The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  Abibaal also told me that, subsequent to my escape from Bethany, Lucius had investigated the failure of our scheme to win Yeshua’s release. It seems that my old friend had indeed been brought before the court astrologer, Augustus Sallustius, as we had hoped, but he had refused to demonstrate any of the powers I had ascribed to him. In addition, he had shown contempt for his host as an idol-worshipper and had accused him of using his talents for evil.

  I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this account, but, if it is true, then – just as I’d feared at the time – Yeshua was unwilling to bow down to a false deity, even one who could have spared his life.

  Aunt Ester took me aside on my first night in her home and informed me that my sister Marta had blossomed after my departure and Mia’s murder. Her renown as a weaver had spread across Judaea, and she now employed four other women in the small factory she had set up in my house.

  Was Marta flourishing now because her life’s work had been accomplished? After all, Mia was dead and I was living in a faraway province.

  That possibility loosened my tongue, and I told Ester of a speculation that I had never dared share with anyone: that Marta had informed our father’s murderer where and when to find him alone. I added that it had long seemed as if my sister had consumed our family like a snake swallowing a lamb – serenely, quietly and expertly, one limb at a time.

  Though Ester dismissed my speculations as impossible, I read in the way she stood up to leave me, her hand clutching at her neck, that her suspicions of my sister for the death of her younger brother were far older than mine.

  Yaphiel, your parents were married on our return to Rodos, and you were born two years later, a little more than a year after your sister Tamar. By then, your family had relocated to Ephesus.

  Twelve years have passed since then. In less than a month you will be thirteen. You are on the verge of manhood – and very nearly the same age as Yirmi when we fled from Judaea.

  On the day of our departure, I did not dare look back to see my home in Bethany vanishing in the distance, but I have searched the town every day since then for all I might have done differently.

  A history made of ifs – such is the life of mortal men.

  55

  Dearest grandson, I know I have tried your patience with this serpentine story. I imagine that you have been asking yourself for some time, Why has this ancient grandfather of mine written so extensively of the past to me?

  A little more patience, dodee; you are, in part, to blame for this flood of ink, so, before I make my request of you, I must tell you how you yourself summoned it forth from me!

  Four months ago, you visited me here on Rodos and stayed for two Sabbaths. Near the end of our time together, I heard odd noises coming from my secret prayer room, and I was certain that one of the island’s playful dormice had slipped inside and, having little regard for learning, was nibbling away at one of my papyrus scrolls. I fetched my broom, intending to sweep him flying into my garden, but, when I eased the door open, I discovered a creature far larger and more troublesome than I had expected.

  You were seated with your legs crossed, holding a cup of wine. My blue ceramic jug – only half full, as I recall – stood beside you. With a horrified grimace, you erupted into tearful apologies. So concerned was I to allay your fears that I fumbled my words, but what I meant to say is that it is natural for a boy your age to sneak across the border of adulthood now and again, either alone or accompanied by companions. There is no shame in it.

  You were stunned that I fetched another cup and asked you to fill it to the brim rather than give you a reprimand. I confess that seeing your shocked countenance made me do a brief victory dance inside my head. Confounding the expectations of others is often so great a joy that I tend to indulge in it whenever I can. And now that I am an old felucca with six decades of wind in my sails, I need not even apologize for the eccentric turns of course I choose.

  I lit a second oil lamp and dropped down close to you. We were seated on the first mosaic I made in my new home, The Living Torah Greeted by Bee-Eaters. You had positioned yourself next to Yeshua, and I made myself comfortable under my terebinth tree. I always sit there to welcome the Sabbath to Rodos. Indeed, it is perfect spot for me to send my soul on its travels, for, when exhaustion summons it home, my eyes are welcomed back by my cerulean-blue bee-eaters speaking to Yeshua in their opalescent language.

  As I have already had reason to mention to you, the Lord Most High manifests Himself in limitless guises, appearing in the form most appropriate to each of us, and in my case – as you have guessed by now – He has nearly always made his presence known to me while wearing feathers.

  You asked me about the naked man in the mosaic, so I told you his name, and I spoke of the dream of an eagle that I had had when I was a boy and how, as I recounted it to Yeshua, he decided to join our paths together.

  To speak to you about Yeshua, I was forced to reveal to you my true name and tell you of my parents and sisters – and swear you to silence about such matters. I spoke only superficially about my friend’s special nature, however, because my memories of him began to blaze as I told you of our Torah studies, turning my inadequate words to ash.

  You went on to question me about the black flames in the menorah in the mosaic that covers my south-facing wall, which, as you now know, is a small copy of the one I did years ago in Lucius’ swimming pool. I answered you hesitantly, since am not permitted to speak to a young man your age about how we may open and close its gates. Also, I have lost the habit of discussing Yechezkel’s Chariot and Yaaqov’s Ladder in any meaningful way; on Rodos, everyone except my friend Agapetos and his sister are certain that I am just an illiterate Ionian mosaic-maker.

