Night Music (42 page)

He heard her voice from afar, the words returning to him as an echo. He had held her and stroked her back, touched by the strength of her feelings yet knowing in his heart that he thought her foolish for responding to a dream in this way.

She moved in her sleep, and now it was he who was crying, the pain forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.

“I dreamt that you were dying, and there was nothing I could do to save you.”

I am dying, he thought to himself. At last, it has come.

“Hush,” said his wife. He looked at her, and although her eyes were still closed her lips moved, and she whispered to him: “Hush, hush. I am here, and you are here.”

She shifted in the bed, and her arms reached out and enfolded him in their embrace. His face was buried in her hair, and he smelled her and touched her in his final agony, his heart exploding deep within him, all things coming to an end in a failure of blood and muscle. She clasped him tightly to herself as the last words he would ever speak emerged in a senseless tangle.

Before the darkness took him.

Before all was stillness and silence.

“Hush,” she said, as he died. “I am here.”

My god, I love you so.

Hush.

Hush.

And he opened his eyes.

H
e wakes in darkness, constricted by bonds. There is stone beneath him, and the air that he breathes is rank and still. He seems to recall that he has heard a voice calling his name, but it is silent now. He tries to get to his feet, but the bonds around him hinder his movements. There is no feeling in his legs. He cannot see, and he struggles to breathe through the cloth on his face. He begins to panic.

There is a sound, stone upon stone. Light breaks, and he shuts his eyes against it as it pierces the fabric. Now there are hands on him, and he is raised from the stone. Fingers gently remove the coverings. He feels tears upon his cheeks, but they are not his own. His sisters are kissing him and speaking his name.

“Lazarus! Lazarus!”

Yes, that is his name.

No, that is not his name.

It was once, but Lazarus is no more, or should not be. Yet Lazarus is here.

A man stands before him, his robes covered in the dust of many miles. Lazarus recognizes him, beloved of his sisters, beloved of himself, but he cannot speak his name. His vocal cords have atrophied in the tomb.

The tomb: he stares down as the last of the grave wrappings are torn from his body, and a sheet is thrown over him to hide his nakedness. He looks behind him at the stone that has been removed from the mouth of the cave.

Sickness: he was ill. His sisters mopped his brow, and the physicians shook their heads. In time they believed him to be dead, so they wrapped him in bandages and laid him in a cave. A mistake was made, and now it has been rectified.

But this is a lie. He knows it even before the thought has fully formed. Some great wrong has been committed in the name of pity and love. The one whom he recognized, the beloved, touches him and calls his name. Lazarus's lips move, but no sound comes forth.

What have you done? he tries to say. What have you taken from me, and from what have I been taken?

Lazarus sits at the window of his sisters' house, a plate of fruit untouched before him. He has no appetite, but neither can he taste any of the food that has been given to him in the days since his return. He still struggles to walk, even with the aid of a pair of sticks, but where would he go? This world holds no beauty for him, not after the tomb.

Lazarus does not remember what happened when his eyes closed for the last time. He knows only that he has forgotten something, something very important and beautiful and terrible. It is as though a roomful of memories has been sealed up, and what was once known to him is now forbidden. Or perhaps it is all merely an illusion, just as it seems to him that the reality of his existence is obscured by gauze, a consequence of the four days spent lying on the stone, for his eyes now have a milky cast to them, and are no longer blue, but gray.

His sister Martha comes and takes the plate away. She brushes his hair from his forehead, but she no longer kisses him. His breath smells foul. He cannot taste the decay in his mouth, but he knows that it is there from the expression on her face. Martha smiles at him, and he tries to smile back.

Outside the window, women and children have gathered to gaze upon the man who was once dead, but is dead no longer. They are amazed, and curious, and—

Yes, fearful. They are afraid of him.

He leaves the window and staggers to his bed.

Lazarus can no longer sleep. He is terrified of the darkness. When he closes his eyes, he smells the fetid air of the tomb and feels the bandages tight around his chest, and the fabric blocking his mouth and nostrils.

