8 Empty Sky

Another year passed. Lazarus had been riding since before daybreak, travelling with two Libyan slaves, approaching old Pelusium along the Clysma road. Today, with any luck, he would pick up a wagonload of the local flax and sixty jars of linseed oil. From his saddle hung another sack of Senmonthis’s dolls. They sold well – well enough to make Senmonthis happy and Heracles jealous. Perhaps he could… but then he recalled the stillborn child and Senmonthis’ sad mood ever since. No, they must sort it out for themselves.

He gazed down the road. The road. The world. Yet already, in the sixth century of his life, it was exhausted. Already all journeys were the same journey, all destinations just places. Already he had exhausted every pleasure and, largely out of boredom, every vice. Things were constantly different, but what was new? Alexandria, Adrianopolis, Athens: when was he last surprised? When was the last unexpected thought? The last true delight? How long would it be before all people, all places, all thoughts were one, without inflection or colour? Already after five hundred years the world was too small; how would it be in a thousand? In a thousand thousand? A thousand thousand thousand?

It was a routine journey and Lazarus’s thoughts were far removed from the rutted track. His neck was sore with some sort of lumpy rash – another bite? – and from time to time he scratched at it absent-mindedly. More importantly, although he had only come to Alexandria seven years previously, already he was thinking of ending his current incarnation. He could disappear to – well, he had not decided. From here, Jerusalem felt just over the horizon. But no, not there, not yet. Images of the smoking city – mixed with a half-dozen lesser sackings – flickered bloodily in his memory, and his horse had plodded some distance before he returned to himself. Nor Antioch – a true merchant’s city he had once known well, but itself sacked and burned by Khosrou and his Persians the previous year. Even the marble had been stripped from the cathedral and carted back to Persia. Briefly he squirmed in his saddle. Something rough in the seam of his loincloth was chafing his groin. At first scratching the top of his bare thigh had helped to diffuse the burning sensation, but after an hour his leg was raw. But pressing through his tunic brought some relief.

Why not India? That was a thought. Too far? Too strange? Still not strange enough? For some reason Heracles’ words came back to him, and the recollection of how hollow they had sounded. But perhaps Heracles’ philosophers were right after all: change was an illusion. Certainly his life seemed only to oscillate between the futility of the ceaseless passing of things and the tedium of their interminable sameness. What kind of man could endure eternity?

But why was he so eager to move on now? There were so many reasons he should not go: he was making a good name in trade; the city was a fine place to live; and in Heracles and Senmonthis he had found good friends. Yes, many reasons.

In part the answer was the same as always: his changelessness would be noticed, and then what? But after so few years, it was surely the wrong answer. No, he corrected himself, it was the wrong question. It was not a matter of managing the endings of his lives but, rather, of why he sought constant new beginnings. Yes, that was the unasked question (the air buzzed with them these days). Immediately he knew the answer: he made countless new beginnings so that he would not have to face the alternative: that all ends were the same. If it was always possible to replace one existence with another, he could always put off the question of the destination, the essence, to which any of them led.

He could not go on like this. The fresh flavours he hoped each new beginning would bring were merging sooner and sooner into gruel. And he was tired. Each morning he rose a little later, with no hope that the day would bring anything he had not seen ten thousand times before. His shoulders ached, his stomach gnawed on his own innards, and his senses vacillated between exhausted and overwrought. His fingertips tingled and his skin crawled. Every sound was piercing, yet distant and dull. His eyes, constantly sore, throbbed, every small shift in focus or attention imprecise and grating. Already he could spend a day – sometimes days together – stretched out on his wretched bed, staring at the ceiling of his small, sparse room, and only the most urgent bodily need could raise him up. And when even the bland, empty ceiling was too relentless, he would retreat behind his eyelids, screwing his fists into his eye sockets in the vain hope of blotting out the very idea of light, and the only signs of his life were the small, desperate moans his neighbours caught through the papyrus-thin walls as he strained to shrink and shrivel down to nothing.

And memory… a maze he could never escape. His senses reduced to windows onto the real world that seemed to grow smaller and more opaque as the memories grew more ancient and immense. Their opacity only reflected what the here-and-now surely was – just dust, settling onto the slowly, patiently swelling bedrock of voiceless history. Mote by mote by mote, drifting, tumbling slowly to earth, to be silently transmuted into unfathomable strata of dead remembrance.

