The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "So there you have the Jewish Law,' " said Onno with ironic emphasis, and looked at Quinten from the side. "That's the Torah."

  Of course Quinten heard the undertone in his voice, but he ignored it.

  Touched and kissed as they passed, the scrolls were taken to the partition with the women's area, from which those high-pitched trills again rose. It was some kind of initiation of a boy of about twelve; men in white yarmulkes and black beards wound a mysterious ribbon around his bare left arm and a strange, futuristic block was fastened to his forehead, while a patriarchal rabbi in a gold-colored toga read from the Torah they had brought. Exuberant women and girls threw candies over the fence.

  "What's in that block?"

  "Text. Commandments."

  Quinten felt jealous. So much attention had never been paid to him. Why that boy and not him? Just because the boy was Jewish and he wasn't? But over and against that, he had discovered something on his own initiative that the boy and all those people had never dreamed of!

  "Shall we go up now?"

  On the right-hand side of the wall an asphalt path led upward in a gentle curve. Passing an unbroken line of photographing and filming tourists, they came to a gate, where policemen with submachine guns over their shoulders inspected all bags. Larger items of luggage had to be left behind.

  "Do you see what it's like here?" asked Onno softly as they waited for their turn. "Steep walls on all sides with guarded gates. Down below is the most sacred place of the Jews; up here for more than a thousand years the third holy place of Islam, unless I'm mistaken—after Mecca and Medina. The situation is a kind of religious atom bomb: if they clash, the critical mass will be exceeded and the whole world will explode. The Israelis understood that very well, and you'll never get through with your stones, even though no one knows what you take them to be in your infinite optimism. You can forget that so-called 'returning' of yours, because you're not dealing here with a crowd of sleepy old fathers made of butter. Unless your name is Nebuchadnezzar or Titus, you'll have to think of something else."

  Quinten jerked his shoulders impatiently. "I'll see."

  He felt tense. In the gate was a table where women whose legs were too bare had to put on gray ankle-length skirts; when he came out of the shadow on the other side, he stopped in amazement and looked out over the silent expanse of the temple terrace. The atmosphere of absence reminded him for a moment of his meadow of Groot Rechteren, with the red cow, the two alder trees, and the three erratic stones. Not only were there far fewer people than down below in the square, but the silence had a strange, expectant nature, like the seconds that elapsed between a flash of lightning and the clap of thunder ... or was it simply the exhaustion of the past—of all the religion, murder, and devastation that this plateau had witnessed over the centuries? A hundred yards farther on, slightly to the left of the center, on a raised terrace, stood a wide sanctum in brilliant blue and green colors: an octagonal base, crowned with a golden cupola, framed in the cloudless sky like a second sun. It was topped by a crescent. From the cypresses and the olive trees, which rose from their shadows everywhere here, came the twittering of birds; on one side there was a magnificent view of a green hillside covered with churches, monasteries, chapels, and cemeteries.

  Quinten glanced at the map and pointed to the poetic hillside. "That's the Mount of Olives."

  "My God," said Onno. "That too. You were right: everything really exists."

  A thin elderly gentleman, conventionally dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and a tie, approached them hesitantly; on his cheek was a minimal tuft of cotton wool. He gave a little cough behind his hand, as though he had not spoken for a long time, and then said hoarsely in English:

  "My name is Ibrahim. I'm a poet and I've lived in Jerusalem for sixty-three years. With me you'll learn more in an hour than without me in a week."

  Onno burst out laughing. "Since we're not tourists, you're just the man we need."

  Ibrahim went straight to work. He half turned and pointed to a great mosque with a silver cupola, which they were close to and which Quinten had not yet noticed. In front of it stood a group of Arab schoolgirls with white headscarves on and with dresses over their long trousers.

  "Al-Aqsa," he said.

  " 'Farthest point.' " Onno nodded.

  Ibrahim looked at him flabbergasted. "You know?"