But Lazarus is never tired. He is never hungry or thirsty. He is never happy, or sad, or angry, or jealous. There is only lethargy, and the desire for sleep without the necessity of it.

No, not sleep: oblivion. Oblivion, and what lies beyond it.

On the third night, he hears footsteps in the house. A door opens, and a woman appears. It is Rachel, his betrothed. She had been in Jerusalem when he woke, and now she is here. She runs her hands across his brow, his nose, his lips. She lies beside him and whispers his name, anxious not to wake his sisters. She leans over to kiss his lips, and recoils, but her fingers continue to move down over his chest and his belly, finding him at last, stroking, coaxing, her face slowly creasing in confusion and disappointment.

She leaves, and never returns.

The priests summon Lazarus. He is brought before their council and made to stand below the dais of the high priest, Caiaphas. Lazarus's voice has returned, but it is an imperfect thing, as though his throat is coated with grit and dirt.

“What do you recall of the tomb?” they ask, and he replies, “Nothing but dust and darkness.”

“In the four days that you lay dead, what did you see?”

And he replies, “I do not remember.”

Caiaphas dismisses the rest so that only he and Lazarus remain. Caiaphas pours wine, but Lazarus does not drink.

“Tell me,” says Caiaphas. “Now that the others have gone, tell me what you saw? Did you glimpse the face of God? Does He exist? Tell me!”

But Lazarus has nothing to offer him, and eventually Caiaphas turns his back and tells him to return to his sisters.

It is not the first time that Lazarus has been asked such questions. Even his sisters have tried to find out what lies beyond the grave, but in response he has been able only to shake his head and tell them what he told the priests.

Nothing. There is nothing, or nothing that I can remember.

But no one believes him. No one wants to believe him.

Caiaphas calls another council, but this time Lazarus is not present.

“Is there no sign of the one who summoned him from the tomb?” he asks, and the Pharisees reply that the Nazarene has hidden himself away.

Caiaphas is displeased. With each day that goes by, he grows more resentful of Lazarus. The people are unhappy. They have heard that Lazarus can remember nothing of what he experienced after his death, and some have begun to whisper that there is nothing to remember, that perhaps the priests have lied to them. Caiaphas will not have his power challenged.

He orders the stoning of three men who were overheard discussing Lazarus in this manner. They will serve as an example to the others.

Lazarus burns his hand on a hot iron. He does not notice until he tries to release his grip, and instead leaves a patch of skin behind. There is no pain. Lazarus would find this curious, except that Lazarus no longer finds anything curious. The world holds no interest for him. He cannot taste or smell. He does not rest, and instead experiences every day as a kind of waking dream. He stares at his raw, bleeding palm, then explores it with his fingers, tentatively at first before finally tearing at the flesh, ripping it apart until the bones are exposed, desperate to feel anything, anything at all.

A woman asks Lazarus if he can contact her son, who died in his sleep two days before, and with whom she had argued before he went to bed. A man asks him to tell his dead wife that he is sorry for being unfaithful to her. The brother of a man lost at sea asks Lazarus to find out where his brother buried his gold.

Lazarus cannot help them.

And all the time, he is confronted by those who question him about what lies beyond, and he cannot answer. He sees the disappointment in their eyes and their suspicion that he is lying.

Caiaphas is troubled. He sits in the darkness of the temple and prays for guidance, but no guidance comes.

In the case of Lazarus and the Nazarene, there are only so many possibilities that he can consider.

i) The Nazarene is, as some whisper, the Son of God. But Caiaphas does not like the Nazarene. On the other hand, Caiaphas loves God. Therefore, if the Nazarene really is the Son of God, then Caiaphas should love him too. Perhaps the fact that Caiaphas does not love the Nazarene means that the Nazarene is not, in fact, the Son of God, for if he were, then Caiaphas would love him, too. Caiaphas decides that he is comfortable with this reasoning.

ii) If the Nazarene is not the Son of God, then he does not have the power to raise the dead.

iii) If the Nazarene does not have the power to raise the dead, then what of Lazarus? The only conclusion to be drawn is that Lazarus was alive when he was placed in the tomb but, had he been left there, he would most assuredly be dead by now. Thus, Lazarus
should
be dead, and his continued refusal to accept this fact is an offense against nature, and against God.

