Lazarus is Dead (5 page)

The scaffold creaks like fishing boats.

It starts to rain. The boys are halfway up the side of the amphitheatre, on the outside of the scaffolding. From the ground, and also from a distance and safely from far far above, they may appear very small.

Lazarus's hand slips, but he catches himself with the crook of his elbow. He blinks grey rain out of his eyes, checks back down on Jesus.

If he falls, he'll take his friend with him, and no one in Sephoris will be able to save them. Beyond Jesus down on the ground Amos is waving his arms, the rain on his upturned face like tears.

Lazarus makes a last big reach for the safety of the roof. He grunts, pulls himself up, swings his body over. His arms and legs ache with the effort but he is safe. He shuffles round on his belly and peers over the edge.

Several feet below him, Jesus is clutching a pole and refusing to move. His eyes are clamped shut and his body is shaking, his wet face jammed against the scaffold to stop his teeth from chattering. A sparrow flies close, hovers, darts away.

‘You're nearly there,' Lazarus shouts. ‘If I can make it so can you. Grab my hand and I'll help you up.'

Jesus clenches his lips together, slowly ungrips a hand. He slips, grabs on hard.

‘Come on!'

Lazarus leans out further, as far as he can go.

‘Take my hand. It's great up here. It's easy.'

Jesus reaches up but not far enough, and he falls. His hands and his arms and his body detach from the scaffold and out he goes, into the air, clear space all around him. Lazarus swipes at his clothes and clings on, hauls him up and over and onto the safe flat roof. It is an impossible achievement, an unbelievable rescue.

They roll onto their backs, panting, swallowing rain, laughing, their doubled heart hammering a hundred times before ordinary breathing resumes. On their hands and knees they look over the edge and wave to Amos below.

He shouts at them to come back down. They cup their ears and shrug, then take in the godview from the highest building in Sephoris, the damp spread of the city, the big rich villas, fields, a glinting river, brown-black mountains. Swathes of heav­enly light cut through the distant rainshadow, and Lazarus feels an exhilaration so powerful he imagines there is nothing he and Jesus will not do together, nowhere they will not go.

‘I can fly,' he says. He has already saved Jesus, so why not another miracle? ‘I'm going to jump.'

He kneels upright, arms out like wings.

Jesus heaves him back and they tumble laughing into the warm rainpools glistening across the roof.

‘We should go back down,' Lazarus says. ‘Before Amos tries to follow.'

They lie on their backs, hair wet with rain. Jesus turns his head, asks if Lazarus can keep a secret.

‘I don't know.' He isn't old enough to know if he's trustworthy. ‘Tell me and we'll find out.'

But Jesus pretends to lose interest, or decides it doesn't matter.

Lazarus closes his eyes for the touch of raindrops on his eyelids. They will do anything for each other. There is no other secret, and nothing else needs to be said.

 

In the Temple before sunrise the enclosed Courtyard of the Israelites glimmers with oil lamps. The light is diffused by incense and the dawn, flames reflecting from the rounded gloss of marbled pillars. A bench is built into one wall, reserved for the old and frail. Their voices merge with those of the younger priests, standing and rocking on their heels, closing their eyes and reciting cautionary scriptures.

The priests have black leather boxes bound to their arms or foreheads, phylacteries containing extracts from the Psalms or the Book of Judges, reminding them of the supremacy of priests or the promise of the One to come.
Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky.

Lazarus stands in the centre of the room, and the nearer priests wince, and draw back. Lazarus has walked from Bethany in the dark, before the heat of the day, but there is a smell around him which is both distinctive and hard to place. It is not a pleasant smell.

The Sanhedrin ruling council has seventy-one members. Lazarus estimates that most of them must be here. The room grows quiet. Isaiah steps forward.

‘For you, Lazarus, this is a great honour,' he says.

‘And a great responsibility,' someone adds.

‘But for us this is a solemn duty. As you know, the penalty for blasphemy is death.'

Lazarus is uncertain of his scripture—as a child he'd been busy making other plans—and he isn't sure what counts as blasphemy. He knows he isn't perfect, but shaving and cheating are minor offences at worst.

‘Your friend in the Galilee is becoming a disruptive influence,' Isaiah continues, ‘and we the Sanhedrin are committed to keeping the peace. There is a problem. Jesus has staged an event that some witnesses are calling a miracle. The news spreads. The more impressionable believers claim him as the messiah, the king of the Jews. That's dangerous. The Romans don't like the idea of an unofficial king, and the Romans can be oversensitive. Like ourselves, they're always alert for impostors. When was the last time you saw your friend?'

