Lazarus is Dead (9 page)

‘Lazarus' is not a name picked at random, the first that enters his head. It is chosen for a reason. Think it through, analyse the coincidence as Cassius does. He is paid to find connections: that's how he understands the world, and how Rome keeps control of an empire.

 

In Bethany, at precisely the moment the paralysed man picks up his mat and walks, the smallpox enters its second phase.

There is nothing Lazarus can do. The
Variola
virus in his mouth and throat spreads to small blood vessels inside the skin. A low-level papular rash moves upwards to his forehead, where each pap grows into a raised blister, round, firm to the touch, but also deeply embedded. The blisters move to his upper arms, his upper legs, and proliferate across his trunk, front and back. The pustules begin to leak.

Lazarus is tired, and he swallows a plug of vomit. He plucks at his clothes to ease the itching.

‘You should be angry,' Yanav says. ‘Furious. Let bad luck fill you with rage. Rage can help.'

No sense of injustice can stall the emerging smallpox, nor the consumptive cough nor the floods of nausea. Lazarus aims at defiance, but is unsettled by sweats and aches and insomnia, and several times comes close to a malarial coma. Yanav pulls him back with large draughts of water, a treatment he'd learned in Babylon.

During the day Lazarus sits slumped inside the house, out of sight of the village, occasionally helped to the latrine. His urine is pink with blood, and he feels as if insects are breeding in his eyes.

When he does sleep, for however short a time, his eyes glue closed.

 

 

‘The time came when the beggar died.'

In the parable, angels carry poor, diseased Lazarus to heaven, while the rich man named Dives dies and goes to hell. The prophet Abraham appears to Dives and explains the balance of the afterlife:
‘Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.'

While Jesus is telling this parable, Lazarus is in daily agony in Bethany, for reasons no one understands. Jesus is both warning and consoling him: you will suffer and you will die but everything, I promise you, will turn out fine. Trust me. Believe in me.

Jesus in his turn has to trust that his words will reach Lazarus by the same channels as his miracles, by hearsay and messenger. He can't contact Lazarus directly because the seventh miracle, the raising of Lazarus, has to have maximum impact. Only then will all eyes turn on Jesus when he enters Jerusalem for the final time. To achieve the necessary element of surprise, there can be no suggestion of advance collusion between the two former friends.

Jesus breaks the spirit of this agreement. He can't resist reaching out to reassure his friend, for in the parable the rich man begs Abraham to send the dead Lazarus to his living brothers, as ultimate proof that divine power is real.

‘Abraham replied: “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.”

‘ “No, father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”

‘He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses the Prophet, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead”'
(Luke 16:29–31).

Jesus is questioning the Lazarus project. He wouldn't be human if he didn't. He feels the horror of making Lazarus, his friend, suffer. Especially as he knows in advance that resurrection has a limited effect—he wouldn't be divine if he didn't. Are miracles worth it?

This is the question the parable asks. Presumably they are, if the aim is to create stories that last.

Isaiah brings the news to Bethany in person, not the parable of Lazarus, but something stranger still. It sounds absurd, and Isaiah doesn't expect anyone to believe it, but in Galilee Jesus has supposedly fed five thousand people with some bread and a couple of fish.

By now, for Lazarus, the pattern is established. Jesus performs a miracle, Lazarus moves closer to death.

Malarial sporozoites take advantage of the feeding of the five thousand, the fourth sign as recorded in the Gospel of John. They unclench from their long wait and invade the liver, where they breed into merozoites that rupture their host cells and escape to cause havoc in the bloodstream. Lazarus has a recurrent fever, and each wave of nausea corresponds to a new cycle of parasites breaking free.

The smallpox pustules, after bursting, deflate and dry up, forming a crust of scabs. Lazarus develops complications. The smallpox becomes haemorrhagic, and in places the internal bleeding makes his skin look charred, as if he's been struck by lightning. This is the black pox. Meanwhile, the scabies mites continue to burrow and reproduce and move. They feel like worms beneath the skin, as if he's already underground.

From the moment of the fourth sign, when the Jesus miracles become spectacular, Lazarus is visibly destined for death. The evidence can be extrapolated from salvaged memories and insights. Thomas Hardy rhymes Lazarus with cadaverous, and the Swedish Nobel prizewinner Pär Lagerkvist, in
Barabbas
(1950), conveys an accurate impression of how Lazarus must have appeared to contemporary observers. His face “was sallow and seemed as hard as bone. The skin was com­pletely parched. Barabbas had never thought a face could look like that and he had never seen anything so desolate. It was like a desert.”

Lazarus sometimes asks his sisters how he looks.

‘Like our brother,' they reply. ‘Really, not so bad. Maybe a little better today.'

 

Isaiah hasn't seen Lazarus since he almost ruined the betrothal, and now the man disgusts him. He pulls out a silk handkerchief and holds it across his nose. He glances at Martha. ‘You knew I was coming. You might have cleaned him up.'

‘We did.'

Martha keeps a close eye on her brother, taking what she can of him while he's still here, overalert for any new signs of decline.

