The Gospel According to Lazarus

By Richard Zimler

From the international best-selling author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon comes a dazzling new work of historical fiction, retelling the story of the Passion from the point of view of Lazarus.

According to the New Testament, Jesus resurrected his friend, but the Gospel of John omits details of how he achieved this miracle and whether he had any special purpose in doing so. The acclaimed novelist Richard Zimler takes up the tale and recreates the story of the Passion from Lazarus' point of view.

Restored to physical health, he has difficulty picking up his former existence; his experience of death has left him fragile and disoriented, and he has sensed nothing of an afterlife. Meanwhile he has become something of a local celebrity, even though he and Jesus are increasingly reviled by the Temple's high priests. As he turns more and more to Jesus for guidance, while observing his friend's growing mystical powers and influence through his spiritual activities, he finds their lives becoming dangerously entwined, which tests to the limit their friendship and affection.

In this compelling work of fiction the author places Jesus in the historical context of ancient Jewish practice and tradition; he is at once a charismatic rabbi and a political activist who uses his awareness of a transcendent reality—culminating in the Kingdom of Heaven—to try to bring justice to his people and a broader compassion for humankind.

With The Gospel According to Lazarus, Richard Zimler brings the familiar story vividly to life and finds fresh meaning in the Passion and Crucifixion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780720620634

Richard Zimler

Richard Zimler’s eleven novels have been translated into twenty-three languages and have appeared on bestseller lists in twelve different countries, including the UK, United States, Australia, Brazil, Italy and Portugal. Five of his works have been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the richest prize in the English-speaking world, and he has won prizes for his fiction in the UK, America, France and Portugal. Richard has explored the lives of different branches and generations of a Portuguese-Jewish family in four highly acclaimed historical novels, starting with The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, now in development as a major film. He grew up in New York and since 1990 has lived in Porto, Portugal. For his contributions to Portuguese culture he was awarded the city’s highest distinction, the Medal of Honour.

Book preview

Natan

1

Perhaps what Yeshua meant was simply that he wrote himself into my dream as a way of joining our paths together. After all, he was burdened at too vulnerable an age by all that he dared not reveal about his inner world, and he needed a companion who would listen to his confessions without judging him or betraying his secrets – and who would be willing to wade with him into the murkiest and most treacherous waters of Torah.

Given his knowledge of all that remains hidden to the rest of us, however, he may have been implying that he created my dream and placed it in the sleeping mind of the eight-year-old I’d been. I suppose it is even possible that he wanted me to believe that he had travelled back in time, across a span of twenty-eight years, and planted it inside me so that it would seem as if I – as a young boy – had been able to prophesy the most traumatic events of my adulthood.

If I were to believe that he could foresee the entire scope and shape not just of his life but of mine as well, then I would also have to accept the disquieting notion that he had known for some time where our journey would end. He had been aware that I would be forced to flee my blood-drenched home with my children, pursued by both Pharaoh and Zadok, holding his final gift to me inside my trembling embrace.

‘Where you die, I, too, shall die, and there shall I be buried.’ Such was the pledge that Rut the Moabite gave to her mother-in-law Naomi, and though the young woman’s fidelity always moved me, it was only when I whispered her words to myself on a barren hillside, while gazing past Yeshua’s crossbeam towards all that would never now come to pass, that I realized that she may very well have regarded it as an act of kindness for the Lord to end her life.

I would not wish to believe he embroidered me skilfully, and over the course of decades, into the intricate weave of his plans, only to pull out every last thread and stand naked and broken before his executioners. And not just because of the decades of hope that I had placed in him. In truth, I resist that possibility because I have discovered that it is no comfort at all to know that there are men who can accomplish what seems impossible to the rest of us – feats that defy all our attempts at understanding.

Beware of men who see no mystery when they look at their reflection.

It was my father who told me that. He was speaking of a tyrannical Roman prefect at the time, but he believed that all of us are changed for the better – become more humble, at the very least – when we recognize that our identity tends to slide away from us every time we strive to catch it. And if the ‘I’ who directs our actions is not fixed and permanent, then how can we ever be certain of who we are and what God has asked us to do?

If only I had glimpsed the possibility that the Romans would arrest him. Then I’d have pressured him to flee with me to our homeland – and refused to take no for an answer.

