The Discovery of Heaven (87 page)

"Well, what do you make of that?" said Onno. "An Egyptian obelisk in the heart of Christendom. This is where they crucified Peter upside down, in the circus of Nero. You find obelisks everywhere in Rome."

"Perhaps," said Quinten, "that might be connected with the Egyptian exile that Moses liberated the Jews from."

"Who can say?" said Onno, laughing. "But that connection can only be grasped with your inimitable way of thinking."

Quinten looked at the long shadow cast by the obelisk, like a sundial, and then at the sides without inscriptions. "There's nothing on them. There should be something written on them."

Onno focused his eyes on the smooth granite, pointed at the top with his stick, and then a little lower with each word:

"
'Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa Heroe men ab mad kheroe sa Ast auau Asar.'
That means—"

"I don't want to know. It sounds much too beautiful for that."

Everything became new again for Onno, too. In the past he had been in Rome repeatedly—the last time as a minister of state: preceded by police outriders with blaring sirens, a government car had borne him straight through all the red lights from the airport to the Quirinal; but since he had been living there, he had not left his own district.

In the colossal basilica he helped Quinten translate the gigantic words that stood in a circle in the cupola above the high altar:

TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM

AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM

"At first sight it seems to say: 'Thou art Peter and on this Peter I shall build my church.' But you need to know that
petra
is a Greek word meaning 'rock.' Peter's grave is supposed to be under this altar, and hence the church is built on it—not only this building, but the Catholic Church as a whole. The popes regard themselves as his successors."

They visited the Vatican museums and the precious shrine of the Sistine Chapel, where they were allowed to talk only in whispers but where the cardinals behind their Golden Wall of course screamed and shouted when they had to elect a new pope from among their number, at least to the extent that they had not nodded off to sleep dribbling. On seeing Michelangelo's
Creation of Adam,
which had emerged in bright colors from the dark-brown candle smoke of ages, Onno suddenly remembered the neon Communist version on the
Rampa
in Havana eighteen years before, when everything had begun. But he did not mention that.

"Do you think Adam had a navel?" asked Quinten, as they came back out. "He didn't have a mother, did he?"

"It's just as well you're not a Dutch vicar. They've branded each other as heretics on that kind of issue for centuries."

Quinten also took him to all kinds of places where he had never been, such as the Aventine, "to look through the keyhole." In a quiet district, on the edge of the hill that dropped steeply down to the Tiber, there was an oblong excrescence from the street with walls on three sides, shaded by cypresses and palms. The Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta could scarcely be called a square; the space was more like an unfinished temple.

There was no one there, and Quinten was immediately seized by a shudder, whose origin he knew: the Citadel. Onno saw that something was preoccupying him, but did not ask him about it; Quinten simply said that it was a design of Piranesi's. While Onno sat down on a stone bench to allow his dizziness to pass a little, Quinten started climbing along the wall, which was twelve or fifteen feet high, glancing at his compass. On the long southern side and the shorter western side it was interrupted by obelisks, stelae, pla-quettes, and mysterious ornaments in such a strange kind of style, or non-style, that he could scarcely believe his eyes. Lyres, globes, points, helmets, crosses, swords, wings, panpipes. Set in the northern side, the wall was the gateway to the monastery of the Knights of Malta, a broad theatrical structure that at first sight reminded him of Palladio, but on second sight was as odd as the other constructions, with its Manneristic ornaments, blind alcoves like windows, and the row of great-urns on the roof.

The sacred domain exuded the atmosphere of the
Carceri,
which Mr. Themaat had shown him, Piranesi's endless dungeons, but at the same time that of his dream—and all of it now tightly compressed in an oblong pattern. He bent down and looked through the famous keyhole of the gate. In the distance, exactly along the axis of a long, carefully trimmed hedge of laurel trees, one could see the cupola of St. Peter's. Yes, of course. For many people that was "the center of the world," but not for him.

