When the King Loses His Head, and Other Stories

by Leonid Andreyev

And he leaped. The rope stretched to its limit, but sustained the weight. The neck of Judas grew thin, while his hands and legs folded and hung down limply as if wet. He died. Thus within two days, one after the other, departed from this earth Jesus of Nazareth and Judas of Kerioth, the Traitor.

All night like some hideous fruit the body of Judas swung over Jerusalem; and the wind turned his face now towards the city now to the desert. But whichever way his death-marred face turned, its red and bloodshot eyes, both of which were now alike, like brothers, resolutely gazed upon the sky. Towards morning some observant one noticed Judas suspended over the city and cried out in terror. Men came and took him down, but learning his identity threw him into a deep ravine where they cast the carcases of horses, dogs, cats and other carrion.

That same night all believers learned of the terrible death of the Traitor, and the next day all Jerusalem knew it. Rocky Judea heard it, and green-clad Galilee too; and from one sea even to another more distant one the news of the death of the Traitor was carried. Not swifter nor slower than the passing of time, but step by step with it, the message spread; and as there is no end to time there will be no end to the stories of Judas’ betrayal and his terrible death. And all—the good and the bad alike—will curse his shameful memory, and among all nations, as many as there are or will ever be, he will remain alone in his cruel fate—Judas of Kerioth, the Traitor.

Lazarus.

CHAPTER I.

When Lazarus emerged from the grave wherein for the space of three days and three nights he had dwelt under the mysterious dominion of death, and returned living to his abode, the ominous peculiarities which later made his very name a thing of dread remained for a long time unnoticed.

Rejoicing in his return to life, his friends and neighbors overwhelmed him with caresses and they satisfied their eager interest by ministering to him and caring for his food, his drink and his raiment. They clothed him in rich attire, bright with the hues of hope and merriment, and when he sat among them once more, arrayed like the bridegroom in his wedding garments, and ate and drank once more, they wept for joy and summoned the neighbors to view him, who had so miraculously risen from the dead. The neighbors came and rejoiced; strangers too came from distant cities and villages and in accents of tumultuous praise voiced their homage to the miracle—the house of Mary and Martha hummed like a beehive.

All that seemed novel in the features of Lazarus and in his demeanor they explained as natural traces of his serious illness and the shock through which he had passed. It was manifest that the destructive effect of Death upon the corpse had been merely arrested by the miraculuous power, but not altogether undone. And what the hand of Death had already accomplished upon the face and the body of Lazarus was like an artist’s unfinished sketch covered by a thin film. A deep earthy bluish pallor rested on the temples of Lazarus, below his eyes and on his hollow cheeks; his lanky fingers were of the same earthy blue and his nails, which had grown long during his sojourn in the grave had turned livid. Here and there, on the lips and elsewhere, his skin, swollen in the grave, had cracked open and was covered by a fine reddish film that glistened like transparent slime. And he had grown very fat. His body, inflated in the grave, retained that ominous obesity beneath which one scents the putrid sap of dissolution. But the cadaverous and fetid odor which had permeated the burial robes of Lazarus, and seemingly his very body, soon disappeared completely; in the course of weeks even the bluish tint of his hands and of his countenance faded, and time also smoothed out the reddish blisters though they never vanished altogether. Such was the appearance of Lazarus as he faced the world in this his second life. To those who had seen him buried it seemed perfectly natural.

The manner of Lazarus also had undergone a change, but this circumstance surprised no one and failed to attract due attention. Until his death Lazarus had always been care free and merry. He had loved laughter and harmless jests. It was this agreeable and merry disposition, free from malice and gloom, that had made him so well beloved by the Teacher. But now he was grave and silent. He neither jested himself nor responded with an approving smile to the jests of others: and the words which he uttered on rare occasions were the simplest, most commonplace and indispensable words, as bare of a profounder meaning as the sounds with which animals express pain or pleasure, thirst and hunger. Such words a man may speak all his life and none would ever learn what grieved or pleased him in the depths of his soul.

Thus he sat with the face of a corpse over which for the space of three days the hand of death had held sway in the gloom of the grave,—arrayed in solemn wedding garments that glistened with ruddy gold and blood-red crimson; dull and silent, ominously transformed and uncanny, but still undiscovered in his new character, he sat at the festive board among his banqueting friends and neighbors. Now tenderly, now tempestuously the waves of rejoicing surged around him; fervently affectionate glances feasted upon his face that was still numb, with the chill of the grave; the warm hand of a friend caressed his blue tipped leaden fingers. The music played. They had summoned musicians to play merry tunes: the cymbal, the pipe, the lute and the timbrel. And it sounded like the humming of bees, like the chirping of crickets, like the singing of birds, this rejoicing in the house of Mary and Martha.