  Once you knew that I had spent many years in Judaea, you encouraged me to speak to you about the wonders of Yerushalayim. I started with the Temple, explaining how its successive courts represent the different levels of our soul, but, when I spotted a request in your eyes for a more familiar story, I told you again about how I was threading my way through the foul-smelling filth of Ge Hinnom when I heard the desperate cries of a baby girl coming from a basket dangling from an oak tree. Now you understood, of course, that I was not a traveller in Judaea when I found your mother but instead a resident of Bethany.

  ‘Ilana called to me and no one else,’ I told you, and, since I could see you needed to hear more, I spoke for a time of our escape from Judaea.

  Like you, it comforts me to know what is coming next in your mother’s story. In this case, however, I could not have predicted what would follow my recollections.

  ‘Pappous, I’d like to see where you found my mother,’ you chirped.

  Shock made me turn to face the wall, as though someone had died.

  You smiled innocently when our eyes next met, unaware of the terror that was now crouching behind me. And then you sent me crashing through the foundations of my mind. ‘Is Yeshua still there?’ you asked. ‘You could take me to meet him.’

  I left you without a word. And did not reply to your calls. You see, the gap between the life I had made for myself in Rodos and what it might have been was staring out at me from your eager brown eyes, which are also your mother’s, and this distance was so wide and deep that it held all I had done since fleeing Bethany twenty-nine years earlier. Indeed, at that moment, it also held everything I would ever do.

  As I stared out across that expanse, I knew I could not fulfil your request.

  I hope you can understand now why I was unable to remain with you that day or even speak of why I had fled. All lives, dear Yaphiel, have their sorrows and regrets, and we sometimes require time to ourselves if we are to keep from drowning in them.

  That evening, I tried to make up for my rudeness by requesting that you play your cithara and sing for me. But I have studied you closely since you were no bigger than a squirrel, and I am familiar with all your different forms of silence, and I knew you were on the verge of tears the entire time.


  I am sorry to have failed you so miserably.

  I started to write this scroll to explain myself to you and to make the apology that I have just made. At first, I intended it to occupy no more than an hour of your time, but I soon discovered that the point of my calamus was, in truth, the entrance to a memory palace, giving me access to events of my past that I had long forgotten.

  It was then that I fetched my strongbox from its hiding place and began to look over my notes about my last days in Zion. I realized straight away, of course, that I ought to use them to guide my writing. And I finally understood why I had stood before Yeshua on his cross and vowed to remember everything that had taken place that day.

  The words and sentences grew and multiplied, and, to give them the honest and useful form that all living things deserve, I was obliged to rewrite them myriad times in my mind before giving them the permanence of ink, until what you now have in your hands became a great deal more than a compendium of disparate recollections, though what it is exactly I cannot say.

  You are the first of my grandchildren to sit with me in my prayer room, since I was certain I would feel cornered if I allowed one of you inside. After all, it is there that I make concessions to no one about what I ought to be. And it is there that I study Torah with Yeshua. Yet once I discovered you hiding inside the room – a tipsy little mouse! – I felt graced.

  Dearest Yaphiel, had I had not found your mother you would be the grandson of another man. But for Yeshua, you and I would never have met.

  A door opens and we step through, and we are for ever changed.

  Did you know that a thousand such doors appear before us each day, and behind each of them is a different world? Can you imagine how it makes me shudder to think that Ilana might never have called out to me?

  But she did cry out. And my sister Mia warned Yirmi in time for him to save his life. And Yirmi gathered up Nahara and told Ehud about the killers in our house, and that righteous giant raised his sword …

  All my children are safe. And they now have sons and daughters of their own.

  We are all still here. Often, lying awake at night, that seems inconceivable – as though it is simply too generous a destiny for a mosaic-maker who failed at the most important task he was ever given. Sometimes I stop in the middle of a walk through the forest near my home and gaze around me at the congregation of life going about its business under the immense, heartbreakingly blue sky, and I think, Despite the bottomless misery and oppressive solitude I’ve known, I’ve been blessed with nearly impossible good fortune.

  At your young age you walk beside a thousand different Yaphiels whom you might yet become. You have told me of a few of them that you have envisaged: the musician, the wine exporter, the ship’s captain, the magician, the sculptor …

  Will you ever see Natzeret, the town where I lived when I was your age? And, if you do, how will it change you?

  Each turn you make along your journey will move you closer to the single Yaphiel who will finally take form. And one day, when you are as old as I am, you will have all but lost every chance of becoming any of the other yous you might have been.

  Life is sad in that way. And the hard, brittle, ever-diminishing contours of identity are still something that moves me down to the sea on many nights to ask the moon and stars if they, too, have ever wished to be other than what they are. On several occasions, I have met other grandfathers and grandmothers limping along over the warm soft sand, looking out towards the horizon with their leaky eyes, as though in search of a lost love, and we have spoken of our insomnia, punctuated by that sorrow-tinted laughter that comes so easily to people who have seen their most cherished friends turned to dust, and so I have become aware that most of us never fully accept that we walk beside an entire host of selves we might have become.

