Lazarus is Dead (7 page)

From early-onset tuberculosis (
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
) he has chest pains and a wet cough that doubles him up, bringing the smallpox lesions on the top of his tongue into sharp contact with those on the underside of his palate. The aerobic tuberculosis bacteria have invaded his lungs, where they divide and replicate every twenty hours.

The nausea induced by the malarial parasite
Plasmodium falciparum
comes at him in waves. Often it competes with the abdominal cramps caused by the
shigella
bacteria responsible for bacillary dysentery.

Which Lazarus also has, and which provokes vomiting and acute diarrhoea.

‘It's nothing,' he tells his sisters. ‘Stop your endless fussing.'

 

For a certain amount of the rest of his life, his first life, Lazarus will be confined indoors, and it is worth providing a fuller picture of how his house may have looked. The pilgrim who visits Bethany today, probably by bus or coach, will be dropped at a dusty roadside on what was once the village square.

There is an official blue sign reading ‘Pilgrimage Sights', and an arrow points to a narrow road leading steeply uphill. On the right-hand side of this road, before the tomb and the three churches commemorating the miracle of Lazarus's resurrection, just after the first gift shop, is a two-storey house with a handwritten banner: The Home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary.

Accredited tour guides warn that this is probably not the house, but the two young men who sit inside the courtyard will accompany interested visitors past the bay tree and inside the disputed building. They show off the engraved brass teapot and matching set of goblets owned by Lazarus himself, and earthenware bowls possibly used by his sisters. Whatever the truth, this is the only house we have.

There are two large rooms, one on each floor. There is a bench built into the walls of each rooms, wide enough to lie down on and sleep. There are rugs and cushions on the floors, woven decorations on the whitewashed walls, and circular brass trays set on wooden stands to make convenient low tables. The attentive young men hint strongly that the teapot and goblets may be for sale.

Otherwise, Coca-Cola is available from a glass-doored fridge in the courtyard outside.

Lazarus stays mostly in the upper room. It makes his urgent trips outside more difficult, but Martha is convinced that the air upstairs is cleaner. She and Mary move the hand loom upstairs, and take turns to sit with him while working on the betrothal gown and asking him questions about Saloma.

‘What's her favourite colour?'

Lazarus rarely wants to talk.

‘We should send for Jesus,' Mary says.

There are awkward silences, and Jesus himself concedes the negative influence he can have on family life:
‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law'
(Matthew 10:35). The Lazarus sisters are not immune. They too are subject to the pressures of the age.

‘Leave him alone,' Martha says.

‘Jesus is trying to tell us something.'

‘You're not helping. Check the stitches on the wedding gown. He needs something to look forward to.'

‘Jesus is healing people he doesn't even know. Complete strangers—the sons of noblemen.'

‘He's in Galilee,' Lazarus says. He pulls his knees to his chest, wipes his hand across his mouth. ‘I'm here.'

‘That boy was healed at a distance.'

‘Of about twenty miles. We're at the other end of the country.'

‘Pray. If you believe he can heal you then he will.'

A smallpox lesion bursts inside Lazarus's mouth, filling his saliva with bacteria. He is sitting but refuses to lie down. He has vowed never to lie down during daylight hours, because he will not admit to weakness.

‘I have a fever and a nasty cough. That's all. I don't want anyone to worry.'

Mary's lips move fast as she prays for her brother. Then she prays she won't fall ill, and that Martha won't fall ill. Most of her prayers are answered.

 

Lazarus will not send for Jesus, neither at this stage halfway through his illness nor later when his life depends upon it:
‘So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick” '
(John 11:3). Instead, Martha and Mary will act on his behalf, and only at the very end, when their brother has barely a day or maybe two days left to live.

In the meantime, it is unthinkable that Lazarus does nothing. He has the rest of his life to lead. He will attempt to save himself in every conceivable way except for calling on Jesus.

