Richard Beard: Lazarus Is Dead

Lazarus covers his heart with his hand in the sign of greeting. Isaiah waves the courtesy away, but Lazarus quickly completes the gesture, heart lips forehead. His skin is hot. He touches his forehead again. He’s burning from the inside out.

‘I trust your family is well,’ he begins.

‘My family is a gift from God.’

‘God has been generous.’

‘Lazarus, enough. We know each other better than that, but not as well as we might, it seems. We the priests are concerned about the rumours from Cana. You can help us, Lazarus. Tell us about your friend from the Galilee.’

A chill descends on the room. Lazarus stifles a cough. He regrets ever mentioning it, but today’s water-into-wine isn’t the first that’s been heard of Jesus. There were the weeks in the desert, then the public baptisms at the river. People in Jerusalem took notice, and after one interested comment too many, Lazarus had been unable to resist.

Yes, he and Jesus had once been friends. Good friends, actually. We grew up together. Now he curses himself for coveting the reflected glory.

‘At every festival there are fewer sacrifices,’ Isaiah says. ‘We both know who is responsible.’

‘That’s partly why I arranged to see you.’ Lazarus changes the subject. ‘These are unsettled times. We need to look to the future, we all do, in the interests of those we love. As Absalom the Rabbi of Bethany is my witness, I would like to marry Saloma your daughter.’

*

In Eliakim’s honest opinion, his family would have fared better staying where they were in Bethlehem.

Late each night he used to collapse on the floor, the handle of an empty wine jar twisting back his fingers. He groaned, wished he was dead. It was finished for Sarah, and she’d been lucky to die knowing her children were safe. Lazarus above all others was safe, and once clear of Bethlehem Sarah had gleamed with joy as if disaster had been forever defeated.

Eliakim knew better. Children needed saving in Egypt, and in Nazareth, and would do until the end of time. There was no single day when the children didn’t need protecting.

There were good times, too. Eliakim amazed the children with his stories about Jerusalem. A week in the big city, he said, especially at Passover, was worth a lifetime in a village like Nazareth. The Temple was a mile high and every massive stone was clad in spotless white marble. It was the home of the almighty that he and Joseph had built beam by beam, stone by stone. They were tradesmen by appointment to god.

Eliakim could have been happy there, anywhere close to the city. They all could. Then he’d drink wine and remember to wish he was dead.

Eliakim died when Lazarus was seven. He was working on the roof of the Roman theatre in Sephoris when a wooden scaffolding pole snapped beneath him. He fell twenty metres onto a pile of plasterer’s straw — instead of dying he broke his hip. He was carried back to Nazareth, and was recovering well. Then he caught pneumonia.

Joseph stood last in line to make some farewell gesture to the body. The old fool was dead. His friend Eliakim, father of Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Amos, was dead. With the heel of his hand Joseph pushed a tear back towards his eye. Push it back. Death should never happen, for any reason, to anyone.

4

Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is unmarried, but she is generally considered better looking than Martha because she does fewer domestic chores. ‘ “ Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me.” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things ” ’ (Luke 10: 40–41).

Mary and Mary, the mother of Jesus and the sister of Lazarus. The number of Marys in the bible can seem clumsy, and a fiction writer would have edited out the confusion — the mother of Jesus and the sister of Lazarus (and also Mary Magdalene) should have different names so that readers can tell them apart.

In fact there are two Marys for a simple reason: the sister of Lazarus is named after the mother of Jesus, and as a clue to her character the Mary connection is useful — the Lazarus Mary is a younger version of the Virgin Mary, and equally devoted to Jesus. Before too long, she will be washing his feet with her hair.

‘You are unbelievable,’ she says to her brother. ‘Of course Isaiah said no. He’s more worried about Jesus, like every other Jerusalem priest. They’re so frightened by the truth they can barely breathe.’

Mary is famously impractical. She doesn’t appreciate how Lazarus has planned it all out.

He goes outside to think, stops at the bay tree and snaps off a leaf. He has a metallic taste in his mouth. He chews the leaf, spits it out, picks another which he slides between a gap in his teeth. The edge slices his gum. He swallows blood.

At yesterday’s meeting he’d promised Isaiah that Saloma would want for nothing. Martha and Mary would care for her in Bethany, and the more lambs Lazarus traded in Jerusalem the more comfortable both she and Isaiah would be. It was a future any loving father should have grasped for his only daughter, especially if she was over the age of twenty and still unmarried because she had something wrong with her that nobody liked to mention.

Isaiah had ignored this reasonable offer, and insisted on talking about Jesus.

Lazarus feels his headache shift. It moves from behind his left eye to the centre of his forehead. He coughs once, twice, spits on the ground by the tree.

‘It’s absurd,’ he says to Mary, ‘Jesus and I haven’t been friends for years.’

As adults, Lazarus and Jesus are easy to distinguish. One lives near Jerusalem and the other in the Galilee. One is clean-shaven, the other typically remembered as bearded.

But as children in small-town Nazareth, the boys could barely be told apart. They were the same age, born within a week of each other in Bethlehem. They endured the same character-building trek across the desert, and lived side by side in Egypt (probably at Alexandria). By the time it was safe to return home, and they arrived in Nazareth, neither could remember a life without the other.

In Nazareth they were outsiders, and these are the friendships that survive. The local boys liked to taunt them, but Lazarus and Jesus rarely came to harm because they were lucky. Lazarus believed they were born lucky, the only two boys to escape the massacre in Bethlehem, and both from the line of David.

This meant that David begat Solomon begat Roboam begat Abia, forty-two generations back to Abraham, and that at some upcountry confluence both Joseph and Eliakim’s families joined by a minor tributary into that principal river of distinguished names. Arriving from Egypt it also meant that both families could claim a tribal welcome in Nazareth, a proudly Davidian village.

Hard to get luckier than that.

Nazareth seemed designed for an idyllic childhood. Prosperous, agricultural, the region was neither too wild nor too civilised. To the north were bandits, allegedly, and Romans were garrisoned in the south. But in Nazareth itself it was easy to believe that if people were kind, life could be sweet and endless. Everyone would live forever.

For Lazarus and Jesus the world was figs and cold water, soft blankets at night and sunrise through half-opened eyes. On the best days of summer the sky filled with cloud, bringing shade and the promise of rain, and whatever Lazarus did, Jesus did next. They climbed the timber delivered to Joseph’s workshop, scrambling up tree trunks and testing their balance. Lazarus climbed higher. Amos jumped up and down, scraped his knees when he tried to follow.

There were accidents. Lazarus and Jesus fell out of the same olive tree, one after the other, and had very similar bruises. Lazarus caught a cold and passed the sickness to Jesus. The boys always recovered, and Menachem the Nazareth Rabbi told them they were indestructible, as strong as mules. None of the native children had bones as solid or constitutions as strong.