Richard Beard is director of The National Academy of Writing, and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. In his fifth novel Lazarus is Dead, from which this excerpt is taken, he sets out to bring “a hyper-rational eye” to the Bible story of Lazarus rising from the dead. He uses fictional sources (such as lives of the saints, paintings, and opera) to create a biography of Lazarus the man. He is not a Christian, but holds that “Christianity has a lot left in it for those interested in storytelling.” He adds: “The debate about Christianity has been largely a non-fiction debate, where reason applied to Bible stories makes them collapse. In fiction you can arrive at a different, more surprising result. In this case the story of Lazarus, I hope, is enhanced.”
Lydia works in the Lower City in a narrow building jammed between alleys. Her windowless room is beneath a sloping roof, reached by a tapered ladder that rises to a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling. This is Lydia’s idea. If a man can’t climb the ladder, if he’s that tired or drunk, she doesn’t want his custom.
Halfway up the ladder Lazarus rests and swallows a gulp of air, ignores the ticking in his inner ear, shakes his head. The rash on his arms flares up. He climbs another rung.
Lydia has beautiful feet. The soles of her feet are waxy and clean, as if she never walks on common ground. He sees her feet, then the curve of her lower legs. The rest of her is wrapped in a length of purple cloth tied beneath her arms, and the skin of her shoulders is bur-nished by lamplight, the flames reflecting in the broad silver bracelet on her upper arm.
“If it isn’t Lazarus.”
She is unprepared for the paleness of his face, the tightness of the skin across the bones. And the smell. She hides her wince, tucks her legs beneath her, picks up a cushion which she hugs to her chest.
Lazarus hauls himself over the rim of the opening. He lies still, his cheek crushed into the softness of a heavy rug, his staring eyes level with the cushions landscap-ing the floor. He flops over onto his back. The walls are softened by Persian drapes, and their swaying rounded shadows.
“I’ve been ill,” Lazarus says, eyes open to the furnish-ings.
“I know. I’ve missed you.”
Lydia’s room is like a version of heaven, somewhere Lazarus and other men would like to come instead of dying. He climbs onto his knees and tilts the trapdoor. It balances on its hinges, then falls shut.
I want to clear up the business of the smell. Lazarus will die and his death will confuse the issue, but for two thou-sand years the Lazarus story has been associated with an unpleasant smell. This is largely Martha’s fault.
“‘But Lord,’ said Martha, the sister of the dead man, ‘by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days’” (John 11: 39).
Or as the smell is forcefully recalled in the Mystery plays (The Raising of Lazarus, the Hegge Cycle, 1451): “He stynkygh ryght fowle longe tyme or this.”
The standard explanation for the smell involves Martha’s pragmatism. Lazarus will die six months from now, in the Judaean spring, when seasonal temperatures begin to rise. Her brother’s body is a body like any other. Inside the tomb the corpse will rot, and organic decay does not smell good.
This is not why Martha mentions the smell. She is confused by Jesus heading towards the tomb—she can’t understand what he’s doing, and gabbles the first thing that enters her head. She is buying herself time to think, because she prepared the body herself. Lazarus is wrapped in sweet-smelling herbs and perfume and linen, Martha having doggedly observed every ritual of cleansing, every bitter gesture of interrupted love.
Martha does not take short cuts. It is not in her char-acter. Therefore the corpse of Lazarus will not smell, not if it was prepared by Martha, not after only four days. The memory of the smell, like the memory of his decaying body, comes from the period before the death of Lazarus.
He scratches a fresh mosquito bite on the bone of his wrist. He shivers, even though it is warm in Lydia’s attic. The bite itches. He scratches. It bleeds.
It itches.
He sits back on his heels, sinks into a rug. He’d expected to feel more alive than this. He slaps the side of his neck.
“I hear you’re engaged,” Lydia says. She hadn’t meant to say anything. It was unprofessional. “Was that because you were ill? Probably you weren’t thinking straight.”
“We’ve set the date for the betrothal. Two months from now.”
Lydia takes another cushion and stacks it on the first. She finds a loose stitch. “Nothing is set in stone.”
“I should have told you. I’ve been ill. You know that.”
