The Brooklyn Miracle

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Lazarus is tired of rising from the dead.

Jesus has started yammering again about the good old days. The good old days, Lazarus says. You always end up murdered. But he doesn’t hear him, never does. He is prone to nostalgia—Lazarus can see memories of the adoring crowds of Galilee in the shine of his forehead. Lazarus is tending his orchids, the shade of sky in August lightening. He sighs, and it ripples the surface of a nearby pond. Every disappointment is turned to wind here.

What if, Jesus starts up, I was a woman this time? He is striding, crushing tiny scarlet flowers as he goes. They send up a musk that penetrates Lazarus’s sinuses and leaves him dizzy.

Joan of Arc, he reminds him. I was that soldier at the Siege of Orleans. He shudders, sending aspen leaves fluttering to the ground in a torrent of gold. Being run through with a sword is one of his least favorite ways to die.

Jesus leans back on his heels for a moment, a whiff of burnt hair, burning scalp emanating from his prismed skin. It’s not enough to stop him though, and he squats, examining the vinca that Lazarus planted last century, pops of violet like twilight interrupting the vine.

I can be Muslim. A source of contention these days. Jesus loves contention. Delicate hairs prickle on Lazarus’s fleshless arms. He considers ways to keep Jesus from chatting up the new arrivals—too many speculated half-truths end up whirled in his haloed head.

Four indigo birds flit onto Jesus’s shoulders. A beam of whitest white envelops him as each bird cocks its head sideways in unison, staring at Lazarus with one gleaming black bead. It’s useless to argue, he knows. Jesus will simply keep it up, pacing the clover into mulch until Lazarus agrees. He raises his eyes to the sourceless light and shakes his head.

Once, a prophet told Lazarus that people can be addicted to anything: booze, cigarettes, sex, but also perfection, adulation, adrenaline. Jesus was addicted to miracles. Heaven was a tedious place because miracles were easy, ceaseless. There’s no art to it, he’d complain. Turning water into wine was a parlor trick, walking on water something any child could do. But on Earth, in the density of matter, it was sheer concentrated effort that allowed even the tiniest of the sublime to squeak through.

Think, he would say, of the Shaiva sadhus whose praises are sung simply for producing ash from their fingertips. His liquid eyes would widen. Or the Nandi grandmothers of the Kapiti Plain who can sing rain clouds into being. The discipline, the enormity of faith they have to have!

Lazarus would nod quietly, pruning his infinite hawthorn.

We have a chance, and here he would clap a hand on his friend’s shoulder, to show them what is possible, to remind them of where they’ve come from. His arm would sweep the endless horizon, every magnificent place of Earth present and amplified a hundred-fold. They would pause, taking in the acapella of angels reverberating through the cumulus.

Lazarus would point out the tedium of becoming human, the vast and needless suffering (Exactly why they need a reminder!). He would say that mortal lives are short, that they would end up here anyway to see for themselves (Not all of them). He would recount the many miracles in the annals of history that had been turned to battle cries (We’ll be careful). When he came to the end of his arguments, he’d scan the riches of his ancient garden, knowing he’d have only its memory for a time, and say, What do you have in mind?

It is to be Brooklyn.

Jesus is enamored of this city, a behemoth of the human condition. He’s found a family for Lazarus, a mother who’s longed for a child without success, a father kind and faithful. For himself, he’ll be born to a rabbi. He’s missed the scriptures in their paper form, the ink of wisdom spilled forth on the page. He’s delighted at the level of literacy in this new country. Even women! He claps his hands. He thinks this makes it more likely that news of their forthcoming miracle will be widely disseminated.

Jesus goes first, settles himself into the laws of the Shulchan Aruch and the flavors of knish and gefilte. When he’s three, he stuns his mother by reciting the Shema in its entirety. By four, he debates his father on the true meaning of Isaiah 60:21. At five years old, the synagogue sits in awe as he sings the piyyut, his child lungs filling the hall to the beams.

It’s then that Lazarus follows, pulled screaming from between her mother’s maroon-streaked thighs. Her father whispers in his new daughter’s ear, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illa-llah,” calling her to prayer.

