Chapter 36 - Lazarus

On our way to Jerusalem, we stopped at Bethania, and at Magdalene's request, we decided to visit the house of a man named Lazarus. Magdalene wanted to see him. She said that Lazarus had once given her shelter and had helped her very much, and had bought her freedom from court servants, it seems. I didn't doubt that they had had something and I was jealous, but I thought it was good to pay a visit to this Lazarus, not to give in to my possessiveness, like pettiness, greed and suspicion, that feeling was a strong stand in the way of someone who bore it comparing his sandals to the wings of the Messiah.

That day about 20 men walked behind us. As always, these were mainly loafers eager to earn a cue from the fuss: beggars, slaves, feeble-minded women, invalids and children with no roof over their heads. The people of Bethania watched our stops with suspicion.

The house of lazarus stood on the main street, in the center of town. It was a small, tastefully decorated villa, not peculiar to the province, as one passing Italy would have put it. We entered the yard, while the crowd remained outside the gates, Simon threatening our scruffy retinue that he would cut an ear off anyone who entered the house. He did a good job of that, those folks could empty and smear any home in a matter of moments.

To adjourn us, Lazarus' wife, accompanied by her friends, came out, a not-so-young woman who had retained the traces of her former attractiveness. Her face was thick with tears. She had more of a Roman than a Jewess. Her name was Martha. She regarded Magdalene with undisguised contempt. It turned out that Laser had died three days before and his remains still lay in the house. Martha had loved him so much that even as a dead person she wanted to keep him with her as long as possible.

I thought there was something about the house of lasers. As we walked there, I envisioned how we would all have a nice meal together and then rest in the clean, comfortable rooms, after which I would then prophesy to the neat people of Bethania, and so I was very unpleasantly struck by the fact that Lazarus had died. His wife's head was clearly not turned toward us, although Magdalene did not shake herself off and began to rant in rapture to Martha that she had brought the great teacher to her and that she should consider it a great happiness.

To get in, I had to act briskly and surprise Martha with something. But with what? And I decided to give her hope, since that suited me even better than setting bones.

"Your husband will rise again!" I said, looking her straight in the eye.

By this time I had learned to look at people in such a way that they complied. This was not easy, I scanned all my mind power, began to believe in what I was saying myself, and thus the lie takes on the status of a prophecy. In such moments, everything people knew as straw truths was consumed by the fire in my eyes.

'On the youngest day, everyone gets up,' Martha replies calmly, without rushing to invite me in for the continuation of the conversation, she remains not very indulgent.

All eyes turned to me. Behind the fence the crowd murmured; from the bushes a black kitten emerged.

'Cabbage, my little one, so there you were!' said Martha, taking the creature on her arm. 'He's been wandering around for more than two days, so stumper, you must be starving...?'

I could leave, but that would be a stain on my reputation. What kind of teacher was that who was not even allowed to enter anyone's house? Rumors so did the dogs...

"Martha, I'm giving your husband life back!" I said loudly.

'Why are you laughing at me!" exclaimed Martha. 'After all, I am a widow now... His body is already starting to reek... Lazarus and I had such a good time, we discussed everything together, and he did so much for me... He was so gentle... you won't find a second one like that in the world! Do you understand? And she burst into tears and put the edge of her dark kerchief in front of her face. The kitten freed herself from her embrace and jumped to the ground. The friends put their arms around her to comfort her and looked at me in exasperation.

'Let me see him, Martha,' I said sternly.

Lazarus lay on a low wooden bed with reed mats. The corpse was decomposing, it stank, and Magdalene dressed her nose and immediately shot out into the room. No one could resurrect him, not even the Lord God, who was not so foolish as to render inoperative the law of death they themselves had created. But I was planning something else. And for that, my knowledge and strength had to be sufficient.

I looked at the face of the deceased for an extended period of time and tried to imagine his features.

The body of Lazarus had something of a sacrifice on an altar, but for some reason it was not accepted, the fire no longer descended from heaven to consume it.

My students, Magdalene and some of the women next to us spread out under the trees in the garden near the house. Martha and her friends brought them something to eat.

I got Martha to send all her friends to their own house and stay away from the room where I was working on the corpse. You could see that Martha didn't quite believe me, but she felt my directions out, if only to have something to do and thus get some distraction, ease the pain of her beloved husband's death a little.

I then gave Martha a strong sleep aid to drink and she left for her room upstairs.