  "But not why it's called that. Farthest point from where? From the other side of the earth?"

  "The farthest point the Prophet ever reached. One night he was sleeping at the Kaaba in Mecca—"

  "What's that?" Quinten asked Onno automatically.

  "The holiest place in Islam, but much older than Islam. A great cube with a black stone in it: probably a meteorite."

  "... when a horse with a woman's face and a peacock's tail transported him at lightning speed to Jerusalem. He tethered it to the Wailing Wall down below and came up the same way as you, after which he undertook his nocturnal journey to heaven."

  "We assume he was dreaming?" asked Onno cautiously.

  "There are scholars who assume that." Ibrahim nodded. "There are also scholars who assume that he came here physically but that his journey to heaven was a vision?"

  "And as a poet, what do you assume?"

  "That there is no difference between dream and action, of course," said Ibrahim with a smile. "The dreams of a poet are his deeds."

  "Bravo, Mr. Ibrahim!"

  "Did Mohammed ascend from that exact spot?" asked Quinten, nodding toward the mosque.

  Ibrahim pointed to the building with the golden cupola. "From that spot. He didn't ascend, come to that. He climbed, up a ladder of light. And he came down that way too, and before day broke al-Buraq took him back to Mecca."

  "Lightning?" asked Onno. "He went there on a horse and returned on the lightning?"

  "That was the name of the horse: Lightning." Ibrahim beckoned them. "Shall we first have a look at the mosque? This Gothic gate was built against it nine hundred years ago by the Crusaders; they made it a temporary church, which they called Templum Salomonis."

  Quinten glanced at the pointed arches without interest. "And the real Jewish temples—where were they?"

  Ibrahim again pointed at the golden cupola. "There."

  "There too?" asked Quinten with raised eyebrows. Ibrahim looked at him with his dark eyes and again cleared his throat. "Everything is there."

  "That's a lot, Mr. Ibrahim," said Onno.

  "You know of course what the Jews usually say: 'Jews always exaggerate, Arabs always lie.' Judge for yourself. You obviously have no interest in the mosque."

  They walked past a deeply inset basin for ritual washing, surrounded by stone armchairs, straight toward the wide staircase, which led up about twelve feet to the terrace; at the top of the stairs there was a free-standing row of arcades of four weathered arches. Quinten felt the gold-domed building becoming more and more forbidding the closer it came, like a lighthouse, which is also meant to be seen only from a distance. The bottom half of the base, covered in white marble, gave way to exuberantly colored tiled ornaments, crowned at the eaves by verses from the Koran in decorative Arabic script.

  Ibrahim told him that the cathedral, called The Dome of The Rock, was usually regarded as a mosque, but it wasn't one; it was a shrine, built in the seventh century by Caliph Abd al-Malik—but, thought Quinten as he took off his shoes at the entrance, according to the design of a Christian architect, because that octagonal style didn't seem very Muslim to him. The octagon was the shape that baptismal chapels had, such as he had seen in Florence and Rome; he remembered Mr. Themaat telling him that this was connected with the "eighth day": the resurrection of Christ—which had also taken place somewhere near here. But Mr. Themaat had never told him anything about this building. They entered across the carpets in their stocking feet. Quinten stopped after a few steps. He caught his breath. Could what he was seeing be true?

  A stone. In the center of the dimly lit space, within the ring of co
lumns bearing the dome, surrounded by a wooden balustrade, there was nothing except a huge boulder, as tall as a man, with a rugged surface. As he looked at it, he felt his father's eyes trained on him, but he did not return his gaze. The stone, shaped a little like a trapezoid, was golden-yellow, like the whole of Jerusalem; obviously it was the summit of the Temple Mount. How heavy might such a thing be? In the past three weeks everything had gotten much heavier: after the lightness of Venice, the somber house fronts of Florence, then the sunken Roman ruins, just now the enormous blocks of the Wailing Wall, and now he stood eye to eye with the heaviest thing of all: the earth itself—but at the same time, Max had once told him, it was actually weightless, as it orbited the sun.