He has offered penitential sacrifices at the Temple: his fever and his headaches remain unchanged. He has purified himself in the
mikveh
, but blames the failed cleansing on his lack of sincerity. He has given up Lydia, almost entirely.

Yet he still feels ugly and weak and smells like a one-man plague. Mary can barely speak without mentioning Jesus, and Lazarus torments himself by remembering the past. He wonders whether there was anything of importance he missed at the time, all those years ago in Nazareth. Jesus has extraordinary powers, and Lazarus had noticed nothing.

He doesn't think so. The proof is there in what happened to Amos, but the past can't be changed. Unlike the future, which can be whatever he is determined to make of it.

 

 

Yanav the Healer travels with a dog called Ezekiel and a brown, one-eyed donkey. He is welcomed in Bethany like news from the desert or the arrival of cut-price eggs. He is an event. The idle gawp at the donkey, at the brass rings in its ears and the clatter strapped to the yellow leather tent on its back.

The healer is a small bearded man with no visible neck. His clothes are good quality but travel-stained, and he has a wary look as if there's danger in fully opening his eyes. His face is often turned at an angle to his body, but the eye furthest away is the one to watch. The nearer eye sees, but the one at a distance does the thinking.

We can't know this for sure. We do, however, know what a healer of the time, like Yanav, would have been carrying in the panniers and flagons jumbled across the back of his donkey.

Foliage from a willow tree, and the dried sap of opium poppies. He has a jar of milk deliberately exposed to the sun. Olive oil, oil squeezed from fish livers, salt, and a box of maggots kept separate from the leeches which travel on the other side of the donkey, next to a bag of locusts. A flask of honey, a pouch of earth scooped from the centre of a termites' nest, sharp thorns, chalk, flat stones, and a stoppered vial of ‘Greek potion' which is his own urine mixed with dill.

He also carries astrological charts and a sheath of peacock feathers, but these are just for show.

 

Mary notes the arrival of the healer and the next day she leaves the village before dawn. She is Lazarus's sister and has similar notions about heroism, though he and Martha have never bothered to notice. Martha is the oldest and Lazarus is a man. They underestimate her, but with the help of Jesus she alone can save her ailing brother.

She believes this to be true, and in her mind it is already so. Jesus will heal Lazarus if Mary of Bethany demonstrates sufficient faith.

She also believes, quite sincerely, that Martha will feel no anxiety about where her sister is or when she's coming back. Mary believes she will come to no harm on the Bethany road, nor after that as a young, attractive woman alone in the empty wastes between Jerusalem and the lake in Galilee. Her faith will keep her safe, and with the aid of kindly strangers she'll arrive in Cana by tomorrow at dusk.

Mary prays for the sick at the Bethesda pool, but passes them by. She prays for the beggars who jostle her in the clamour of Jerusalem. She will not be deterred, because she recognises the blisters in her brother's mouth. She knows smallpox. The consumptive cough she has also heard before, and tended to the dying with similar malarial fevers. If she does nothing, Lazarus will die.

At the Damascus Gate a military checkpoint slows her progress, but she joins the queue to leave the city. Waiting, too, may be part of the celestial plan.

The soldiers block her path. The northern road is dangerous for an unaccompanied woman. Besides, she has no business outside the city. She is carrying nothing she can sell in the desert.

‘I wouldn't say that,' but before the soldiers can start she turns and doubles back, believing god must mean her to leave the city by another route.

By the time she reaches Herod's Gate, Cassius is already there.

‘You are Mary, the sister of Lazarus.'

She glances over her shoulder, then briefly at his face. His blue eyes mean nothing to her.

‘How is your brother? I hear he's not been well.'

‘He is about to make a recovery, thank you.'

‘It's not catching, then, whatever he has?'

‘Let me through, please. I have a long distance to travel.'

‘To the Galilee, I expect. You'll have heard the stories about Jesus and his two miracles.'

Mary is better looking than Cassius expected, and she blushes nicely, though young women should learn not to clench their fists. ‘Do you believe either of these miracles is true?'