Lazarus looks at different faces, but in the lamplight expressions are difficult to read. He sees many earnest men with beards. ‘Not so long ago. Quite recently, in the grand scheme of things.'

He'd like to please them so they buy his sheep. He wishes he knew what they wanted to hear. ‘Though at the same time, in human terms, I haven't seen him for ages.'

‘Thirteen years,' Isaiah reminds him. ‘Not since you arrived in Bethany. Is Jesus planning to visit Jerusalem?'

‘I don't know. Is he?'

A blind priest seated along the wall taps his stick against the flagstones, insists on being heard. ‘I saw him once. Years ago, a child. He sat on the steps outside and we talked with him. He had an astonishing grasp of the scriptures.'

‘He was lost,' adds another voice. ‘I was there too. How could a genuine messiah get lost?'

‘Because on his own he's hopeless,' Lazarus says. ‘I wasn't here to watch out for him. He was twelve years old and lost in Jerusalem. Anything could have happened.'

‘He did know his scriptures, though.'

‘Yes, so I heard a million times from Joseph when they arrived back home in Nazareth.' Lazarus senses he is talking out of turn, but these are resentments he has never been able to express. He wants his opinions about Jesus heard. He knows the man better than anyone, and he remembers Mary telling him again and again how wonderful Jesus was for speaking so confidently with the priests. ‘She overreacted. So did Joseph. They were anxious parents relieved their son was safe. If you want the truth, these days I rarely think about him. We lead very different lives.'

Lazarus doesn't add that his is more impressive. At an early age Jesus had lost himself to the what will be will be. He'd sunk into the rut of doing what was expected, doing what his father did. Lazarus had escaped Nazareth. He worked hard. If Jesus had ever made the effort to visit Bethany he'd have found his friend rich and respected beyond reproach. Only Jesus never came.

‘He had a good touch around animals,' Lazarus adds. He doesn't want to sound unkind. ‘But honestly, as a boy he cast a shadow. When he was scratched by thorns he bled. He got scared. I know. I was there.'

 

 

There is no gospel according to Lazarus, and if any such document suddenly came to light, scholars would question its authenticity. They would have encountered references or fragments before now in the many available texts from the early centuries after Lazarus died, was buried, and on the fourth day returned to life.

These references do not exist. We therefore have no direct access to Lazarus's version of the story, but without a biographer's overview he is unlikely to have realised the significance of his performance in that slow dawn before the start of the Temple day. His answers to the Sanhedrin postponed the death of his friend. Probably. If Lazarus had remembered in the boy Jesus something divine, the priests would have acted quickly and without mercy. God on earth was blasphemy, and the most efficient way to disprove a messiah was to kill him.

After his interview with the Sanhedrin at the Temple, Lazarus is rewarded with an invitation to the largest downstairs room of Isaiah's house in the Upper City. Servants scuffle in and out.

‘Look me in the eye,' Isaiah says. He puts both hands on Lazarus's shoulders. ‘Marriage is a beginning, not an end.'

‘I agree utterly,' Lazarus says.

Saloma has yet to make an appearance. Her mother and her aunts and uncles, all her family including Isaiah, are very polite about the smell. Lazarus washed when leaving the Temple, washed again before coming into the house, but even he can smell the rancid odour that persists on his skin. The smell may be connected to his cough, and the frequent headaches. By the middle of every day the whites of his eyes are pink.

‘I cry a lot,' he explains to Saloma's mother. ‘From happiness.'

Another symptom is self-doubt. He finds himself questioning his plan to marry, despite the virtue of his motives. He wants to establish the Lazarus family at the heart of Jerusalem life. Not for personal gain, but for the sake of Mary and Martha. He is about to remind himself of some further benefits of marriage when the aunts and uncles make way for Saloma herself.

She is heavily swathed in robes, a headscarf, a veil. This is unusual for the traditional viewing of the bride before an engagement. A chair is placed in the middle of the room. Lazarus sits on it. Saloma will walk around him seven times.

Her eyes, the only part of her face he can see, are soft and dark but slightly lopsided. One is bigger than the other. She walks once around his chair. She has a limp.

‘Close your mouth, darling,' Isaiah says. He clasps his hands together and stands up on his toes. ‘There's a good girl.'