But in the end, dearest grandson, there was no time left for pleas or arguments – which is yet one more indication that we are never truly at home in this world. Though perhaps the Lord, too, wishes that He had more time on occasion. Would it be a heresy to suppose He might? If so, then I no longer care; three decades of longing and regret have earned me the right to speak to you honestly.

Dear Yaphiel, in order to begin writing this scroll that you now have in your hands, I purchased ink this morning from a stall at your favourite marketplace – the one favoured by our island’s flower-sellers that comes to life each dawn beside the Temple of Athena. On reaching home, I locked myself away in my hidden prayer room. Can you see me there? At this very moment, I am seated on my mosaic of Yeshua, underneath the terebinth tree that grows at the centre of my world.

Picture the tip of my calamus as it designs these words.

Picture me endeavouring to tell you of matters that will never be able to fit easily or comfortably on a roll of papyrus.

Picture yourself standing at the endpoint of every sentence.

I am determined to leave nothing unsaid, for you deserve a full explanation from me of why I was so very rude to you the other day. Also, I have realized that the time has finally come for me to tell you of your long-secret place in my life – which means, in turn, that I need to tell you of the man you asked to meet when we were last together.

Of Yeshua.

He is our aleph and our taw and every letter in between, for he is the gift-giver who brought us together.

If I find the courage, I shall also ask you a favour that I cannot ask of anyone else.

A warning: your grandfather is not the man you thought he was. Does that mean that you are not entirely the boy you have always believed yourself to be? Perhaps. Only you, my child, can say for sure.

‘Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened to you.’

Yeshua ben Yosef

2

How great is the distance between the sunken-cheeked, leaky-eyed old man writing to you now and the swallow-quick eight-year-old he once was? According to the calendar, it is fifty-seven years. Yet, according to my winged heart, it is the nearly-nothing time it takes for me to close my eyes and alight in Natzeret …

I am perched on the mat in my bedroom. It is the twelfth of the month of Tevet, long past the second watch of night, and in my window is a watchful moon.

It is the sixty-seventh year since Rome’s conquest of Zion, and Augustus is our emperor.

When I finally fall back to sleep, I dream that the Lord is a blood-red eagle with a purple crest and jet-black eyes. Standing at the corner of our roof, He gazes out towards the spray of sunrise on the horizon with a stern and wary expression, as if all the world depends on His vigilance.

I want to touch him, but fear of His sharp, powerful beak forms a fist at my throat. Still, I venture a first, tentative step, and, when He – the Eagle-God – shows no anger, I ease closer. On coming to His side, I kneel down and reach out with the cautiousness of a boy who has already witnessed a number of executions. I make the movement of my hand into a whisper of greeting – the proof of my goodwill and righteous intent.

With a graceful bow of His head, the Lord leans towards me, granting me permission. I trace the tips of my fingers across the cool, firm, silken plumage of His back. The feel of him – so compact and forceful – makes me shiver. Tilting His head, the Lord’s dark eyes catch mine and ask a question.

‘Eliezer,’ I tell him. ‘Though my father calls me Lazarus.’

He blinks to show me He has understood.

At that moment do He and I pass through an invisible gate? We seem to reside now inside our own time and place. Only a decade later will I find myself able to shape my feelings into words, and they will be these: our silent complicity has created an island for the two of us, and around that island is all that I once was – and all that I shall never be again.

Then, a shift … I am standing on the defensive wall around Natzeret. The Lord is perched on my right shoulder, His gnarled, rust-coloured talons gripping me tightly.

Invaders will come from across the Jordan River, and we must all be ready to fight. That is the meaning I take from the urgency of His gaze towards the bronze-coloured dawn spreading over the Galilee. As I scan the silhouette of hills around our town, searching out the archers and spearmen of a foreign army, a tendril of flame unfurls on the horizon. Soon it is joined by others, which makes me understand that I have erred in my judgement – the still-hidden sun has not yet announced its return; the enemy is setting fire to our orchards.

With a cry of battle, the Lord takes wing. A few moments later, while soaring above the flames, He is transformed by their heat, growing tenfold in size and tenfold yet again.

All too soon, however, He disappears over a ridge of flaming hills in the distance. Around me now is a sea of fire and smoke.