  It was sacred here—or was that feeling only caused by the way the spot was represented, like a jewel in a golden setting? Could you turn everything into something sacred like that? Why were there no more than two or three tourists? In the wide gallery on the other side of the circle of arcades Arab women were sitting on the ground here and there, with their faces averted, in long white robes that also covered their heads.

  At one corner of the balustrade was a tall structure in the shape of a tower, in which, according to Ibrahim, three hairs from the beard of the Prophet were kept. Then he pointed to a hollow in the stone and said:

  "This is his footprint as he took off on his nocturnal journey. And here," he continued, pointing to a number of wide corrugations in the side of the stone, "you see the fingerprints of the archangel, who held back the rock, because it too wanted to go to heaven. That was Gabriel, as you call him, who dictated the Koran to the Prophet."

  Quinten let his eyes wander over the stone. "So were the temples of Solomon, Zerubbabel, and Herod here too?" he asked.

  "So we assume."

  "But surely that's easy to check? Why don't the Jews do a bit of excavating around here?"

  Ironic wrinkles appeared on Ibrahim's forehead. "Because our religious authorities don't like Jews doing a bit of excavating around here."

  "And so they don't?"

  "Not up to now."

  "You could even prove it to some extent on the basis of the New Testament," said Onno in Dutch. "Do you remember that text in the dome of St. Peter's: 'Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall build my church'? Christ probably said it with very special accents: 'Thou art Peter and on this rock I shall build my temple.' That means," said Onno, pointing to the rock, "distinct from the temple on this rock."

  Ibrahim waited politely until Onno had finished.

  Quentin saw that he didn't like being excluded, and as they walked on, in a clockwise direction, he asked: "Is this where the Holy of Holies was?"

  "According to some people. According to others, this was the spot where the altar for burnt offerings stood." He pointed to a glimmer of light coming out of the rock on the other side. "There's a hole in the stone there, which leads to a cave; perhaps the blood of the sacrificial animals ran out through that. In that case, the Holy of Holies would have been more toward the west."

  Quinten groped under his shirt for his compass, and first felt his new Star of David. The entrance through which they had come faced due south, in line with the al-Aqsa mosque, which, naturally, pointed toward Mecca. So that west was in the direction of the Wailing Wall, east in the direction of the Mount of Olives. The chapel had doorways there too.

  "But surely," he said, as they walked on, "Mohammed didn't come precisely to this spot for his heavenly journey because there were Jewish temples here?"

  "No," said Ibrahim with a smile. "Things are still not like that."

  "Why, then?"

  "For a reason that is also connected with the buildings of the Jewish temples on this spot."

  "Which was?" asked Onno. It was as though the inquisitorial manner in which Quinten was again trying to get to the bottom of things had infected him.

  Rather surprised, Ibrahim looked from one to the other. "This is like a cross-examination."

  "So it is," said Onno decidedly.

  "There are all kinds of traditions connected with this place," said Ibrahim formally. "Will you be satisfied with four? The first is that King David saw the angel standing on this rock on the point of destroying Jerusalem. When that danger had been averted, he built an altar here. Solomon, his son, subsequently erected the first temple here."

  "And the second tradition?"

  "It says that a thousand years before that, the patriarch Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven here, by which the angels descended and ascended."

  Onno raised an arm and recited the Dutch Authorized Version: " 'And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!' - That's Dutch," he added in English.

  "Nice language," said Ibrahim. "A bit like Arabic. Just as guttural."

  "That's right. Your colleagues never tire of saying 'Allemachtig achtentachtig.

  Ibrahim looked at him reproachfully. "They are not my colleagues," he said in a voice that suddenly seemed a little hoarser.

  At the same moment Onno felt sorry he had made the remark. Perhaps Ibrahim really was a poet who earned his living as a guide, and not a guide who wrote abominable poems in his spare time.

