Five thousand Galileans look at each other. As if by magic, their bags and pockets are suddenly full of the bread they’d been hiding and the fish they’d been hoarding for later. They can’t let Jesus seem more godly than they are. At heart the Galileans are selfish, but they are also jealous and competitive. They have negative traits to spare.
‘Besides,’ Isaiah adds, ‘in rural areas their eyesight is even worse than here. Who knows what anyone really saw?’
‘Couldn’t you poison him?’
‘If I wanted to.’
Yanav assures Cassius that none of his treatments have any guarantee of success. As a healer he makes estimates, he guesses, but for the fee he demands he has to be seen to be trying. Otherwise no one would believe he could heal.
‘Why isn’t he dying more quickly? He looks like it should be quick.’
Cassius has decided that for the benefit of Rome Lazarus should already be dead. After this most recent miracle his priority is to restore order, in the sense that what normally happens should happen normally, to remind the Judaeans what’s normal. The son of the widow of Nain dies and should consequently remain dead. Cassius sends his spies to report from the village, in case there’s a second revival, but this looks unlikely. The villagers have buried the body.
The dead are dead. This is the ending that Judaeans can safely expect, just as Jesus will turn out to be a provincial shaman defeated by the challenge of Jerusalem. His friend Lazarus is a hill farmer in a region with pre-Roman levels of hygiene. He falls ill. He sacrifices sheep. He employs a healer who is ignorant of Greek advances in observational science. Under the circumstances, it is normal that Lazarus’s health should fail. All things being equal, he will die.
The death of Lazarus will provide evidence of natural law functioning as usual in the universe. Death is the most predictable of life’s events. It is the opposite of a miracle.
‘Don’t lift a finger to help him.’
‘I’m a healer. The sisters will get suspicious.’
‘You know what I mean. Do anything you like, as long as it doesn’t work. I trust you.’
‘I trust you too.’
After the fourth miracle, the feeding of the five thousand, Yanav is close to admitting defeat. Everything he knows he has tried, but Jesus outdoes him with a new miracle that sets Lazarus back.
Lazarus can’t remember when he last ate a proper meal, but the tack in his mouth tastes like mud and death. The stench around him is ferocious, a hanging presence that mixes nard and incense with necrotic human flesh. The end smell is always there, underneath, however powerful the man-made scents.
Yanav eases his pain. For headaches he applies leeches to the veins behind the ears. The leeches swell like glossy black ringlets—Lazarus as he’d have looked if born as someone else. When Lazarus complains about pressure on his eyeballs, Yanav inserts a leech inside his nostril, on the same side as the eye that hurts.
On other days he sits Lazarus forward in the bleeding position, elbows on knees and fists pressed hard into the sides of his neck. Yanav slices through a bulging vein between the eye and the ear, and catches Lazarus’s blood in a bowl.
‘Push harder. Hold your breath.’
This doesn’t count as healing, Yanav knows. Other healers bleed and leech endlessly, with little or no success. He therefore remains obedient to the wishes of Rome as expressed by Cassius. Even so, he studies the blood for clues. Every day he searches for patterns, solely for his own enlightenment, but sometimes the demon is active and sometimes it is not.
Yanav dresses Lazarus’s skin with a paste of crushed lime bark, and when he truly runs out of ideas he consoles Lazarus with stories about heroes. One day they’re weak and the next they’re strong. Like Samson, they’re down then they’re up.
This is the basic story everyone likes to hear. Job had his cattle and camels stolen, his servants murdered, his sheep burned alive and his children crushed by a hurricane. He did not despair. He recovered from calamity and lived to be a hundred and forty. Yanav tells tales about characters far worse off than Lazarus is now. And they end up somewhere better.
‘Amos,’ Lazarus mutters, ‘how did it get better for Amos?’
Yanav hasn’t heard of a hero called Amos. He blames the fever.
‘Gilgamesh,’ Yanav says.