Once – no, for centuries – he had imagined that there was some point to it all. No - he had needed there to be some point, some reason… And his world being drenched with the notion that the world itself made sense – someone’s sense – for centuries he assumed that his purpose was to witness. Witness what, he had no idea – just to be there, to wait for God and witness. But in the end, all dreams wear out. Five hundred years of groping for something intangible left him intangible. Except that inside he shrieked. Soon all time will be now, everywhere will be here, and I will, I know, go mad. There will no elsewhere, no elsewhen, nothing but thrusting away the horror of present moment, forever. And I will be nothing. No man. All pleasure would be dust, each satisfaction empty, contentment an unimaginable fancy. He must find a way to turn from this ceaseless wandering, these ceaseless false beginnings, this flight from everything, this going nowhere, this finding nothing. He must turn his thoughts another way.

Eternity. He must face eternity.

But he had no idea how. He had looked eternity in the face often enough to know that it was an unanswerable – but also that it was inescapable. Sometimes he would think of the days to come, and weep in great sobbing convulsions at the enormous pointlessness of it all. No, not enormous, not pointless – such words were too puny to plumb the empty infinitude he saw stretching out ahead.

As these thoughts – solid and real as never before – presented themselves to him, he looked out upon his horse, his slaves, the road and the morning breezes as though observing another world. A world in a little bottle, surrounded by the vast nothingness that was the final truth.

These Christians (even after a century and a half they remained ‘these Christians’) were so fond of talking about eternity. They had no idea, he thought contemptuously. It was just a word to them: a formula for conjuring away an incomprehensible truth.

Yet there was something. Something in Jesus’s message, even after it had been embroidered and distorted by five centuries of religion, finally seemed to be touching him.

He had never been a devout Jew: a Jew he certainly had been, but so indelibly had the religion into which he had been born fused with the world in which he lived that he could just as truthfully have described himself as a pious breather of the air and faithful walker of the earth. He had prayed with his family and neighbours, twice he had helped rebuild Bethany’s house of worship, and every year they had gone up together to Jerusalem to attend the Passover sacrifice.

But reciting a creed is not conviction and prayer is not quite belief. He believed in his religion as a fish believes in water – which is to say, hardly at all. And not having quite believed, when he left Judea the articles of his faith had been scuffed off along with the dust of its roads. Then, for many long decades, the thought of what lay in the ashes behind him was so unbearable that he would always pass by the Jewish communities he found scattered across the vast Roman and Parthian domains, preferring other taverns and boarding houses. Nowadays he lodged comfortably enough in Jewish hostelries, but they were no more home to him than the colonies of Greeks or Armenians with whom his nominal countrymen feuded and fought.

So, if his Judaism had lapsed, nothing else had taken its place. The Roman faith, with its skyful of dubious characters, he could scarcely regard as a religion at all. How could anyone devote themself to beings who traded favours for trinkets – a cupful of ram’s blood for victory in the arena or three libations for a harvest? If the worshippers of Jupiter, Mithras or Sol Invictus made the prescribed sacrifices and intoned the correct prayers before their gods, they were far more genuinely impassioned by their legion, their chariot team, or Rome itself. In which, then, did they believe?

So he attended church like any man, and found it no more alien than attending a strange synagogue. He wore a thoroughly blessed icon around his neck and signed against the evil eye. Who did not? But he had observed a hundred creeds in search of one that would touch him, and in all the gestures and incantations, where was humanity? What did this god or that care for him?

All his life he had failed either to escape a vague sense that his life must mean something. Yes, he acknowledged, his ‘belief’ was as crazed and feeble as that. For a whole century after Jerusalem he agonised over who and what he was, searching for the part he must play but never finding it. Then for three hundred years, almost up until this day, he had preferred to face existence one day at a time, carefully turning his back on his own impossible truth. For who could find sense in immortality, when everyone and everything he loved was annihilated by time? What was not ashes in his mouth? As he loaded his packhorses and checked his accounts and sat drinking beer in the marketplace, and above all as his little caravans plodded earnestly down the road to nowhere in particular, the fleetingness of it all swirled in his head, like dirty water welling up from a bottomless black drain. All gone, soon you will all be gone, and the first, most certain thing I will know of your successors is that they will follow.

