‘What would he say?’ I ask.
‘We are all of us Adam and all of us Havvah, for the moment we realize we are alive – and separate from God – we become exiled from Eden.’ She takes a quick sip of wine, licks her lips and hands the cup back to me.
‘I had a more … selfish reason for choosing my own face,’ I reply while waving away the bothersome mosquitoes that have just found us.
‘What reason is that?’
‘I want something of me to remain after I’m gone.’ As I speak, I notice how my Galilean accent grows more prominent when I converse with Maryam.
‘And yet stone is a poor … vessel for carrying who you are into the future,’ she says.
‘But what if it’s my only option?’
Maryam looks up to the firmament and places a motherly hand at the back of my neck. ‘All the stars and the smell of this spring night … Nothing can take them from us. We are here now, and there is so much beauty everywhere.’
‘But is that beauty enough?’
‘Oh, Lazar,’ she says, ‘now that I’ve buried my husband and lived through more than half a century of winters, it seems a luxury even to ask that question.’ As she gazes past me – towards Yosef, I believe – tears sprout in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,’ I tell her.
She squeezes my hand and fights to smile, and it’s her effort to appear more resilient than she is that makes panic beat inside my ears. ‘Is there something wrong with Yeshua?’ I ask.
Her lips tremble. I feel as if I am standing on a needle point and about to tumble off – and the needle is made of all the terrible things that might take her son from the two of us.
‘I’m worried that he is in danger,’ she says.
The night darkens around us. ‘Why?’ I whisper.
She dries her eyes. ‘Can we keep walking? Sitting still like this … It’s no good for me.’
As we start to walk, she says, ‘I suspect that my son has remained in Yerushalayim for an important reason, but he won’t tell me what it is.’
‘You’ve asked him?’
‘Yes, two days ago.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that it was better for me not to know – safer for both of us. But I was too worried to talk of anything else. I haven’t felt like this in many years – since he was small, when we all feared he would die young. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I never told you or him that, shortly after he was born, an oracle from Cyrene told me that Yeshua would always be in danger, because great good attracts great evil.’
As I study her worried face, I realize that I have begun to think of Annas and Yeshua as opponents in a war that extends all the way up into the Throne World. Perhaps Yeshua was destined from birth to become the enemy of tyrants and despots.
‘Do you think what the oracle told you is true?’ I ask.
‘Yes, through my son – unfortunately – I’ve learned it is.’ She slaps at a mosquito that had landed on her arm. ‘When I insisted that Yeshua tell me of his plans,’ she continues, ‘he told me that it would be better if he had no mother or father. He said that this was why he’d never remarried.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ I say.
‘He began to weep when he told me he wanted no parents,’ Maryam says, as though excusing him. When I tried to comfort him, he pushed me away and ran off. It took me until this afternoon to understand. I knew then that I had to see you.’
‘What did you understand?’
‘If he considers my feelings, he won’t be able to carry out his plans. He must try to live as if he has no mother – as if there is no one who would suffer for the rest of her life if anything bad were to happen to him.’
So he is about to put himself in grave peril.
It is not necessary for me to say that; that is what our tense silence along the rest of the way to her niece’s house confirms all too well.
18
When I saw Yeshua carried away by the River Jordan, the surge of fear in me left no room for thought. I was in the frigid water without knowing how I’d come to be there. The current was relentless, and I fought it at first, but when I looked ahead at Yeshua, who was struggling to keep his head above water, I let my arms and legs go limp.
We were both then twelve years old.
I do not know how I knew that if I restrained the urge to fight against the current – if I surrendered to its will – it might carry me towards him much faster.
My father had taught me how to swim when I was nine, having predicted – correctly – that I would often wade into marshes, streams and lakes in order to observe birds more closely.
Yeshua was gulping for breath and straining to reach back to me.
I found myself being driven closer him, as I had hoped. Had he fought his way into a gentler channel? It seemed likely at that time, but in truth he had been slowed by his feet scraping against the stony riverbed; later we would discover his painful cuts.
