‘Lazarus, not Jesus. I don’t mean either of them any harm, I promise.’ Cassius holds out his arms. ‘I’m alone. I came to find Lazarus. He’s an extraordinary person who’s had an exceptional experience.’
‘You’ve got the wrong man.’
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘I think you have,’ Lazarus says. He steps into the room from the storage area where he’d tried to hide. With one foot in a wooden bucket, he’d felt absurd. Besides, Cassius was alone.
Lazarus sits down. He makes a point of looking into his bowl, pushes some bones over in search of meat.
‘Look at me sitting quietly here among friends. No thunderbolts, no lightning. Let’s not pretend. I am not the one.’
‘Humility is exactly what I’d expect. You came back from the dead.’
‘We’re glad Lazarus is with us,’ Martha says. ‘Of course we are. But we give our thanks and praise to Jesus. When you meet him, you’ll see why.’
‘I’ve met Lazarus.’
‘Yes,’ Lazarus says. ‘In the Antonia Fortress. What’s changed?’
‘I’ve changed. Your escape from the Antonia was miraculous.’
‘I’m just lucky. And you’re outnumbered. Apart from you and me everyone in this room believes in Jesus.’
‘Jesus is finished. One of the disciples betrayed him. I heard it from an informer in the Temple guards.’
He has their full attention.
‘Is that true? How can we warn him of the danger?’
‘You can’t. Not unless you know where he’s hiding.’
‘There is no time to lose. They leave Bethany as Jesus in Jerusalem says: ‘Take and eat; this is my body’ (Matthew 26: 26).
Cassius ties up the horse. He wants to blend in, like the speculatore he is, a pedestrian like Absalom and Lydia interested only in following Martha towards Jerusalem. They’re going to save the friend of Lazarus, and Martha knows from Mary where to find him.
‘Drink from it, all of you’ (Matthew 26: 27).
Lazarus keeps an eye on Cassius, and on the facts. He does seem to be acting alone but Romans can’t be trusted. Lazarus does not let Cassius out of his sight.
Martha leads them across the Kidron stream and takes the most direct route to the inn, through the Siloam Gate. As Lazarus enters the south of the city Jesus leaves it to the east, taking the Sheep Gate for a short walk to the Garden of Gethsemane.
In the narrow alleys of the Lower City, cats fight and midnight washwater is launched from upstairs windows. Martha stops outside a popular inn, at the foot of a wooden staircase.
‘Cassius goes first,’ Lazarus says. He is learning from his mistakes — sometimes it is wiser to hang back, and to be the one who follows.
Cassius climbs the stairs, tries the handle of the door. It is locked. He puts his ear against the wood, knocks. ‘It’s Lazarus. We’ve come from Bethany. Let us in.’
A key turns in the lock. Mary opens the door.
The room itself is ‘furnished and ready’ (Mark 14: 15), as famously depicted by Leonardo da Vinci in The Last Supper (1497). There are three rectangular windows in the far wall, looking out now on festive Passover lamps, and open to snatches of traditional song spilling through the night. Rectangular drapes hang from the side walls, and the ceiling is a boxed shape of beams.
‘They didn’t tell me where,’ Mary says. ‘But it’s late. I don’t expect they’ll be long.’
Mary has witnessed the covenant of the bread and wine, and it hasn’t surprised her to open the door to Martha and Lazarus. Their lives have been determined by Jesus since the day Lazarus first had a headache.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘We’ve eaten.’
Lazarus studies the long trestle table covered in a white cloth. He sticks breadcrumbs to the pads of his fingers, brushes them off and picks up a cup from the centre of the table. He peers inside. It is empty, apart from an intact fly wing in a dreg of wine. He puts the cup back down. He could be happy, if he knew what he was hoping to find.
‘What now?’ Lydia asks.
‘We wait,’ Lazarus says. ‘We have to trust, if he’s the man you think he is, that our warning will reach him in time.’
They sit down at the table, and unusually all of them are on the same side. No one feels comfortable. They stand up. Cassius hopes Lazarus is taking in the banality of the surroundings. Nothing special. Martha stacks plates.
Some time later Lazarus is sitting on the floor, his back against the wall between two of the hanging drapes. Lydia is beside him, sitting close because the space is narrow. He assumes he knows what she wants.
‘There is something,’ he says, is the most he feels he can offer. ‘There is not nothing.’
The outside of her thigh touches his.
Lazarus starts again. ‘If I could explain it, I would. It’s like you can see everything, but it isn’t seeing. Everything that has happened and everything that will happen is utterly there, but there’s no there or then and nothing is happening. I think it’s shapeless and colourless, because no shapes or colours fit what I remember about death. Although death isn’t the right word. If I try to define it I end up describing here.’
He gestures around the upstairs room at the inn. ‘It’s not like here at all.’
Dying is easy. Anyone can do it. Living is the problem — Lazarus has been brought back to life and he can’t explain himself. Luigi Pirandello (Lazarus, 1927) therefore concludes that he has nothing to say:
Dead!..And he doesn’t know a thing about it! Where’s he been? He ought to know… And he doesn’t! If he doesn’t know he’s been dead, that’s a sure sign that when we die, there’s nothing on the other side… Nothing at all.
Khalil Gibran reaches a different conclusion. True nothing, by its very nature, would annihilate everything inside it. He admits that Lazarus is ‘silent, silent as if the seal of death is yet upon his lips’, but the man has been dead and is now alive and Gibran can only suppose, in all honesty, ‘there is something else’. Or as Eugene O’Neill exults in Lazarus Laughed: ‘there is no death’.
What else can Lazarus say, after dying and coming back? This is what he knows as a certainty: ‘There is something beyond.’
Lydia looks at him blankly. ‘That’s not what I was going to ask.’
5
Lazarus falls asleep, despite the imminence of significant theological events. He is not alone. That same night, the apostle John has slept at the table in The Last Supper (1447) by Andrea del Castagno, whose image predates that of da Vinci. In Gethsemane, the disciples Peter and James will fall asleep three times while Jesus is ‘deeply grieved, even to death’ (Matthew 26: 38).
Sleep is a gift offered to anyone involved with Jesus at this time. Lazarus and the disciples sleep while they can, because the season of miracles is about to end.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence of a single person dying in Jerusalem between the resurrection of Lazarus and the death of Jesus. For one week the city holds its breath, and the gateway between this world and the next goes unfrequented.
By the early hours of Friday morning, however, the influence of the raising of Lazarus is fading. The gateway is about to open again, and the signal for this to happen is a betrayal in Gethsemane by a disciple for money. There will be a kiss, an ear sliced off in anger, an arrest. An unjust trial, a death. Life on earth resumes.
Lazarus startles awake. He senses a change, but Jesus is not back and he settles beside Lydia and sleeps again, dreaming of escapes across the desert. Sleep is gifted most powerfully to Lazarus; he is a friend and he has suffered and he still has much to do.