“I heard the news at the Temple. Did you think I wouldn’t be interested?”
“A man without a wife is incomplete.”
“That’s what they say. Unlike a whore without a husband.”
“Don’t. I didn’t come here to argue.”
“I’m sorry. I know why you came. I’ll find the best oils, to celebrate.”
“I don’t do this with just anyone,” Lazarus says.
“I know.”
She knows what he wants, and out of habit they act out their roles. Lazarus has always insisted that they’re special, both of them. He is Lazarus king of the Jews; she is his queen. Lydia unstops a flask of nard, one of the first luxuries for which they’d developed a taste together: Lazarus preferred it to the smell of sheep. So did she.
Lazarus unpeels the purple cloth and Lydia stretches out flat on her stomach on the rugs, hands limp above her head. He admires her back and buttocks, and instantly believes he feels better. Only he, Lazarus, has ever truly appreciated her stunning nakedness.
He takes the perfumed oil and rubs a handful into her back. She is crying silently, a tear trapped in the flare of her nostril, but she doesn’t understand. With more money he’d have made her exclusively his.
‘This is the last time,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
He’ll live a chaste life in return for his health. He’ll stop making visits to Lydia, honestly he will. Anything to avoid living obsessed by sickness, like an old man scared of death.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she says. She wipes the tear away with her knuckle, sniffs once, twice, rests her cheek on her hands.
Lazarus swallows a cough. He holds his breath with his fingers on his chest.
Lydia turns and reaches out to him.
He holds up one hand, his face turning red.
“I know,” she says. “It’s often the last time.”
He aims to fend her off but instead grabs her hair. He pushes her face away so she doesn’t have to smell him, but then it overwhelms him, a coughing fit that sets Lydia free and has him bucking on his knees with his weight on his arms.
The effort exhausts him. He collapses onto his side and drops a forearm across his face. He is so hot, but the worst is over, is probably over. It hurts to close his eyes.
The Lazarus smell is possibly the only instance in classi-cal painting of smell as a recurrent motif. It insinuates itself into image after image, such as a Limbourg broth-ers’ illumination in the Très Riches Heures (1416). A clean-shaven Lazarus is shown emerging from the tomb, and of the fourteen bystanders four are covering their noses, three with their hands and one with the bunched front of his tunic.
The onlookers expect a man who has been dead for four days to smell. Martha has actively directed their attention to this possibility, even though the idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Jesus can bring a man back to life he can erase the evidence of decomposition. If not, the miracle is half achieved—the work of a messiah with limitations, so no messiah at all.
Lazarus must emerge from the tomb free of the stink of death and decay.
The smell, however, cannot be ignored. The evidence of the ages strongly suggests that a nasty smell is part of the story, and indeed it is. It belongs with the descriptions of a rotting, half-alive Lazarus: from the time before his death and not after.
His living body is fizzing with a compendium of dis-eases awaiting their divine signal, but the timing has to be right. Instead of multiplying and overrunning the host organism, the viruses and bacteria in Lazarus mark time and fester, embittering the blood. The full symptoms of his illnesses are for now repressed, but this stench that seeps from his every pore is the stink of calamity on standby.
It is the smell of divine intervention. There are side-effects. No god can act directly in a world such as ours without unfortunate consequences.
***
Now is as good a time as any. Several months have passed since the first of the seven signs of Jesus, the water-into-wine at the wedding in Cana. A second sign at this stage will not be out of place.
Jesus’s second miracle, as recorded by John, also takes place in Cana when Jesus is approached by a nobleman. The nobleman’s son is sick, and Jesus is asked to leave immediately for Capernaum to heal him. This is a pow-erful display of optimism because Capernaum is about twenty miles from Cana, or a day’s walk. Jesus stays where he is. He heals the boy at a distance.
Mary hears this story in the Bethany square, and rushes inside to share the news with Lazarus. He staggers outside to the cistern, stares at his clean-shaven reflection in the water, then plunges his head into the barrel.
The healing of the nobleman’s son is the second sign that Jesus has been sent by god. Lazarus takes a turn for the worse, exhibiting the early symptoms of every com-mon ailment of the age. He has a generalised rash from the scabies crawling beneath his skin, now accompanied by reddish spots on his tongue and inside his mouth. These spots contain the smallpox virus, Variola, and because Lazarus must suffer he has both deadly variants, Variola Major and Variola Minor.
