Lazarus is Dead (6 page)

 

In a small cell low in the Antonia Fortress, Cassius is questioning a young man stopped by a routine patrol at the Damas­cus Gate. He was leaving Jerusalem with a message for Jesus from the house of Lazarus.

Lazarus is too clever to have sent the message himself. It is an appeal from his sister Mary asking Jesus to pray for his sometime childhood friend, who is ill. He has been ill for months and is not getting better.

With a little Roman encouragement, the messenger is persuaded to continue on his way to Sidon without stopping off in the Galilee.

‘We will know,' Cassius warns him. ‘We will be watching. There is nothing we Romans don't see.'

Cassius, like any ambitious
speculatore
, tries to identify a pattern. Lazarus is either ill or pretending to be ill. He is in contact with his friend Jesus, who has a talent for drawing crowds. This is a situation with potential, because for some time Cassius has been developing an idea to impress the consuls in Rome. He's searching for a Roman client messiah.

Romans everywhere make life better for foreigners who have yet to become Romans. In Palestine it will be no different, and the secret to this corner of the empire is hatred. The rich hate the poor and the poor hate the rich. Cassius has studied their scriptures. The smooth men hate the hairy men. The Judaeans hate the Galileans who hate the Samaritans, and everybody hates the Idumeans. Periodically, they come to hate how much they hate each other, making them hungry for a messiah who can teach them how to love.

Their hope is their weakness. Rome allows them self-government, as long as Rome can select their king. Now Cassius wants to take this imperial principle one step further. A messiah is the future that Judaeans expect and a messiah, like a king, can be compatible with the Roman project. As long as Rome decides who that messiah shall be.

 

Standard pathology, on this occasion, will not apply. Remem­ber that Lazarus is fated to come back from the dead. If there is divine intervention on the frontier between life and death, then natural law can equally be suspended elsewhere. Lazarus can have all seven diseases at the same time, but the progress of each will depend on his special circumstances.

Return again to the sources.

There is a thriving folk memory of a sick and diseased Lazarus, usually attributed to the moment he reappears from his tomb. He has a greenish tinge to his head, among other gruesome details. Sholem Asch remembers ‘a skeleton . . . the skull was covered with a sort of skin, but the colour of it was neither human nor animal: ashen, bluish and lifeless . . . the naked, bony throat and neck'.

The parchment skin, a strange-coloured head, recessed staring eyes—over the years this description of the living Lazarus has migrated (as in Asch) to the time after his death. It is as if the resurrected Lazarus were only half alive, half brought back. The horror is vividly remembered, but incorrectly placed. The recollection of an agonised Lazarus comes not from after his resurrection, as Asch mistakenly assumes, but before.

‘We saw two yellow arms,' Nikos Kazantzakis writes in
The Last Temptation
(1961), ‘cracked and full of dirt; finally the skeleton-like body.'

Before, not after. Lazarus in the last months of his life will become quite a sight. His ruined body will become a public curiosity, his illness a combination of the harshest symptoms of the worst illnesses sent to try the Israelites.

This solution makes divine sense. Lazarus is about to die. To his family, and to all his friends except one, his suffering will seem to come from nowhere, with no obvious cause. This makes him the same as everyone else. Nature is indiscriminate. It can warp the human body in terrible ways and at any time, and remember that Jesus wept. In the bible he weeps on this one occasion only, and there must be a reason for Jesus weeping, which has never been adequately explained.

Lazarus must suffer extremely. Though not suspiciously so. Nobody should guess that divine forces are at work, because that would lessen the impact of the eventual miracle. As far as possible the rules of cause and effect must apply. However abrupt his deterioration may appear, every change will have its clearly determined catalyst.

 

Though not yet, even if on his latest journey to Jerusalem the city has never seemed further away.

Lazarus is light-headed long before he reaches the second valley, and only vaguely returns greetings from acquaintances he ought to acknowledge. He feels grey from his tongue through his innards to his anus. He doesn't stop to contemplate the Bethesda pool, not today, but stumbles forward, eyes fixed ahead.

