The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  ‘Who told you the Romans want more blood?’ I ask.

  He stands back up and moans while pressing his hand into his lower back. ‘Eli, you would do well to convince that Galilean sorcerer of yours to mix you a youth potion before you reach my age!’ he says.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. So who told you what the Romans want?’

  ‘It makes no difference who it was. All you need to know is that I wouldn’t like to see you, shall we say, compromised by ill-advised friendships. I aim to help you protect those artistic gifts of yours – with or without your assistance!’

  Since neither of us is a fool – as we have already established – he does not need to add, At least until you have finished my mosaics!

  In the middle of the afternoon, I hear Mia and Yirmi calling to me over the wall of Lucius’ garden. After I open the gate, my sister rushes into my arms. Her eyes are ringed red, and the scent of her distress makes me shudder.

  I hold her so tightly that she knows not to speak, for I need a few moments to prepare for the terrible news I expect her to give me; I am certain that it concerns Yeshua.

  When I ease my grip on her, she says in a clenched whisper, ‘The body of a young man … it was left at your door.’

  Relief flows through me, since she has not spoken Yeshua’s name. ‘Which young man?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know, but neighbours saw you walking with him this morning.’

  An unruly crowd has assembled in front of my house, and Ion and Ariston are having no luck dispersing them, so we cross to the next street and make our way to Mia’s home. In our common courtyard lies the young man about whom she has spoken.

  ‘But I was just with him,’ I say; the eternal protest of those who cannot forgive death for failing to announce a date and time.

  Uriyah has been dumped so roughly that his right arm is pinned behind his back at a painful angle. His mouth hangs open, and his throat has been cut from ear to ear. A dark crust of blood circles his neck. The collar and right sleeve of his tunic have been soaked with blood.

  To look at a boy whose lithe and perfect body has been so cruelly defiled means only one thing to me at that moment: there are men amongst us who cannot permit beauty to live.

  I ask Yirmi to return to his room and wait for me there, then sit with my back against the wall and hide my grief behind my hands. The Torah of Mosheh teaches that we are each of us a universe, which means there are no longer mountains, rivers and forests in Uriyah – and no star-filled firmament to guide him.

  And I am the reason why.

  Mia questions me about who the boy is, but I intend to sit at the very bottom of my guilt for a time before climbing up again to speak of it. I owe that, at least, to the good-natured youth who spent his morning protecting me.

  Some time later, footsteps I recognize cross the floor towards me.

  Just turn around and leave! I exhort her in my mind, but she does not hear me.

  ‘Eli, this silence of yours is selfish and absurd!’ Marta snarls from directly above me.

  I dare not look up at the outraged face she must be making.

  Mia sits with me and whispers that she will support and defend me no matter what errors I have committed, and the tense hesitation in her voice tells me what she is imagining about the nature of my relationship with the young man. Would that it were true, I think, for at least then I would have the taste of his youth in my mouth and feel of his timid grace in my hands. Not for the first time in my adult life do I think that my life would have been easier if I had stayed in Alexandria.

  At length, the wish to punish myself – to inform my sisters of my fatal mistake – coaxes me out of silence. ‘I ought not to have walked with Yeshua this morning,’ I confess. Marta will extract the perverse nectar she feeds on from my self-loathing, so, looking at her, I add, ‘If I had gone to work at Lucius’ villa this morning, this boy would be alive.’

  ‘Eli, what are you talking about?’ she demands.

  ‘His name is Uriyah. We walked together behind Yeshua. He and another young man protected me. He’s a Samaritan. And I realize now that –’

  ‘A Samaritan?’ Marta exclaims. ‘No wonder this has happened!’ Frowning viciously, she says, ‘Eli, I want this creature out of our courtyard now!’

  ‘Marta, please, this is no time for orders,’ Mia tells her. ‘We have to find out if he has family in Judaea.’

  Marta grips the silver talisman of the Angel Rafael that she keeps around her neck, locks her panicked eyes on Uriyah and chants, ‘From this foreigner’s land come plagues, storms, demons and disasters, but my Lord shall protect me!’