They live eight blocks apart but see each other only twice in the intervening years. The first time Lazarus, unsteady on her toddling legs, holds her mother Noora’s hand on the way to alāt al-jumu’ah, Friday prayers, the dome of the mosque glittering in a July noon. She spots him crossing an intersection, a scrawny weed wearing a yarmulke, striding behind his father whose gait is that of a king.

“Daisha!” Noora pulls on the small fist in her palm. “It is rude to stare.” Jesus looks up for a moment as he reaches the shore of the opposite sidewalk. A smile twinkles his eyes. Noora pulls her reticent charge away and into the shadow of the congregation.

The next time, Daisha sits straight-backed in her own chair at the café, coloring fantastically orange daisies in her notebook. Her mother and aunt Nadia discuss the upcoming visit of one of Daisha’s long list of cousins, coffee and pastries crowding the checker-clothed table.

He stops next to the patio, taller but just as thin, and raises a hand in hello as his mother calls him. So his name is David, she thinks, and adds some purple tulips to her masterpiece.

When they see each other again, it’s because it’s time for her to die.

They’ve met in an alley behind a paint store, discarded metal cans glinting in the new morning’s sun. Daisha snuck away after her father, Asmin, left for work. Her mother and aunt were still discussing the newspaper spread out after breakfast as she quieted the click of their apartment door on her way out.

Adolescence has caught up to Jesus, his pockmarked face uneasy with the first scragglings of a beard. But his smile is as radiant as ever, and though they don’t risk a hug in case they’re spotted by a wandering trash collector, each gleams in the presence of their old friend.

“Your family has been kind?” Jesus inquires.

“They’re good people. I don’t want them to suffer from this.” Her voice is as high and light as a sparrow’s. It seems strange to hear it saturate with the facts of grief.

Jesus promises all will be resolved quickly, that he has a plan he’s satisfied with. They cover the details as he winds them through a series of backways towards his chosen spot. Lazarus lifts the edge of her abaya, careful as they jump puddles left from the last day’s rain. Noora is laborious in keeping her from mud, and Lazarus thinks it small consolation to obey since she will be dead soon.

“But you will rise again and be her miracle child.” Jesus stoops to retrieve wire-rimmed glasses that clatter to the pavement when his foot catches a pothole. “I’m not used to such legs! Are they not longer than you remember legs to be?”

“You’re a klutz.” She shrugs her tiny shoulders and repeats the word she’s heard cackled in front of the deli.

They’ve reached the boulevard across from Schwartz’s Bakery, where the usual morning bread line has formed. The smell of yeast drifts through traffic, mingled with cigar smoke from old men lingered over coffee. Jesus surveys the number of potential witnesses—a knot of women hovers near the bodega, rose and indigo hijabs collecting light from the growing day, two young men head to yeshiva, Talmud in hand, and an assortment of construction workers laugh while they erect a garish apartment complex a block down. Satisfied there are enough eyes present, he turns to Lazarus.

“Are you ready?”

She thinks of her mother, leaning over the kitchen sink, gossiping with her aunt while they scrub breakfast off the plates. Yoghurt, cream and honey swirl the drain as her aunt sucks tea through the gap in her teeth. Lazarus makes Jesus promise again that he will bring her back as soon as it’s determined she’s dead. No waiting this time, no prolonged wail from her mother’s breast.

“It’s easy. These days they can tell right away. They’ll do CPR, and before they load you into the ambulance . . .” He stretches his teenage arms in front of him in a gesture of benevolence.

She edges towards the asphalt. “How should I decide which car?” She looks behind, but he’s backed into the shadows of the alley.

“Whichever seems fastest.”

She cringes, thinking of the featherweight of this body, its delicate wrists, the simple bones of its skull. All to add to the effect, she thinks, and rushes forward in front of an old Volvo.

She has only a moment to wonder what will happen to the driver.

She was so tiny! I swear I could see nothing! I would have stopped. I would have given my own blood to have changed for her.” Faiz Safar weeps by his dented bumper, the crowd giving way under the barked commands of EMTs and police.

