The Discovery of Heaven (94 page)

He turned to look at Quinten. "And what if they're not there, Quinten? There is a minimal chance of that, isn't there?"

"Then nothing. Then I'll close it up and we'll leave," said Quinten without looking up. "But they're there."

"And what are you going to do, in that case?"

"Then I'll take them with me, what did you think? No one will ever know. You yourself said that the altar won't be opened for another thousand years, but even then no one will miss them, because no one knows that they were there."

Onno looked at him, perplexed. "Now I don't understand anything anymore. You make a earth-shattering discovery, which would make you immortal, and you keep it secret?"

"Didn't you yourself say that otherwise it might end in a war?" "That's true. But what do you plan to do with them, then?" That question surprised Quinten. He looked up in astonishment. He had not thought about it for a moment. "I don't know," he said with a helpless note in his voice. After a few seconds he jerked his shoulders back and bent over the book again. "I'll see when I get there."

The following morning—it was Quinten's birthday—they read Grisar's minute account seated next to each other at the table, examined the photographs and drawings, and ran their index fingers over the plans. Supplemented with Quinten's own observations in the chapel they constructed a plan, that, according to Quinten, couldn't fail. According to Onno, however, everything could always fail, even failure—then he leaned back and told Quinten about the phenomenon of the failed suicide: the intention was to call attention by a failed attempted suicide, but that failed because unexpectedly the suicide succeeded.

"Can you imagine anything more sad?" he asked with a laugh.

It had not been said with so many words that he would assist in Quinten's crazy enterprise, but Quinten appeared ultimately not to have any doubts—and since at his wit's end he had finally plunged into the adventure, something like a paternal frivolity had taken hold of him. The idea that the stone tablets would be in that altar was of course monumental nonsense—the whole enterprise would culminate in a dreadful anticlimax, since they would not even manage to get the first door open, and that blow would be a hard one. But who had a son with such fantastic aspirations? What did other sons want? Equipment. Money. Fun. Who had a son who wanted the Decalogue?

Because the relief in the arch of Titus was up quite high and couldn't be examined closely, in the afternoon they went to the Piazza Monte Citorio, where there was a large bookshop opposite the parliament building.

As they passed the Pantheon, Onno suddenly stopped and asked: "Shouldn't you give your grandmother a call?"

"No," said Quinten at once.

"But, Quinten! She's all by herself in that castle, and she knows that it's your birthday too. As far as I'm concerned you can say that you're living with me. Can't you imagine that she's getting worried? You've been away from home for three weeks already."

"You were away longer without calling."

That remark shut Onno up; he didn't say anything more for the rest of their walk. Quinten may have forgiven him, but he would never forget something like that. The fact that he had abandoned Quinten for so long also obliged him to collaborate in his whim.

In the art history section in the bookshop they found a bulky standard work on the monument, in which there was a series of detailed photographs of the relief. Onno studied the faceless man at the far left intently.

"Yes," he said finally. "If you want to see it, then you can see that he's carrying something flat with him."

"Didn't I say so?"

"Absolutely."

In the Via del Corso they took the bus and went to the Sancta Sanctorum, to find out the opening times and to test their plan against reality. It was as though the kneeling faithful on the stairs were the same; it was just the same, too, in the silent chapel. Onno looked with satisfaction at the huge bars and locks: what French looters had not succeeded in doing 450 years ago, Quinten would not succeed in doing now. But Quinten didn't even deign to look at the altar; obviously, he was by now so sure of himself that he was only interested in technical details.

As though he were admiring the ceiling paintings, he showed Onno that cameras had not been installed anywhere. The sanctum was obviously regarded solely as a place of pilgrimage and not a museum; the supernatural painting ot the Savior on the altar might be miraculous, Onno reflected; in the art trade, of course, it was not worth a penny. When the old priests, gnarled like olive trees, saw Quinten again, a glow of affection lit up their faces; perhaps they did not even know themselves what he reminded them of.

"They're all deaf," whispered Quinten.

"Let's hope so."

When they got outside again, Onno suggested that they should say no more about it for now.

"It's just like with an exam: on the last day you mustn't do any more, and take distance from everything—so that your mind can recover. Now we're going to celebrate your birthday. I know a reasonable restaurant behind the Piazza Navona. Tomorrow you can make your criminal purchases, I'll read up on the Ten Commandments, and to kill time we'll go and collect them the day after tomorrow. Okay?"

Of course Quinten saw the ironic twist in the corner of his father's mouth, but he didn't mind.

"Agreed," he said.

59
Waiting

The evening of the following day, Friday, they found another table on a terrace opposite the Pantheon, where they went to eat. The square was full of Romans out for a stroll; young tourists in jeans formed blue garlands on the steps of the fountain with the obelisk, where Onno had left his plastic bag full of shopping ten days before. When dusk fell and the rattling of steel shutters being let down in front of shop windows rang out on all sides, it seemed as if the temple—in the sophisticated light of floodlights on the surrounding roofs—gradually began to phosphoresce from its journey through the day, through all those hundreds of thousands of sundrenched days.

Shortly afterward a couple of small bats flapped around the ancient walls, like charred snippets of paper from a distant fire. What Quinten had never seen on the photographs and drawings of Mr. Themaat he now suddenly saw: the building looked like a weathered skull, with the cupola as the cranium, the architrave as the triangular hole of the mouth, and the columns as a row of teeth.

Although Quinten had not once asked about it, Onno assumed of course he wanted to know more about the Ten Commandments, which suddenly obsessed him so much, because he had obviously not gotten any further than "Thou shalt not kill." During the meal, while pigeons pecked at the crumbs of bread between their feet, he shared with him what he had meanwhile found out. To start with, in the Hebrew Bible there was no mention of the "Ten Commandments," but about the "Ten Words":
asereth ha dewarim
— which corresponded to the Greek translation:
deka logoi.
On each of the two stone tablets five "words" were written.