The true wonder of it all was that, when his head went under the surface of the water and I lunged for him, I caught hold of his tunic on my first try. My feet soon found purchase against a large boulder, and I hooked my arms under his shoulders, and my next memory is of dragging him on to a sandbar and from there up on to the riverbank. Pulling him out of the water required only the decision to do so; my strength seemed to have doubled or even tripled.
After I dragged Yeshua through the rushes fringing the river into a clearing, he pressed a hand of thanks to my chest, too weak to speak. His long hair was slicked to his neck and brow, and he was crying with relief. His eyes shone with an otherworldly light, as though his near-death was a sign of God’s glory.
Yeshua’s eyes were dark brown but rimmed in black, like his father’s.
It never occurred to me at the time that he might have been testing me. Or trying to alter his mother’s feelings towards his study partner and friend. I only began to consider those possibilities more than twenty years later, after fleeing Bethany and going into exile. And yet, whenever I remember his tearful gratitude towards me, and our hands locked together, and the weight of his soaked flesh as I hauled him on to the riverbank, I am certain that this near-catastrophe came about just as he had told me: he had been lost in fervent prayer one moment and the next was being carried downstream.
Yosef had heard his son’s cries for help and came dashing down the pathway from our encampment soon after we reached safety. A few moments later, Maryam ran to us as well, barefoot, holding her shawl in her white-knuckled fist, panting for breath. I tried to tell them what had happened, but everything had taken place so quickly – and still seemed so confused in my mind – that my words trailed off after just a few sentences. ‘In any case, we’re both all right now,’ I concluded.
Yeshua told his parents all that he considered essential – that I had jumped into the water and rescued him.
Yosef embraced me so hard that even then I realized that he was not just holding me but also the future that the waters had nearly stolen from him.
‘Your courage has saved my family,’ he whispered.
While he ministered to the cuts on Yeshua’s feet and legs, Maryam cupped my chin in her hand and looked at me as though she were seeing me for the first time. ‘Bless you, beloved Lazar,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget you in my prayers.’
It was the first time she had ever called me dodee – beloved. Very soon Yeshua and I would adopt this form of greeting as well.
‘It wasn’t courage,’ I admitted to her and Yosef, and I explained how fear had taken hold of me and determined all I had done. ‘Even pulling Yeshua out of the water and on to the bank was done before I’d even thought of it. The strangest thing of all is that I never felt so powerful.’
‘The River Jordan turned you into Shimshon!’ Yeshua told me, laughing in the wild and exultant way of those who can still feel the terror of death in their gut.
‘It’s tru
e!’ I said, awed by the potent magic inside my body.
Maryam laughed with us, then apologized to me; for what I didn’t then know, and I didn’t ask, because she had begun to sob.
It was the first time a woman had ever cried in my arms, and I was overwhelmed with her compact fragility – and my own failure to know how to help her.
That evening, I wove together clues from out of the hundreds of times Maryam and I had spoken, and I realized that she must have apologized to me because she had never trusted me or even particularly liked me.
As Yeshua watched me trying to comfort his mother, his eyes continued to shine with their stark, mysterious light, and he smiled at me in that way that made him seem much older than he was. At such moments, it seemed that he might not be the young man we knew him to be, that he might, in fact, be what we never dared say: a prophet.
19
After bidding Maryam goodnight at the door to her niece’s house, I head to the modest inn near the Woodworker’s Synagogue where Yeshua usually lodges in Yerushalayim, vowing not to start a quarrel with him even if he had deliberately put himself in serious danger.
If you gave birth to a boy who could make visible what is hidden, would you not always fear that he would reveal what those in power would prefer to conceal?
A thousand sleepless nights Maryam must have endured while thinking of her son, and yet I am certain that she would not give up a single one of them – not even if the Lord asked her.
Because I would not.