‘Come back!’ I cry out in desperation. ‘I don’t want to die here!’

A man’s voice behind me calls out my name. ‘Eliezer, I am the gate you seek!’ He shouts.

The voice is familiar, though I shall be unable to identify it for many years. Before I can turn to see who it is, hands push me forward. Falling, I am engulfed by the flames.

And yet I am not burned. And I do not die. I tumble through the conflagration until I find myself flying through a bruised red sky. I am clothed in silver feathers.

Yerushalayim rises up before me.

The Phasael Tower … I decide to perch at its rim to assess the enemy’s strength, but as I alight there …

Through that metamorphosis of emotion that marks us for ever as the children of Havvah and Adam, my powerful wingbeats become the leaping heart of a Galilean boy who awakens to find himself in his bedroom, naked, bathed in moonlight, wondering how – and why – he became a God with wings.

3

I must speak to you now of the week that changed my life and sent me into exile here on Rodos – and that brought you into our family. Try if you can to imagine me as the widower and father of two young children that I was then – a man who had celebrated thirty-six birthdays with his family and friends.

One afternoon, I awaken to a confusion of faces unknown to me, lit by the harsh saffron-coloured light of a dozen night-lamps. My heart recoils from so many strangers, and my first thought is that I must quickly make an appeal for mercy. But I do not utter a word; I remain a pair of blinking, terrified eyes waiting for clues that will reveal to me the nature of my predicament.

Out of habit, I speak the Lord’s words to the prophet Yirmiyahu inside my head, Be not afraid of them, for I am with you and shall deliver you. And yet, raucous shouts from somewhere unseen make me flinch – and wish to run. Rushed whispers soon reach me as well, but I am unable to comprehend them. The tense, insistent beating in my chest sways me from side to side, and my throat is as dry as sand.

Deep underground – that is where my scattering thoughts seem to have sought refuge.

A long-haired youth holds up a torch and leans towards me, studying me with moist and troubled eyes. His tunic is ripped along the neckline.

When I gaze past him, I find butterflies of shadow fluttering on a ceiling of pale stone. The heavy, sweet, humid scent of myrrh fills me with each of my laboured breaths.

They’ve taken me to a cavern, I think. I must try to discover what they want of me before I speak.

A small woman with a drawn face and curious, deep-set eyes leans towards me. She holds a small square of fabric over her mouth and nose, and she peers at me as though endeavouring to solve a complex calculation. She says something unintelligible – in Latin, perhaps – and lifts her brows in an attempt to prompt my reply. I wonder why she doesn’t address me in Aramaic – or in Hebrew or Greek.

She must be a foreigner. The others, too. And yet nearly all of them wear Judaean dress.

To my left a stooped old man is weeping, his tallith draped over his shoulders. Beside him is a tall long-limbed woman – forty years old, I would guess – clutching a woollen mantle to her chest as if it might jump from her and scamper away if she were to ease her grip. She has the stricken face of a lost soul who has seen too much, and the collar of her peplos is torn. The small scar on her chin – in the shape of a crescent – seems familiar to me.

Something furry folds into my right hand. A mouse? Could I have been taken to a den of wild animals and vermin? I am unable to turn my head to get a look. Below my racing pulse stirs the hope that the little creature will not bite me.

Yaphiel, you might think it comic, but I later discover that the hand of an old friend can feel exactly like a shivering mouse under certain peculiar circumstances.

My shoulders are gripped from behind, and I am pushed into an upright position. The long-haired youth and the woman with a crescent scar unfold a coarse linen cloth that has been wrapped around my chest and legs. Do I fall asleep while they work? I next remember the tearful old man covering my naked sex with his prayer shawl.

A wooden ladle is held to my lips by a slender man in a camlet cape and hood. He is patient with me, this stranger with generous and powerful hands, and I gulp at the next ladle he offers me, and the one after that, and … After a time, I split into two persons: an exhausted being desperate to slake his thirst and a distant and curious observer wondering why such a simple act has become so difficult.

After I have drunk my fill, I notice an amber necklace around my neck. Its beads are a milky yellow. When I try to grip it, tremors strike my hand again.

Help me.

My voice will not come, but the long-haired boy reads the desperation in my face and lifts up the necklace for me to see. Could it be the one my mother always wore?