An aunt detaches the veil. Saloma has a heavy jaw. Her mouth is twisted. One of her eyes, vivid with terror, skews to the level of Lazarus's chest. He coughs. She flinches.

‘Sorry,' he says, then holds up his hands in apology for saying sorry. ‘Sorry.'

Lazarus has a growing blockage of mucus in his nose. He puts his head on one side, to try and shift the load between nostrils, and this gives him the appraising look he uses when judging sheep. Saloma's mother nods her head, impressed by his serious approach.

The further benefits: he'll have an exclusive contract to deliver sheep at the Temple. His sisters will become part of an established Sanhedrin family, and if anything happens to him they will not be left abandoned. He glances at Saloma's lumpen face. She will live in comfort for the rest of her days. Everyone will be happy.

Saloma has two more tours of his chair to go, each slower than the last. The foot on the end of the leg that makes her limp is now dragging on the floor.

Her father encourages her. Lazarus remembers Abraham and Job, husbands and fathers heroic for enduring dismay. Saloma grips the back of his chair to help with the last half of the last circuit. Then they will be engaged, exactly as Lazarus had planned.

When I get home, he thinks, I'm going to cut my hair.

The Romans know about Lazarus long before his return from the dead.

He is the friend of Jesus.

For at least a decade the Roman consul Sejanus has argued that knowledge should be treated as power. Legions alone will never be enough to control the empire, and Sejanus formalises the idea that information is intelligence. The Romans, for their own safety, need to collect and collate every available scrap of information.

Sejanus therefore invents two new categories of soldier, the
speculatores
and the
exploratores
, and he attaches these units to the army. The
exploratores
are scouts. The
speculatores
are more like spies. They are licensed to listen and to think freely. Often they work out of uniform, but always with a clear objective: to identify and prevent unrest.

High in the Antonia Fortress, Cassius pulls aside a gauze curtain. He has flat blond hair and blue eyes, into which this far south nobody can read any meaning. Afternoon sunlight floods the mosaic on the floor of his room—a woman carrying a basket of apples.

Below the fortressed walls he sees the roof of the Holy of Holies, the Temple courtyard, then a drop to Jerusalem's mazed houses and alleys. The Fortress is the highest point in the city, and on its way to heaven the smoke from burnt offerings rises past the garrison windows.

The smell of blackened fat reminds Cassius that whatever the Romans provide, it is never enough. These people want something more, and their prayers are insistent with invocations, horns and trumpets, the howl of dying beasts.

The Judaean people are waiting for the One. This one, that one, anyone. He's coming and he'll save them all, yet Rome, in truth, is the saviour. Messiahs pull rank. They appeal directly to a higher authority, making Cassius confident they register as trouble.

He has been tracking Jesus since his first move south towards John the Baptist at the river.

‘He's harmless,' the local informants said.

‘And the crowds?'

‘The man was a long time in the desert. He doesn't talk much sense.' The riverside spies also reported that Jesus had no obvious strategy. ‘He'll run out of ideas. He'll go back home to the Galilee.'

They were right. Cassius rewarded his informers with tax exemptions and gifts of Spanish leather. The carrot, as recommended by Sejanus, not the stick.

Now Cassius is wondering about Lazarus. In his Galilee backwater Jesus has disciples. He has followers, none of whom register as threats, but the one man he calls friend is dangerously local to Jerusalem and in regular contact with Sanhedrin priests at the Temple.

Cassius has not been commissioned to believe in coincidence.

 

After his engagement to Saloma, Lazarus stops taking risks with his health.

That was two months ago, but he sees no measurable improvement. During the day fatigue overcomes him, and his head can ache as if clamped in a carpenter's vice. He is sometimes cold, shivering in June daytime temperatures of up to thirty-five degrees. Or so hot in the chill nights that sweat slicks the backs of his hands.

He continues to offer sacrifices, not as many as when he needed to influence Isaiah, but often enough to harm his business. He picks out the best of Faruq's animals with the softest velvet ears, those he'd usually have reserved for Jerusalem's most penitent grandees.

‘We can't afford this,' Martha warns. ‘You're sacrificing lambs you should be selling. And we still have to pay Faruq.'

‘I can't afford to be ill. I've got a lot coming up, and I have to look after you two. When I'm feeling better I'll earn the money back. Don't worry. All will be well.'

He develops a nasty rash.

