The Discovery of Heaven (88 page)

"He's bloody angry," said Quinten softly.

Onno had to laugh. " 'Wrathful,' it's called, and he had reason to be."

"Why?"

Onno looked at him with something like alarm. "Do you know anything about the Bible?"

"Only a bit. Almost nothing about the Old Testament."

"Doesn't matter. That's what your father's there for, he knows it by heart—at least, he used to, thousands of hours of Bible reading by my father and at school and at catechism class made sure of that. You obviously know at any rate that Moses led the Jewish people out of exile in Egypt. After that the refugees wandered through the desert for forty years, looking for the promised land. At the very beginning of that period, Jahweh had given him all sorts of instructions on Mount Horeb—like for example about that seven-branched candelabra that you saw yesterday on the triumphal arch of Titus. Finally he was given—" Suddenly there was a flash of light in the church, followed immediately by a loud, violent clap of thunder, which rumbled away over the city like an iron ball as big as the cupola of the Pantheon. Onno looked at Quinten in astonishment and said, "That's very appropriate."

Quinten didn't seem to understand what he meant. "What was he given finally?"

"Finally he was given the Ten Commandments, which Jahweh had written on two stone tablets with his own finger. Come on, you've heard of the Ten Commandments, I hope? The Decalogue?"

"Of course. 'Thou shalt not kill.' "

"That's immediately an incorrect, Christian translation. 'Thou shalt not murder' is what it says:
lo tirtsach.
Killing is allowed, under certain circumstances. But anyway, he was gone for more than a month. The Jews thought something had happened to him and had started worshiping a golden calf instead of Jahweh. It made Moses so furious that he dashed the stones to pieces. That's the moment that Michelangelo depicted."

Quinten looked at the tablets under Moses' arm, which he had always taken to be folders, like the ones in which Theo Kern kept his drawings.

"And then?"

"Well then, of course, he had to go back up again, with two new tablets, which he had to pay for himself this time. If I remember correctly, it's not completely clear in the Bible whether God wrote the Ten Commandments the second time himself or whether he simply dictated them. Let's assume he did that. If I were a writer, I wouldn't feel like doing the same thing twice."

"And those funny horns on his head? What do they mean?"

"Another mistranslation."

"Another mistranslation?"

"When he came down from the mountain the second time, his face shone so terribly, because he'd been speaking with God, that he had to wear a veil. But the Hebrew word for
shining
can also be translated as
horned,
except that that doesn't make sense."

Quinten nodded thoughtfully and looked at the statue. "So we really ought to get rid of those horns."

Onno looked at him in alarm. "There's a look in your eyes that says you're capable of doing that."

"Yes, why not? It's a linguistic error, isn't it?"

"But it's written in marble."

Quinten felt that everything was gradually coming together, but what was it? When he looked up at that violent marble figure, he felt his father's eyes focused on him. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Do you believe in God, Quinten?"

"Never thought about it. What about you?"

"Not since I thought about it."

"How old were you when you started thinking about it?"

"About the same age as you are now." A scene of thirty-five years previously appeared before Onno's eyes, in his parents' house in the front room, with the Authorized Version on the stand. After he had put on his Sunday clothes, he had solemnly informed his father that he had hesitated for a long time between the sentence "I don't believe that God exists" and the sentence "I believe that God does not exist"—and that he, as a believer, had been converted to the second sentence. His father's flashing eyes, his weeping mother ... but since as an unbeliever he had opted for the first sentence, he no longer wanted to remember that past.

"And what's next on your agenda?" he asked.

The thunderclap of a moment ago had obviously been both the beginning and the end of the storm. The sun began breaking through, and now and then a burst of bright light swept through the church.

"We were going to the Lateran, weren't we?"

Onno looked at him for a few seconds. "What on earth are you looking for, lad?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing. I'm just a tourist."

