The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "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 G
othic 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."

  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 dis
appointment—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: