Ensemble
Page 30
myriad known curses of his tribe and his country.
This may well be, you might overhear our people saying at the well or in the taverns; it sounds reasonable, and certainly explains his aberrant behavior. But there is one more possibility, which only a very few dare to think, yet alone speak: that The Lazar seeks out his resurrection man for another purpose—not to thank him or curse him, but to strike him down, even to kill him. This is why The Lazar must keep wandering, so consumed is he with hate, why he will never give up until he accomplishes his mission or death once again overtakes him, this time for good. Because there is no reason to believe that The Lazar necessarily saw a glimpse of paradise when he died—after all, if he did, then he can probably be assured that he will someday return to that blessed state, so it is always something to look forward to, something God himself has promised very few men. But who is to say The Lazar saw paradise through a peephole? There is another land after death, some of our wise men claim, a place of eternal woe and misery, of smoke and cinders and sunless sky, where the wailing of lost souls deafens the ears and though you are thirstier than you have ever been, there is no dew upon the blackened leaf; though you are hungrier than you have ever known, all larders are bare, all tables empty. A place so terrible we have no name for it, a place no one would want to witness even for a second, for it would drive you mad, knowing such a place does indeed exist, and to there you must someday return. And so some of those of us who have thought this through blame not The Lazar; we have some inkling of why he might want to destroy whoever subjected him to such misery, he who defied God by playing God. Yes, indeed, a drunkard once said, and what’s more, they were never really strangers to one another; they were of the same father, they grew up under the same roof. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, we avoid The Lazar, as he wanders the countryside and the alleys and the marketplaces, begging from no one but so intent upon his quest we are afraid to look at him, for fear of seeing ourselves in the violence of his eyes.
Sixth Meditation
My brother had always been such a prankster, at home and at school, that there are times when I wouldn’t be surprised at all, were he to throw down his glasses and crutches and proclaim that he’d only been testing us—our faith, our love, maybe just our gullibility. Once when were nine and ten, he’d rubbed ketchup into his T-shirt and placed himself strategically below the hayloft, so he’d be seen when our mother looked up from her gluing and decoupage. One of my sisters and I hid within a horse-stall, peering through a spider web and breathing in manure and sawdust. Things went as expected, but our giggling gave us both away before she’d gotten within twenty feet. Oh dear, oh dear, she said, with mock solemnity. My brother was the only one who had not broken character. He lay bloody in the stable-yard, neck twisted and arms outstretched. Guess I’ll have to get a shovel and start digging, and won’t that make me all dainty just in time for choir practice?
I remind my brother of that incident as we drive around the rocky periphery of the Cape, listening to Richard the Second’s oratory of crowns and mirrors and imagining what it might be like to live in this or that cottage and have this or that humble new job, pretending there are a hundred or more possible lives out there ready for us, were we to welcome any one in particular. He is resting on the safe, soft backseat of the rented Volvo, where he can stretch out his childlike legs, and I catch glimpses of his dark glasses bobbing and mustache smirking in the rearview mirror. His skin is as yellow and creased as the leaves in an old paperback, and his jawbone trembles when he talks, though he says he is not cold, not now. But that wasn’t me with the ketchup, he says, that was you, and our very proper and very nervous mother was more interested in church socials than choir practice, and she never did decoupage in her life, and accidents of any sort were always funny to her, and she would sooner laugh than express grief in public at a funeral, or… and I have to agree, at least for the moment, that he could be right.
Simon is in the passenger’s seat. Sounds apocryphal, anyway, he says in his most scholarly voice, and I have to laugh. He is wearing a very silly Hawaiian shirt and horn-rims held together at the bridge with a Band-Aid and looks anything but the distinguished doctor of philosophy he really is. Did you know the word grief comes from an old Norse word for weight? he suddenly says, snapping off the tape, which had been blithering on unnoticed about war and murder all this time. Neither of us has a comeback prepared.