55
The Spot

When he got out of the taxi on the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano ten minutes later, Quinten could not believe his eyes. Standing next to the cathedral, by the octagonal baptistry of Constantine, he looked across the imposing square with his hair waving in the wind. There it was! Piranesi's framed etching, which had stood on the floor against the bookshelf in Mr. Themaat's place! He might have known, but he hadn't thought for a moment that he would actually find it here: the towering obelisk, standing like a rocket about to be launched to the moon; a hundred yards farther on, that two-story Renaissance building, in which the Sancta Sanctorum had been incorporated, the private chapel of the medieval popes, and the Holy Stairs from the praetorium of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. The sandy plain had given way to asphalt, across which the traffic roared, but with its gray fragments of clouds, alternating with patches of blue, even the sky looked as it did on the print.

Onno looked up at the obelisk. He had never been here before either; with his head right back, stroking his beard thoughtfully, he peered at the hieroglyphics.

"Can you read them?"

"I'm a bit rusty, I see. It looks like a ceremonial treatise on the eternal life of Pharaoh Thutmoses the Third."

"Another Moses then."

"But a few hundred years older than the Jewish one. This," he said, pointing with his index finger, "is definitely the oldest artistic monument on European soil. I mean, approximately between three and a half and four thousand years old."

Onno explained to him that Moses was an Egyptian name which meant "child," "son." Because the pharaoh had all newborn Jewish males murdered, Moses' mother had put her baby in a rush basket among the reeds of the Nile; it was made of papyrus stalks, since crocodiles had an aversion to papyrus. Moses' sister saw him being found by the pharaoh's daughter, and then told the princess that she knew of a good wet nurse for the foundling— namely, her mother. And so it came to pass. The princess called the child "Child," so that, without anyone knowing, Moses was brought up by his own mother. More than a thousand years later, said Onno, as a mirror image of those events, Mary and Joseph fled with their son to Egypt of all places in order to escape Herod's murder of the innocents in Bethlehem—and just as Moses' foster mother was actually his real mother, so Jesus' lawful father was not his true father.

"In those circles, family relationships are often rather complicated."

"The Annunciation." Quinten nodded.

"As you say. So Thutmoses means 'child of the God Thoth.' He was the inventor of writing."

"You look as though you really believe that."

Onno shrugged his shoulders.

"An ex-cryptographer has to have a God too, doesn't he? And anyway, what does 'really believe' mean? Do you know that story about Niels Bohr, the great physicist? Max told it to me once. Another great physicist, Wolfgang Pauli or some such person, once visited Bohr in his country house and saw that he had nailed an horseshoe above his front door. 'Professor!' he said. 'You? A horseshoe? Do you believe in that?' To which Bohr said, 'Of course not. But do you know, Pauli, they say it helps even if you
don't
believe in it.' " He laughed, and Quinten could see that it was partly also because he was thinking of the way that Max had told him that anecdote. "By the way, did you know, child of mine, that the word
obelisk
was the first word that you could speak? There at the grave of that horse, at Groot Rechteren."

"Deep Thought Sunstar," said Quinten, lost in thought. He couldn't remember it, but the sudden emergence of the castle here in the square, from his father's mouth, gave him the same kind of feeling as when he drank a glass of hot milk on a winter's day. "Sometimes," he said, as they walked toward the side entrance of the cathedral, "I have the feeling that the world is very complicated, but that there's something behind it that is very simple and at the same time incomprehensible."

"Such as?"

"I don't know ... a sphere. Or a point."

Onno glanced at him from the side. "Are you talking about stories, like the one about Moses, or about reality?"

"Is there so much difference?"

Perhaps a story was precisely the complete opposite of reality, thought Onno; but he had the feeling that he should not confuse Quinten with that.

"And that sphere, or that point, does that give reality a meaning?"

"Meaning? What do you mean by that?"

Onno said nothing. The thought that anything could give a meaning to the world was alien to him. It was there, but it was absurd that it was there. It might just as well not have been there. Quinten's sphere reminded him
of
that original, shining sphere, which had been polished in Los Alamos by young soldiers, who went out dancing with their girls in the evening. What was the relation between the smoldering chaos in Hiroshima and that Platonic body? One could not be understood with the aid of the other, though it emerged from it. How could a human being be understood from a fertilized ovum? How could anything be understood?

