The Discovery of Heaven (89 page)

He bought a brochure on the building from an ancient priest at a table. As he put down his money, a second old priest tapped hard with a hundred-lire coin against the glass of a ticket office and made an inexorable gesture toward a man who was planning to visit the sanctuary in shorts. He also had an emblem of a white heart with the letters
JESU
XPI
PASSIO
, crowned by a cross on the chest of his black habit.

"You mean," said Onno in a muffled voice, as they gradually ascended the staircase and stopped at an appropriate distance, "the story about 'What is truth?', washing one's hands in innocence, 'Ecce homo' and all that?"

Quinten knew that story only vaguely. He breathed in, in order to say something, stopped, and shook his head—it was as though he were not clear himself what he meant.

"I don't know, leave it. In any case a story that those people are part of too," he said, nodding at the kneeling people, "who are praying and crawling upward, toward that ypsilon."

"Ypsilon?"

"The crucified Christ on that fresco at the end. He's in the shape of a
Y,
isn't he?"

"Good God," said Onno. "Pythagoras's letter." He looked at Quinten appreciatively. "Well seen. Do you know that cross is also on the ceremonial habit of a bishop? Perhaps you've made a discovery."

Quinten had not been listening to him. "I have the feeling that this building itself is telling a story in some way."

"You're talking in riddles. But perhaps that's appropriate here."

"Let me read this first."

By a pillar Quinten sat down on the marble floor and opened the brochure, but immediately a broken voice told him to get up. A second priest, just as old and dressed in black like the other, was sitting on a straight wooden chair in the middle of the vestibule and moved a white index finger reproachfully back and forth. While Onno was amazed at the frenzied mood that had suddenly taken hold of Quinten, he went and looked at the statues and painting in the entrance. Meanwhile Quinten read the short text, which was concluded with twenty-eight prayers, one for each step.

After a few minutes he looked up. "Dad?"

"Yes?"

"I know all about it."

"That's a lot."

"It's like this: according to a medieval legend, that staircase was brought to the Lateran by the empress Helena from Jerusalem. She was the mother of Constantine."

"I know. He was married to a certain Fausta—that pious Christian emperor subsequently had her murdered." He looked at Quinten with a crooked smile.

"When the popes returned from exile in Avignon, in the fourteenth century, the palace was largely gutted and then they took the Vatican as their headquarters. In the sixteenth century Sixtus V had the Lateran demolished, except for the papal chapel, up there. The architect," he said, and looked in the brochure, "Domenico Fontana, then moved the staircase to here. For some reason or other it happened at night, by torchlight."

"It obviously couldn't bear the light of day."

"The steps were laid from top to bottom, otherwise the workers would have had to stand on them."

"It seems right to me."

With a wave of his arm Quinten looked around him. "Just imagine: everything gone, that enormous palace, where all those popes lived for a thousand years—all that's left is that chapel with this staircase here. The building has been put around it like a shell."

"What's so strange about that? The whole of Rome is made like that."

"But what about those crawling people? It isn't just a kind of museum, like everywhere else, is it? There's something going on here, isn't there? It's just as though it's a stage up there, on which a mystery play has to be performed. Just look, that window with those bars, under that painting of the crucifixion, which they are heading for. It's like the window of a prison cell. Come on, let's go and have a look."

"Just a moment. You don't really expect me to go up that staircase on my knees?"

"Here at the side there are two ordinary staircases. At the other side too."

While they went up the marble stairway on the left, Onno was pleased by Quinten's enthusiasm. What boy was interested nowadays in anything else except technical things, having fun, and money? He reminded him of himself when he was the same age and how he buried himself in study, which astonished his friends. No, it had never been any different. Boys like Quinten and himself had always been exceptions. But if you were such an exception yourself, it took twenty-five years for it to get through to you that not everyone was exceptional, and that awareness came as a great disappointment—while the nonexceptional people precisely thought that the exceptional ones were constantly arrogantly aware of their exceptional qualities. The opposite was the case. They didn't despise other people; they overestimated them. It was the nonexceptional people who were constantly aware of the exceptional quality of the exceptional one. It was like a misunderstanding between a dog and cat. When a dog was afraid, it put its tail between its legs, but if it was happy, then it wafted the pleasant smell of its backside toward you; but a cat wagged its tail precisely when it was afraid, since its feces stank. The dog wagging its tail jumped forward to play with the cat wagging its tail, who in turn thought that it was being attacked, and the dog got a bloody scratch on its nose—that linguistic confusion gave birth to the irreconcilable enmity between the two of them. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at Quinten. As they climbed the stairs, his hair billowed like black satin.