From early-onset tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuber-culosis) he has chest pains and a wet cough that doubles him up, bringing the smallpox lesions on the top of his tongue into sharp contact with those on the underside of his palate. The aerobic tuberculosis bacteria have invaded his lungs, where they divide and replicate every twenty hours.
The nausea induced by the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum comes at him in waves. Often it competes with the abdominal cramps caused by the shigella bacteria responsible for bacillary dysentery.
Which Lazarus also has, and which provokes vomit-ing and acute diarrhoea.
“It’s nothing,” he tells his sisters. “Stop your endless fussing.”
For a certain amount of the rest of his life, his first life, Lazarus will be confined indoors, and it is worth provid-ing a fuller picture of how his house may have looked. The pilgrim who visits Bethany today, probably by bus or coach, will be dropped at a dusty roadside on what was once the village square.
There is an official blue sign reading “Pilgrimage Sights,” and an arrow points to a narrow road leading steeply uphill. On the right-hand side of this road, before the tomb and the three churches commemorating the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection, just after the first gift shop, is a two-storey house with a hand-written banner: The Home of Lazarus Martha and Mary.
Accredited tour guides warn that this is probably not the house, but the two young men who sit inside the courtyard will accompany interested visitors past the bay tree and inside the disputed building. They show off the engraved brass teapot and matching set of gob-lets owned by Lazarus himself, and earthenware bowls possibly used by his sisters. Whatever the truth, this is the only house we have.
There are two large rooms, one on each floor. There is a bench built into the walls of both rooms, wide enough to lie down on and sleep. There are rugs and cushions on the floors, woven decorations on the white-washed walls, and circular brass trays set on wooden stands to make convenient low tables. The attentive young men hint strongly that the teapot and goblets may be for sale.
Otherwise, Coca-Cola is available from a glass-doored fridge in the courtyard outside.
Lazarus stays mostly in the upper room. It makes his urgent trips outside more difficult, but Martha is con-vinced that the air upstairs is cleaner. She and Mary move the hand loom upstairs, and take turns to sit with him while working on the betrothal gown and asking him questions about Saloma.
“What’s her favourite colour?”
Lazarus rarely wants to talk.
“We should send for Jesus,” Mary says.
Lydia works in the Lower City in a narrow building jammed between alleys. Her windowless room is beneath a sloping roof, reached by a tapered ladder that rises to a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling. This is Lydia’s idea. If a man can’t climb the ladder, if he’s that tired or drunk, she doesn’t want his custom.
Halfway up the ladder Lazarus rests and swallows a gulp of air, ignores the ticking in his inner ear, shakes his head. The rash on his arms flares up. He climbs another rung.
Lydia has beautiful feet. The soles of her feet are waxy and clean, as if she never walks on common ground. He sees her feet, then the curve of her lower legs. The rest of her is wrapped in a length of purple cloth tied beneath her arms, and the skin of her shoulders is bur-nished by lamplight, the flames reflecting in the broad silver bracelet on her upper arm.
“If it isn’t Lazarus.”
She is unprepared for the paleness of his face, the tightness of the skin across the bones. And the smell. She hides her wince, tucks her legs beneath her, picks up a cushion which she hugs to her chest.
Lazarus hauls himself over the rim of the opening. He lies still, his cheek crushed into the softness of a heavy rug, his staring eyes level with the cushions landscap-ing the floor. He flops over onto his back. The walls are softened by Persian drapes, and their swaying rounded shadows.
“I’ve been ill,” Lazarus says, eyes open to the furnish-ings.
“I know. I’ve missed you.”
Lydia’s room is like a version of heaven, somewhere Lazarus and other men would like to come instead of dying. He climbs onto his knees and tilts the trapdoor. It balances on its hinges, then falls shut.
I want to clear up the business of the smell. Lazarus will die and his death will confuse the issue, but for two thou-sand years the Lazarus story has been associated with an unpleasant smell. This is largely Martha’s fault.