He tries out the Mesopotamian demigod Gilgamesh, who is often in trouble and always prevails, his long life describing the great adventure of an active man avoiding death.
After the feeding of the five thousand Lazarus is housebound: his life shrinks to his nest in the corner where he sits on the floor among cushions and blankets. A bowl of soft-boiled walnuts is on a rug beside him, but his wider field of vision has narrowed. He can see clearly, but as if through a tunnel. Sometimes his sisters approach, at others he stares at the bag of dried beans hanging from a nail in the door.
He crushes his cheek against the white hardness of the wall. A spider crawls straight towards his eyes. He grunts, and it changes direction, moving away.
Nothing is preordained. Any second now he will send a message from his brain to his hand. He’ll raise his hand above his head. Not yet, but when he chooses to do so. He may not send the message at all—nothing is predetermined because now, he decides, equally, that he will not send the message and he will not raise his hand.
Instead he makes a noise. Unghh. That was unexpected, but he, Lazarus, is the being who made the noise happen. He can decide to do it again. If he chooses, he can make sounds that don’t yet exist in the world and will only exist if he, Lazarus of Bethany, consciously decides to make them. Or they will never exist and never have existed if he decides otherwise.
He raises his arm. Unghh. He concentrates so hard on his free will that his eyes lack focus. Unghh. Raises his arm. Unghh. He is acting like a man possessed.
He chooses to stop. There has been some mistake, because he is not this kind of person. Nor is he ready for death, not Lazarus, and personally he can’t imagine anyone less suited to dying. He is not the dying type. Too young. Too much ambition.
He has an idea. There is a way to save himself that he hasn’t yet tried.
3.
However bad Lazarus looks and smells, and whatever Cassius may have decided, Yanav remains convinced that he can feel in Lazarus an indomitable force of survival. He buys an orange-feathered hen.
On the whole, reading the future is more trouble than it’s worth, but Yanav has never known anyone to resist his cures like Lazarus. He’d like to find out where he’s going wrong.
A ribbon of pink light breaks across the hills to the east. A cock crows in the village. Some dogs bark, then go quiet. Yanav squats in a grey predawn corner of the Lazarus courtyard, the hen in the crook of his arm. He strokes its ginger head with one flat finger, makes magical sounds, breath that never quite shapes as words.
The chicken calms in his expert hands, clucks occasionally at remembered courtyard indignities.
Yanav wrings its neck. He sighs, lays the twitching body on the ground. It is warm to the touch. He disembowels it, using the point of his knife to prise out the pulsing guts. He puts aside the heart, which he’ll crush together later with some bindweed, then concentrates on the liver. The liver is the origin of blood and therefore the base of animal life. He slices it into the centre of a circular dish, cutting seven sections, each for a specific deity.
The pieces of liver bleed in different ways. He swills them clockwise three times round the edge of the dish, then examines closely the position that each god chooses to take.
At first, he can’t make sense of what he’s seeing. He must have made a mistake, an apprentice error like swilling the pieces in the wrong direction.
Yanav has never seen an augury like it, and a cold breath passes along his spine. Right is wrong and up is down. The gods are doing something new, he thinks, and the first time round they can make mistakes. That’s what they usually do. They make mistakes until they get it right. Many people suffer.
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Martha fans him when he is hot and Mary wraps him in blankets when he is cold. Yanav sees a frail body holding tight to its soul. Lazarus floats into sleep and out again. He remembers the Arab traders who used to detour to Nazareth from the Via Maris. He loved to watch them working the marketplace, and he’d sneak glances at their black-eyed daughters. He was sixteen years old. The women found him amusing.
One day in winter, when the seasonal caravanserai moved on, he joined some carpet weavers on the first stage of their journey east. Jesus followed along, and Amos walked closely beside Jesus. Amos had convinced himself that he was Jesus’s special friend, even though he was two years younger. To deepen this friendship he’d started acting like Lazarus, only more so. He would bustle ahead, be first at whatever they did.
‘You can’t come,’ Lazarus said. ‘No fourteen-year-olds.’