 

It is safe to envisage the rash: the Book of Leviticus is a manual for acting correctly before the eyes of god, and two entire chapters are devoted to skin infections. For a long time these skin diseases were collectively mistranslated as ‘leprosy' (a disease of the nerves, not the skin), but Old Testament skin problems are more likely to have been caused by the widespread incidence of scabies. A visible rash also signifies the first phase of smallpox, which explains why Leviticus stipulates strict measures requiring prompt action: smallpox could devastate a community.

Lazarus has eight months to live. That much we know, but smallpox would have killed him quicker than that. His rash at this stage must therefore be scabies, caused by parasitic mites beneath the skin.

The mite
Sarcoptes scabiei
clusters on bedding, clothing and other household objects. Impregnated female mites wait for contact with human skin, then seek out the folds of the body. They make a home in the softness between fingers and toes, inside the elbow or behind the knee, between the buttocks or in the red heat of the groin. They start tunnelling.

Under the skin they burrow an S or Z shape, and inside this tunnel the mite eggs hatch. The larvae start to move, and their activity produces a vivid discoloration of the skin and intense itching. The itching is the worst part—‘scabere', Latin for itch.

Lazarus's most visible infestations spread a scarlet rash along the inside skin of his arms, and at night he lies on his back, eyes wide open, willing himself not to scratch. No need to panic. Leviticus specifies a procedure.

 

Cassius sends out frequent patrols to Bethany. Since Jesus returned from the Jordan to Galilee his friend Lazarus has rarely been seen in the city. Jesus has gone quiet, and Lazarus has, too. Apparently he is ill, a feeble excuse if he has something to hide. Cassius looks for the connection—he assembles his information.

Several months ago Lazarus travelled to Jerusalem and appeared before a dawn council of Sanhedrin priests. Cassius has spies almost everywhere, but not yet in the Sanhedrin itself, and he suspects they were plotting, talking about Jesus and the Romans.

Since that meeting Lazarus has been spending money on sacrifices, sending in many pairs of sheep from Bethany. This is unusual behaviour for him. The animals could be a way of covertly delivering messages, but Cassius hasn't worked out how the system might function.

Either that, or the sacrifices are part of a broader ploy. Lazarus wants people to believe he's genuinely ill (thirty-two years old, regular walker, never a day sick in his life—the Roman informers have asked around), but Cassius is not so easily deceived. He senses there is some kind of plan in action, a longer-term design he can't quite decipher, and he is not entirely displeased. At some point in this scheme Jesus will come to Jerusalem. Cassius will be waiting, and he will take this chance to get noticed in Rome.

He needs to place a spy close to Lazarus.

 

Absalom examines his younger friend, first one arm then the other.

‘You have a rash,' he says. ‘But it could be worse. You're not dying.'

Absalom sighs for his departed mother. He still can't understand why she had to die, any more than he can conceive of an all-seeing god who creates bacterial parasites.

‘You're unclean,' he says. ‘You need to purify yourself.'

Medically, the cleansing procedure described in the Book of Leviticus remains sound. Lazarus must wash his clothes and his bedding and not leave his house for seven days except for ritual immersion in the village bath.

He wraps himself in a blanket and shambles across the square. For a few seconds the fury of the sun blinds him. It is high summer, with unforgiving sunshine day after day, but slowly the village buildings emerge from the light. A Roman patrol rests and drinks by the well, the soldiers hazed and floating in the heat. Lazarus shivers and heads for the
mikveh
, a carved pool inside a cave below the village.

He feels his way into the gloom, drops his blanket. Water drips and echoes. Steps are cut into the rocks, and the tepid water soothes his ankles, his shins, his knees, slaps against his thighs. There is a raised shelf to his left for the inflow, and to his right a flat overspill. The water is always gently moving, slowly refreshing itself from a higher source.

Lazarus walks to the far wall, swishing the water with his thighs and hands. He turns and lowers himself onto the smooth stone floor, the water reaching his chin. He breathes out, setting off a skin of ripples, works his arms one way and then the other, checks himself over. The rash spreads down both inner arms, it discolours the top of his legs and his feet. He flexes his toes and fingers. The water eases the itching.

He can see his ribs. Is he getting thinner?

Lazarus loves his body. He does not want it to perish.

He stretches out, rests his head on the ledge behind him. He pictures Lydia naked.

 

This is not so much a question of why, as why not?