Back at the cabin, under the light of one yellow bulb now that it is l’heure bleue (as my piss-elegant brother lovingly calls it, as if such moments were collectible like china), we toast each other with gin-and-tonics (though my brother is expressly forbidden any alcohol) and listen to the night herons and crickets. Simon has a new joke for us all: I cannot repeat it, or any of his jokes, for so many of them rely on Simon’s ability to mimic the lumbering cadences of an asthmatic Cantabrigian don or a fire-breathing backwoods evangelist or a typical Long Island I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale mensch. (Simon has never been much out of Boston, but I suppose he’s as close as the movies get.) Most of his jokes are about religion, dealing especially with what happens when Jews and Episcopalians and Pentacostalists meet on injured aircraft or in runaway trains or lifeboats, and quite often involve fat little lusty vicars, dour rabbis who remind him far too much of his father, and the occasional devil in his Sunday best. I like to see my brother laugh his braying laugh, though too often it ends up in a choking fit, which he himself finds even funnier—and so each joke is guaranteed of at least a solid minute of this sort of macabre appreciation. Oh, you’d go over big in the Catskills, he says, choking and laughing at the end of a long joke, and Simon leans over him and kisses him so passionately on his forehead I must look away.
Seventh Meditation
When his mother and brothers came for The Doctor, or Teacher, or whatever he was known as, they were incensed, outraged, horrified; people ought to know he was insane, he was unschooled, he was a criminal, he was disrupting the natural order of things. You might have thought he had been raising the dead by the thousands, that soon the world would be turned upside-down, no one knowing when they met a stranger on the road if that stranger was really alive or not, no one knowing how to or whether to welcome back those they had buried after so much ceremonial grief. Didn’t a family’s tears count more than a soul’s fear of the afterlife? Who did he think he was, this “doctor” whose work was so erratic, who taught in riddles and didn’t realize that death is sometimes the best cure? His mother and brothers beat on the door of the inn, but he would not come out or even acknowledge their presence; You are my true family, he said to the followers around him, who were frightened by all the racket and feared they might be thrown out by the innkeeper or even arrested. At last someone went to the window and convinced his family that he had already gone away. And he’ll never come swindling in this town again! one of the brothers said, shaking his fist as he walked away.
Eighth Meditation
The Doctor had traveled far to the East, they said, to a land where God has a thousand unpronounceable names and the humble beasts of burden wear garlands of roses and holy men are always fasting and burying themselves alive. Here he studied and here he observed. It was said that some of these holy men could inhabit their graves for weeks, months, even years at a time, as if they were all trying to outdo each another—until one day, without warning, when the sleep had lasted long enough to call it death, they would emerge whole and healthy and proclaim that they had at last seen the face of God. Then they would tear off their winding sheets and plunge naked, insane with a kind of spiritual lust, into the widest and swiftest and holiest of rivers. Time passed more slowly there. The Doctor sat every day in a temple by the banks of this river, watching how the water turned black and then silver and then black again in shade and sun, listening to distant flutes calling to one another like owls in the night, breathing in the spices and balms and perfumes the women rubbed into their mysteriously luminescent skin.
; And it was on one such day, along the banks of this sacred river, that The Doctor saw the stranger approaching through the red dust raised by a passing ox-cart. The sun glared off the cart-driver’s amulets, and he was momentarily blinded, yet he heard very clearly what it was the stranger said, running across the dusty road, right arm lifted as if in salutation and left hand shielding his eyes as if he dared not witness who was at last before him: doctor, teacher, magician, messiah, misfit, madman, doctor, teacher, savior, brother…
Ninth Meditation
On sunny afternoons, below the overgrown rose garden, within the cool of the silver beeches, Simon has been reading to us from books my brother says he always meant to read, but never had time for before. His medicines have made my brother ever-more sensitive to light, so it is good to relax here in the shade. We’ve pulled up two irritable wicker chairs and an equally creaky wicker chaise, filled a majolica jug with a high-protein elixir (tastes like hemlock, Simon attests), and assembled as if at a symposium in an olive grove. Lately Simon,