Traditionally the First Commandment read "I am Jahweh, thy God, and thou shalt know no other Gods but me." But that "thou shalt" is not actually there in Hebrew; the first word said "Thou obviously has no other Gods but me." By taking another good look at the text, Onno told him, he had discovered that the Decalogue did not have the character of a book of law, but more a manual of good manners: "One doesn't do such things." One didn't eat spaghetti using a spoon, to say nothing of a knife. It was also significant to note that Jahweh didn't say that there were no other gods but him, but only that you didn't worship them—and in so doing he actually confirmed their existence. The second word for that matter also had a double bottom. The fact that it was not fitting to make images was only, apparently, an anti-artistic judgment, because it derived from the one who made human beings in his own image—typically the remark of an artist, who not only wanted to be the best but also the only one; and consequently he said immediately afterward that he was a jealous God. The third word, that you simply didn't just use his name, and the fourth, that you of course honored the day of rest, also referred to the relationship of man to Jahweh. The fifth, that you naturally honored your father and mother, was a transition to the words on the second stone, which dealt with the relationships between people—but it also still belonged on the first stone, because parenthood was an illustration of Jahweh's position as creator.

"At least that was the commentary of Philo, and you'll understand, my son, that I completely agree with him."

The nonchalant tone did not sound sincere—they both thought at the same moment of Ada, far away in the north in her white bed. The short waiter on platform heels, who looked a little like Goebbels and regarded the world as though he would prefer to destroy it sooner rather than later, cleared the table and put down coffee for them. The horse carriages in front of the Pantheon had disappeared and at the kiosk the newspaper racks had been brought inside; the hour of the bats had passed, and they had suddenly given way to swallows, which swooped around the temple and across the square with a sound as though small knives were being whetted:
Itis . . . itis . . .

Quinten listened in silence to his father's exposition, but his mind was not on it. Onno was wrong in his assumption that Quinten was interested in the Ten Commandments: it wasn't they that concerned him, only the tablets on which they were written, those concrete stone things that were lying waiting for him a few miles away—till tomorrow night.

Murder, Onno continued after a while, was, according to the sixth word, not done; according to the seventh, adultery; according to the eighth, theft; according to the ninth, blaspheming; and according to the tenth, attempts to acquire other people's property. That second group of five represented in the final analysis nothing except the ancient, universal "golden rule": Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Onno was able to report that according to Hillel, a legendary Jewish scholar from the time of Herod, even the whole Torah boiled down to the same thing—all five Biblical books of Moses, that is—with their 613 regulations. For Judaism those ten were no more important than the other 603—they only became so for Christianity. Many of the other commandments were even forbidden at the same time, such as circumcision, which was replaced by baptism. Onno burst out laughing. He suddenly remembered, he said, his vicar in catechism class, forty years ago in The Hague. While he told them that little Jewish boys were included in the covenant with God by giving them a cut in their foreskin, he had made a short vertical movement over his breastbone. He thought that was the "foreskin"—a vicar! Imagine the kind of world that those Dutch Calvinists inhabited!

He touched his tongue for a moment with the tip of his ring finger, picked up a crumb of bread from the table, and popped it into his mouth. Since Quinten did not react to his exposition, he began to realize that he was only listening out of politeness, but that didn't stop him going on. It was a matter of honor to be only his son's technical assistant from now on; maybe he had done his duty by Quinten as a historical-theological adviser, but that wasn't going to prevent him saying what he had left to say.

When a scholar once asked Christ, he went on, what in his view was the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus said that it was love of God; and that the second commandment, like the first, was that you should love your neighbor as yourself. Obviously, he assumed that everyone loved themselves. Knowledge of human beings was not his strong point: for that we had to wait for another Jew, from Vienna. Anyone who did not love himself, or indeed hated himself, could according to that second thesis therefore hate his fellow man to the same extent. You could murder if you simply committed suicide afterward, like Judas and Hitler. Jesus obviously had no conception of hell, and that was in fact obvious: after all he was the creature that God loved like himself. But the profundity of his answer lay in the equals sign that he inserted between the five commandments on the first stone and those on the second; one day, for that matter, he even himself formulated a positive version of the golden rule "Therefore all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets."

"This is the law and the prophets . . ." repeated Quinten, while something like happiness appeared on his face.

The mysterious turn of phrase pleased him. He looked at his father. The operation of his intelligence reminded Onno of the lightning-fast swerves with which an ice hockey player passed his opponents, slammed the puck into the goal, swept past the net on screeching skates, and raised his stick aloft in defiance. He was almost his old self. In other ways, too, it seemed as though the last ten days had completely obliterated the previous four years; neither of them could actually remember how it had been all that time. Onno wondered what the point of it had been. He looked at Quinten for a moment, but immediately looked down again. He thought of the conversation that they had had at the obelisk of Thutmoses: about the sphere and the point. Even if life had a meaning, he reflected, what was the meaning of that? And if that was a play on words, didn't the same apply to the question about the meaning of life? Was that perhaps the reason why Quinten didn't know what was meant by "meaning"?

They only got up when Goebbels pulled the chairs out from under them and from the Piazza della Minerva two screeching vans from the municipal sanitation department approached, like lobsters, with spraying water and revolving brooms.

The floodlights had already been extinguished for some time, and the Pantheon had been consigned again to the gray night. They made their way home in silence through the narrow, dark streets, interspersed with abandoned squares, where bearded marble figures had frozen in their violent efforts to struggle free of gravity. Perhaps, thought Quinten, no one was looking at the Pantheon now—how was it possible then that it could exist? Shouldn't someone look at everything the whole time, to keep the world together?