‘Burn it in the rooms of the dying. Bring solace and some extra days to those who you do love.’
Lydia has enough memories without buying offcuts from his body. She is desperate to see how Lazarus has changed. An experience like this will have changed him, and she is prepared for the worst, for the Sholem Asch expectation of a contented Lazarus with ‘the wise, gentle smile of one who had penetrated all secrets and had come through to peace, the smile of one who had looked into the face of Death, and conquered him’ (The Nazarene).
If Lazarus has solved the ultimate mysteries then Lydia doubts that she’ll be needed. They will never be together, she has already accepted that, but one last time she wants to see him for herself.
Baruch pins Lazarus face-down to the ground like an animal for branding. He presses the cold blade of his knife flat behind Lazarus’s ear.
‘Not again,’ Lazarus grunts. He struggles but makes no progress. ‘Yanav, get off me. You know I want to live.’
Baruch makes a fighter’s calculation. Lazarus has light-weight bones, and not enough muscle to surprise him.
‘What is beyond?’ he hisses.
Lazarus stops moving. He doesn’t recognise the voice.
‘Lazarus, my friend, tell me what is beyond. If you do, I’ll make the killing quick.’
‘I don’t know.’ His voice is muffled by the inside flesh of his cheek crushed between his teeth. Baruch pulls his head up by the hair. ‘If I knew I’d tell you.’
‘Tell me, or you’ll wish you stayed dead.’
‘Wait! There is something!’
‘What? What is there?’
‘I don’t know what. I can’t remember. But there must be something, or I wouldn’t be here.’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘I’m not a liar.’
‘You’re a well-known liar. You say you came back from the dead.’
‘I never said that.’
‘And now what? You think you’re going to live forever?’
Lazarus suddenly decides he’s had enough. Sickness couldn’t kill him. Yanav didn’t drown him. The beggar bowed down before him. Whoever his attacker is, he is outrageously ignorant of destiny.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Lazarus says. ‘Kill me. Find out how long I have to live.’
With the boy in the forest Baruch had fumbled his knife, a basic error he wouldn’t usually make. This time he’s allowing Lazarus to speak. Nothing is as it was.
‘How did you keep your scheme a secret?’
‘Kill me.’
‘Where did you hide the food?’
‘You can’t do it, can you? I frighten you.’
‘I can do it. If you don’t like it, just come back.’ Baruch leans forward so that his lips are close to the heat of Lazarus’s ear. ‘God’s wrath is coming. Here is god’s wrath, today.’
The dagger jars loose from Baruch’s hand, skitters across the floor. Lazarus twists himself free and scrambles away. He turns and sees his attacker flee up the stairs, then leaps towards the dagger, seizes it and jumps into a crouch. He points the blade at the new arrival on the far side of the tomb.
Cassius has his hands on his knees and is breathing hard. He puts up one hand.
‘Lazarus, lay down the weapon. I’m arresting you in the name of the empire.’
5
1
IN THE RUSSIAN tradition, above all others, there is a yearning to know more about Lazarus. He is the patron saint of second chances, and his example ought to be instructive. There are times when everyone would like to start again.
In the novel Crime and Punishment (1866), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the student Raskolnikov kills an elderly woman with an axe. He is not instantly struck down by an avenging god, and is further disconcerted by his lack of remorse. He decides to visit his girlfriend Sonya, who is a prostitute, and on her chest of drawers he finds a bible (‘an old one, second-hand, in a leather binding’).
‘ “Where’s the bit about Lazarus?” he asked suddenly … “Go, read it!” ’
Sonya then reads to Raskolnikov from John 11, verses 1–44, finishing at ‘Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”
‘ “That’s all there is about the raising of Lazarus,” she whispered sternly and abruptly, and stood unmoving, turned away to one side, not daring to raise her eyes to him, as though she were embarrassed.’
That’s all there is.
Sonya closes the book, but they both know there should be more. In the aftermath of his crime, Raskolnikov has turned to Lazarus, not to Jesus, because for Dostoyevsky the resurrection of Lazarus is ‘the great and unprecedented miracle’. It promises hope to a true unbeliever, or would do if only more of the story survived. Yes, Lazarus came back to life, but what then, what happened to him next?
The biblical Lazarus fails to provide the guidance that Raskolnikov needs. ‘All she [Sonya] could see was that he was horribly, infinitely unhappy.’
Raskolnikov is Lazarus, disconsolate and unsmiling, ‘infinitely unhappy’, surprised to be alive but uncertain what this life is for.
2
They tie his hands, loop a rope around the binding, then fix the rope to the saddle of a Roman horse. This is the second procession of the day from Bethany into Jerusalem, and the less well known of the two because the believers who tell the story of Holy Week are active in the city with Jesus.
‘Where I am, my servant also will be,’ Jesus is saying in the Temple at this precise moment. ‘My father will honour the one who serves me’ (John 12: 26).
By the end of the week Jesus will have been arrested, imprisoned, beaten and executed. Even so, on this day in Jerusalem he is at liberty to travel and speak as he wishes. Both the Sanhedrin and now the Romans are preoccupied with Lazarus, who stumbles over trampled palm leaves littering the Jerusalem road. Every time he falters, the rope tugs him onward.
Lazarus, too, is followed by a crowd. The believers are with Jesus, so those who walk with Lazarus do not believe.
‘If that’s him, he’s hardly worth it.’
‘Jesus saved one man in the Jerusalem region.’
‘And calls himself messiah.’
‘Lazarus was his friend.’
‘Isn’t that always the way?’
‘They cooked it up years ago.’
‘And no one saw Lazarus die.’
They toss his name about like an unwanted gift: the malingerer Lazarus, the charlatan, the liar Lazarus of Nazareth. Inside the city walls, women lean out of windows. Men leave their work to catch a glimpse of him.
‘They’re taking him to the fortress.’
‘The Romans have chosen Lazarus. They think he’s the one.’
Children cower behind adult legs, and teenagers compete to look a dead man in the eye. Many hold their hands over their noses.
Lazarus and Jesus have overreached themselves. Nobody with any sense believes in resurrection. Dead is dead. They’re Galileans too far from home, fake messiahs counterfeiting a special relationship with the Jewish god.
‘They’re the same as the rest of us.’
‘No one escapes death.’ On this point everyone can agree. ‘And especially not Lazarus the overseer. He was always a bit strange. I never liked him.’
‘Fear would be the wrong response,’ Cassius says. ‘Though to look at, you don’t seem very frightened.’
Cassius polishes an apple, checks his reflected face in the skin. ‘The Antonia Fortress is the safest place in Jerusalem. That’s what we built it to be.’