On entering the inn, I discover that Hozai, the owner, is away. A new assistant – sweaty and unkempt, and reeking of the barnyard creatures with whom he must share his home – tells me that my old friend and his followers have not been there for weeks.
‘But … but he always stays here,’ I stutter. ‘He would have told me if he was staying anywhere else.’
‘Apparently he forgot to tell you.’
‘That seems impossible.’
‘Are you listening to anything I say? He wasn’t here!’ The man takes out a knife from behind his desk, faces away from me and starts cleaning his fingernails.
How do I explain to him that such indifference is a luxury no Jew can afford? ‘I saw a boy crucified today,’ I tell him. ‘He couldn’t have been more than thirteen.’
He swings around to me with an indignant curl to his lips. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘Terrible things can happen at any moment. We need to help each other. And I need to know if you have seen Yeshua ben Yosef – even if he asked you not to say so. We’re old friends, and I …’
‘Like I said, I haven’t seen him in weeks,’ he interrupts in a surly voice.
Back on the street, I come to the only reasonable conclusion: Yeshua led me to believe he was staying at his usual inn – and did not share the truth with me – because he feared I might be compelled to give up his whereabouts to Annas or another of our enemies.
Nikodemos ben Gurion is the only good friend of Yeshua’s who lives all year round in Yerushalayim. Although we have known each other for the better part of a decade, our friendship began in earnest only after I started work on a mosaic in his villa six months before. It took me nearly seven weeks to complete his extensive and eminent family tree – sprouting from King David! – and it adorns the entire western wall of his atrium.
We are extremely fortunate to have Nikodemos as an ally, since he is a well-respected and powerful Pharisee serving on our ruling council, the Sanhedrin; his authoritative voice has saved Yeshua from charges of blasphemy on a handful of occasions and, at least once, from allegations of heresy.
If the truth be told, I have never been entirely comfortable in his presence, however, for his manners are so refined that I grow embarrassed by my own rough ways. Does he notice how I hide my callused hands behind my back when we are together? I am also secretly envious of his collection of ancient scrolls; at least two of them are so rare that their knowledge would probably be lost to us if his copies were destroyed. One of them is a Book of the Just that is more than five centuries old, and the other, scripted by the renowned Petros of Alexandria, is The Story of Iddo the Seer.
Nikodemos’ personal slave Anekletos answers my knocks with the traditional Judaean formulae of welcome and sends his young son to tell their master of my arrival. On receiving word that Nikodemos will receive me, Anekletos escorts me to the triclinium, where his master is reading by the light of a standing menorah and munching on small round biscuits. ‘Eli, there you are!’ he says with an affectionate smile. Sensing that it is more than just the uphill walk to his home that has left me out of breath, he rushes to me and takes my hands. ‘What’s wrong? Is it your leg, my boy? I’ve heard it’s been giving you difficulties.’
‘No, I’m fine. I just don’t have all my strength back yet. And I’m worried about Yeshua.’
With his hand steadying me at my back, he escorts me to the red silk couch where he has been reading. I accept a cup of mulled wine from Anekletos to avoid giving offence.
‘Start at the beginning,’ Nikodemos tells me, sensing my apprehension.
After I speak of Maryam’s concerns, I make him vow not to let Yeshua know that she came to see me; I would not wish to risk creating a deeper rift between mother and son. I do not mention Yeshua’s suspicions of Yehudah of Kerioth, since I do not know what Nikodemos has been told. When I mention that our old friend has not been staying at his usual inn and that I don’t know where he might be, my host pulls his head back like a hen and puffs out his lips with irritation. ‘But he told me he’d be with you!’
‘He visited me, but he’s staying somewhere else,’ I reply.
‘Of late, Yeshua has become as unpredictable as an eclipse,’ Nikodemos says, shrugging as if to say that we have no choice but to resign ourselves to his whims.
‘What do you think he’s planning?’ I ask.