The crumpled body of Daisha Najjar is slumped against a curb. A pool of scarlett flows without hurry into a storm drain. By then, her mother and Nadia have received the frantic calls of neighbors and have followed the screams of sirens and onlookers. They arrive at the same time as an ambulance, forcing their way to the wrecked girl that once took shelter in their arms.

Officers pull the crying women away, making room for first responders, mobile defibrillators, a stretcher that dwarfs the girl’s frame. Friends and strangers gather the women in an assembly of arms. They do not give false hope, they will not betray in that way, but they can hold, and they do.

Jesus waits until the EMT hangs his head, hand passing across his sweaty face. His partner, crimson spatter breaking the white of her uniform, tells them there is nothing more that can be done.

The wail Lazarus feared erupts as Noora sinks to her knees. Asim has finally gotten through traffic, pushed to his dead daughter and broken wife. He finds Faiz Safar, cowering in the shards of glass that were his windshield, pulls him up by the collar. Two officers must harness him, wrestle him to the ground, where his eyes are now level with his daughter’s, endlessly blank. In Jesus’s rendition of miracle performance, agony is a prerequisite to faith.

He moves into the scene, gentle as a lamb, resting a soft palm against the back of the EMT, still hunched over the child that couldn’t be saved. He looks into the eyes of Daisha’s mother. “Your daughter has been chosen to be the evidence of God’s love.” The words should feel empty under the circumstance, the awkward reassurance of a student still protected by his parents’ embrace. Instead, Noora finds her heart returning to its particular rhythm. She feels as she did the night she told Asim she was, after so long, pregnant with their child. A great exuberance lifts her to her feet, and she must cover her lips with her hands to keep from singing.

The air permeates with the smell of jasmine. A sound that roars like a tornado encompasses the crowd, yet even styrofoam cups littering the gutters are still. Instinctively, Noora looks up to a sky grown bright from horizon to horizon.

“Father, we pray that you restore to life this most faithful of your servants,” his fourteen-year old voice cracks at the word servant. He raises his arms over her body, and Lazarus is instantly sucked back in. Blood reverses from sewer to vein, frontal bone pops into place, crushed lung inflates giddily with oxygen. Lazarus is seared with pain as each splinter of femur and tibia fuse themselves together. She reaches for her mother, who, feeling the warmth of her daughter’s hand, exclaims, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” The chant gathers force, men and women who once made up the bread line calling back, “Barux hashem! Elohim gadol!” The construction workers hold each other and sway, the police officers bring Daisha’s father to her as if escorting a foreign ambassador, and a swell of joy rushes from chest to chest, enfolding them all in one great benediction.

At the hospital, Daisha is admitted, though she is fine. A troop of doctors pronounce her a miracle, but they don’t believe it, and whisper among themselves about insurance fraud and knowing how those people are. Asim and Faiz have made peace, arms around each other’s necks, understanding that, for whatever reason, they’ve been chosen to be part of Allah’s plan. Noora and her sister can’t stop weeping, the tears of course different now, the women luminous. Neighbors, witnesses to the great miracle, come by with maamoul and copies of the newspaper. They laugh at foolish reporters who call the accident “minor.” Nodding, they conspire about the best time to bring the imam, if it’s indeed proper to bring him to the girl, or the girl to him.

Lazarus’s sense of dread begins to grow.

Finally, the beep of machines is silenced, and the girl allowed to go home. Noora will not hear of a visit to the imam until her daughter is rested and fed. But though Daisha protests, her father takes her that Friday to the mosque.

The imam has heard the story already. He sees the girl briefly, but it changes nothing in his mind. A Jewish boy cannot raise a Muslim from the dead. It’s idiocy to think differently. Asim tries tentatively to argue that such a thing as this is beyond that kind of distinction, but the imam dismisses him. They leave quickly. At home, he paces in front of his wife.

