The Discovery of Heaven (95 page)

According to plan Quinten woke only at about midday, since they wouldn't be getting any more sleep for a while; but Onno had kept waking with a start. Each time, he stared into the dark with heart pounding and eyes wide open, wondering desperately what he had gotten himself into. If someone had ever foretold this, wouldn't he have avoided the idiot for the rest of his life? That Saturday afternoon they said little to each other. It was dreary, gray weather. Onno tried to read the paper, but the later it got, the more uneasy he became. He hoped that something would intervene, an earthquake, war, the end of time, but reality had decided not to pay any heed to their proposed expedition.

Quinten on the other hand was amazed at his own calm. It was as though he would soon simply have a routine chore to perform, like taking the dog for a walk, or turning down the central heating—while at the same time he had the feeling that his whole life had been heading toward this day. The fact that this evening he would be penetrating into the center of the world, which had alarmed him so much in his dreams, did not inspire fear in him. Was the center of his secret Citadel perhaps more dangerous than reality? Like a trail of seaweed, the title of a book—or was it a play?—began floating through his thoughts:
Life Is a Dream. .
. . He also remembered that Max had once said that you couldn't prove that you weren't dreaming when you were awake, because sometimes in a dream you were also certain you were awake and weren't dreaming. So if reality could be a dream, mightn't the dream perhaps also be reality?

Toward evening he leaned with his arms folded on the windowsill and looked at the bronze angel on the Castel Sant'Angelo, which, when the sun came from behind the clouds like a beaming pineapple, suddenly began glinting like a golden vision.

"We must be off," he said, turning around.

Onno had fallen asleep.

"What, what?" he said, sitting up from his mattress with a groan. "Not yet, surely? We're not really going to do it, are we?"

"You bet we are. It's five-thirty. The Sancta Sanctorum closes in two hours." Quinten took the small bright-red canvas backpack, which he had bought yesterday and had packed hours before, off his camp bed. "Are you coming, or would you rather go on sleeping?"

"Of course I'd rather go on sleeping," said Onno gruffly, and stumbled to the tap. "I was just dreaming about an ideal world without crime, without commandments, and without boys who are far too enterprising."

After they had eaten half a French loaf with ham at Mauro's, with nothing but an espresso, and had been to the toilet one last time, Onno suggested hailing a taxi, but that didn't seem a good idea to Quinten: if things went wrong, the driver would have their description. On the Corso Vittorio Emanuele they took the bus and got off at the basilica. As they walked past the obelisk to the entrance, Onno raised his stick in the air and said:

"Ave, Pharao, morituri te salutant."

In his other hand he had the flat, sturdy gray plastic air-travel suitcase in which the stone tablets of Moses were shortly to be put.

The Sancta Sanctorum was busier than on the previous days—perhaps because tomorrow was Sunday. The grumpy face of the old priest, who was ready to tap angrily with his coin against the glass, lit up with a smile when he saw Quinten.

"You're about to rob that dear old chap," said Onno.

"I'm going to collect something he doesn't even know he has."

"And you think that's not stealing? Perhaps it's even worse. You don't do things like that. It isn't even a question of Mosaic morality, but upbringing."

"Then you should have brought me up properly," said Quinten before he knew it. He was immediately sorry that he had blurted it out. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that."

Onno nodded without looking at him. "Leave it. You're right."

No, he wasn't a thief, Quinten reflected. He'd never stolen anything. After all, he didn't want those stones for himself! Once he had them, he would no more have them to himself than those priests had them now. Those same fathers of the Holy Cross would certainly understand him better—but no, they of course had only entered the order to get to heaven; they were expecting a rich reward. He himself expected nothing, and his father kept trying up to the very last moment to make him give up his plan. But if he wasn't a thief, what was he then?

In order to win the complete confidence of the priests, and in order to be able to use their piety as an argument in the event of a disaster, Quinten had persuaded Onno to go up via the Holy Stairs. They crossed the entrance and waited at the bottom stair for their turn, as though in front of a box office.

"In a moment," said Onno, "I shall sink to my knees, and from the Calvinist Heaven my father, seated at the right hand of God, will glare down at me and then fall from his chair in a swoon. All your fault." And when a place became free and he actually knelt down, supporting himself on his stick, he bent his head and muttered, "Forgive me, Father, I know not what I do. Only your grandson knows that."