“‘But Lord,’ said Martha, the sister of the dead man, ‘by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days’” (John 11: 39).
Or as the smell is forcefully recalled in the Mystery plays (The Raising of Lazarus, the Hegge Cycle, 1451): “He stynkygh ryght fowle longe tyme or this.”
The standard explanation for the smell involves Martha’s pragmatism. Lazarus will die six months from now, in the Judaean spring, when seasonal temperatures begin to rise. Her brother’s body is a body like any other. Inside the tomb the corpse will rot, and organic decay does not smell good.
This is not why Martha mentions the smell. She is confused by Jesus heading towards the tomb—she can’t understand what he’s doing, and gabbles the first thing that enters her head. She is buying herself time to think, because she prepared the body herself. Lazarus is wrapped in sweet-smelling herbs and perfume and linen, Martha having doggedly observed every ritual of cleansing, every bitter gesture of interrupted love.
Martha does not take short cuts. It is not in her char-acter. Therefore the corpse of Lazarus will not smell, not if it was prepared by Martha, not after only four days. The memory of the smell, like the memory of his decaying body, comes from the period before the death of Lazarus.
He scratches a fresh mosquito bite on the bone of his wrist. He shivers, even though it is warm in Lydia’s attic. The bite itches. He scratches. It bleeds.
It itches.
He sits back on his heels, sinks into a rug. He’d expected to feel more alive than this. He slaps the side of his neck.
“I hear you’re engaged,” Lydia says. She hadn’t meant to say anything. It was unprofessional. “Was that because you were ill? Probably you weren’t thinking straight.”
“We’ve set the date for the betrothal. Two months from now.”
Lydia takes another cushion and stacks it on the first. She finds a loose stitch. “Nothing is set in stone.”
“I should have told you. I’ve been ill. You know that.”
“I heard the news at the Temple. Did you think I wouldn’t be interested?”
“A man without a wife is incomplete.”
“That’s what they say. Unlike a whore without a husband.”
“Don’t. I didn’t come here to argue.”
“I’m sorry. I know why you came. I’ll find the best oils, to celebrate.”
“I don’t do this with just anyone,” Lazarus says.
“I know.”
She knows what he wants, and out of habit they act out their roles. Lazarus has always insisted that they’re special, both of them. He is Lazarus king of the Jews; she is his queen. Lydia unstops a flask of nard, one of the first luxuries for which they’d developed a taste together: Lazarus preferred it to the smell of sheep. So did she.
Lazarus unpeels the purple cloth and Lydia stretches out flat on her stomach on the rugs, hands limp above her head. He admires her back and buttocks, and instantly believes he feels better. Only he, Lazarus, has ever truly appreciated her stunning nakedness.
He takes the perfumed oil and rubs a handful into her back. She is crying silently, a tear trapped in the flare of her nostril, but she doesn’t understand. With more money he’d have made her exclusively his.
‘This is the last time,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
He’ll live a chaste life in return for his health. He’ll stop making visits to Lydia, honestly he will. Anything to avoid living obsessed by sickness, like an old man scared of death.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she says. She wipes the tear away with her knuckle, sniffs once, twice, rests her cheek on her hands.
Lazarus swallows a cough. He holds his breath with his fingers on his chest.
Lydia turns and reaches out to him.
He holds up one hand, his face turning red.
“I know,” she says. “It’s often the last time.”
He aims to fend her off but instead grabs her hair. He pushes her face away so she doesn’t have to smell him, but then it overwhelms him, a coughing fit that sets Lydia free and has him bucking on his knees with his weight on his arms.
The effort exhausts him. He collapses onto his side and drops a forearm across his face. He is so hot, but the worst is over, is probably over. It hurts to close his eyes.
The Lazarus smell is possibly the only instance in classi-cal painting of smell as a recurrent motif. It insinuates itself into image after image, such as a Limbourg broth-ers’ illumination in the Très Riches Heures (1416). A clean-shaven Lazarus is shown emerging from the tomb, and of the fourteen bystanders four are covering their noses, three with their hands and one with the bunched front of his tunic.
The onlookers expect a man who has been dead for four days to smell. Martha has actively directed their attention to this possibility, even though the idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Jesus can bring a man back to life he can erase the evidence of decomposition. If not, the miracle is half achieved—the work of a messiah with limitations, so no messiah at all.