After waiting a while until she was deeply asleep, I told my students to undress lazily, carry them into the garden and bury them under a fig tree. Using the shovels they found among the garden tools, they did so. My students were in a hurry and it became a shallow grave. Dogs might find the grave, but luckily Lazarus and Martha did not have dogs, and around the plot of the house with its spacious garden was a stone wall that finely hid everything from the view of curious people.

Then I grabbed a shovel, wandered a bit through the garden wave here and there and looked at the earth here and there. Everywhere was loose brown soil, very suitable for fruit trees but not for me. There were plenty of stones, also useless. Finally, in the far south corner of the garden, near a bit, I found some red clay. I had to have that.

I told my students to grab a stretcher with four ephah of clay and bring it to the room along with a small vessel of water, while I myself cut off enough thin twigs. Matthew asked if I sometimes intended to bake pots. I told him that no large oven had yet been built for firing my pots. Matthew was silent.

I sent Judas to the market to buy seven pieces of white cloth, two doves and a chicken egg. I told him to go ahead, because otherwise Martha would wake up and might take it into her head to come and see how the process of raising her husband to life was going on.

Using the twigs in a language found in the house, I made a man-sized scarecrow, put it on the death bed and smeared it with the clay diluted with water. I made haste. Matthew helped.

Judas came with what I had asked him: the fabric was solid, the pigeons cooed in their cage. 10 eggs he had bought, because they were not sold by the piece in town.

One egg I masoned into the doll's head.

Judas in Matthew gave the doll fingers and toes. I modeled the face: the mouth, cheekbones and all the rest, it became perfectly natural. But with the eyes already a problem, their sockets could not be left empty. I thought for a moment about what to do, then I took from Matthew two lepta and pressed his into the eye sockets of clay. The greenish sheen of the Kober satisfied me completely.

Next, I got a hefty zajin for the doll for all intents and purposes but immediately wound up, because, after all, a clay zajin was not going to stand up on its own, and I did not want to deprive my ship of such an important function.

Then I reached into the ring finger of my left hand with a small needle and smeared a drop of blood on the doll's mouth.

If you wanted to create a human being, as is well known, you had to first ignite the passions in him, but how exactly you did that was up to the creator himself, according to the situation, the doll's destination and the materials available. I decided to make sure that my doll was rigid with passions, completely wrapped in them. Seven was the minimum number of passions with which a being resembled a human being. Therefore, I pointed the seven pieces of cloth on the ground and took the first pigeon out of the cage. Holding the dove in my right hand, I pressed it with a brusque movement of my left the head and wrote with the blood spotting from the bird's ramp on the first piece of cloth:

Evenness

As I thus put one bird to death after another, I wrote down six more formulas on the remaining six pieces of cloth:

Stupidity

Honor

Rude

Small smart

Big smart

Stubbornness

With the help of Judas in Matthew, I developed the life of clay with these rags.

Now all I had to do was give the doll a beard. Lazarus had had a blond one. I sent Judas into town once more, to snort up flax somewhere. He ran away, was back in no time, with the flax, and the dolls got a natural-looking beard. Lazarus had been bald, so there was no need to put fake hair on the head.

A bloodied rag wrapped and ready to rise along the loamy Lazarus birds. The drop of my blood was to provide the bird blood tenfold and with it the power of the passions. We miss the doll in the clothes that Lazarus had left behind.

The new Lazarus was dressed in robes, but the most important thing of all still had to be done: casting an incantation on the clay body, so that the spirits of the earth would sail into him and make him move. I very much hoped that I would manage that and regretted that I had never practiced this before. I had the methodology from the forest showy handwriting of the great scholar Abram of Emalina, which I had gotten hold of when I was staying at Cyrenaica, with an enlightened Chaldean. I asked him to sell me the scrolls, he refused, but thanks to my good memory I remembered the text almost word for word.

Standing at the head end of the sponde, I applied the word meat to the doll's life-filled head with the bone needle and spoke liltingly, "Swirling spirits of the volcanic earth! In the name of another's suffering I quench your thirst for incarnation! Enter into this sweet body! Dissolve in it, like the salt in the water! Let legions of fires become a single fire! A living egg and a man's blood await you! Break out of the shell of the earth! Go wild, vibrate! Like the power of cursed torments! Luminous wrath! Vibrate!

The doll did begin to move, but it was as if an invisible person were pulling on invisible wires, checking whether a leg, an arm, was working, or the head could turn. A first sound erupted from the loamy Lazarus' throat, something big and a little gray goo dripped down his red cheek.

The incantation worked! I let out a shriek of joy, after all, I had succeeded in bringing a doll to life the first time, but Judas verbalized and recoiled backwards, toward the door, while Matthew groaned and reached for his heart. It made me joyful.