She does. Cassius sees this straight away, because the Jesus believers have no talent for deception, as if concealing their belief were as bad as denying it. Her shoulders dip, and she picks up her skirts, as if she expects to have to run.

‘I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy,' Cassius says consolingly. ‘Let alone my brother's friend. Jesus of Nazareth sent by god. Imagine the responsibility.'

Mary raises the bright and defiant eyes of a believer, and Cassius briefly thinks that she too may be ill. She believes in stories that grow more far-fetched at every step from Cana, and to a
speculatore
credulity looks like an illness. It needs stamping out.

‘Now go back home. You will not be permitted to leave for the Galilee. Every soldier on every gate has orders that you and your sister belong with Lazarus in Bethany.'

 

 

Jesus is not the only healer in Palestine at this time. Yanav has travelled extensively, and he has a reputation.

Lazarus welcomes him into the downstairs room, sits his back against the wall. Then he clutches his stomach, apologises and staggers to the latrine behind the house.

Yanav has seen it all before. He accepts some modest hospitality. A glass of sweet tea, one of Martha's honey cakes, and yes very kind perhaps just one more half of a honey cake. Thank you.

Martha bustles about, checking the healer has everything he wants, then in the absence of Lazarus she asks him directly how much he charges. Her hand leaps to her throat, then settles on her racing heart. For that amount she'd expect him to work miracles.

Lazarus returns, misses the entrance and smashes his eye socket against the door frame. Glaucoma. As well as pain in and around the eyeball, he is losing his peripheral vision. He crouches down, holding his head, cursing his eyes, hitting out at the door for being so narrow. Feels sick, stands up. He's too hot or too cold, and hasn't eaten for days.

‘I'll need most of my fee in advance. There may be additional expenses. Herbs, and so on.'

‘We have the money,' Martha says. ‘If you can make him well.'

Lazarus has a coughing fit which leaves him panting and exhausted. He ends up on one knee on the floor, but refuses to lie down.

Yanav leads him to the bench, helps him to sit upright. What­ever he was expecting, Lazarus is worse, especially as Yanav”s favourite healings involve diseases that no one can see. He likes sick people with active imaginations who thrive on close attention. They may well believe in peacock feathers and astrology, in which case Yanav is confident that he can help.

With Lazarus there is the rash, the fever and the pinkness in the whites of the eyes. Yanav examines the welted tongue, the pustules in the mouth. He sucks his teeth. Lazarus is suffering from symptoms that Yanav has encountered before, many times, though never all at once in the same body.

There is also a distinct, unpleasant smell, either from Lazarus or somewhere close. Yanav has never smelled anything like it. Courage, he tells himself, this is the friend of Jesus whom Jesus the upstart healer, for reasons of cowardice and inexperience, has neglected to attempt to heal.

Yanav rests his hands on Lazarus's shoulders. He squeezes, feeling for the density of flesh and bone, for the will of the man to survive. He looks hard into Lazarus's inflamed eyes.

‘As I thought.'

Lazarus is tough, wiry, the upcountry type that lasts forever. He is also rich and unmarried, so his only concern is his health.

Yanav's reputation depends on successful predictions. If he examines a man and predicts he will die, and he dies, then his reputation remains intact. Better, of course, to see in advance that a dying man will live.

There is something about Lazarus—he looks frail and he smells horrendous, but Yanav can sense survival deep within him.

‘No need to panic,' he says, deciding to trust intuition. ‘If you do exactly as I say, I'll have you as good as new.'

Jesus comes to Jerusalem.

The British author Robert Graves, deep in his novel
King Jesus
(1946), uniquely identifies the significance of this unexplained trip to the capital city:

 

He [Jesus] spent the months of December and January at Jerusalem, secretly financed by Nicodemon, but never once visited the house of Lazarus . . . ; and Lazarus, pained by this neglect, did not seek him out in the market places.