‘Give him a look at the talisman!’

A woman’s emphatic voice prompts him to show me a roundel of parchment that has also been hung around my neck. Four crude figures are designed on it, graced with oval Egyptian eyes. Their angelic names are written above their heads: Mikhael, Gavriel, Uriel and Rafael. Underneath them is a quote from the Psalms in the handwriting of a child: ‘No disaster shall befall you, no calamity shall come upon your home. For the Lord has charged His angels to guard you wherever you go.’

A flute melody – a Phrygian tune, plaintive and mournful – calls me towards sleep, and the slumber inside me is warm and abundant, like a gently swaying sea.

Some time later, the man who helped me drink kisses me on the lips. He has taken off his hood. He has red and swollen eyes.

He has been grieving, I think, and I wish to ask him if a friend of his has died, but I am still unable to find a voice.

He caresses my cheek. ‘Shalom Aleikem, dodee,’ he whispers. Peace to you, beloved.

He knows Aramaic, which is a comfort.

Stubble coarsens his cheeks, and his shoulder-length brown hair is in a tangle. He shows me a weary but contented smile.

He would like to let himself go and laugh the exhausted laugh of a man who has been weeping, I think.

The mist of forgetfulness inside me clears at that moment, and I recognize him. Yet he looks older than I remember him – and spent in body. Could he be ill?

When I reach up to him, intending to test his brow for the heat of fever, he grips my hand and kisses it as if we had been lost to each other for years. ‘I answered you in the hiding place of thunder,’ he says, which is how we have greeted each other since we were boys. It is a quote from our favourite verse of Psalm.

Where are we? I shape this question with my lips – at least, that is my intent – but for some reason I fail to make myself understood, and Yeshua shows me a puzzled face. ‘You’ll be yourself again soon,’ he tells me. ‘All of us will help you.’

I scan the countenances around me and count them – fourteen. Standing on each side of Yeshua are my old friends Maryam of Magdala and Yohanon ben Zebedee. Yohanon has had his thick black hair clipped so short that he appears to be wearing an Ionian skullcap. He smiles encouragingly at me through his tears.

Maryam’s kohl-ringed eyes look bruised. She is wearing her saffron-coloured robe – a gift from Yeshua – though it looks too large and cumbersome on her. Behind her – dressed in an elegant toga, pinching his nose – stands Nikodemos ben Gurion, one of Yeshua’s benefactors. He peers at me as if I might be an impostor. Could I have changed in some way that makes me seem another man?

At the back, taller than all the others, are my Alexandrian cousins, the twins Ion and Ariston. Ion, the bolder of the two, waves at me and grins in his boyish way.

Maryam draws my glance from him when she raises her hands and blesses me. I spot a wine-coloured design of the zodiac on her palm and aim to ask her about it, but all that emerges from me is a dry ratcheting sound.

At length, I grow anxious to find my mother and father, but they do not seem to be with us.

I know that I am crying only when I taste salt on my lips. The long-limbed woman – whom I now recognize as my sister Mia – takes my hand and places it over her face, breathing in deeply on the scent of me, though she soon starts coughing. When we were children, she used to say that I smelled like warm barley bread. I remember that now, and my name, but many other things still escape me. Might we have all gathered together for my father’s funeral?

‘Where are our parents?’ I manage to ask her in a hoarse whisper.

‘Everything will be all right,’ Mia replies. ‘You mustn’t worry yourself.’

She puts her arm around the old man next to her. ‘Grandfather Shimon risked leaving the house to be with you,’ she tells me in a cheerful voice. She points then to the small tired-looking woman holding a piece of fabric over her mouth. ‘And Marta is here, of course. Many friends have come. And your son and daughter.’ She summons my children to her with a wave.

Nahara is trembling. She looks as she does when she has been chased out of sleep by thunder. Yirmiyahu, her older brother – the long-haired youth with anxious eyes – lifts her up to me.

Nahara throws her arms around my neck. Blessed be the kindness of the Lord; as she sobs, I still the shaking in my hand long enough to comb her soft brown hair, though my touch only makes her cry harder.

If I’m unable to calm her, then Leah will …

Before finishing my thought, I recall that my wife’s life ended six years before, at the same moment that our daughter’s began. My mind also locates my parents’ graves in a suffocating corner of my memory I rarely visit.