But the doll was still mute, like a small tablet on which words had to be applied using the vibration of my voice. Silence was required, lest the puppet store up accidental, unnecessary sounds. I told Judas in Matthew to go to the garden and sit silently with everyone else.

Left alone, I uttered the formula Ab ovo audi me, with which the process was to be begun, and then I continued in a muffled voice, "I Am Lazarus... It is a miracle... I tell you truly...!

The doll began to move its lips noiselessly to repeat after me. That meant the words were printed in the structure of the small.

"I welcome you... May your days be long and happy... Sprinkle me with water... Praise the Lord... Anathema!" I dictated.

When I had uttered all my most cherished quotes from the Torah, Magdalene stepped into the room, came to sit at my feet and whispered, "Jesus, I want you.

'Go away, beast, not now,' I replied softly, lest the loamy Lazarus hear. 'Your lust is immeasurable ... Quiet ...'

With a disgraced face, Magdalena walked away.

"Thirsty, go forth and all without payment!" continued I, quoting the great words of the prophet Isaiah. 'Go and take without silver and pay for the wine and the milk!'

And I added the threat that every new-fangled prop of Israel was so fond of, even the most talentless: 'Hear, hear! The walls of Jerusalem will fall!'

To add to all this, I taught him a few phrases to reinforce my authority: 'He who does not believe in Jesus had better tie a millstone around his neck and drown himself in the depths of the sea' and 'Abandon your possessions, for the first will be last, the last will be first, as Jesus of Nazareth told us'.

I felt like a father teaching his child the first words, so I added to the doll's humble vocabulary, "I love you, my father.

At last I say in a commanding tone, "Lazarus, get up and walk!

He came to the government and sat down. I put a hood over his head. Put sandals on his feet.

By this time a huge crowd had gathered behind the fence around the house of residents of Bethania, among whom I saw rabbis and even some soldiers. The situation was dangerous, I came to be accused of anything and everything. I had to get the doll to the people as quickly as possible.

Lazarus stood up and made his way to the door with a slow, awkward gait. Out of nowhere, the black kitten emerged and began to play with the son of his robe, but the blind, unfeeling Lazarus got on top of him. The kitten howled shrilly and shot out like a little black shadow.

Lazarus walked out after him.

Fox's beard and coppery gaze were hidden from view by the shadow of the hood. Moreover no lazarus grievously stooped, he hid his face, therefore everything looked perfectly human.

My pupils, Magdalene and our other women stood beside the house with Martha, who at the sight of the doll immediately lost consciousness, sank to the ground, Andreas narrowly catching her and preventing her from landing on her head. Everyone stiffened in amazement.

Without paying attention to him, Lazarus stalked toward the gate, while I climbed the stairs, toward the roof of the house, to better watch the event.

The loamy Lazarus opened the gate, or rather, gave such a powerful push against it with his hands that the lock broke. When the crowd saw this, they fearfully became free.

'Glory be to Jesus!" sounded his voice, as if it came from the bowels of the earth. 'I am Lazarus! The walls of Jerusalem will fall! Go and take attic silver and pay for wine and milk!'

As night fell, Lazarus moved through the crowd with a heavy pace, casting a long shadow even more impressive than himself. I was ecstatic, feeling like the creator of new life, unspiritual admittedly, but still, life! In the end, everything that had form was also alive, according to Aristotle.

'Jesus, I want you! Go away, slut! Not now! Your lust is immeasurable!" sailed Lazarus forth pouring out his words, and I was amazed at the strength of his clay throat. 'Silence! The walls of Jerusalem will fall! Anathema!

"Lazarus has risen and become a prophet!" someone shouted.

'Whoever does not believe in Jesus ... A millstone around his neck!" roared Lazarus the whole street. 'Tell you truly!'

'Gives us permission to pay for wine to grab,' sounded another voice. 'Let us go to the mall! Lazarus, go ahead of us!'

With much noise, the crowd closed around him. I was afraid that I accidentally tore off an arm or turned his head, but everything remained amazingly firm. The loamy Lazarus walked down the street to an unknown dog. He made blessing gestures with his right hand, which was strange because I hadn't taught him that. Probably carnal and loam people acted similarly in similar circumstances, according to the laws of universal mechanics. The movement of the loamy Lazarus was awkward, but full of dignity, and I thought he could very well become a clergyman. He knew nothing and thought of nothing, only uttered a few phrases, but in his body resided the life-giving passions, with underneath, the stubbornness, and that was the most important thing for a clergyman.

