Amos was gone, and when you’re dead you’re dead. That’s what the Sadducees believed, and their scriptural evidence was easier to find — ‘the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 9: 5–6).
Lazarus wept. Jesus watched. Lazarus wiped his eyes and walked away.
He grew the first hairs of his beard — again Lazarus was first. He shaved them off. The Rabbi urged the Nazareth villagers to allow for the boy’s anger and tolerate his wayward behaviour. This flaunting of the laws was grief, or growing up. All being well, he’d soon return to the fold.
To Lazarus, their tolerance made no difference, because god destroys both the blameless and the wicked. He could be understood or forgiven or ignored, without consequences — their god, if he existed, acted as if he didn’t. Amos was dead. There were no divine interventions.
Jesus grew his hair and his beard like everyone else, as if god were not at fault and god was watching and god cared. Jesus kept himself busy. He had sheep troughs to hollow, and advanced classes on the intricate rituals of the Torah. Lazarus sometimes despised him, watching silently as Jesus sanded a nut bowl.
‘How special is it just doing what your dad does? We can be more important than this.’
Joseph told Lazarus he was a fool for wanting to leave the village. Lazarus called Joseph a hypocrite. He and Mary had left Bethlehem for a better life, and Lazarus wanted the same.
‘Those were exceptional circumstances.’
‘Were they?’
‘It was ordained.’
‘Why should this be different?’
Lazarus and Jesus should have been living in the mountains like lions. Or not in the mountains, but anywhere else but Nazareth.
Their friendship, however strong it had once been, was never destined to last. Quite the opposite. The two boys had to be uncoupled, placing one at either end of the country. Some decisive event had been necessary to prise such friends apart, and that event was Jesus standing inept on the shore as Amos drowned in the lake. Their separation was in the design.
2
Lazarus regrets everything. If this is how life ends he must have made mistakes. He’d planned to live enough life for all three of them.
He remembers the pressure of his early ambition, hot and tight enough to burst. In Nazareth the streets narrowed, the houses shrank to nothing, and he lay awake for long afternoons listening to silence and his echoing solitude. He was dissolving, at one with the dates and figs melting to treacle outside. He has the same feeling now that he’s dying.
Joseph said he was too young to leave Nazareth, and anyway none of them were city people. Jerusalem would swallow him whole, while Galilee was safe and his friends were there to help him. Lazarus laughed. He remembered the shore.
Menachem the Rabbi supplied the opportunity. He had always said the two Bethlehem boys were special, but it was Lazarus he took aside. His cousin Absalom near Jerusalem had an opening in the sheep trade. It wasn’t much, but a young man with a pragmatic outlook could make a comfortable living. If he worked hard and made connections at the Temple, he could earn himself a fortune.
Martha and Mary would travel with him, to keep him company and help him set up house. Luckily, neither of his sisters was married.
‘You are the one I have chosen.’ Menachem’s milky eyes focused somewhere to Lazarus’s left. ‘King David, too, left home in his youth. A great future awaits you in Bethany, I’m sure of it. I have prayed for you, Lazarus of Nazareth. God will do the rest.’
Lazarus found Jesus in Joseph’s workshop. It was a long time since their last proper conversation.
‘I’m going to Jerusalem. Menachem has it all plotted out.’
Jesus was experimenting with fasting, hoping for visions of the heavenly mystery. In real time this meant he was planing the edge of a door in the wrong direction. He could have hurt himself.
‘You should come. We’ll earn enough for two. Easily.’
It was the final appeal Lazarus would make to their friendship. Despite Amos, he was prepared to make a last effort, because he’d have sworn they still had feelings in common, like not feeling at home in Nazareth.
‘Jerusalem,’ Lazarus repeated, as if the name of the city spoke for itself. Literally anything was possible in Jerusalem, and he could see that Jesus was tempted.
But it was too late, with too much left unspoken. They were friends, yes, but Jesus would soon be a carpenter, like his father before him. Lazarus had grander schemes in mind; he was leading the way and he could sense that Jesus was jealous. Jesus wished he were Lazarus, but no one gets everything they want.
*
Out in the square the children play sick man tag, keeping one eye open for Jesus, who could appear in Bethany at any time.
There are plenty of visitors who arrive in his place. They drift in from the villages and from Jerusalem. Most are strangers but some are friends, because Lazarus had many friends. They want to pay their respects.
‘My brother is not dead.’ Martha turns them away. ‘You’ve wasted your journey.’
But Martha can’t stop them leaving gifts and offering compliments. They act as if Lazarus is accomplishing a very difficult task, and make it worse by not speaking ill of him, as if there is no hope.
Isaiah makes the trip from Jerusalem.
‘I was wondering about the date for the wedding,’ he says, but his pretence can’t last. He hands Martha a bag of coins, and closes her hands around it. ‘Lazarus was a good man. It is the least our family can do. You should take him to see his tomb.’
‘He can’t see.’
‘There is comfort in being well prepared.’
‘Our brother is very ill,’ Martha says. ‘Even small distances are a challenge.’
In this period of terminal decline Cassius visits Bethany several times, and not always in disguise. In battle uniform he rides into the village, accompanied by officers on restless chargers from the garrison. Cassius manoeuvres his immense black horse as far as Lazarus’s gate.
Martha comes to the doorway. She squints into the sunlight and dries her hands on a cloth. The Roman horse sniffs in her direction, as if curious to know whether she’s edible. Cassius leans forward in the saddle.
‘Any signs of improvement?’
Martha turns and goes back inside.
Cassius smiles. Jesus can walk on water but he can’t help Lazarus.
Yanav comes out to ask Cassius to leave the family in peace.
‘With pleasure,’ Cassius says, wheeling his horse away. He calls back over his shoulder. ‘And thank you. You’ve done an excellent job.’
1
Lazarus insists at all times on lamps that are filled and lit.
‘Send for Jesus,’ Mary says. She can’t think it and not say it. ‘Send for Jesus. Send for Jesus. Send for Jesus.’
‘More oil, more wicks,’ Martha says. ‘Don’t let any go out.’
People can get used to anything, except dying. Lazarus has known for years that Jesus is not coming to Bethany and he will not come. In the day as at night he tells the passing of time in the guttering of flames in oil. He is terrified when a wick starts to flicker and smoke.
More lamps! More! Don’t let the light go out.
Lazarus rarely speaks. When he makes the effort, it is to curse the winter of his birth. He should have been killed in the Bethlehem slaughter, as good as dead from the moment he left the womb.