“We will contact the Muslim Council of Elders. We’ll bring their scholars here. They’re experts in Quranic Law. They will make him see!” Lazarus knows this will do no good, but the heat from her father’s anger singes the air, inflames her mother and aunt. Soon, they have called a meeting.

Each agrees that what they saw was indeed a miracle, but few want to contradict the imam. It seems to them that though they can’t deny the veracity of Allah’s work in the occurrence, perhaps the Jewish boy was like them, only witness.

“Why would Allah choose this boy, Asim?” a man called Nasir says. “Would he not choose one of our own honorable youths?” A chorus of agreement rises around this logic, so much so that it’s easy to think it’s true.

Lazarus listens with her ear against her bedroom door. Her mother finally speaks. “Daisha was a child I had years after I was said to be barren. Maybe it is she who created the miracle.” This leaves silence in the room as it is considered whether a Jew or a girl is to be credited.

A man who lives on the floor below chimes, “It is Allah’s will, whatever it is.” This starts a new round of discussion and dissension, voices cutting into each other like well-practiced bayonets.

She listens at the door until the hour becomes so late that she has no choice but to curl into her bed and sleep. She dreams of desert palms and battlefields and a man who walks alone into a dark sea. When she wakes, the morning is yet unlit, and she can feel unease seep through the gaps around her windowpane.

Rumors reach them through friends, and friends of friends. The boy, David Rabinowitz (for they’ve found out that’s his name), is having similar troubles. His father, unlike Daisha’s, was not there and doesn’t believe his son’s account. Upon hearing, the rabbi called his son a heretic, and at first, they’d been told, had thrown him on the street. The last part is not true, but a split has surely developed in the community, with David’s father on one side and the melammed from David’s yeshiva on the other. The old man has been teaching the Torah for over fifty years and has never had a student understand the most subtle layers of the teachings as David does. He’s seen things with the boy in the time he’s known him, and he believes the stories. But the rabbi is adamant.

Faiz takes to parking his dented Volvo in front of the mosque, an action that brings threats to his door and a reprimand from the imam. When Daisha and her mother stop by the café, the woman who takes their order leans into Noora’s ear and tells her Schwartz’s refuses to sell them bread for their sandwiches. When she asks why, the woman slides her kohl-lined eyes over Daisha.

“Perhaps they don’t consider us good enough for their work.”

Daisha’s aunt walks by the deli and overhears two women on the verge of yelling. One argues that David has shown the way to peace, the other countering that no good Jew would bring the enemy back to life. “They’ve killed so many of us!” Nadia repeats the woman’s words. Asmin’s brother-in-law is in line at the post office when it’s supposed between a couple behind him that perhaps the girl seduced David.

Her mother turns purple at this one. “She is a child!” she fumes. She and Asmin begin to speak of conflicts Daisha’s never heard of, but her father’s repetition of the words “it’s just the same” chill her far more than the growing autumn.

One evening, Nasir stops Asmin at the apartment door. “The rabbi has told his son to make a statement that Daisha was uninjured in the accident, and we are trying to make her famous!” The men roar at the insult, Daisha waiting in the hall for her father to come home.

She wishes she could find Jesus, ask him what’s true, but she knows now that’s impossible.

Lazarus is asleep when it happens. Daisha’s warm little body is snuggled against the crook of her mother’s spine. She has slept next to her since the crash, Noora convinced a wayward vehicle could come across her daughter and pounce in the night. No sudden pang wakes her to tell her all has changed; her lungs remain steady until the cold of morning pushes them both to wakefulness.

They’ve barely dressed when a friend of Noora’s knocks on the door. Rabia Hamdi watched from the enclave of women at the bodega as Daisha was thrown from the centerline and shattered on the asphalt. She was the first to phone Noora, the first to hide her own panic in an effort to comfort the mother. Now, she holds the door frame to steady herself. Her cheeks glisten with tears, her eyes are dark moons that have collapsed in on themselves.

“They have killed him!” And, of course, Lazarus knows who.

It takes Noora several minutes and a cup of coffee to calm her oldest friend. Rabia tells them what she’s heard, the pieces others have gathered at her feet for her to quilt together and deliver.