While Onno stayed hesitantly on the landing, which the five steps brought him to, Quinten immediately walked on to the point where the central staircase ended, the holy spot. The believers, who were now climbing toward them from below, kept their heads bowed as they muttered, and paid no attention to him. He turned his back on them, bent down, and looked through the bars, which were thicker than a finger and which were in a marble frame.

The Sancta Sanctorum. The transition was even greater than just now from the square to the front entrance—in the dim chapel it was as silent as in a mirror, and the first thing Quinten thought of was the face of his mother in her bed. His heart began pounding. The small space was high and completely square, approximately twenty feet by twenty, exuding an overwhelming sense of everything that was
no longer
there: 160 popes, who had prayed here daily for ten centuries.

It was as though time had disappeared from here. In the middle of the inlaid marble floor, opposite the altar, was a prayer stool. The altar was behind the protruding, raised section of the back wall, which was supported by two porphyry columns. Across the whole width of the frame above the gilded capitals were the letters:

NON • EST • IN • TOTO • SANCTIOR • ORBE • LOCUS

He beckoned his father. "How would you translate that?" he whispered.

"Quinten," said Onno sternly. "You've been to secondary school for five years. You can do that perfectly well."

"There is not," Quinten tried, "at all . .. more sacred .. . world place?"

"Compelling prose. Of course you could also say: 'Nowhere in the world is there a more sacred spot.' Just because those popes were here? That seems slightly exaggerated."

Quinten pointed out to him the great icon, which stood on the altar: a triptych with opened side panels. The scene could scarcely be distinguished in the dim light, but he told his father what he had just read: the image of the most holy savior on the central panel,
acheiropoeton,
had been painted not by a human hand but by an angel. Only the head painted on silk had not been covered by gilded, heavily worked silver, but that head was not the original one; that was underneath. The panel was covered by a semicircular canopy, crowned by two gilded angels.

"Yes, Quinten," said Onno with a laugh. "We're not in Holland here." He put his hand on the bars. "To my taste it's more like a torture chamber here. Look at this, between those turned columns above the altar: there are also two barred windows. Of course from there the holy fathers were watched as they sat praying. And the bottom part of that altar itself is also all bars. Look at those locks."

Quinten looked at the padlocks, which he had not yet noticed. The top one was a gigantic iron thing, a sliding padlock, as large as a loaf—the moment he saw it, he was overcome by alarm. Where was he? Was he dreaming? Was he in his dream? He looked at his father with his eyes wide.

"What's wrong?" asked Onno in alarm. "You've gone as pale as a ghost."

"I don't know . . ." he stammered.

Was that vanished Lateran palace his Citadel? Was he there? Those steps, four times seven steps, that chapel, his mother. ... In confusion, he turned away from the bars and for the moment met the glance of an old woman, who had mounted the twenty-eighth step, stood up groaning, crossed herself, smiled at him for a moment, and, rubbing one thigh, went to the other staircase.

"Let's go," said Onno. "It's unhealthy here. You have to eat something."

Quinten shook his head. "That's not why . . ." He could not possibly tell his father what was going on inside him, because that was a deep secret. "Perhaps it's not that chapel which is behind bars, perhaps
we're
the ones who are behind bars.. .. He looked around him wide-eyed. "I know for certain that something very strange is going on, I can't say why, but I must and I will get to the bottom of it."

Onno gave him a searching look for a few seconds. Suddenly there was a hard glint in Quinten's eyes. Onno nodded, leaned on his stick, and looked around as though he were searching for something too. His dizziness was more intense than usual; perhaps it was because of the steps.

"I don't know what you're getting at, but something strange has struck me too in the meantime."

"What then?"

"That chapel is called Sancta Sanctorum, isn't it?" And when Quinten nodded, "Precisely, and I don't really understand why."

"Why not?"

"Well, it means Holy of Holies."