Nikodemos considers my question as Anekletos refills his master’s cup. ‘For some time, I’ve sensed him moving towards an important moment in his life, though he seems to be sneaking up on it, so to speak – as if to draw no attention to himself.’
‘Have you any idea what it might be?’
‘No, he hasn’t told me.’
‘And do you know where he is right now?’
‘No, but Loukas and Yohanon told me today that he’ll be leaving with them for the Galilee at first light. They said he’d be preaching the day after tomorrow in Capernaum.’
And yet he told me he would try to return to me in the evening, I think, which means that he wants to keep Nikodemos and me guessing – and probably most of his other friends as well.
My host reads the continued concern in my countenance. In cautious voices, we discuss possible reasons for Yeshua’s deception and conclude that he must have predicted that my resurrection would deepen the conflict between him and our priests.
Nikodemos puts his arm over my shoulder and assures me – nodding in his kindly, authoritative way – that Yeshua knows how to protect himself. ‘With God’s blessing, you and Yeshua will both have long and fulfilled lives,’ he adds. ‘And don’t forget, I’m expecting another mosaic from you after you finish at Lucius’ villa!’
Is it odd that a friend twenty-two years my senior can ease my preoccupations by using only his voice and hands? Perhaps this is how those of us who have lost a father too young become aware of the nature and depth of the void inside us.
After I have wiped away my tears, a candle in a window at the far end of the room catches my attention. Its halo – like the diffuse glow around the polestar – seems to have a mysterious purpose. I step to it as though compelled by a dream. And beyond its light, in the darkness of the firmament, I see Annas watching me from far away, through sorcery.
I am with a friend, and I deserve a moment of peace, and I won’t permit you to intrude on us, I tell him, and here, in this room, my powers must be greater than his, because his hostile gaze vanishes from my mind.
The windows in
Nikodemos’ dining room are made of highly polished mica. We mosaicists call this astonishing material by its Roman name, lapis specularis. It is a stone mined and cut in distant Hispania Tarraconensis, far in the west, and I sometimes use papyrus-thin slices of it in my work to add resplendence to the eyes of my figures. But its transparence is always imperfect, and now, as I move left and right, forward and back, the lanterns and lamps in the night-time city waver and ripple in strange and elusive ways. For a moment, I also catch my own ghostly reflection, which chills me, for I seem to be imprisoned in a place where no one but Yeshua can help me – on a bridge between death and life.
A man standing by a window overlooking a city that has always seemed too crowded for him thinks of how Yehoshua commanded the moon and sun to stop still in their paths. He wishes that he, too, had that mastery over all the stars and planets, and all the people of the earth. Then there would be no death, he thinks.
Extending his hand over a candle flame, he is grateful for its sting because it makes him realize that he is being moved about the streets of Yerushalayim and Bethany by forces he senses only vaguely. He has lost control.
I understand almost nothing about what is happening to me, he thinks. I shall have to look for signs in everything I see and hear.
The Temple stands in the distance, silent and imposing under the moonlight. Nikodemos comes up behind me so silently that I start when he places his hand on my back.
After apologizing, he asks for my thoughts. When I tell him, he quotes the prophet Yirmihayu in a whisper. ‘“All your adversaries, every one of them, will enter captivity.”’
It would be rude to challenge the faith of my host, so I do not say, But what if our adversaries may be more formidable than we ever imagined?
After I leave Nikodemos, I head off to my usual brothel, sensing that only in the arms of a courtesan shall I be able to free myself from the feeling of dread in my belly. But so many pilgrims have been led there by Eros, and they are in such an impatient mood, that I am unable to talk my way past them to the owner, who has long valued my loyalty and who would surely escort me inside without delay. Street prostitutes frequent the rotting alleyways near the tanneries – mostly Judaean and Galilean young women and men, but Nubians with polished black skin have started appearing amongst them of late, and their statuesque, otherworldly grace seems the cure for what ails me, so I make my way there.
The Gospel According to Lazarus Page 11