‘I’ll stop at the lake. Might get some work from the fishermen.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t even swim.’
‘I can. Easily as well as you.’
They became part of the Arab convoy, pretending they were adventurers to the heart of Persia.
‘Goodbye, Galilee!’ Amos shouted. ‘I’ll be back when I’m rich!’
‘Or by sunset,’ Lazarus said, ‘whichever comes sooner.’
At Capernaum, the weavers rolled out their mats and set up awnings in the marketplace, while the three boys from Nazareth explored the rocky shore of Lake Galilee. They skimmed stones and watched the launch of fishing boats, the sails catching and dragging the men away. Poorer fishermen cast from the beach, wading in as far as their thighs, wrestling with the heavy knots of their nets. Today they were in a hurry. There was a storm coming.
Lazarus had swum in the lake many times, and it was best to find a cove out of sight of the locals. They said swimming was dangerous, and the currents unpredictable.
‘Or in other words,’ Lazarus said, ‘they’re old and frightened and have lost their appetite for life.’
‘Yes,’ Yanav says. ‘We can try.’
He gathers scraps of wood from around the village, because Lazarus doesn’t have the strength to reach Jerusalem on foot, or sitting astride the donkey. Yanav finds a hammer, and borrows some nails. He cuts rope and devises a solution. Anyone can be a carpenter.
Yanav lashes his homemade stretcher to the donkey. The stretcher is on sleds and has a wooden backrest so that Lazarus can sit upright, looking home towards Bethany as the donkey drags the stretcher to Jerusalem. Martha and Mary help their brother outside, while Yanav calms the donkey.
Their procession limps away from the village. The dog and the donkey, Yanav and the sisters, Lazarus bumping on the stretcher which scrapes up dust as they go. After an hour they’re still in the first valley, and Lazarus insists on trying to walk.
“The strangest figure in the procession, a frightening apparition, was Lazarus,” writes Sholem Asch. “His yellow-ashen face stood out from among all the others, for it had the aspect of an empty skull above the covered leanness of the skeleton: his legs moved stiffly, like wooden supports, as he followed the ass.”
On the busy track Sadducees and Pharisees point him out. There in that hideous face is evidence of the weakness of Jesus. Not everyone agrees, and for the Jesus believers Lazarus has only himself to blame—he should have made more of an effort, offered himself for baptism in the River Jordan. Only those who demonstrate their faith will be saved.
The three-mile journey to Jerusalem takes all morning, and in his pitiful condition Lazarus is seen by travellers, priests, soldiers, traders, women, children. In Bethany, on the road, near Jerusalem. It is necessary. These are the witnesses who will later swear that Lazarus must have died, that no one living has ever looked so nearly dead.
Lazarus himself has other ideas. He has tried everything else, but not the Bethesda pool.
2.
Jesus stood on the shore with their clothes and sandals in his arms. He followed Lazarus in everything else, but never into the water. He couldn’t see the point of swimming—it wasn’t a skill he wanted to learn.
The brothers raced each other into the lake. Lazarus won, but only just. They dived and sank and sprang back up again, water spuming from their shoulders. Amos did a comic backwards tumble, Goliath in the waves.
‘Let’s go deeper,’ Lazarus said. He didn’t like Amos showing off for Jesus. ‘If you dare.’
‘I like it right here.’
‘You can touch the bottom. It doesn’t count.’
Lazarus flipped over onto his back, his chin out of the water and also his toes. He checked Jesus was watching. Jesus had always been there, all through his childhood, as faithful as an imaginary friend. With Jesus everything would turn out fine. That was what their friendship had come to mean, and it was this message that Lazarus recognised in his friend’s patient eyes.
Amos splashed back towards the shore and was stumbling out of the water. Lazarus taunted him and slapped the waves and laughed out loud until his brother changed his mind.
‘No stretchers,’ someone says. ‘Mats at the back.’
In one of the lower porches they hire a mat at a ridiculous price. Martha hands over the coins because nothing is too good for Lazarus, as long as he doesn’t die.