Reality wasn't a syllogism like "Socrates is a man—all men are mortal— hence Socrates is mortal," but more like "Helga is a human being—all telephone booths have been vandalized—hence Helga must die." Or like: "Hitler is a human being—all Jews are animals—hence all Jews must die." That incomprehensible logic, which controlled everything, good and bad and neutral, Quinten must find for himself. He didn't consider it his job to cloud the purity of the boy. Someone who didn't even know what "meaning" meant must keep that pristine sense for as long as possible.

A mass was being celebrated in the crowded archbasilica—"mother and head of all churches in the city and the world"—by a cardinal in purple; they walked forward on tiptoe. The cold baroque interior disappointed Quinten; there was as little left of the medieval building from the time of the emperor Constantine as of the old papal palace. Only the high altar with its Gothic canopy did he find beautiful and mysterious. At the top of the slender cage on posts, behind bars, were statues of Peter and Paul; their heads were supposed to be buried beneath it. He looked up from his guidebook.

"Were they friends, those two?" he whispered.

"Not that I know of. When you're occupied with things like they were, I don't think there's room for friendship. In the religion business, I expect it's the same as in politics."

Quinten again focused on the closed, painted part of the ciborium, where the relics were housed. He seemed to see the two skulls already lying there. "I'd like to take a look in there."

"You won't be able to do that, my friend."

There was a flash: someone took a photo of the striking pair, the tramp with the beautiful boy. With panic in his eyes, Onno turned around. A Japanese girl with a black raincap on her head; she was already walking on, as though it was allowed simply to appropriate someone's image. A little later a sexton stopped her and pointed to her camera with the shake of his head.

"Why does it make you jump like that, Dad?"

Onno made a helpless gesture. "I'm sorry, a stupid reflex. Any Dutch scandal sheet would have gladly given a thousand guilders for that photo. You get those kinds of reactions when you've hidden away from everybody for years."

"But it's not like that anymore, is it?"

"No, Quinten, not anymore. But what it's really like, I don't honestly know. We'll see." He didn't want to think about it; he would have preferred to spend his days like this forever, with Quinten in the Eternal City. "Where are we going now?"

"To the other side."

The gigantic bronze doors of the Roman Curia, which now formed the central entrance, were closed; they emerged outside through a side door. Quinten turned around for a moment and looked up. Sharply outlined against the sky, above the eaves of the basilica, a row of enormous figures stood gesticulating excitedly, as though something extraordinary were about to happen.

They crossed the busy, windy square diagonally and Quinten stopped on the terrace of the building containing the Sancta Sanctorum and looked in through the open doors. Straight ahead of him, on the other side of a high doorway, were the Holy Stairs, the Scala Santa.

A shiver went through him. With the din of the traffic behind him, he looked into a world where it was as quiet as in an aquarium. On the slowly ascending steps, less than nine feet wide, ten or twelve men and women were kneeling, praying with their heads bowed, their backs and the soles of their shoes facing him. They were as stationary as people on an escalator, but the escalator was not moving, it was standing still; now and then someone made his way laboriously up to the next step. The walls and the semicircular ceiling were covered with pious frescoes; the architect had constructed the stairwell in such a perspective that it seemed as though it were a long, horizontal corridor to the other side, with the navel of a crucified Christ at the vanishing point. The stairs were covered with wood, but small cracks revealed the marble, over which the accused was supposed to have walked.

"Now you're the one who looks as if you're being touched by transcendence," said Onno ironically, as they went inside. "Don't tell me that you really believe that staircase comes from Pilate's Citadel Antonia."

The mention of the word
Citadel,
at this moment, gave Quinten a slight jolt. "Like those people there? Not at all. Or, rather, I don't bother to ask myself if it's genuine or not. But I don't know . .." he said, and looked around. "I have the feeling that there's a story being told here."