He was about to wave to his father, but when he saw him sitting there on the other side with his stick, like a homeless alcoholic who ate out of trash cans, he checked himself. The abandoned square lay in the subdued light of the spring sun. Destiny had finally brought them together, but now it had happened, it was as if he had more contact with the stones of Rome than with his father. Even in the evenings in the Via del Pellegrino they said little, and never spoke about the past; all of that was somehow on the other side of a barrier that neither of them wanted to surmount. And yet he knew for certain that they had to stay together, like two companions who were at each other's mercy.

They looked at each other. There was something remorseless about that boy, thought Onno. Something inhuman. A touch of interstellar coldness.

On the Piazza Venezia a policeman in a white helmet was directing the traffic with such fascinatingly immaculate body language that Onno was reminded of his theory of the physicality of power. But so as not to let himself be intimidated, he himself raised his gnarled stick in the air at the edge of the pavement and, laughing all the while, they made their way to the other side through the stream of speeding cars, as if through a trumpeting, stampeding herd of elephants. A few minutes later they had descended into the silent pit of the past.

The Forum Romanum, the extended strip of white and reddish-brown ruins, fragments, and pieces, weeds, pillars broken in two, boulders, holes, remains of walls, all crushed by the flat hand of time, presented Onno with a gloomy image of his own life—but it had an entirely different effect on Quinten. The area caused a strange agitation in him, such as other boys might feel at an air show, when formations of jet fighters swooped low overhead. Again it reminded him of the Citadel, but now of what remained in his memory after he awoke. He was getting close to something; somewhere, something was waiting for him! But where? What was it? By the edge of the open cellar the traffic roared along the Via dei Fori Imperiali; on the other side rose the somber, threatening slope of the Palatine, where the imperial palaces had stood; the sun revolved around the column of Phocas and for hour after hour they wandered through the delicate ruins.

After the frothy lightness of Venice, which floated like a cork on the water, and after the massive reticence of Florence, the things here were so heavy that they had sunk many feet deep into the ground. As he listened to Onno, with the guidebook of the Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato in his left hand, the index finger of his right hand on the page, the stones ordered themselves before Quinten's eyes, tugging and shifting. Comitium. Regia. An ugly, badly proportioned brick building, which obscured the triumphal arch of Septimus Serverus and definitely needed clearing away, suddenly turned out to be the Curia, the Roman senate; according to the guidebook, the original bronze doors were in the basilica of the Lateran.

"What's the Lateran?" he asked.

"In the Middle Ages the popes lived there, before they moved to the Vatican."

"We have to go there too."

"Of course," said Onno. "Anything you say. It's not far—over there, behind the Colosseum. The original palace no longer exists, though."

With each step they took along the great stones of the Via Sacra, the Holy Way, the Forum was in a different century. Every broken column, Onno told him, every fragment of brickwork, every piece of marble that lay in the sun on the dry grass had been constantly pushed backward and forward in time in thousands of publications, until it had been assigned its place in history: the beginning of the millennium, third century
A
.
D
., sixth century
B
.
C
, Renaissance, medieval. A monstrous ruin, which Quinten had taken for something from the Second World War, suddenly turned out to be the basilica of Maxentrus. The three remaining columns of the temple of Vespasian, with a fragment of architrave still on them: Onno pointed to it with his hand, and said it was the perfect logo for classical antiquity. The round temple of Vesta cut vertically in two and half blown away by time. The triumphal arch of Titus, which spanned the Via Sacra at its highest point, opposite the Colosseum.

Onno pointed out to Quinten a frieze in the tunnel of the arch, which depicted the return of Titus's triumphant troops from Jerusalem, after the conquest of the city in
A
.
D
. 70. Titus was the son of the emperor Vespasian, whom he succeeded a few years later. Despite the damage, the relief was a masterly depiction of the soldiers, marching into the Forum along the same street where they were now standing, full of movement and as if the music and hurrahs could still be heard, above their heads the trophies from the destroyed Jewish temple: the silver trumpets, the golden table for the shew-bread, the golden, seven-branched candelabra.

"What's shewbread?"

