The Abyss and Other Stories (Alma Classics) by Leonid Andreyev

Author:Leonid Andreyev [Andreyev, Leonid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847497239
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2018-08-23T22:00:00+00:00

LAZARUS

I

When Lazarus emerged from the tomb,* where for three days and nights he had been in the mysterious power of death, and returned alive to his abode, no one noticed in him for some while those ominous oddities which, with time, made his very name terrible. Rejoicing with bright joy at this man returned to life, his friends and relations were unceasingly kind to him, and through the trouble they took over food and drink and new clothing they satisfied their greedy attention. They dressed him splendidly in bright colours of hope and laughter, and when, like a bridegroom in wedding garb, he again sat amongst them at table, and ate again, and drank again, they cried with emotion and invited the neighbours to look at this man who had miraculously risen from the dead. The neighbours came and rejoiced emotionally; strangers came from distant towns and settlements and expressed their reverence for the miracle with wild exclamations – it was as if bees were buzzing over the house of Mary and Martha.

And anything new that had appeared in Lazarus’s face and in his movements was explained naturally as the vestiges of the serious illness and the shocks he had been through. Obviously, death’s destructive work on the corpse had merely been halted by miraculous power, it had not been completely obliterated – and what death had already managed to do to the face and body of Lazarus was like an artist’s unfinished drawing under a thin sheet of glass. On Lazarus’s temples, underneath his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks there lay a deep, sallow blueness; just as sallow and blue were his long fingers, and the blueness of the nails, which had grown in the tomb, was becoming purple and dark. Here and there on his lips and on his body, the skin, which had swollen in the tomb, had split, and there remained in those places thin, reddish cracks – shiny, as though covered with transparent mica. And he had become corpulent. His body, which had swollen in the tomb, had retained those monstrous dimensions, those ugly bulges, beneath which could be sensed the fetid moisture of decay. But the heavy, putrid smell with which Lazarus’s funeral clothes and, it seemed, his body itself were impregnated, soon vanished completely, and after a certain time the blueness of the hands and face lessened and the reddish cracks of the skin faded, although they never did vanish entirely. It was with such an appearance that he came before people in his second life – but to those who had seen him buried, it seemed natural.

Besides his appearance, Lazarus’s temper seemed to have altered, but this surprised no one either, and did not attract the attention it should have. Before his death, Lazarus had been constantly cheerful and carefree, had enjoyed laughter and an inoffensive joke. It was for precisely this pleasant and consistent cheeriness, devoid of malice and gloom, that the Teacher had loved him. But now

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