looked. The pilgrim who visits Bethany today, probably by bus or coach, will be dropped at a dusty roadside on what was once the village square.

  There is an official blue sign reading ‘Pilgrimage Sights’, and an arrow points to a narrow road leading steeply uphill. On the right-hand side of this road, before the tomb and the three churches commemorating the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection, just after the first gift shop, is a two-storey house with a handwritten banner: The Home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary.

  Accredited tour guides warn that this is probably not the house, but the two young men who sit inside the courtyard will accompany interested visitors past the bay tree and inside the disputed building. They show off the engraved brass teapot and matching set of goblets owned by Lazarus himself, and earthenware bowls possibly used by his sisters. Whatever the truth, this is the only house we have.

  There are two large rooms, one on each floor. There is a bench built into the walls of each rooms, wide enough to lie down on and sleep. There are rugs and cushions on the floors, woven decorations on the whitewashed walls, and circular brass trays set on wooden stands to make convenient low tables. The attentive young men hint strongly that the teapot and goblets may be for sale.

  Otherwise, Coca-Cola is available from a glass-doored fridge in the courtyard outside.

  Lazarus stays mostly in the upper room. It makes his urgent trips outside more difficult, but Martha is convinced that the air upstairs is cleaner. She and Mary move the hand loom upstairs, and take turns to sit with him while working on the betrothal gown and asking him questions about Saloma.

  ‘What’s her favourite colour?’

  Lazarus rarely wants to talk.

  ‘We should send for Jesus,’ Mary says.

  There are awkward silences, and Jesus himself concedes the negative influence he can have on family life: ‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law’ (Matthew 10:35). The Lazarus sisters are not immune. They too are subject to the pressures of the age.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Martha says.

  ‘Jesus is trying to tell us something.�
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  ‘You’re not helping. Check the stitches on the wedding gown. He needs something to look forward to.’

  ‘Jesus is healing people he doesn’t even know. Complete strangers—the sons of noblemen.’

  ‘He’s in Galilee,’ Lazarus says. He pulls his knees to his chest, wipes his hand across his mouth. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘That boy was healed at a distance.’

  ‘Of about twenty miles. We’re at the other end of the country.’

  ‘Pray. If you believe he can heal you then he will.’

  A smallpox lesion bursts inside Lazarus’s mouth, filling his saliva with bacteria. He is sitting but refuses to lie down. He has vowed never to lie down during daylight hours, because he will not admit to weakness.

  ‘I have a fever and a nasty cough. That’s all. I don’t want anyone to worry.’

  Mary’s lips move fast as she prays for her brother. Then she prays she won’t fall ill, and that Martha won’t fall ill. Most of her prayers are answered.

  Lazarus will not send for Jesus, neither at this stage halfway through his illness nor later when his life depends upon it: ‘So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick” ’ (John 11:3). Instead, Martha and Mary will act on his behalf, and only at the very end, when their brother has barely a day or maybe two days left to live.

  In the meantime, it is unthinkable that Lazarus does nothing. He has the rest of his life to lead. He will attempt to save himself in every conceivable way except for calling on Jesus.

  He has offered penitential sacrifices at the Temple: his fever and his headaches remain unchanged. He has purified himself in the mikveh, but blames the failed cleansing on his lack of sincerity. He has given up Lydia, almost entirely.

  Yet he still feels ugly and weak and smells like a one-man plague. Mary can barely speak without mentioning Jesus, and Lazarus torments himself by remembering the past. He wonders whether there was anything of importance he missed at the time, all those years ago in Nazareth. Jesus has extraordinary powers, and Lazarus had noticed nothing.

  He doesn’t think so. The proof is there in what happened to Amos, but the past can’t be changed. Unlike the future, which can be whatever he is determined to make of it.

  2.

  Yanav the Healer travels with a dog called Ezekiel and a brown, one-eyed donkey. He is welcomed in Bethany like news from the desert or the arrival of cut-price eggs. He is an event. The idle gawp at the donkey, at the brass rings in its ears and the clatter strapped to the yellow leather tent on its back.

  The healer is a small bearded man with no visible neck. His clothes are good quality but travel-stained, and he has a wary look as if there’s danger in fully opening his eyes. His face is often turned at an angle to his body, but the eye furthest away is the one to watch. The nearer eye sees, but the one at a distance does the thinking.

  We can’t know this for sure. We do, however, know what a healer of the time, like Yanav, would have been carrying in the panniers and flagons jumbled across the back of his donkey.

  Foliage from a willow tree, and the dried sap of opium poppies. He has a jar of milk deliberately exposed to the sun. Olive oil, oil squeezed from fish livers, salt, and a box of maggots kept separate from the leeches which travel on the other side of the donkey, next to a bag of locusts. A flask of honey, a pouch of earth scooped from the centre of a termites’ nest, sharp thorns, chalk, flat stones, and a stoppered vial of ‘Greek potion’ which is his own urine mixed with dill.

  He also carries astrological charts and a sheath of peacock feathers, but these are just for show.

  Mary notes the arrival of the healer and the next day she leaves the village before dawn. She is Lazarus’s sister and has similar notions about heroism, though he and Martha have never bothered to notice. Martha is the oldest and Lazarus is a man. They underestimate her, but with the help of Jesus she alone can save her ailing brother.

  She believes this to be true, and in her mind it is already so. Jesus will heal Lazarus if Mary of Bethany demonstrates sufficient faith.