  Her incantation makes me understand that whoever killed Uriyah probably chose him – rather than the other boy who guarded me – because Samaritans are regarded as filth.

  ‘Did anyone see who dropped him at my door?’ I ask.

  ‘A rag-picker with a donkey cart,’ Mia says. ‘He told me that a pilgrim came to him just outside the Dung Gate and paid him to carry the boy’s body to your home.’

  ‘Did this rag-picker know the pilgrim’s name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about how the boy was murdered?’

  ‘No, nothing. He said he asked no questions of the pilgrim.’

  While gazing at Uriyah, I hear him say: I couldn’t have known any better – I am just a boy. But you ought to have predicted that this might happen and protected me!

  When I agree, he replies – gentler now, as though to acknowledge that I did not harbour any ill will towards him – If I could return to this morning, I would refuse to walk beside you. I would be alive, and you would be spared this grief.

  His regret seems proof that destiny separates into a thousand different directions from every moment, but only one of them comes to pass, and none of us will ever know why that one was chosen, not even the dead.

  ‘We must see that his body is buried early tomorrow morning,’ I tell my sisters, and I kneel down to close his mouth, but Marta grabs my wrist. ‘Don’t touch him, Eli. He’ll bring you bad fortune!’

  I twist my arm free. ‘Don’t you understand? He shielded me from harm.’

  While Marta glares at me, I close the boy’s mouth with my hand, then free his twisted arm from behind his back. It is stiff and cold, which means he has been dead at least a few hours.

  ‘Eli, you never seem to care how you put us in danger!’ Marta says in an exasperated tone. ‘You’re selfish, exactly like our father, and you –’

  ‘Damn you, Marta, leave me be!’ I roar, and I kick the wooden stool that Mia keeps by her cooking tripod towards her. The dry thud of it crashing into the wall reminds me of how easily she turns me into a confused child. In a careful voice – warning her that a vial of poison is concealed behind each of my words – I say, ‘You’ve paid me back a hundred times or more for having been beaten by our father all those years ago – and for my cowardice at not coming to help you. It’s enough! Either you give up your need for revenge – here, right now – or we cannot remain brother and sister.’

  Why do I choose that instant to draw a border she dares not cross? I believe now that it is because I returned from death knowing that we have far less time than we think.

  ‘Oh dear, I hadn’t noticed until now what a bully you’ve become!’ Marta says in a superior tone.

  She swings around to Mia. ‘Well, what do you have to say?’ she demands, which is her way of trying to turn this into a two-against-one combat.

  ‘Maybe it would be best if you returned to your weaving,’ Mia tells her.

  Marta thrusts her hand over her heart, looking – probably even to herself – like a mime who is trying way too hard to be convincing. ‘Have you, too, come to hate me, dear sister?’ she asks, and, though her voice seems genuine, the tears caught in her lashes are a strategy covered in twenty years of dust.

  ‘Marta, please stop,’ Mia replies, ‘I can’t think with you sniffling like that.’

  Perhaps Mia
’s words have some special meaning to Marta that I do not know about; her eyes bulge and her face reddens. She extends both her hands palm up towards Mia, inviting hidden life to descend into the room, and speaks a curse in a slow, venomous chant, in a mixture of Aramaic and Egyptian, hoping, perhaps, that we will be unable to defend ourselves against what we do not understand.

  I catch the words shed, meaning devil or demon, and tsalmaveth, a deep, penetrating shadow, and twice she uses the verb yaqad – to set ablaze – which leads me to conclude that she has asked a night-spirit to turn Mia to ash.

  Who would have ever suspected that when Marta finally gave voice to the full, lethal scope of her wrath that she would direct it at the one person who has always supported her?

  Mia reaches stunned hands up to her cheeks. Without thinking, I jump up, raise my hands over her head and recite the Shema from back to front, as Rabbi Baruch taught me. ‘I’ve deflected her evil,’ I whisper to Mia.

  Is the sound of Marta’s footsteps leaving the room the end of our lives together?