David had slipped out the night prior to walk under the brazen glow of streetlights. Lazarus can see it, knows Jesus’s need for movement, the way he creates a breeze around him with his thoughts. He must’ve lost track of where he was, or where he needed to stay, because a bullet found its way between his scapulae. There was no crowd to gather this time, but someone called 911. The same EMT that crouched over Daisha’s lifeless form is said to have arrived, to have continued to work without pause as David’s heart failed to rhythm.

The coffee drained, Noora asks about David’s family. Rabia doesn’t know, is sure the mother is beyond any kind of succor. David’s father has gone quiet, but the melammed is certain an Arab took the shot. There are just as many whispers it was a Hassidic group that snarled about David’s choice of miracle girl, and there are those who maintain it was simply a random act of the kind of violence that’s endemic to the city.

Weeks jolt by, leaves abandoning trees in a sullen wind. There are investigations that result in nothing, reports the police are harassing young Muslim men in the area. A group of teenagers coming from the synagogue is jumped, left bruised and wretched. The neighborhood is covertly districted, a chessboard of sanctioned and unsanctioned areas for Muslim or Jew.

After the thirty days of sheloshim is complete, the rabbi meets with the imam, both in agreement on one salient point. There has been no miracle. It’s the kind of folk nonsense that old women tell their grandchildren to get them to sleep. It’s clear that peace can be restored only through this denial, which both men thoroughly believe. The imam extends condolences to David’s father, maintaining the innocence of his congregation. The rabbi, for his part, is gracious, concedes they may never know what happened, falters into the street under the weight of his son’s absence.
When Noora hears David’s family has moved to Boston, she’s inconsolable.

Winter passes before the old men at Schwartz’s stop staring as Daisha walks by with her mother on the way to school. Asmin never mentions the accident, except when Faiz comes over Sunday evenings for chess. Then, they philosophize about the cynicism of America, the great failure of faith in urban life. Noora teaches her daughter to cook saleeg, Nadia to braid her hair. When she is older, her aunt will ask if she remembers what happened, remembers David. She will say no because she can’t face the tears that surge in her mother’s eyes when his name is mentioned.

Lazarus has nothing she can do but live, as she has in every age, hoping that will be enough.

She names her daughter after her aunt, who dies soon after Daisha graduates from college. When her first son is born, Noora wants her to name him David, but though the rumors have long since turned to ash, she will not burden him with such a thing and instead calls him Jamil. She convinces her husband to change coasts, so she can be where it’s warm enough for hibiscus and birds-of-paradise to grow. They’re happy, and when her parents have bent with the burden of years, they bring them to live by the warmth of the ocean.

When she leaves, grandchildren hover by her bed, her husband’s arthritic hand rests in hers. The light has come, and she wishes only that they could see it with her.

Jesus glooms in one of the temples, an archangel’s, Lazarus thinks, though it’s easy to lose track. He decides to let him have his peace, whatever that means this time, and instead plants blood lilies and sycamore. He will bring Asim and Noora here soon, so they can sit by the fountain and breathe the palpitating fragrance of roses that quivers the air. He thinks they’re content, wrapped in the love of a thousand generations, without need or want, the simplicity of death filling them with beauty. When his children come, he will bring them, too, and relish all the stories they will tell.

Jesus arrives sooner than Lazarus anticipates. He stands by the fountain at the spot where Lazarus first agreed to be born again. Mist sparkles around him, his robes flowing with perpetual sunset.

These are nice, he points at the blood lilies, whose scarlet blooms bob in greeting. Lazarus stays quiet, waits.

Maybe it isn’t miracles they need. He looks up, tilted face reflecting gold, then at Lazarus. They’re surrounded by them, you know.

He smiles back, a fig dipping from the sycamore into his hand. I know.


Jessica Michael Contributor
Jessica Michael lives and writes in the high desert of the Southwest United States when she’s not traveling this intriguing blue planet. Her work has appeared in Allegro, The Comstock Review, Red Fez, Rebelle Society, Outdoor Australia, and others.
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