  She also believes, quite sincerely, that Martha will feel no anxiety about where her sister is or when she’s coming back. Mary believes she will come to no harm on the Bethany road, nor after that as a young, attractive woman alone in the empty wastes between Jerusalem and the lake in Galilee. Her faith will keep her safe, and with the aid of kindly strangers she’ll arrive in Cana by tomorrow at dusk.

  Mary prays for the sick at the Bethesda pool, but passes them by. She prays for the beggars who jostle her in the clamour of Jerusalem. She will not be deterred, because she recognises the blisters in her brother’s mouth. She knows smallpox. The consumptive cough she has also heard before, and tended to the dying with similar malarial fevers. If she does nothing, Lazarus will die.

  At the Damascus Gate a military checkpoint slows her progress, but she joins the queue to leave the city. Waiting, too, may be part of the celestial plan.

  The soldiers block her path. The northern road is dangerous for an unaccompanied woman. Besides, she has no business outside the city. She is carrying nothing she can sell in the desert.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ but before the soldiers can start she turns and doubles back, believing god must mean her to leave the city by another route.

  By the time she reaches Herod’s Gate, Cassius is already there.

  ‘You are Mary, the sister of Lazarus.’

  She glances over her shoulder, then briefly at his face. His blue eyes mean nothing to her.

  ‘How is your brother? I hear he’s not been well.’

  ‘He is about to make a recovery, thank you.’

  ‘It’s not catching, then, whatever he has?’

  ‘Let me through, please. I have a long distance to travel.’

  ‘To the Galilee, I expect. You’ll have heard the stories about Jesus and his two miracles.’

  Mary is better looking than Cassius expected, and she blushes nicely, though young women should learn not to clench their fists. ‘Do you believe either of these miracles is true?’

  She does. Cassius sees this straight away, because the Jesus believers have no talent for deception, as if concealing their belief were as bad as denying it. Her shoulders dip, and she picks up her skirts, as if she expects to have to run.

  ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,’ Cassius says consolingly. ‘Let alone my brother’s friend. Jesus of Nazareth sent by god. Imagine the responsibility.’

  Mary raises the bright and defiant eyes of a believer, and Cassius briefly thinks that she too may be ill. She believes in stories that grow more far-fetched at every step from Cana, and to a speculatore credulity looks like an illness. It needs stamping out.

  ‘Now go back home. You will not be permitted to leave for the Galilee. Every soldier on every gate has orders that you and your sister belong with Lazarus in Bethany.’

  1.

  Jesus is not the only healer in Palestine at this time. Yanav has travelled extensively, and he has a reputation.

  Lazarus welcomes him into the downstairs room, sits his back against the wall. Then he clutches his stomach, apologises and staggers to the latrine behind the house.

  Yanav has seen it all before. He accepts some modest hospitality. A glass of sweet tea, one of Martha’s honey cakes, and yes very kind perhaps just one more half of a honey cake. Thank you.

  Martha bustles about, checking the healer has everything he wants, then in the absence of Lazarus she asks him directly how much he charges. Her hand leaps to her throat, then settles on her racing heart. For that amount she’d expect him to work miracles.

  Lazarus returns, misses the entrance and smashes his eye socket against the door frame. Glaucoma. As well as pain in and around the eyeball, he is losing his peripheral vision. He crouches down, holding his head, cursing his eyes, hitting out at the door for being so narrow. Feels sick, stands up. He’s too hot or too cold, and hasn’t eaten for days.

  ‘I’ll need most of
my fee in advance. There may be additional expenses. Herbs, and so on.’

  ‘We have the money,’ Martha says. ‘If you can make him well.’

  Lazarus has a coughing fit which leaves him panting and exhausted. He ends up on one knee on the floor, but refuses to lie down.

  Yanav leads him to the bench, helps him to sit upright. What­ever he was expecting, Lazarus is worse, especially as Yanav”s favourite healings involve diseases that no one can see. He likes sick people with active imaginations who thrive on close attention. They may well believe in peacock feathers and astrology, in which case Yanav is confident that he can help.

  With Lazarus there is the rash, the fever and the pinkness in the whites of the eyes. Yanav examines the welted tongue, the pustules in the mouth. He sucks his teeth. Lazarus is suffering from symptoms that Yanav has encountered before, many times, though never all at once in the same body.

  There is also a distinct, unpleasant smell, either from Lazarus or somewhere close. Yanav has never smelled anything like it. Courage, he tells himself, this is the friend of Jesus whom Jesus the upstart healer, for reasons of cowardice and inexperience, has neglected to attempt to heal.

  Yanav rests his hands on Lazarus’s shoulders. He squeezes, feeling for the density of flesh and bone, for the will of the man to survive. He looks hard into Lazarus’s inflamed eyes.

  ‘As I thought.’

  Lazarus is tough, wiry, the upcountry type that lasts forever. He is also rich and unmarried, so his only concern is his health.

  Yanav’s reputation depends on successful predictions. If he examines a man and predicts he will die, and he dies, then his reputation remains intact. Better, of course, to see in advance that a dying man will live.

  There is something about Lazarus—he looks frail and he smells horrendous, but Yanav can sense survival deep within him.

  ‘No need to panic,’ he says, deciding to trust intuition. ‘If you do exactly as I say, I’ll have you as good as new.’