  ‘This has become impossible,’ I say. ‘I’ll ask Ion and Ariston to come up with a suitable reason for insisting that Marta join them when they return to Alexandria. We need to get her far away from us while we think of a permanent solution.’

  Mia is sick in her stomach and unable to reply, so I fetch our basin.

  At such times I perceive that no one can make me suffer like Marta; she knows that I shall worry far more about Mia than myself. Like a trained hunter, she can always find the part of me that is most dependent and fragile – the little brother in me.

  I pray and chant over the lifeless husk that once gave home to all that was Uriyah, then walk seven times around him, enjoining his soul to find his path to the Lord without delay, since a sudden and violent death can make it adhere so tightly to our world that it remains amongst us as an ibbur. ‘There is nothing left for you here,’ I say aloud, and I adapt the words of Mosheh from the Book of Words to help his soul find its way: ‘Climb ever higher, and do not look back at Balak and Balaam, and lift your eyes to the west and north and south and east, and gaze out over all the earth, and then cross the waters of the Jordan.’

  I do not add that I wish I could revive him; if he is still with me, then he hears that unmistakably in my voice.

  When Mia joins me, she kneels by Uriyah. ‘What a waste death makes of youth!’ she tells me with a reproving expression, and she begins to examine his hands. ‘His fingers are stained by soot of some sort,’ she tells me. ‘But I’ll clean them well – don’t worry.’

  While she removes his sandals, I cut away his blood-soaked tunic and discover the Greek letter theta etched into his right shoulder. It is engraved inside a crude circle.

  ‘What could it mean?’ I ask my sister, pointing, but she ventures no guess.

  Scars that look like worms burrowing under the skin cover his back, a sign of repeated scourging. They extend up to the base of his neck and down to his buttocks.

  Unspeakable things happened to me, Uriyah tells me as I study his face.

  Mia takes the signet ring from the index finger of his right hand and inspects the inside of the band. ‘For Avraham,’ she reads, ‘on his twentieth birthday.’

  ‘Probably an inheritance from his father,’ I suggest.

  ‘Maybe his mother is still alive and we can find her,’ Mia says with hopeful eyes.

  I take a long look at her, and it seems that I have failed to see my sister as she is for many months – perhaps even years.

  Mia, whose protruding, rabbit-like teeth and pointy face make her ugly to others.

  Who gifted me young with the knowledge that only the beauty that love permits us to see can withstand the passage of time.

  Who sometimes, even today, says her Sabbath prayers with her eyes open, keeping watch on her mischievous younger brother.

  Mia waves at me irritatedly because my gaze has become too probing, then stares off beyond me – into the past, I soon learn. ‘When you were born,’ she tells me, ‘your fingers were so tiny, and yet each one was so … perfect. When I held you for the first time, I began to understand some things that had eluded me until then.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She looks at Uriyah regretfully. ‘I understood that the Lord made us too fragile. I wanted each moment of your life to involve a great deal more than just breathing and sleeping. I wanted every instant to be incredibly complex.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that it would be harder for you to die.’ She lowers her head as if to make a confession. ‘I understood, too, that your life was an extraordinary gift, which meant that mine was, too.’

  In the downward tone of her voice, I hear a final confession: But I wasted so many years on things that didn’t matter – most of all, on trying to please a husband who no longer loved me and a sister who wished to draw evil to me.

  She suddenly taps me playfully on the head. ‘You know, Eli, when I get up in the morning, I feel the sunlight tugging me out into the world, but I want to stay in the darkness. I find I want to be alone more and more.’ She raises her hands to her mouth and laughs. ‘My goodness, I sound so morose. But the truth is, the world seems more beautiful to me today than it did when I was young.’

  As she carries the basin into the corner, the sound of a baby crying reaches us.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘I found a newborn exposed on the dungheap in Bethany this afternoon. She’d been burned badly by the sun. I’d better check on her.’

  A few minutes later, the crying subsides. When Mia returns to me, she says, ‘You haven’t told me yet why Uriyah was murdered and dropped in front of your house.’