‘I’m thirty-three years old,’ Lazarus says. ‘I’m not going to die.’
Martha adds another coin for luck.
Bethesda is heaving with the sick and dying. The porches and poolside have been packed since Jesus made his visit. Everyone here knows the story. Jesus arrived unannounced, selected a stranger at random, and told him to take up his mat and walk.
Now no one knows where best to set themselves up. Some hang back in the hope that Jesus will come again. Others push to the edge of the pool and wait for the water to tremble. When the reflections shudder, when the sky quakes and the pillars quiver, when the angels pass by, that is the moment to jump.
Lazarus can set up wherever he likes, because of the smell. No one dares come near.
‘Next to the water,’ Lazarus says. ‘As close as we can get.’
He does not believe in miracle visits from Jesus. Even the magic of the Bethesda pool is more reliable. Lazarus wants to live, and there is nothing he will not try.
That afternoon, after the long trip from Bethany, fatigue overcomes him. He fights it, even though he could drop off at any moment. The water laps against the stone edges of the pool, and the glinting light is Galilee, at the lake. He can hear the groaning of the sick, but luckily he can barely see them. He has always been lucky.
In the night he lies awake. It is at night that he becomes a bad sleeper, with a tiredness too important to sleep through. He senses that someone is watching him, and he focuses on individual stars in the sky. Then he wonders if angels pass at night, when no one can see the water tremble.
Quietly, in the dark, he is frightened he’s going to die.
The idea is inconceivable. Death is not to be confused with whatever is happening to him. Death is out there, and death happens, but not to him, not to Lazarus, with all his thoughts and memories and feelings.
This is when he has to be vigilant that his fears don’t turn into prayers. He must not weaken. He reminds himself that he prefers planning to praying, and only he can help himself. He is the one, and he can do anything.
The next day the water is like glass, making clean reflections of the pillars on every side. As he waits, and watches, he discovers that there are sick people at the pool who as part of the mystery of sickness have lost their sense of smell. They recognise Lazarus and are surprised they can get so close.
They approach hesitantly, and pretend to be interested in his health, but Lazarus knows that before too long the question will come. They arrive at it from different directions but the question is always the same. What is Jesus like?
Lazarus looks at the surface of the water. It does not tremble.
‘What is Jesus really like? You’re his friend.�
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‘Slow at climbing.’
‘No, honestly.’
‘Hopeless at swimming. I don’t remember.’
Jesus had light flickering around his face, not heavenly light, but sunshine reflected from the trembling surface of the lake.
‘Don’t keep it to yourself. Tell us how he was as a child.’
Don’t ask me, Lazarus thinks. Ask Amos.
1.
He waded back out to the same depth as Lazarus, because it was important to keep up, to be as strong as the next boy along.
It happened quickly. Lazarus swam out further and Amos followed. Lazarus turned back, and Amos had his nose above the water, his hands paddling fast. His neck was strained back at an unnatural angle, and then his head went under. Lazarus thought his brother was playacting. He got his hands underneath him and pushed him up, gave him a shove towards the shore. He went under again.
‘That’s not funny!’
Amos came up, paddling furiously, as if panic could keep him afloat. He whined with terror, his lips sucked tight into his mouth.
Lazarus caught him and held him up. He pushed him hard to get him started but his own head went under. He was the taller of the two, and his toe touched gravel on the bed of the lake.
The gravel slipped beneath him. He reached again with his foot but drifted further from the shore, pulled out by the currents of the coming storm. Amos was now closer to the shore than Lazarus but still out of his depth; Lazarus reached down a foot to move closer and found himself further away. His brain wasn’t working—he made the mistake several times more before accepting he had to swim.
He splashed hard with his arms, slapping his hands into the water. He aimed himself at Amos but wasn’t making progress. He put his foot down searching for solid ground but the gravel dragged him back before he could push himself off.
Now Lazarus, too, felt the strength leave his arms.
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