The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  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?

  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.