 

During the last six months of his ministry Jesus travels to Jerusalem but decides against a visit to Lazarus. They both have birthdays at this time of year—thirty-three years old—but Jesus fails to make an effort for his only friend who lives a short walk away in Bethany. He avoids the visit even though Lazarus is widely known to be acutely, perhaps critically, sick.

This is not a friendship without difficulties.

 

In Bethany there is no time to lose. For the sake of his reputation, Yanav likes to make his more exotic interventions in public where everyone can see what he's doing.

‘Fine,' Lazarus says, ‘as long as it works. Let's get started.'

He leads Yanav out to the courtyard, and Martha follows.

Mary is sitting, arms crossed, on the circular bench beneath the bay tree. No one will discuss her adventures in Jerusalem.

‘Whoever he was, your Roman was right,' Martha had said. ‘This is where we belong. Not left for dead on the Galilee road. You didn't even tell me you were leaving!'

Now Mary stares meanly at a crumb trapped in the healer's beard. Yanav locates the crumb, examines it, then pops it into his mouth.

‘Everyone sit with Mary on the bench,' he says. ‘Make yourselves comfortable. We're going to chase this demon out.'

Lazarus watches Yanav rummage through the saddlebags on his donkey, while Martha and Mary bicker in whispers.

‘How much are you paying him?' Mary asks.

‘Does it matter?'

‘Jesus heals for free.'

‘Yanav is a professional, not a carpenter.'

He comes back with a curved thorn as long as his thumb.

‘This won't hurt a bit.' He opens Lazarus's mouth. ‘Head back. Hold still.'

‘Aaah.' Lazarus can't make himself heard.

‘Tongue upwards. That's it. Don't move.'

Yanav locates a glistening pustule on the underside of the tongue. He lances the swelling and collects pus onto the thorn's sharpened point.

‘Martha next,' he says. Martha's eyes go blank but Yanav is the healer. He has a reputation.

He asks for her left hand, palm downward. He clamps the hand between his knees and scratches the thorn between her knuckles, once, twice, three times, each time drawing blood. Martha shivers through her arm, shoulder, neck, all the way to her chin. Yanav goes back over the cuts, making sure the point enters deeply beneath the skin.

Mary absolutely refuses. She stands up and turns her back.

‘Please,' Lazarus says. ‘Trust him. For me. He says demons don't like to be spread about.'

‘Thank you. I prefer to pray.'

‘As you wish,' Yanav says. He's disappointed, but healing is a mysterious art—everyone might be right.

‘I'm going to live,' Lazarus says. ‘I promise you all. Give me a week or two and I'll be dancing at my own betrothal.'

 

Days pass, and Bethany neighbours tell Lazarus about Jesus in Jerusalem. He knows. Breathless messenger boys keep running to the village, as if energised by the secret of existence. They are so young. They think they know everything, but all they know is the news.

No, they say, Jesus never mentions Bethany. He is not making arrangements to visit his only friend.

Instead, Jesus is surrounded by rumours of the many miracles not credited by the evangelist John, unexplained events that feature in the other three gospels from which the story of Lazarus is omitted. There are confusing reports that in Galilee Jesus brought the dead back to life. A little girl, people say, though nobody will admit to knowing the details:
‘Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened'
(Luke 8:56).

As if they're not going to talk. People talk. Cassius listens. He has no idea what to make of this intelligence.

‘Jairus,' his informants tell him. ‘That was the man's name. His daughter died and then she was alive again, but the story doesn't smell quite right.'

‘Of course it doesn't,' Cassius interrupts. ‘Dead people don't come back to life.'

‘You'd think he'd want people to know.'

Cassius thinks this through. ‘Can anyone prove the girl was dead? You say she wasn't buried, so maybe her revival wasn't all it appeared to be.'

‘The father's grief looked authentic.'

‘Anyone can fake emotion.'

This story connects with another, about the son of the widow of Nain. He too is supposedly restored to life, which Cassius finds annoying. Cassius wants a messiah he can control, but Jesus is difficult to predict. He hushes up unbelievable powers in which his followers are prepared to believe. He travels to Jerusalem. He doesn't visit Lazarus. What are the two of them playing at?