It sounded like a prayer, and Quinten had difficulty in suppressing a laugh. That old mixture of jokes and seriousness that he remembered so well from the past was returning more and more. Or, rather, it wasn't a mixture; the one was at the same time the other—the jokes were serious, without being any the less jokes for that. Perhaps no one had ever understood that except Max; perhaps their friendship had been based on it.

Quinten also knelt on the first step with his hands folded. He had not gone to the lengths of learning the twenty-eight official prayers by heart, but just moving his lips for a quarter of an hour seemed equally ridiculous to him; so he began muttering his Latin declensions:

Hic, haec, hoc. Hic, huius, hoc. Hic, huic, hoc. Hunc, hanc, hoc. Hoc, hac, hoc. Hi, hae, haec. Horum, harum, horum. Horum, his, horum. Hos, has, haec. Hos, his, haec."

The wood-paneled steps were low and wide, the next two were empty, on the fourth knelt a nun and a heavy, common-looking man. The soles of his shoes, which Quinten was looking at, had thick treads with small stones stuck in them. He would have loved to take a knife out of his backpack and prise them out, which would have made them fly six feet in the air. While the nun and the man made their way laboriously to the following step, like invalids, he and Onno also clambered upward. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his father shuffling clumsily with his stick and his case. After five or six steps, each of which were kissed by the nun, he had run out of pronouns, and so started on the verbs:

"Capio, capis, capit, capimus, capitis, capiunt. Capiam, capias, capiat, capia-mus, capiatis, capiant. Capiebam, capiebas, capiebat, capiebamus, capiebatis, capiebant. Caperem, caperes, caperet, caperemus, caperetis, caperent. Capiam, copies, capiet, capiemus, capietis, capient."

The higher he got, the more irregular the verbs became and gradually he sank into a light trance. How did it go again?
Deponentia, semi-deponentia ... Volebamus, ferebatis, ferrebaris. . . .
Through a small glass window in the wood, pale-brown spots were visible on the white marble: Christ's blood of course.
Conficit, confecit, confectus . . .

At the top, by the barred window of the chapel, opposite the altar, they got to their feet.

"If we are not crushed by the power of God's right hand now," said Onno, "that will be the ontological proof that he doesn't exist."

It was seven o'clock. For the last half hour they wandered among the tourists and worshipers through the chapels, which gradually began to empty; a priest had stationed himself at the bottom of the Holy Stairs to prevent anyone else climbing them.

"There's still time for us to leave," said Onno, without hope.

"But we won't. Let's take up our positions."

They went to the right-hand side chapel, where there was no one except an elderly couple, obviously German; they both wore green loden jackets and were looking at the fresco of St. Lorenzo above the altar. Very shortly, Quinten knew, a priest would do the rounds in order to ask the stragglers to leave with unctuous gestures. The priest himself would not wait for them, but a little later he would come back for a last check. If he were to appear before the couple had disappeared, there would be no problem: they would wait until they were alone and then quickly make themselves invisible— there was no communication between the priest above and those at the foot of the four profane staircases. But it was made easy for them. As they stood by the outside wall, opposite the bronze door with the padlocks on it, which led to the Sancta Sanctorum, the man in the loden jacket suddenly looked at his watch, said, "Good heavens!" in alarm—and hurried oft holding his wife by the arm.

The moment they were out of sight, Quinten and Onno turned, pulled open the black velvet curtains of a confessional, and slipped in.

The scuffing sandals of the priest had come and gone. Five minutes later they had again come and gone, the outside doors had closed with a thunderous crash, the light has been turned off, and in the pitch blackness of their hideaway they listened to the sounds. After the lay public had been turned out into the street, the atmosphere of sanctity downstairs at the entrance gradually gave way to a flaming row in Italian.

The clerics seemed to have undergone a transformation. Onno could not follow what all those grumbling old voices were saying, but regarded the fact that this had happened as a confirmation of his theory of the Golden Wall: behind the Church's wall things were just like everywhere else—and in a certain sense that was right and proper, because in this way those impassioned old men in their black dresses proved that they were religious professionals and not pious amateurs. After about ten minutes calm returned: murmuring voices in the distance, obviously on the farthest staircase on the other side, which led to the chapel of San Silvestro; the slamming of the door there, which gave access to the convent.