‘I’m sorry I’m so weak,’ I whisper to my daughter.

As she sobs, Yirmi eases her despair with endearments, then leans down and presses his lips to both my eyes, which seems his way of linking the three of us together – and an extremely mature gesture for a youth who only reached manhood a few months earlier.

Yeshua returns to me then. He places his hand on top of my head and presses down, as he does when he wishes to heal a supplicant. ‘The season of singing has come,’ he quotes from the Song of Shelomoh.

He begins to chant, and I flow towards his voice, which I know as well as my own, and, when he lifts his hand from me, I follow its absence beyond the borders of my flesh, and I am in the air now, held aloft by the sound of his words in Hebrew, and I remember my father telling me that our ancestors gather around us when we intone our hymns, and …

‘Do you think you can stand, dodee?’

Yeshua’s question brings me back inside my body. I shake my head, for I am unable to feel my legs.

‘But you know now who I am?’ he asks.

A silly memory makes me grin. ‘Sometimes a teacher and sometimes bitter trouble,’ I whisper.

It is an answer I invented when we were students in order to put him in his place when he grew too full of himself. It is a play on words: morah means bitter trouble and moreh means teacher.

I expect Yeshua to laugh; instead, he speaks to me in a down-hearted voice. ‘No, I’m the one who pushed you off the wall and into the talons of the Lord of the Sky. Though maybe I …’ Before he can complete his sentence, his eyes flood with tears and he squeezes my hand. ‘Can you forgive me for coming too late?’ he asks.

Too late for what? I wonder.

4

After my cousins lift me on to a wooden bier and carry me into the daylight, I realize I had been lying inside one of the rock-cut tombs just off the road north to Anathoth.

Yeshua and Maryam, walking together, lead our small group out of the necropolis towards the road south to Bethany. Bread and fruit have been left before many of the entrances to the tombs, summoning clouds of flies.

When my grandfather lifts the back of my head to slip a small cushion underneath, I ask him why I was brought here.

‘So you remember nothing, my boy?’ he questions.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

My son raises a palm frond over my head to shade me. ‘What’s your last memory, Father?’ he asks.

With my eyes closed, I see myself seated on a mosaic of a bird, surrounded by the tools of my trade. ‘I was repairing the floor of our courtyard,’ I reply. ‘I think it was this morning.’

The boy grimaces as if I have given him bad news.

His aunt Mia eases him out of the way. ‘We’ll talk at home, Eli,’ she says. ‘Just rest for now.’

‘At least tell me who died and whose tomb I was in.’

‘The tomb belongs to Nikodemos.’

‘But he’s right over there.’ I lift my hand and gesture towards him; he is walking ahead of us, alongside Shimon bar Yona, another of Yeshua’s close friends.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ Mia agrees, but she says nothing more.

Frustration makes me wish to shout, but my words come out as a desperate croak.

My sister calls to Yeshua. ‘Speak to my brother,’ she tells him, which confirms my earlier suspicions that he has been directing this conspiracy against me.

My old friend comes to the left side of my bier, as though to counterbalance the emotional weight of my sisters, who walk on my right. ‘Lazar, just be patient. All will be clear in a little while,’ he tells me, using his childhood name for me to win my compliance. He pats my arm and implies with his constrained expression that he’d prefer to talk to me only when we have a chance to be alone.

Fortunately for him, I am too weak to argue. Also, an unruly throng has gathered around us, and Ion and Ariston have found themselves forced to thrust their way forward through tightly packed clusters of men and women who stare and gape at me.

The crowd soon parts for a tall man with tight hyacinth curls in his fair hair, a style favoured by the Judaean aristocracy, for they are ever eager to imitate our conquerors. He wears a porphyry-coloured robe embroidered at the collar with golden thread. An armed bodyguard walks beside him.

‘I’ve been warned about you, Yeshua ben Yosef!’ the man snarls, and he glares at my old friend as though cursing him in his mind.

At the time I thought that this interloper was simply an angry stranger, but it occurs to me now that news of what had happened to me in my tomb might already have reached the Temple. If so, then he might have been a messenger sent by the High Priest to dissuade Yeshua from using his healing powers again in so astonishing a manner. Indeed, that possibility seems a likelihood now.