Few men admit to visiting prostitutes but that doesn't mean they don't exist, either the women or their clients.
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
lists two prostitutes, fifteen whores and forty-two harlots. There are more harlots in the bible than tax collectors, more whores than doctors.

Lazarus is unmarried. He lives in Bethany with his sisters, but is frequently away on work in Jerusalem. He is making decisions in an era before the influence of Christianity—good men are not yet finding their goodness by striving to imitate Jesus—and paying for sex escapes the sanction of divine punishment. Or so Lazarus believes. It must do, or he'd have fallen ill long before now.

If anything, he feels blessed. Jerusalem is a city of eighty thousand souls, and the traffic in slaves and soldiers brings in every latest disease. Within living memory (as reported by the Jewish historian Josephus) an epidemic has decimated the city, probably smallpox. This among other invisible demons is always creeping from house to house, and every illness is lethal. And also not lethal. Some people are struck down and die, and some are struck down and do not.

Lazarus, so far, has remained untouched—even god, it seems, approves of Lydia.

He sinks his head underwater, and hears his beating heart loud in a pulse behind his ear. By following religious procedures he is giving god a chance to make him well. He is a reasonable man.

He lets his face up for air, scratches an itch on the outside of his ankle—not the scabies but a mosquito bite. He takes the skin off the top. Sinks again, waits, rises up, breathes. His nails are too long. He picks off a fingernail and flicks it away into the slowly moving water.

Overhead, on the greenish roof of the cave, moisture gathers in blisters. One of these fills out, elongates, detaches and aims with focused intention directly at the centre of Lazarus's forehead. He blinks at the last moment and it hits him below the eye.

 

 

Leviticus works. If it didn't, the rules would never have been written down.

By the end of a seven-day quarantine his scabies rash is fading. His groin sometimes itches, and his head can hurt, and he hasn't sold a sheep in a week, but Lazarus feels sufficiently recovered to attempt the walk into Jerusalem. He has a question to ask Isaiah about the betrothal ceremony, now only a month away. He wants to know if Isaiah will pay for the wine.

At the tombs Faruq is dismantling a sheep-pen. Lazarus greets him and the two men squat on their heels. They face each other silently, and this is business so neither rushes to speak.

‘Faruq, are you my friend?'

‘Everyone is your friend.'

Lazarus leans his weight forward, elbows on knees. His fingers brush the fading rash along his inner arm.

‘My cousin knows a healer,' Faruq says. ‘At Jericho.'

‘I'm fine. The worst is over.'

Lazarus glances at the pens. Faruq has sold half his midsummer stock, but not to Lazarus. Like everyone, Faruq needs to live—friendship can only go so far.

‘I'll negotiate higher prices,' Lazarus says. ‘I haven't been well.'

Faruq's eyes are orange like those of his sheep, his face the colour of hardwood scratched and polished by every outdoor season. He nods his head. He watches Lazarus stand up, turn, walk past the tombs and round the corner. Slower than he used to be. Faruq detaches a rail from a fence.

 

We've established that Lazarus's illness is so familiar that the bible doesn't need to describe it. Also that Lazarus falls sick at the exact moment the water at the wedding in Cana becomes wine. None of the diseases common in the region at the time, however, fit the one-year interval between infection and death.

The incubation periods don't add up, and in this area the story of Lazarus needs some attention to make it credible. Even outside the story, beyond time, with the benefit of hindsight and foresight, it can be difficult to fit every factor together.

It is therefore worth searching out more detailed evidence of the disease that plays its part and will eventually kill him.

“Nearly all his life he suffered from a weak heart, then he was cured, as everyone in Bethany could testify, and now he was dead.” José Saramago claims that Lazarus had chronic heart trouble, and died peacefully in his sleep.

Equally absurdly, the Czech writer Karel Čapek (
Lazarus
, 1949) thinks Lazarus died of a chill—‘it was the cold wind that got me, that time when—when I was so ill . . .'

Not so. The story demands that Lazarus suffer. The more hideous his death the more impressive his revival. When the time comes, Jesus needs everyone to believe that Lazarus has truly come back to life. But they first need to believe, without reservation, that he died.

The most effective way to publicise his death in advance is to make his physical decline visible. His sickness should be horrific, definitive, undeniable. It should be both recognisable and worse than anything anyone has ever seen.

Yes, this is how it was done. Lazarus did not die from one of the seven prevalent illnesses of ancient Israel. Not enough. He has to contract them all.