Lazarus must emerge from the tomb free of the stink of death and decay.
The smell, however, cannot be ignored. The evidence of the ages strongly suggests that a nasty smell is part of the story, and indeed it is. It belongs with the descriptions of a rotting, half-alive Lazarus: from the time before his death and not after.
His living body is fizzing with a compendium of dis-eases awaiting their divine signal, but the timing has to be right. Instead of multiplying and overrunning the host organism, the viruses and bacteria in Lazarus mark time and fester, embittering the blood. The full symptoms of his illnesses are for now repressed, but this stench that seeps from his every pore is the stink of calamity on standby.
It is the smell of divine intervention. There are side-effects. No god can act directly in a world such as ours without unfortunate consequences.
***
Now is as good a time as any. Several months have passed since the first of the seven signs of Jesus, the water-into-wine at the wedding in Cana. A second sign at this stage will not be out of place.
Jesus’s second miracle, as recorded by John, also takes place in Cana when Jesus is approached by a nobleman. The nobleman’s son is sick, and Jesus is asked to leave immediately for Capernaum to heal him. This is a pow-erful display of optimism because Capernaum is about twenty miles from Cana, or a day’s walk. Jesus stays where he is. He heals the boy at a distance.
Mary hears this story in the Bethany square, and rushes inside to share the news with Lazarus. He staggers outside to the cistern, stares at his clean-shaven reflection in the water, then plunges his head into the barrel.
The healing of the nobleman’s son is the second sign that Jesus has been sent by god. Lazarus takes a turn for the worse, exhibiting the early symptoms of every com-mon ailment of the age. He has a generalised rash from the scabies crawling beneath his skin, now accompanied by reddish spots on his tongue and inside his mouth. These spots contain the smallpox virus, Variola, and because Lazarus must suffer he has both deadly variants, Variola Major and Variola Minor.
From early-onset tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuber-culosis) he has chest pains and a wet cough that doubles him up, bringing the smallpox lesions on the top of his tongue into sharp contact with those on the underside of his palate. The aerobic tuberculosis bacteria have invaded his lungs, where they divide and replicate every twenty hours.
The nausea induced by the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum comes at him in waves. Often it competes with the abdominal cramps caused by the shigella bacteria responsible for bacillary dysentery.
Which Lazarus also has, and which provokes vomit-ing and acute diarrhoea.
“It’s nothing,” he tells his sisters. “Stop your endless fussing.”
For a certain amount of the rest of his life, his first life, Lazarus will be confined indoors, and it is worth provid-ing a fuller picture of how his house may have looked. The pilgrim who visits Bethany today, probably by bus or coach, will be dropped at a dusty roadside on what was once the village square.
There is an official blue sign reading “Pilgrimage Sights,” and an arrow points to a narrow road leading steeply uphill. On the right-hand side of this road, before the tomb and the three churches commemorating the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection, just after the first gift shop, is a two-storey house with a hand-written banner: The Home of Lazarus Martha and Mary.
Accredited tour guides warn that this is probably not the house, but the two young men who sit inside the courtyard will accompany interested visitors past the bay tree and inside the disputed building. They show off the engraved brass teapot and matching set of gob-lets owned by Lazarus himself, and earthenware bowls possibly used by his sisters. Whatever the truth, this is the only house we have.
There are two large rooms, one on each floor. There is a bench built into the walls of both rooms, wide enough to lie down on and sleep. There are rugs and cushions on the floors, woven decorations on the white-washed walls, and circular brass trays set on wooden stands to make convenient low tables. The attentive young men hint strongly that the teapot and goblets may be for sale.
Otherwise, Coca-Cola is available from a glass-doored fridge in the courtyard outside.
Lazarus stays mostly in the upper room. It makes his urgent trips outside more difficult, but Martha is con-vinced that the air upstairs is cleaner. She and Mary move the hand loom upstairs, and take turns to sit with him while working on the betrothal gown and asking him questions about Saloma.
“What’s her favourite colour?”
Lazarus rarely wants to talk.
“We should send for Jesus,” Mary says.