‘May peace yet find you on this beautiful morning,’ Yeshua tells him, holding up his hands to show that he carries no weapon.

‘We’ll have peace when you and your companions return to your homeland!’ the aristocrat retorts.

Yohanon steps beside Yeshua. ‘What exactly were you told about us?’ he asks.

‘That you would bring your evil sorcery to Judaea, and that your sinister words –’

‘I cast no spell,’ Yeshua cuts in. ‘It was the Lord who chose life for my friend.’

The man spits by Yeshua’s feet. ‘And yet a filthy stench accompanies you everywhere. All who stand downwind of you and your friends know that the Lord has abandoned you.’

‘Stop wasting our time and step aside!’ my grandfather shouts.

The unpleasant Judaean tells him to mind his own business in an imperious tone and turns again to Yeshua. ‘If you didn’t steal this man out of the arms of death, then who did? Give me the name of the necromancer who would play at such dangerous games!’

‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,’ Yeshua answers.

‘So you insist that your trickery is the work of God?’ the man says with a sneer.

‘No, you’ve misunderstood me. What I’m saying is something different – that the Lord has reminded us today of the profound and hidden things in our world and His.’

The stranger gives no indication that he recognizes these words as coming from the Book of Daniel, which gives me to believe that he is ignorant of scripture – though I realize now that he might have wished to keep us from guessing that he was in league with our priests.

‘Not even a heretic like you could believe that God wishes for cadavers to take to their feet and prowl our streets!’ he declares.

‘All I know is that the Lord has brought my friend back to us. And I’m grateful.’ Yeshua smiles down at me – his eyes moistening – and he again cites Daniel, but this time, only to me and in a whisper, as though to tell me that he and I shall soon need to broach difficult and secretive matters: ‘The Lord knows what is in the darkness, though the light dwells in Him.’

At the time, I see no particular importance in Yeshua’s focus on the Book of Daniel.

‘Do you really expect me to believe that the Almighty is working through a Galilean peasant?’ the quarrelsome stranger demands.

Yehudah of Kerioth steps beside Yeshua. ‘Enough of this silly argument,’ he says to the aristocrat. ‘We’ve got to get our friend home. Can’t you see that?’

‘Who is it you think you’re addressing, young man?’

‘I’m addressing a man who ought to let us get on our way!’ Yehudah replies in a seething tone. His green eyes are lit with rage.

The stranger’s bodyguard unsheathes his sword, but Yeshua pleads for calm, then takes the arm of our belligerent enemy and leads him a few paces away. As I watch them conversing in lowered voices, a barefoot tyke with a much-soiled face, reeking of filth, manages to squeeze between my two sisters. ‘Was an ibbur inside you?’ he asks me in an eager voice.

Before I can find out why he would pose such a silly question of me, an old woman with a squashed and wrinkled face grabs Ion’s arm. ‘Let’s have a good look at him!’ she cackles.

When the crowd surges, my cousin loses his grip on the front of the bier, which lands with a thud on the packed earth of our roadway. I tumble off but do not suffer anything more painful than a bump on my shoulder thanks to the quick reflexes of my son, who cushions my fall.

The crone shakes a filthy rag at me, spraying a greasy liquid over my chest and face. ‘Now we’re gonna see what you are!’ she shouts.

Later, my sister Marta, who has long studied the curious arts in a secret circle of local women, will speculate that the fluid was designed to reveal my true form as a demon and that the old woman probably expected me to sprout horns and a tail.

As Mia wipes my face, the sunlight presses like hot metal against my closed eyelids. Thankfully, Yirmi soon has me shaded again with his palm frond, and my cousins lift me back on to my bier. This time, I feel Ion’s strong grip around my ankles, which means that sensation is returning to my legs.

Marta spreads my shroud over my belly and legs as a protective covering.

After Yeshua comes back to us, he tells me in an apologetic voice that he has to leave me again for a short while. I quickly lose sight of him, and it is while I am looking for him in the multitude that a sumptuously dressed woman carrying a strand of pearls in her hand asks me if her servant might be permitted to slice off a piece of my shroud.

I am at a loss as to how to reply, but Yohanon intervenes. He speaks with the woman in hushed tones, then comes to me. ‘Her eldest daughter is a leper,’ he whispers behind his hand. ‘She believes that even just a thread of your shroud might cure her.’