  Indeed, when I cede to feelings of sorrow about the way life traps us inside one mind and body, I wonder if I ought to have tried out dozens of other lives while I still had the chance.

  It often seems to me that youth is one kingdom and old age quite another. And death a mysterious third.

  Is affection the bridge between them? That is another of the many questions I pose to the moon on occasion.

  I shall tell you two secrets that have helped me understand this important link: when I taught you my old game of Noach and the Ark, it was really my sister Mia who was speaking to you through me; and when I climbed with you to the top of the highest hillside near my home and showed you the Archer and all the other constellations, it was my Grandfather Shimon who named them for you.

  When we are together, I am an astronomer, teacher, poet and actor and all those other men I might have become!

  And know this: when you were first presented to me by your mother, at least three other people carried you in their arms with me and bathed you and sat you on their belly: Yeshua, Mia and Leah. Even today, when I embrace you before bed, they do, too.

  You have been watched over by all the men and women who have loved me.

  After you requested I take you to Yerushalayim, I pondered such connections on many a morning and evening, and I came to believe that if I did not consider your request I would fail to honour what you have meant to them – and to myself.

  And yet for weeks I slept with a talisman around my neck and chanted Psalms to chase away the doubts assaulting me. Often, while working on my mosaics, I would find my hands trembling, which seemed to be the Lord’s way of saying: I shall give you no peace until you have given your grandson an answer.

  And then, as I was casting my gaze over the sea from my rooftop, imitating my old friend Ayin, a flash of insight made me climb back down with the knowledge of what was keeping me from answering you: the mystery of why Yeshua brought you into my life.

  I realized I could not reply to you until I had an answer.

  This, then, is the second reason why I started to write this scroll – to search the past and discover why he gave you to me.

  Just half a day after I began to write to you, during the first watch of night, a disturbing, trance-like dream descended upon me. In it, I caught a glimpse of another Yaphiel – the one who will exist ten or fifteen years from now, after my death. I saw that you had become a strong and purposeful man with the tender light-infused eyes of your mother. You were seated by the palm tree in my garden, and you were playing a Lydian melody on your cithara that your father had taught you. At length, I noticed a figure behind you listening with a rapt and grateful expression – Yeshua. When our eyes met, he smiled as if to say that he was proud of you, which was when you spotted him. You ran to him as if you had known him your whole life.

  This dream gave me to understand that you asked me if you would meet Yeshua in Judaea because your soul has realized that you will need to know the man who gave you to me if you are to live the life you were meant to have.

  Of course, I wish he could sit with you and speak to you himself.

  Or has he? Men such as Yeshua can accomplish feats far beyond our comprehension, and I would not be surprised to learn that he has written this scroll through me, though I would swear to any judge or daysman that I wrote every word of it myself.

  Over the last fifteen years, I have heard a handful of different accounts of Yeshua’s life and work. Three were told to me by acquaintances here in the Jewish community of Rodos, and they focused almost exclusively on the physical nature of my old friend’s miracles, including – in one case – my resurrection.

  I found the two other accounts quite troubling, however. In fact, they struck me as misleading and dangerous and, in one case, left me pacing my prayer room and cursing.

  I heard the first of these narratives in Alexandria a decade and a half ago, on the journey I took with your mother and your father to visit Aunt Ester and other relatives. On my very first morning there, my cousin Ion informed me that Yeshua’s mission had splintered into several different sects in Judaea and the Galilee and that their adherents had spread word of his activities west to
Rome, east to the Parthian border, south into Egypt and north to the Greek settlements on the shores of the Hospitable Sea.

  Ion and I were eating breakfast when he gave me this news, and hearing that Yeshua’s teachings had spread far beyond the borders of Zion so stunned me that I cut the palm of my hand with the knife I’d been using to slice open an Egyptian melon, so that even today, whenever I receive some unexpected news, I see the heavy fruit breaking open on the floor and scent its sweet yellow pulp.

  While I staunched the blood, Ion responded to my questions about old friends, and I was particularly relieved to hear that Yohanon and Yaaqov were not only still alive but amongst those teaching Yeshua’s precepts far and wide. They had apparently founded two synagogues in Judaea and one each in the Galilee and Samaria.

  I realized how sorely mistaken I had been to believe that Yeshua’s dreams had vanished from our world, and I spent my first night in Alexandria chanting and praying – giving voice to my profound gratitude.

  The next afternoon, Aunt Ester told me that a charismatic follower of Yeshua’s lived in the main Jewish quarter of the city. He was a preacher and healer who had adopted the name of Theophanus ben Netzach, undoubtedly intending to communicate the idea of victory through the Lord’s intervention.

  As you may know, theophanus is Greek for the appearance of the Almighty, and netzach is Hebrew for victory, often with the connotation that it has been won through considerable struggle.