In Jerusalem Jesus does nothing in particular, and therefore does nothing wrong. Cassius watches him from upstairs windows and from behind solid Temple pillars. He is reminded of Lazarus. The two men possess a similar self-reliance, which explains why neither has married. Many men who think too highly of themselves prefer to stay single.

Cassius listens to his instinct. He has a strong feeling that as long as Jesus and Lazarus are kept apart, the Romans have nothing to fear.

 

‘Go and see him,' Mary pleads. She is helping Lazarus back into his sitting position, rearranging the blanket over his shoulders. ‘He's in the city. This is your chance, before they block the gates again. You have nothing to lose.'

‘He knows where I live.'

‘You have to ask him.'

‘Ask him what? He's a fraud. Remember what happened to Amos, but then you weren't there that day at the lake in Galilee. If anything, he should be asking help from me.'

Mary squeezes his arm, at first to give him comfort and then to hurt him. She wants to be in Jerusalem embracing Jesus by the feet, but her brother and sister need her here in Bethany. She closes her eyes, prays for forgiveness. Then she sits at the loom and loops in strands of fine white linen for the betrothal gown. She can't concentrate.

‘He is a lamb, he is a shepherd.'

‘Well, which?' Lazarus snaps. His head feels like it could split in half. He pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders. ‘I know about sheep. He knows nothing about sheep. Nothing.'

‘He is bread. He is blood.'

‘Oh make up your mind.'

Lazarus forbids any further mention of Jesus. He claims he's more concerned about the betrothal, because they haven't resolved the problem of the smell. He stinks of suspended flesh and of innards leaking.

Yanav has done what he can. He gives Lazarus nutmeg to sweeten his breath, boils lemongrass with rose oil and waits for uphill breezes to blow the scent around the house. Not enough. He gives Martha baskets of dried laurel leaves to add to the fire, then pellets of cedar sap, rosemary, incense.

Nothing helps for long. Yanav mixes concoctions of splintered goat horn in warm oil, or willow bark crushed into the fat of a pregnant ewe. Lazarus holds his nose and swallows, because medicine is a question of faith: Lazarus has to believe more strongly in the healing than in the sickness, and elaborate preparations can sway a reluctant believer.

The demon does not come out. The smell remains.

As a small comfort, the betrothal ceremony will at least take place outside, sanctioned beneath the eyes of god. Lazarus is determined to go through with it, because his business is neglected and failing: he needs Isaiah more than ever. He holds Mary's hand. ‘You've been so good to me. Isaiah won't let you starve, not when you're family.'

Yanav buys more perfume. Nard is the best, and it comes in oil form in half-litre flasks at three hundred coins apiece. Martha questions the extra expense, but a genuine healer uses only the finest materials. Yanav rubs a handful of the perfumed oil in circles onto Lazarus's chest. He can't understand it: the rash and the pustules stay the same, but the smell is always worse.

 

Yanav's treatments gradually take effect. True, Lazarus isn't visibly better, but nor is he any worse.

His cough has stabilised, whereas villagers unable to afford a healer would expect, by now, blood to be appearing in the sputum. The blisters on his tongue, a symptom feared throughout the region, have neither swollen nor burst. The pustules harden but stay intact, and astonishingly both Martha and Mary remain untouched. They are models of robust good health.

Lazarus loses weight and his eyesight weakens, but his digestion steadies because Yanav feeds him earth. Every morning he makes a paste with goat's blood and powder from the termites' nest.

Yanav sometimes asks questions about Rome, Romans, and the probability, in Lazarus's opinion, as a respected tradesman in Jerusalem, of a popular uprising that could threaten the rule of the foreign oppressors. But he does this while applying a compress of moss and honey to the scabies rash, and Lazarus usually ignores the questions as he waits for an end to the itching. The end soon comes. Yanav works another miracle when he bleeds Lazarus with a cut beneath the armpit—his body cools, the fever briefly subsides.