There are many new signs of decline.

Isaiah almost sits down, then changes his mind. He hitches up his clothes so they don't touch the floor.

‘Of course, this latest miracle never happened,' he says.

He repositions the leather phylactery strapped to his upper arm (
‘His kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end'
Daniel 6:26).

‘There are five thousand people who believe it did,' Mary interrupts.

‘And thousands who weren't there who don't.'

Isaiah hastily replaces his handkerchief. If Jesus intended to convince the masses, he had missed his opportunity in Jerusalem. In Galilee he could do what he liked, because up in the sticks it hardly mattered.

‘I notice Lazarus has stopped sending us sacrifices. Maybe you should start again. For the sake of his health.'

‘Money,' Lazarus says, and Isaiah flinches. The fiend can speak. ‘Can't afford it.'

‘At the Temple we could make you a loan,' Isaiah suggests. He speaks through the forgiving silk of his handkerchief. ‘In return you might have a word with Jesus. We're getting tired of his stories. He sets us and the Romans on edge.'

‘Jesus means well,' Mary says. She will not cover her nose while Isaiah is in the house, but the smell makes it hard to breathe. ‘He has done nothing to hurt you.'

‘We are the keepers of the vineyard,' Isaiah reminds her, ‘and god doesn't like miracles. Never has. I'm surprised Jesus doesn't know that.'

Miracles are disruptive. When the dust settles there is always damage done—not all the hungry are fed, and not all the sick are healed. Not all the dead can rise, but Jesus doesn't learn. He will know about the killing at Mount Deborah, but still he dupes a large crowd into believing he can change the world.

On behalf of the Sanhedrin, Isaiah has worked out an explanation for this latest miracle, a version of the incident that has circulated ever since. If it is credible now, it would have occurred to the sceptical at the time: the people of Galilee are selfish, which accounts for this recent episode. The Judaeans and Samaritans can agree that the selfish Galileans wouldn't have wanted to share their food. They'd have kept hidden reserves until Jesus gave out the bread and fish he'd been saving for himself and the disciples.

Five thousand Galileans look at each other. As if by magic, their bags and pockets are suddenly full of the bread they'd been hiding and the fish they'd been hoarding for later. They can't let Jesus seem more godly than they are. At heart the Galileans are selfish, but they are also jealous and competitive. They have negative traits to spare.

‘Besides,' Isaiah adds, ‘in rural areas their eyesight is even worse than here. Who knows what anyone really saw?'

 

‘Couldn't you poison him?'

‘If I wanted to.'

Yanav assures Cassius that none of his treatments have any guarantee of success. As a healer he makes estimates, he guesses, but for the fee he demands he has to be seen to be trying. Otherwise no one would believe he could heal.

‘Why isn't he dying more quickly? He looks like it should be quick.'

Cassius has decided that for the benefit of Rome Lazarus should already be dead. After this most recent miracle his priority is to restore order, in the sense that what normally happens should happen normally, to remind the Judaeans what's normal. The son of the widow of Nain dies and should consequently remain dead. Cassius sends his spies to report from the village, in case there's a second revival, but this looks unlikely. The villagers have buried the body.

The dead are dead. This is the ending that Judaeans can safely expect, just as Jesus will turn out to be a provincial shaman defeated by the challenge of Jerusalem. His friend Lazarus is a hill farmer in a region with pre-Roman levels of hygiene. He falls ill. He sacrifices sheep. He employs a healer who is ignorant of Greek advances in observational science. Under the circumstances, it is normal that Lazarus's health should fail. All things being equal, he will die.

The death of Lazarus will provide evidence of natural law functioning as usual in the universe. Death is the most predictable of life's events. It is the opposite of a miracle.

‘Don't lift a finger to help him.'

‘I'm a healer. The sisters will get suspicious.'

‘You know what I mean. Do anything you like, as long as it doesn't work. I trust you.'

‘I trust you too.'

 

After the fourth miracle, the feeding of the five thousand, Yanav is close to admitting defeat. Everything he knows he has tried, but Jesus outdoes him with a new miracle that sets Lazarus back.

Lazarus can't remember when he last ate a proper meal, but the tack in his mouth tastes like mud and death. The stench around him is ferocious, a hanging presence that mixes nard and incense with necrotic human flesh. The end smell is always there, underneath, however powerful the man-made scents.

Yanav eases his pain. For headaches he applies leeches to the veins behind the ears. The leeches swell like glossy black ringlets—Lazarus as he'd have looked if born as someone else. When Lazarus complains about pressure on his eyeballs, Yanav inserts a leech inside his nostril, on the same side as the eye that hurts.

On other days he sits Lazarus forward in the bleeding position, elbows on knees and fists pressed hard into the sides of his neck. Yanav slices through a bulging vein between the eye and the ear, and catches Lazarus's blood in a bowl.

‘Push harder. Hold your breath.'

This doesn't count as healing, Yanav knows. Other healers bleed and leech endlessly, with little or no success. He therefore remains obedient to the wishes of Rome as expressed by Cassius. Even so, he studies the blood for clues. Every day he searches for patterns, solely for his own enlightenment, but sometimes the demon is active and sometimes it is not.