  ‘It was a warning from Annas and Caiaphas.’

  ‘What kind of warning?’

  I take both her hands because I am about to frighten her. ‘If I am seen again with Yeshua in public, I’ll be next.’

  26

  The Jews of Alexandria say that sorrowful tidings fly more swiftly even than Raziel, and, that evening, as though to prove them right, an agitated crowd assembles outside my house and overflows the street into the dusty square surrounding Bethany’s abandoned well. Still, my sisters and I allow no one – neither friends nor relatives – to come inside. We dare not, lest some malicious-minded guest spit on Uriyah or express his enmity for Samaritans in some equally odious way. Few understand why we are so keen to protect his body, however, and, since gazing at a dead youth will make them feel their good fortune more acutely, a number of them bargain with us for a peek at him.

  Does our cobbler neighbour Aron ben Socrates really believe that I would grant him entrance to my courtyard in exchange for a pair of smelly old sandals?

  I remain patient with all such infuriating proposals I hear until Mia lets our cousin Hannah and her husband Theodoros into my home. Hannah is tiny, feisty and built like a miniature bull, and she long ago crowned herself queen of her own small kingdom. In fact, she never looks up when she is speaking to the rest of us – her subjects – so that if you want to meet her glance you must lean down to her level. At the moment, she is standing just inside our door, talking to Mia while panting hard; it seems she has run all the way from her home in the bakers’ quarter of Yerushalayim for a look at the body. Her eyes are painted with so much blue eyeshadow that they resemble peacock feathers. Without so much as a greeting, she peers around me as though I am a palm growing in the wrong place and points to the courtyard. ‘Is he in there, Eli?’

  The covetousness in her voice – implying that Uriyah belongs to her now – frees me from constraints I’ve so long held that I would have thought them part of me. I take my knife in my fist and tell her that she has to leave.

  Mia presses my wrist back down. ‘Eli, please stay calm,’ she says.

  Theodoros is an olive-oil importer and the son of rough-mannered nomads from Egypt, and he sizes me up with the sneer he reserves for townsmen that he considers overly educated. ‘Talk to my wife properly!’
he snarls.

  ‘Theo, I hear your mother calling you,’ I say. ‘And she wants you home without delay.’

  ‘Eli, what’s got into you?’ Hannah asks me.

  At that moment, I realize I am being tested again – by the world itself if not by God. ‘The greedy eyes of strangers shall not defile him,’ I tell her.

  ‘Strangers?’ my cousin questions. ‘Don’t be absurd! You and I have known each other since we were tiny!’

  ‘My point is, you didn’t know the murdered boy.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she scoffs. ‘As it stands, he couldn’t tell the difference between a crust of matzoh and the Megillah,’ she adds in an authoritative tone.

  I clutch my outrage to me as my shield. ‘You wish me to accompany you into the wilderness, but I am staying here with Uriyah.’

  ‘Good God, man!’ Theo exclaims with a groan. ‘You talk like you’re reading scripture!’

  ‘I’m not reading scripture, I am scripture!’ I assure him, since that will scandalize him.

  ‘You’ve always got to prove you’re better than us,’ he says resentfully, and, while he sweeps his hairy, monkey-like hand at me, Hannah shows me a fearful look and forms a protective symbol with her fingers.

  ‘If I were a demon,’ I tell her, ‘I wouldn’t bother speaking to you. I’d simply cast you straight into the Underworld.’

  ‘Eli, please – let’s keep this conversation friendly,’ Mia requests.

  In this context, friendly means we must cede to their wishes, since they are family, which is why I say, ‘I have no intention of being friendly!’

  Maybe it is true that my wits have forsaken me, for Hannah and Theo seem to me at that moment no more important than two wasps who have crossed the threshold of my doorway unbidden. Hannah is surprisingly gullible, and so, to rid myself of her, I ask to be permitted to tell her a story. ‘It will prove I’m right,’ I tell her.

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘About you having to leave.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll prove anything but your own rudeness, but go ahead,’ she says with regal courtesy.