He gives Lazarus fish oil to drink, but in a month and a half nothing conquers the smell. The demon is weakening, Yanav is sure of it, but he has yet to cast the enemy out.

Lazarus doesn't always help. He wastes energy on self-pity and regret, because his life feels diminished. Each day holds fewer possibilities than the last, his choices fading as if heroic reunions and legendary adventures might now never happen. Poc. The options disappear, one after another they vanish. Poc.

Lazarus will not have it. Life must not close down. He will stand in Jerusalem for his betrothal, no matter how he gets there. He will assert his will, ride on Yanav's one-eyed donkey, do whatever needs to be done.

 

 

Yanav chants invocations to every deity he can remember. There are so many gods, and most of them are difficult to please. He exhausts the remedies in his saddlebags, and makes regular trips to the market to search for fresh ingredients.

It is in the Bethany market, without any warning, that Cassius pulls him aside. Yanav looks sideways at him, at the pale northern sky of his eyes. The Roman is disguised as an out-of-town trader.

‘How's Lazarus?'

‘This isn't the place or the time.'

‘You haven't kept in touch. I hear he's worse since Jesus came to Jerusalem.'

Every healer has a last patient, a heavy defeat. Yanav does not intend his to be Lazarus.

‘We know he's running out of money,' Cassius adds. ‘Why are you trying so hard?'

‘I'm a healer. He's an interesting case. Not what I expected.'

‘I only asked you to keep an eye on him.'

‘He's dying.'

‘Good.'

‘Really?'

Cassius is under no obligation to explain himself. He has decided that now is the time for the Romans to influence events. The Sanhedrin priests have mixed intentions, and, although they value the rule of law, they can be impulsive, and act without subtlety. Romans are more experienced in the practice of power, and Cassius prides himself on the delicacy of his judgement—it is better for everyone if Lazarus stays sick. This will neutralise Jesus. He can stage as many miracles as he likes, but his followers will always doubt him if he appears powerless to help his friend.

‘I hear you're planning to take Lazarus to Jerusalem.'

‘For his betrothal. Have a heart.'

‘Be very careful. I don't want him meeting with Jesus.'

 

The Sanhedrin priests are the next to react. Jesus makes them nervous, especially in Jerusalem, because he knows how to appeal to the dissatisfied. He steals their spiritual attention, and the priests have the most to lose. They have a status to maintain, a living that needs to be earned.

Later, when Lazarus comes back to life, we learn the depth of the Sanhedrin's resentment:
‘So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus too, because on his account many Jews were rejecting them and believing in Jesus'
(John 12: 10–11).

Lazarus is not their first encounter with rejection, or the religious competition offered by Jesus. So what would their ‘plans' involve? How does a committee of senior priests set about murdering an opponent?

They could hand him over to the occupying forces and intrigue for a crucifixion. But only as a last resort. Alternatively, they can do what they've done for centuries. They call on the Sicarii, the dagger-men.

The Sicarii are a sect of first-century Jewish assassins. Their signature weapon is the dagger, and they are known for their efficiency and discretion. They travel under assumed names, and are expert at living unnoticed among strangers.

In the village of Nain, on the lower slopes of the Hill of Moreh overlooking the Esdraelon Plain, Baruch stalks the widow's boy who claims to have returned from the dead.
‘On his account many Jews were rejecting the priests and believing in Jesus.'
Resurrection is as intolerable now as it will be in three months' time with Lazarus. These Jesus charades must stop, and quickly—the Sanhedrin have made their decision.

For three days, mainly from the roof of the synagogue, Baruch watches the widow's house. He changes his position with the sun, so that whatever the time of day he is a shadow within a shadow.

At dusk the widow comes into her yard. She fills a water bowl for her chickens, then throws out handfuls of grain from her apron. She dusts off her hands and looks nervously about, as if she knows. She has felt like this for months, even before the death of her son. She bustles inside and bolts the door.