He enters Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate, but ignores the most direct route to the Temple. He avoids the street that leads to Isaiah's house.

Lazarus has choices, and options. He is in charge of his own life, and amid the disorder of the city he changes his mind. Anyone can change their mind.

 

 

Lydia works in the Lower City in a narrow building jammed between alleys. Her windowless room is beneath a sloping roof, reached by a tapered ladder that rises to a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling. This is Lydia's idea. If a man can't climb the ladder, if he's that tired or drunk, she doesn't want his custom.

Halfway up the ladder Lazarus rests and swallows a gulp of air, ignores the ticking in his inner ear, shakes his head. The rash on his arms flares up. He climbs another rung.

Lydia has beautiful feet. The soles of her feet are waxy and clean, as if she never walks on common ground. He sees her feet, then the curve of her lower legs. The rest of her is wrapped in a length of purple cloth tied beneath her arms, and the skin of her shoulders is burnished by lamplight, the flames reflecting in the broad silver bracelet on her upper arm.

‘If it isn't Lazarus.'

She is unprepared for the paleness of his face, the tightness of the skin across the bones. And the smell. She hides her wince, tucks her legs beneath her, picks up a cushion which she hugs to her chest.

Lazarus hauls himself over the rim of the opening. He lies still, his cheek crushed into the softness of a heavy rug, his staring eyes level with the cushions landscaping the floor. He flops over onto his back. The walls are softened by Persian drapes, and their swaying rounded shadows.

‘I've been ill,' Lazarus says, eyes open to the furnishings.

‘I know. I've missed you.'

Lydia's room is like a version of heaven, somewhere Lazarus and other men would like to come instead of dying. He climbs onto his knees and tilts the trapdoor. It balances on its hinges, then falls shut.

 

I want to clear up the business of the smell. Lazarus will die and his death will confuse the issue, but for two thousand years the Lazarus story has been associated with an unpleasant smell. This is largely Martha's fault.

‘ “But Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days” '
(John 11:39).

Or as the smell is forcefully recalled in the mystery plays (
The Raising of Lazarus
, the Hegge Cycle, 1451): ‘He stynkygh ryght fowle longe tyme or this.'

The standard explanation for the smell involves Martha's pragmatism. Lazarus will die six months from now, in the Judaean spring, when seasonal temperatures begin to rise. Her brother's body is a body like any other. Inside the tomb the corpse will rot, and organic decay does not smell good.

This is not why Martha mentions the smell. She is confused by Jesus heading towards the tomb—she can't understand what he's doing, and gabbles the first thing that enters her head. She is buying herself time to think, because she prepared the body herself. Lazarus is wrapped in sweet-smelling herbs and perfume and linen, Martha having doggedly observed every ritual of cleansing, every bitter gesture of interrupted love.

Martha does not take shortcuts. It is not in her character. Therefore the corpse of Lazarus will not smell, not if it was prepared by Martha, not after only four days. The memory of the smell, like the memory of his decaying body, comes from the period before the death of Lazarus.

 

He scratches a fresh mosquito bite on the bone of his wrist. He shivers, even though it is warm in Lydia's attic. The bite itches. He scratches. It bleeds.

It itches.

He sits back on his heels, sinks into a rug. He'd expected to feel more alive than this. He slaps the side of his neck.

‘I hear you're engaged,' Lydia says. She hadn't meant to say anything. It was unprofessional. ‘Was that because you were ill? Probably you weren't thinking straight.'

‘We've set the date for the betrothal. Two months from now.'

Lydia takes another cushion and stacks it on the first. She finds a loose stitch. ‘Nothing is set in stone.'

‘I should have told you. I've been ill. You know that.'

‘I heard the news at the Temple. Did you think I wouldn't be interested?'

‘A man without a wife is incomplete.'

‘That's what they say. Unlike a whore without a husband.'

‘Don't. I didn't come here to argue.'

‘I'm sorry. I know why you came. I'll find the best oils, to celebrate.'

‘I don't do this with just anyone,' Lazarus says.

‘I know.'