"A sacrifice," said Onno. "Twelve round unleavened loaves, in two piles of six. They were replaced every Sabbath and the old ones were then eaten by the priests. You find the same thing in Christianity in a different form. Christ said that he was holy bread himself."

"Really? Did he say he was made of bread? Then I suppose he had to be eaten too?"

"That's right. It's still the climax of the Catholic mass."

"But then the Catholics are cannibals!"

"That's what your grandfather always said, but cannibals eat people, while the Catholics regard themselves as God-eaters."

"Perhaps it's something like that with cannibals too."

"Quite possibly. But because the Catholics ultimately only eat bread, not people, they're more like sublimated cannibals—or perhaps one should say transubstantiated cannibals. The strange thing, though, is that you don't find that magic eating-of-the-god figure in Judaism. That seems to derive from Egypt, from the cult of Osiris, who by the way also rose from the dead. In the temple of Jerusalem the only other sacrifices were lambs, and Christ said that he was also a sacrificial lamb. Besides that, he compares his own body with the temple itself."

"The building obviously made a big impression."

"You could say that."

If the Pantheon was an image of the cosmos, thought Quinten, the temple of Jerusalem was obviously an image of man. Together they were everything.

"And the candelabra?"

"That was the Jews' holiest object. The menorah. God told Moses personally how it should be made."

"And the Romans simply took it away with them?"

"As you can see. Though it's not quite accurately depicted here, but for some reason Israel chose this version as its state symbol."

Quinten looked at the thing, which was almost the same height as he was.

"Where is it now?"

"No one knows. Probably stolen, by the Vandals in the fifth century. They were a Germanic tribe that had founded a state of its own in North Africa. That's where our word
vandals
comes from." As he said it, he suddenly felt a great surge of weariness.

Separate capitals, flagstones, worn steps, inscriptions, caves . . . wildcats everywhere, stalking each other. Once this had been the center of the world, thought Quinten, to which all roads led, not only Titus's road from Jerusalem, but now his own from Westerbork too—but that was something different than the
center
of the world. Or not? He stopped on the other side of the Forum by the "black stone," Lapis Niger.

A secret! No one knew the meaning of that square block of marble down there in a hollow, as if in a navel. According to his guidebook, it might be connected with the overthrow of Etruscan domination. Perhaps it was a grave: the grave of Romulus, the mythical first king, from the eighth century
B
.
C
. The spot had been sacred since the time of Julius Caesar. He descended a few steps, further into the past with each step, and knelt down by a weathered oblong stone beneath the Lapis Niger, in which there were remnants of archaic inscriptions. He wanted to ask his father if he could read them, but Onno had stayed at the top.

"Dad?" he shouted. "Come over here. What does it say?"

Onno looked down at him, wiping his brow with a sleeve. "Probably some ritual law or other. It's very early Latin, but almost unreadable. Just that whoever defiles that spot is cursed. So come on up quickly."

"Why can't you come down for a moment?"

"I'm aware that you've inherited it from me, Quinten, but I don't want anything to do with writing. You must understand that. Let's go. I'm dizzy."

The following day, Whitsunday, the weather changed. Dark purple clouds drifted quickly over the city and in the distance there was now a faint rumbling. After breakfast at Mauro's, Quinten wanted to go immediately to San Pietro in Vincoli, rushing as though he had an appointment for which he must not be late. The medieval church stood on the site of the Roman prefecture, where Peter and Paul had been chained, on a silent, enclosed square not far from the Forum; the black entrance reminded him of a mousehole.

Although there was no service in progress, the pews were full of people absorbed in prayer. He looked around in the semidarkness—and in the right-hand aisle he suddenly discovered the figure with whom he had had an appointment for so long. Speechless, he looked at the remnant that remained after Michelangelo had carved away the superfluous marble: the horned
Moses,
which he knew so well from the photograph in Theo Kern's studio fastened to a beam with a drawing pin, full of strength and much more colossal than he had imagined, the expression on his face much more furious, his veined hand clawing agitatedly at his beard. At a stand with a telephone on it a boy and girl stood with their ears almost touching, the receiver between them, and looked at the seething figure.