"Stands to reason."

"But that expression doesn't occur at all in the Christian religion."

"In which one does it occur, then?"

"Only in Judaism."

56
Biblical Scholarship

"How does it occur there, then?"

"Let's not stand here," said Onno, "where those people can see us."

They walked back. On the left of the Sancta Sanctorum, where there was a Renaissance chapel with two small altars, named after San Silvestro, they sat down in one of the dark-brown choir pews, which occupied the three walls. Onno saw that Quinten could scarcely wait to hear what he had to say; his otherwise gentle face was as taut as a sail in a storm. He could not understand, and it alarmed him. Perhaps he should have kept his observation to himself.

"What's gotten into you suddenly, Quinten?"

"Tell me!"

Amazed that someone should not know such a thing, Onno explained to him that in Judaism the Holy of Holies was a space in the former temple of Jerusalem. That was an oblong complex, consisting of three parts—or, actually, of four. First there was the court, where no Gentiles were allowed, only Jews—that is, Jewish men. There was the burnt-offering altar. The entrance to the actual temple building was flanked by two pillars: Jachin and Boas.

Oblong? Like his mother's bed? Hadn't he talked to Mr. Themaat about that?

"Pillars with names on?" he asked, thinking for a moment of the two columns on the piazzetta in Venice. "Why was that?"

Onno sighed. "Sometimes I amaze myself with my knowledge, but I still don't know everything. But I do know how you can look everything up, and that's a very useful alternative to knowing everything. When you went in," he continued, leaving the pillars for what they were, "you entered the dimly lit sanctum via a doorway—at least if you were a priest; otherwise you weren't allowed in. In that sanctum stood the incense-offering altar and the seven-branched candelabra and the table with the shewbread on it. The back room was in the shape of a cube, with a great curtain, or veil in front of it. Inside it was always completely dark. That was the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was allowed to enter once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement."

Quinten stretched his back in excitement. "It's like the setup here! Outside on the square there is that obelisk of Thutmoses, so that's the court; then there's a doorway; then the Holy Stairs, so that's the sanctum; and then the Sancta Sanctorum! It isn't a cube, but it is a square."

"That's precisely the odd thing about it," said Onno, grimacing slightly. "In Christianity the Holy of Holies is never anything architectural, as with the Jews; Christians use that concept only symbolically. For example, in the gospels it says that in the temple the veil between the sanctum and the Holy of Holies was rent at the moment that Jesus died—'split open,' it actually says in Greek—and that was explained by saying that Christ through his crucifixion and resurrection had made the Holy of Holies, that is Heaven, permanently accessible to everyone, as a kind of super high priest. For Christians it is never an earthly building."

"And in that Jewish Holy of Holies? What was in that?"

"The ark of the covenant."

A priest shuffling past glanced at them, put a finger to his lips, and disappeared through a small door between the choir stalls.

"What was that?" asked Quinten softly.

With a sigh Onno looked at him and said: "On the one hand I think it's dreadful that young people nowadays know almost nothing anymore; on the other hand I consider you fortunate that you no longer have to carry around all that ballast with you. But obviously nature will out. The ark of the covenant was a golden box, the most sacred thing that the Jews possessed: something like the throne of Jahweh. In a certain sense it was actually Jahweh himself."

"And yesterday you said that the candelabra was the most sacred object of the Jews."

"That was the case at the time of Vespasian and Titus. Come on, let me explain the whole thing to you at once, then."

Onno raised one finger of his left hand and three on his right and said that Quinten must distinguish four things: the tabernacle and the three successive temples in Jerusalem. When Moses was given the Ten Commandments in the wilderness, Jahweh also gave him the responsibility of making a tabernacle, with all its dimensions precisely noted. At that time it was only a collapsible tent, which they could take with them on their wanderings, but it already consisted of a court, a sanctum, and a Holy of Holies. Moses was also told exactly what appearance the ark should have; and it could all be looked up in the Bible. On the golden lid there were two golden angels with outspread wings, facing each other. To one side there were golden rings for two sticks so that the box could be carried with them. A few hundred years later, in approximately 1000 B.C., King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem according to the same principle. In the Holy of Holies in it, the ark was flanked by two huge angels fifteen feet high, again with outspread wings.