So it is that I give my permission for her servant to take a piece.

Yeshua’s forearm is bleeding when he returns to me. I ask him about it, but he tells me it is of no importance. He parts the crowd by waving his staff before him.

Just before starting off again, Mia smears ewe’s fat on my lips, which must be crusted and cracked, for her fingertip comes away with blood. Judging from the low angle of the sun, it is late afternoon. Swallows are slicing through the air above us, playful and exuberant, possessed of all the energy and grace that I now lack.

All these clues from nature tell me that it is springtime, and, as we enter Bethany, the dusty streets overflowing with pilgrims remind me that Passover is at hand – and the reason that my Alexandrian cousins are with us.

It seems to me that our pilgrims have begun arriving in Yerushalayim earlier and earlier in recent years. Or did I somehow miss the start of Passover? When I ask my grandfather, he pats my hand reassuringly. ‘No, my boy, our Seder is still a week away.’

Sitting in a donkey cart by a clothing stall in the marketplace is a young mother with plaited hair, her baby at her breast, and seeing them together reduces my thoughts to a single lost hope: if only Leah were able to meet me at our door and explain to me what has happened.

5

On reaching home, I discover that my legs are still unsteady, so my cousins carry me to the alcove that serves as my bedroom, ease me down on to my mat and prop me up with cushions. Marta insists on going to the courtyard to heat up some lentil soup for me, though I tell her I am not at all hungry. After Mia helps me slake my continued thirst, she sets about removing the grime from my face with her strigil, but my skin feels as if it has been burned, and her scraping, no matter how gentle, makes me shudder.

My friends have brought myrrh from the tomb in which I awakened, but its funereal scent sickens me, so, to mask the peculiar stench that accompanies me now, Yirmi and Marta gather wild roses and strands of jasmine and lay them on my table, shelves and clothes trunk. Mia scatters the potent incense she makes of charred thyme leaves around the perimeter of my room.

After Yeshua requests some time alone with me, he lowers my reed blinds around us. My feet have turned to ice, so he covers them with his cape. The squealing laughter of my daughter playing in our courtyard seems the world’s way of reassuring me that all will soon be as it was, but my heart – spinning outward towards my fears – gives me to believe that whatever has befallen me has changed me for ever.

Kneeling, Yeshua holds the back of his hand to my forehead and tells me in a pleased voice that the heat of creation is returning to my flesh. When I fail to respond with a smile of relief, he sits with me. ‘Talk to me,’ he says, taking my shoulder.

‘I feel as if you and the others have left me behind with Pharaoh. Nobody will tell me what’s happened.’

‘You had tertian fever for a week. Mia said that she and Marta piled every cover they could find on top of you, and yet you still shook with chills. You had troubling visions as well. You told everyone you were trapped in snow on the top of Mount Sinai.’

I am unable to recall any wintry summit, but when I lower my gaze, a feeling of entrapment returns to my arms and legs. And I see a bearded man kneeling before me. He wears the long robes and cylindrical hat of a Persian. His eyes are uneasy, and his hand movements are awkward and agitated. Is it dread that I see in his face?

‘Did the Baal Nephesh send a friend to look after me?’ I ask Yeshua, using the title of esteem that my parents long ago gave our physician, who grew up in Babylon.

‘No, your sisters told me that he was away. I don’t know who recommended the healer who came to see you.’

‘But someone came. I remember him – a Persian with a beard.’

‘Apparently so. Marta told me that he brewed herbs for you to drink.’

I recall a bitter taste in my mouth. ‘What did he give me?’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

I call through my curtains to Mia, who presumes the right to eavesdrop on my private conversations. And since I long ago ceded this point to her, there is no need to pretend otherwise.

‘The visitor was a Persian named Kurush,’ she tells me. ‘Lykos recommended him.’

Lykos is the Baal Nephesh’s assistant. ‘What cure did he prepare for me?’ I ask.

‘A decoction of vetch and willow bark.’

‘It tasted terrible. Did it do any good?’

‘For a time. But then you grew weaker.’

The effort she makes to fight away tears makes me raise my hand and bless her for looking after me.