Yet there was something. In this at least the Christians seemed a little different. Or at least, Christianity did. Beneath what was otherwise only another agglomeration of prayers and rites, it was about – himself? Though not in the selfish way. More than just another routine of mechanical ritual and outward compliance, it seemed to be pointing to – what was the word? Sanctity. Yes, an inner sanctity. A cleanness of soul. Was he clean? He did not know. Yet now that the question had posed itself, it seemed to be not so much whether he could endure immortality as whether he was worthy of it.

He sighed and looked up, scratching again. His horse sauntered onwards. Nearly there.

Around him the desert spread out to the horizon, occasionally interrupted by a tuft of ragged grass. He looked around, but his eyes refused to fix on anything in the boundless waste. Overhead a flock of ibis headed south, but he was too distracted to try to read the omen they offered. Again he shrugged his itching thigh against the coarse seam of his tunic. Was not the whole world of humanity surrounded by silence, like the empty sands that ran south from here until – forever?

Why not simply step out of the world? Was not the desert big enough to swallow a thousand Umbrias? Because, he knew in his heart, it was not an answer to the real question. He might escape from humanity, he might step out of time, for years and centuries and even millennia; but time would always be here, waiting for him, and one day he would have to return.

Or a monastery? As the wagons creaked onwards, he tried to imagine life as a monk. Under the desert sun the thought of a cool cell was appealing. Sparse, dreary food – the thought deterred him very little. Not much sleep. A life of prayer, ritual, devotion? – he could not grasp what they would mean; perhaps he had to try them before he could understand.

Or perhaps I should set up a column like that Syrian fellow. As tall as a tree and barely a single pace from side to side. Lazarus Stylites: it had a good sound. He laughed out loud, causing a flock of seagulls scavenging by the roadside to scatter in all directions. Live out eternity up in the air – nearer, my God, to Thee, he added bitterly. I wonder what they will think when I’m still up there a hundred years from now. Yes, just come out with it: For I am Lazarus, touched by God, so you’d better mind your manners!

He laughed again, his voice edged with hysteria.

‘Master?’ Lazarus glanced up. His new slave was looking solicitously, perhaps anxiously his way. Lazarus smiled awkwardly and waved the man’s concerns away.

A monastery. A hermitage, deep in the desert, where he could confess who he was to an understanding abbot and... And if, once told, the abbot was not so understanding? Well, what could they do? But he knew very well what they could do: they could say he was a witch or possessed or a demon, and then – quickly he snuffed out the all too familiar images.

He looks up from his reverie. Unexpectedly, Pelusium’s main street greets him. He sighs: Yes, I must start to think seriously. Just get this shipment off my hands, then... oh, he must write to Heracles too, and send him the profits from Senmonthis’s dolls. He recalls the lump on Senmonthis’s throat. She lights candles and over the horny swelling she wears the hollow amulet Lazarus brought her from down along the Red Sea coast. Each morning she fills it with oil from the little flask the priest has blessed and calls upon the djinn who is said to inhabit the amulet. But each evening the lump has grown a little more. Daily she pounds concoctions of red beetle and lacy moth and mutters charms without end, her lips moving incessantly as she browses market stalls, stirs the porridge and settles her children to bed. Each day her voice grows more a little more hoarse. Her eyes sink into shadows. He wonders what it means, what malignant power would send such a horrible thing to a mother so devoted, a wife so loving and a woman so kind. He does not wonder where it will end.

But before anything else, I need a good rest. He stares down the dusty street before him. How tired I feel today. And this sore throat just won’t go away.

Cagily he dismounts and looks up and down the road, absently scratching his neck again and pressing down onto his chafing thighs. They are extraordinarily tender now. He feels feverish too, though that’s probably just that fish back in Clysma. Yes, my head does ache rather. Really, I’m not well – here, look at this nasty swelling behind my ear. I think I have another one here too – right in my armpit! Ugh, it’s huge! And here’s another! They weren’t there last night, that I do know. Look, it’s all dark. Yes, I’ll find a doctor. Ugh, what’s that smell? Oh God, it’s burst! Oh, disgusting!