Martha came, Judas took her into the house. Andrew and Philippus came up to me, on the roof. The people continued to push around Lazarus noisily, and the procession got further and further out of sight.

'Jesus, that's amazing,' Andreas said. 'I have always believed in you; you are truly a great teacher! Tell me, can this op move on for a long time?'

''A few weeks, I think,'' I said, ''but if he goes out in the sun, he'll dry out and fall apart faster.'' By the way, if he gets water there regularly ... Just to be on the safe side, I taught him to say ''splash me with water.'' And if someone is smart enough to look under his hoodie and erase the first letter of the word met on his forehead, he's been right there, he turns into a motionless pile of lories and loam, because the word truth then turns into the word death.'

'Master, you could create a perfect minnar,' Phillippus said. 'The most beautiful in the world, always vigorous and blessed, who will never give up.'

'You can create a legion of lovers and thereby subdue the empire novel,' I replied. 'Because only love is capable of withstanding a regular army. You will see how yet another Pompei will be astonished when it sees our army!'

We shot out laughing.

It had grown dark. The murmur of the crowd hushed in the distance. It occurred to me that I had released the new Lazarus into the world and in doing so had immediately severed the bond with him. Similarly, God, if he existed, lost the bond with every newborn human being. Whereas children, if they had barely learned to walk, went away from their parents forever. Yes, between all of us the abyss gaped.

That is why I always deliver family ties and family life with contempt. It saves me from having recently come to separate the husband from his father, the daughter from her mother, and a bride from her groom. Suddenly I had taken someone else's bride literally on the eve of her wedding. That had been in Masada. Incidentally, she had returned home shortly thereafter, when she did understand that I could give her neither peace nor prosperity.

That evening we all dined together in the dining room. I sat in the chair of the gentleman of the house who had moved under the fig tree. Helping Martha, because she did not understand why her revived husband had left. When everyone put themselves to sleep, Magdalene and I took possession of the room there in which I had created the mud man. I had drunk a lot of wine, was excited and almost happy. From the scraps of string I had needed to make the doll, I made a kind of harness and put it around Magdalena's head. She sat down on all fours. We had intercourse for a long time on the wooden bed whose wicker mats still smelled a little of the deceased and were covered in clay, but I felt only the equally firm and willing flesh of a wonderfully voluptuous woman, she clamped the rope between her teeth, pressed it into the corners of her mouth, her clitoris swelled blissfully, I massaged it with my finger, with faster and faster movements, and then poured my seed into her, with a cry of joy, with a feeling that I had died and was born again, for the eternal true life, obscured by nothing.

In my ecstasy, I was probably equal to God at that moment. After all, what Philon of Alexandria saw ecstasy as the gateway to heaven, and this man I believed, because he was not only sagacious but also one of the richest Jews in Egypt. Moreover, he believed that the Jewish God should not belong to the Jews alone, and that was a proposition as bold as it was truly astute. I had always wanted to meet Filon and talk with him, but would he have wanted to descend to me, a vagabond who had never even taken a step across the threshold of a yeshiva? Maybe so... I believed he knew something about the logos that I did not, even though I healed people using it and came to make a mud doll move.

We stayed in Martha's house for four days. She kept wanting to look for her Lazarus, to bring him back home, but I tried to talk her out of it by pointing out that he was now serving God exclusively. I assured Martha that her husband still loved her and had not forgotten his resurrection, but that he was not stupidly on a very, very important mission.

At that point, the loamy Lazarus was already far from Bethania, with a group of people behind him who considered themselves his disciples.

If you added to that time a little bit of menstrual blood, the artificial man would be amenable and accurate. If you added the saliva of a rabid dog, you would get a brave soldier. The blood of a bat made him fast and agile, while the juice of hazel with the oil of mint made him diligent and obedient. Powdered earthworms helped him make the right decisions and even be a little cunning. Hyena dung pounded with coke made him considerate and honorable. There were many other ingredients that imparted different properties to an infant stream. If I once had a fine workshop, in a secluded spot, and the opportunity to work quietly, I might come and make a perfect doll.

The ink with which I wrote this excerpt was prepared from kufi, roasted acorns, vitriol, alum, dried leeches and gum arabic, over which a special prayer was then said by a smiling moon. This was a precautionary measure. The method of bringing matter to life, as here set forth, is dangerous in the hands of a fanatical believer or mentally ill person, because he can create and lead an army, by which he expands the territory of his insane world, and not the territory of love. The properties of this ink are such that such people see here only rules from sacred Scripture, innocent and useless, because everyone knows them.