Silence.

Onno sat with his stick between his legs on the priest's bench, his hands folded on the snake's head, and felt as if he were playing a part in an absurd play. This couldn't be real. Under the bench was the suitcase. He would not have felt more foolish if someone had sent him off to catch a basilisk with a butterfly net and an empty jam jar. This was where that sultry Cuban night eighteen years ago—when Ada had seduced him—had finally brought him: to a Roman confessional with his son, locked in next to the holiest spot on earth, since that, according to this same tyrant, was where Moses' stone tablets of the Law were preserved. They were no more in that altar than yesterday's paper—or perhaps they were: they would never know. The tension he felt derived exclusively from uncertainty about how their weird burglary would turn out.

Quinten himself wasn't sure, either; but he did not doubt for a moment that they could force their way into that chapel and find the tablets there. They were simply waiting for him. In his half of the narrow cupboard things were less comfortable; there was only a bench for kneeling on, on which he had sat down. Separated by a partition with a barred diamond-shaped opening, they listened to each other's breathing.

"Can you hear me, my son?" whispered Onno.

Quinten turned around cautiously and put his mouth to the grille. "Yes."

"Satisfied, now you've finally got your way?"

"Yes."

"What would . . ."—"Ada" was on the tip of Onno's tongue—"Max say if he saw us sitting here like this?"

"I can't imagine."

"Do you know what I think? He'd have died laughing."

Onno thought of Max's fit of laughter in Havana when they had discovered what kind of conference they had wound up in. There on that island not only had Quinten been conceived, but the seeds of his own political downfall had been sown. Koos's face, on the boat to Enkhuizen: "Does your stupidity know no bounds, Onno?" Helga's death the same day . . . Ada. . . . And Quinten also thought of Max, vanished so completely from the world as if he had never existed. His empty coffin in the earth. His mother . . .

"Perhaps it's because it's so dark and silent here," whispered Onno, "but I keep thinking of your poor mother the whole time."

"Me too."

"Do you remember we went to visit her together?"

"Of course. We were chased by the police."

"Yes, I vaguely remember something of the sort."

Quinten hesitated, but a moment later said: "That evening I had a really fantastic dream for the first time."

"Can you remember that too? It's almost ten years ago."

"Didn't I say that I hardly ever forget anything?"

"What did you dream, then?"

"I'm not going to tell you," said Quinten, turning his head away a little. "Something about a building." The center of the world. He thought of the deathly fear with which he had woken up after hearing that calm, hoarse voice, how afterward he had groped around helplessly in just such a darkness and silence as he found himself in now—but although he was not dreaming now, and although the fact that he was here was completely bound up with that dream, he didn't feel a trace of fear. "But at the very last moment it suddenly turned into a nightmare. I had no idea where I was. I stared screaming, I think, and it was only when Granny came out of Max's bedroom and put the light on that I saw that I was on the threshold of her room."

Onno caught his breath. Did Sophia come out of Max's bedroom at night? What did that mean? He had the feeling he really shouldn't ask about it, but he couldn't help himself:

"Did Max and Granny sleep together, then?"

"Never noticed it. Perhaps they'd been talking, for all I know. Be quiet for a moment..."

Far away a soft, sing-song voice resounded: probably from the refectory, where a priest was reading an edifying text, while the others sat silently eating their frugal meal and did not listen.

Onno would have liked to ask what Sophia was wearing that night, but he knew enough. Bloody lecher. He stopped at nothing—not even that frigid Sophia Brons, who was a thousand years older than him. How could he ever have believed otherwise? But had he ever believed otherwise? He'd never wanted to think about it, because of course he suspected that there was something going on between those two in that lonely castle with its long nights, but he hadn't wanted to admit it to himself. Why not? What was wrong with it? Because Max's offer to bring up his son had to be an act of pure, self-sacrificing friendship? How pure were his own motives when it came down to it? He also realized with a jolt that this meant that his mother-in-law had recently—without anyone knowing—been widowed for the second time, at the age of sixty-two.