Yanav dresses Lazarus's skin with a paste of crushed lime bark, and when he truly runs out of ideas he consoles Lazarus with stories about heroes. One day they're weak and the next they're strong. Like Samson, they're down then they're up.

This is the basic story everyone likes to hear. Job had his cattle and camels stolen, his servants murdered, his sheep burned alive and his children crushed by a hurricane. He did not despair. He recovered from calamity and lived to be a hundred and forty. Yanav tells tales about characters far worse off than Lazarus is now. And they end up somewhere better.

‘Amos,' Lazarus mutters, ‘how did it get better for Amos?'

Yanav hasn't heard of a hero called Amos. He blames the fever.

‘Gilgamesh,' Yanav says.

He tries out the Mesopotamian demigod Gilgamesh, who is often in trouble and always prevails, his long life describing the great adventure of an active man avoiding death.

After the feeding of the five thousand Lazarus is housebound: his life shrinks to his nest in the corner where he sits on the floor among cushions and blankets. A bowl of soft-boiled walnuts is on a rug beside him, but his wider field of vision has narrowed. He can see clearly, but as if through a tunnel. Some­times his sisters approach, at others he stares at the bag of dried beans hanging from a nail in the door.

He crushes his cheek against the white hardness of the wall. A spider crawls straight towards his eyes. He grunts, and it changes direction, moving away.

Nothing is preordained. Any second now he will send a message from his brain to his hand. He'll raise his hand above his head. Not yet, but when he chooses to do so. He may not send the message at all—nothing is predetermined because now, he decides, equally, that he will not send the message and he will not raise his hand.

Instead he makes a noise. Unghh. That was unexpected, but he, Lazarus, is the being who made the noise happen. He can decide to do it again. If he chooses, he can make sounds that don't yet exist in the world and will only exist if he, Lazarus of Bethany, consciously decides to make them. Or they will never exist and never have existed if he decides otherwise.

He raises his arm. Unghh. He concentrates so hard on his free will that his eyes lack focus. Unghh. Raises his arm. Unghh. He is acting like a man possessed.

He chooses to stop. There has been some mistake, because he is not this kind of person. Nor is he ready for death, not Lazarus, and personally he can't imagine anyone less suited to dying. He is not the dying type. Too young. Too much ambition.

He has an idea. There is a way to save himself that he hasn't yet tried.

 

 

However bad Lazarus looks and smells, and whatever Cassius may have decided, Yanav remains convinced that he can feel in Lazarus an indomitable force of survival. He buys an orange-feathered hen.

On the whole, reading the future is more trouble than it's worth, but Yanav has never known anyone to resist his cures like Lazarus. He'd like to find out where he's going wrong.

A ribbon of pink light breaks across the hills to the east. A cock crows in the village. Some dogs bark, then go quiet. Yanav squats in a grey predawn corner of the Lazarus courtyard, the hen in the crook of his arm. He strokes its ginger head with one flat finger, makes magical sounds, breath that never quite shapes as words.

The chicken calms in his expert hands, clucks occasionally at remembered courtyard indignities.

Yanav wrings its neck. He sighs, lays the twitching body on the ground. It is warm to the touch. He disembowels it, using the point of his knife to prise out the pulsing guts. He puts aside the heart, which he'll crush together later with some bindweed, then concentrates on the liver. The liver is the origin of blood and therefore the base of animal life. He slices it into the centre of a circular dish, cutting seven sections, each for a specific deity.

The pieces of liver bleed in different ways. He swills them clockwise three times round the edge of the dish, then examines closely the position that each god chooses to take.

At first, he can't make sense of what he's seeing. He must have made a mistake, an apprentice error like swilling the pieces in the wrong direction.

Yanav has never seen an augury like it, and a cold breath passes along his spine. Right is wrong and up is down. The gods are doing something new, he thinks, and the first time round they can make mistakes. That's what they usually do. They make mistakes until they get it right. Many people suffer.

 

Martha fans him when he is hot and Mary wraps him in blankets when he is cold. Yanav sees a frail body holding tight to its soul. Lazarus floats into sleep and out again. He remembers the Arab traders who used to detour to Nazareth from the Via Maris. He loved to watch them working the marketplace, and he'd sneak glances at their black-eyed daughters. He was sixteen years old. The women found him amusing.

One day in winter, when the seasonal caravanserai moved on, he joined some carpet weavers on the first stage of their journey east. Jesus followed along, and Amos walked closely beside Jesus. Amos had convinced himself that he was Jesus's special friend, even though he was two years younger. To deepen this friendship he'd started acting like Lazarus, only more so. He would bustle ahead, be first at whatever they did.

‘You can't come,' Lazarus said. ‘No fourteen-year-olds.'

‘I'll stop at the lake. Might get some work from the fishermen.'

‘You don't know what you're talking about. You can't even swim.'

‘I can. Easily as well as you.'

They became part of the Arab convoy, pretending they were adventurers to the heart of Persia.