•  •  •

Caiaphas decides that he is no longer quite as troubled as before and goes to his bed.

Rachel is released from her obligations to Lazarus and marries another. Lazarus watches from an olive grove as the bride and groom arrive at the wedding feast. He sees Rachel and remembers the night that she came to him. He tries to understand how he should feel at this time and counterfeits envy, grief, lust, and loss, a pantomime of emotions watched only by birds and insects. Eventually he sits in the dirt and puts his head in his hands.

Slowly, he begins to rock.

The Nazarene returns in triumph to Bethany. The people hope that he will give them answers, that he will tell them how he accomplished the miracle of Lazarus, and if he is now prepared to do the same again, for there have been further deaths since last he came to that place, and who is he to say that the grief of Martha and Mary was greater than that of another? A woman whose child has died carries the infant in her arms, its body wrapped in white, the cloth stained with blood and tears and dirt. She holds up the corpse and begs the Nazarene to restore the infant to her, but there are too many others shouting, and her voice is lost in the babble. She turns away and makes the preparations for her child's funeral.

The Nazarene goes to the house of Martha and Mary and eats supper with them. Mary bathes his feet with ointment and dries them with her hair while Lazarus looks on, unspeaking. Before the Nazarene leaves, Lazarus asks for a moment with him.

“Why did you bring me back?” he asks.

“Because you were beloved of your sisters and beloved of me.”

“I do not want to be here,” says Lazarus, but the people have gathered at the door, and the Nazarene's disciples pull him away, concerned that there may be enemies among the crowd.

And then he is gone, and Lazarus is left alone.

Lazarus stands at a window, listening to the sound of Rachel and her husband making love. A dogs sniffs at him, and then licks his damaged palm. It nibbles on his tattered flesh, and he watches it blankly.

Lazarus stares at the night sky. He imagines a door in the blackness, and behind that door is what he has lost. This world is an imperfect facsimile of what once was, and all that should be.

He returns home. His sisters no longer speak to him. Instead, they gaze at him with cold eyes. They wanted their brother back, but all that they loved of him remains in the tomb. They wanted fine wine, but all they received was an empty flask.

The priests come for Lazarus again, arriving under cover of darkness. They make a great deal of noise—enough, he thinks, to wake the dead, were the dead man in question not already awake—but his sisters do not come to investigate. This time he is not brought before the council, but is taken into the desert, his arms tied behind his back, his mouth stuffed with a rag. They walk until they come at last to the tomb in which he had once been laid. They carry him inside, and place him on the slab. The rag is removed from his mouth, and Lazarus sees Caiaphas approach.

“Tell me,” Caiaphas whispers. “Tell me, and all will be well.”

But Lazarus says nothing, and Caiaphas steps back in disappointment.

“He is an abomination,” he tells the others, “a thing undead. He does not belong among us.”

Once again, Lazarus is bound with bandages, until only his face remains uncovered. A priest steps forward. In his hand he holds a gray stone. He raises it above his head.

Lazarus closes his eyes. The stone falls.

And Lazarus remembers.

T
he history of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository has not been entirely without incident, as befits an institution of seemingly infinite space inhabited largely by fictional characters who have found their way into the physical realm.

For example, the death of Charles Dickens in June 1870 precipitated the single greatest mass arrival of characters in the Caxton's history. Mr. Torrans, the librarian at the time, at least had a little warning of the impending influx, for he had received a large quantity of pristine Dickens first editions in the mail a few days earlier, each carefully wrapped in brown paper and string, and without a return address, as was traditional. No librarian had ever quite managed to figure out how the books came to be sent; old George Scott, Mr. Torrans's predecessor, had come to the conclusion that the books simply wrapped and posted themselves, although by that stage Scott was quite mad and spent most of his time engrossed in increasingly circular conversations with Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby, of which no good could possibly have come.