Once Mia is gone, Yeshua continues his explanation: ‘Your nephew Binyamin found me preaching near Pella. He asked me to return to you. But I …’ His expression grows worried.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘I waited two days before coming here. I feared we might quarrel again.’

‘I don’t remember any quarrel.’

‘The last time we were together, we argued about my plans to defy the priests.’

As he tells me of our disagreement, I recall growing fearful for his safety and pressing him too vociferously to refrain from challenging the authority of our Temple officials. I am about to apologize when he says, ‘Can you forgive me for taking so long to reach you?’

Tears squeeze through his lashes, which summon my own. ‘How could I not forgive you?’ I say.

‘I need to hear you say the words aloud,’ he tells me.

‘I give you all that you might ever ask of me – including my forgiveness.’

My throat is desperately dry again, so we retreat into silence while I gulp down more water. At length, he stands up and goes to my window. I sense he needs to look into a world beyond our concerns. With Yeshua, there has always been the danger of his descending into too deep a chamber inside himself and never again emerging.

On turning back to me, he takes a deep breath. ‘Your sisters told me you died while I was making my way here,’ he says.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You stopped breathing. Apparently you were dead for two days.’

He clearly believes the truth in what he is telling me, so I do not laugh. When I taste blood in my mouth, I realize that I have nibbled away some crust from my lips.

My old friend studies me closely. I expect him to speak within me, as he sometimes does when voicing his thoughts aloud might endanger or compromise us, but he says nothing.

‘My sisters told you this?’ I ask.

His eyes grow glassy. ‘Yes, they said your fever worsened and that you became so weak that you were unable to move. Mia said she was rubbing your feet with oils when felt the tremor of your soul leaving your body. She checked on your breathing, and there was none.’

‘Given that I’m here now, she must have been mistaken.’

‘Marta confirmed that you were dead.’

‘That … that’s very hard to believe.’

‘Yet that’s what happened. You were gone, and then you returned to us.’ He nods as if no other conclusion is possible. Echoing the Psalms, he says, ‘As you know, I have always filled my quiver with the unlikely and improbable.’

That’s true enough, I think, and yet … ‘Are you certain?’ I ask.

After he confirms that I was dead, I imagine the man I’d been only a moment before standing behind me, observing me, unwilling to come forward and join me. I am tempted to turn to face him, but I hold up my hands instead, and I open and close them, testing what it feels like to be alive. I study my calluses, which are thicker than I remember them, and, as I listen to my hesitant breathing, questions that I suspect I shall never be able to answer begin rattling inside my mind: How can I still be here? Has every part of my soul returned to my body? If this is possible, then what is … ?

‘Lazar, you need not walk this path alone,’ Yeshua says. ‘And together, we shall –’

I have not told Yeshua to be quiet in at least a decade, but I do so now, because what has happened is beyond my grasp, and I sense that it always will be, and all I want to do is find a plot of land inside my mind where I can bury what I now know and continue where I left off a few days earlier.

After Yeshua sits down beside me, I recall what a little boy asked me as we made our way home from the necropolis. When I turn to my old friend, he opens his arms to welcome my words – and to assure me that he took no offence at my requesting silence. ‘If I were an ibbur inhabiting this body,’ I tell him, tapping my chest, ‘then I wouldn’t be me – I wouldn’t have any of my memories of you or my sisters or anyone else.’ Speaking to myself as much as him, I add, ‘It’s obvious that I’m here in the flesh. But if I had died, then I’d have surely been …’ I stop speaking because what I was about to say has vanished from my mind.

Marta carries in a bowl of steaming soup before Yeshua can address my apprehensions. She puts it on the low table by my mat and gathers up the protective talisman I’d removed from around my neck, which makes me realize what ought to have been obvious – that she made it for me.

‘Eli, stop talking – you need to eat,’ she says in a concerned tone.

Could you simply hug me and listen to my fears? I ask her in my mind. Aloud, I say, ‘It’s very kind of you, Marta, but I don’t think I can eat a thing.’

She crosses her arms over her chest, ready for a fight, so I take a first sip and tell her it is delicious.

‘All of it!’ she warns.

‘Of course, Marta, but it’s too hot at the moment.’

She looks at Yeshua as if I am being difficult and says, ‘Make sure he finishes it.’ Eyeing him suspiciously, she adds,