Richard Beard: Lazarus Is Dead

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.’

1

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.

6

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.