She knows what he wants, and out of habit they act out their roles. Lazarus has always insisted that they're special, both of them. He is Lazarus, king of the Jews; she is his queen. Lydia unstops a flask of nard, one of the first luxuries for which they'd developed a taste together: Lazarus preferred it to the smell of sheep. So did she.

Lazarus unpeels the purple cloth and Lydia stretches out flat on her stomach on the rugs, hands limp above her head. He admires her back and buttocks, and instantly believes he feels better. Only he, Lazarus, has ever truly appreciated her stunning nakedness.

He takes the perfumed oil and rubs a handful into her back. She is crying silently, a tear trapped in the flare of her nostril, but she doesn't understand. With more money he'd have made her exclusively his.

‘This is the last time,' he says. ‘I'm sorry.'

He'll live a chaste life in return for his health. He'll stop making visits to Lydia, honestly he will. Anything to avoid living obsessed by sickness, like an old man scared of death.

‘Whenever you're ready,' she says. She wipes the tear away with her knuckle, sniffs once, twice, rests her cheek on her hands.

Lazarus swallows a cough. He holds his breath with his fingers on his chest.

Lydia turns and reaches out to him.

He holds up one hand, his face turning red.

‘I know,' she says. ‘It's often the last time.'

He aims to fend her off but instead grabs her hair. He pushes her face away so she doesn't have to smell him, but then it overwhelms him, a coughing fit that sets Lydia free and has him bucking on his knees with his weight on his arms.

The effort exhausts him. He collapses onto his side and drops a forearm across his face. He is so hot, but the worst is over, is probably over. It hurts to close his eyes.

 

The Lazarus smell is possibly the only instance in classical painting of smell as a recurrent motif. It insinuates itself into image after image, such as a Limbourg brothers' illumination in the
Très Riches Heures
(1416). A clean-shaven Lazarus is shown emerging from the tomb, and of the fourteen bystanders four are covering their noses, three with their hands and one with the bunched front of his tunic.

The onlookers expect a man who has been dead for four days to smell. Martha has actively directed their attention to this possibility, even though the idea doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If Jesus can bring a man back to life he can erase the evidence of decomposition. If not, the miracle is half achieved—the work of a messiah with limitations, so no messiah at all.

Lazarus must emerge from the tomb free of the stink of death and decay.

The smell, however, cannot be ignored. The evidence of the ages strongly suggests that a nasty smell is part of the story, and indeed it is. It belongs with the descriptions of a rotting, half-alive Lazarus: from the time before his death and not after.

His living body is fizzing with a compendium of diseases awaiting their divine signal, but the timing has to be right. Instead of multiplying and overrunning the host organism, the viruses and bacteria in Lazarus mark time and fester, embittering the blood. The full symptoms of his illnesses are for now repressed, but this stench that seeps from his every pore is the stink of calamity on standby.

It is the smell of divine intervention. There are side effects. No god can act directly in a world such as ours without unfortunate consequences.

 

 

Now is as good a time as any. Several months have passed since the first of the seven signs of Jesus, the water-into-wine at the wedding in Cana. A second sign at this stage will not be out of place.

Jesus's second miracle, as recorded by John, also takes place in Cana when Jesus is approached by a nobleman. The nobleman's son is sick, and Jesus is asked to leave immediately for Capernaum to heal him. This is a powerful display of optimism because Capernaum is about twenty miles from Cana, or a day's walk. Jesus stays where he is. He heals the boy at a distance.

Mary hears this story in the Bethany square, and rushes inside to share the news with Lazarus. He staggers outside to the cistern, stares at his clean-shaven reflection in the water, then plunges his head into the barrel.

The healing of the nobleman's son is the second sign that Jesus has been sent by god. Lazarus takes a turn for the worse, exhibiting the early symptoms of every common ailment of the age. He has a generalised rash from the scabies crawling beneath his skin, now accompanied by reddish spots on his tongue and inside his mouth. These spots contain the smallpox virus,
Variola
, and because Lazarus must suffer he has both deadly variants,
Variola
Major
and
Variola
Minor
.