  Meanwhile they had walked around the northern, narrow, side of the rock, where there were women in white sitting everywhere. With each step and with each word, Quinten was less and less in doubt that the Holy of Holies had stood here.

  "And why," he asked, "did Jacob sleep on this exact spot?"

  Ibrahim ran the palm of his hand over his thin gray hair. "Because something else had happened here even earlier. This is also the place where his father, Isaac, was about to be sacrificed by his grandfather, Abraham."

  "Of course," said Onno, again in Dutch.

  "But at the last moment he was prevented by an archangel."

  "Gabriel?" asked Quinten.

  Ibrahim made a skeptical gesture. "Michael, if I remember correctly. So in a certain sense there was already an altar in the rock then: for human sacrifices. That was why the Prophet came to this exact spot—or, rather, why Gabriel brought him to this exact spot on his horse. When he arrived, he was welcomed in this place by Abraham, Moses, and Jesus."

  "Yes," said Onno. "We accept everything you say at face value because that's how we are. But I'm getting really curious about the fourth tradition, because I detect a rising line in the events as you are narrating them, Mr. Ibrahim." He hesitated for a moment. "What does my ear suddenly hear from my own mouth? Ibrahim? Were you named after Abraham?"

  Ibrahim made a short bow. "My father did me that honor." On the eastern side, where the stone was lower and a praying woman in white sat tucked into an alcove like a moth, with her back to them, he stopped. "Of course Jerusalem is the Jewish center of the world," he said, stretching out his arm, "but from the earliest times this rock was the center of the center for the Jews."

  "The center of the center?" repeated Quinten, wide-eyed.

  "This rock," said Ibrahim solemnly, "not only bore the temples, but according to the Jews it is the foundation stone of the whole edifice of the world. Here is where the creation of heaven and earth began—the first light emanated from this point."

  The Big Bang, thought Onno; a pity Max was no longer here to see this tangible proof of the theory—religion and religious background radiation. . .. He looked in alarm at Quinten. Something was brewing in that head again; but whatever it was, he was having no more part of it.

  Perhaps because he had seen the skeptical expression on Onno's face, Ibrahim now addressed himself solely to Quinten.

  "This stone is where heaven and earth and underworld meet. As long as God is served here, he will hold back the ravaging waters of the underworld, which burst forth in the days of Noah."

  "But he is not being worshiped here any longer, you say."

  "Not in the Jewish way."

  Quinten sighed deeply. He was now absolutely certain that here was where the Holy of Holies h
ad been. He had suddenly gone one step beyond the center of the world—he had gone beyond his dream. Here in the center of the center was where the ark of the covenant had stood, and later the tablets of the Law had lain on this rock. What he would have most liked to do was to climb up and see whether a recess had been carved anywhere, by Jeremiah, in which they could have lain. And at the same moment he saw the spot, nearby, at the edge of the rock, where the woman in white sat praying: an oblong hole about eight inches by twenty, into which the tablets would fit precisely.

  Ibrahim saw him looking and said: "That's the footprint of Idris, Enoch from the Bible."

  "Dad . . ." said Quinten, and pointed without saying anything.

  Onno had understood at once and rolled his eyes in despair. "When are you finally going to stop this outrageous nonsense? Haven't we gotten into enough of a mess already?" Suddenly he became furious. "Why don't you realize that all you've brought from Rome is nondescript rubbish, a couple of old roof tiles, and that hole is more likely to be the footprint of Enoch than what you take it to be. Shoe size twenty-two!"

  "Perhaps it's both."

  "Rubbish, rubbish, total rubbish! I want to get out of here this instant. I've had enough. We're going," he said to Ibrahim.

  "Don't you want to go to the cave, the Fountain of Souls—"

  "We're going."

  Onno's outburst left Quinten cold. He had the tablets of the Law in his possession and for centuries they had lain in that hole, in the complete darkness of the debir, completely unobtrusive, right at the side.

  When they emerged through the eastern gate into the heat and blinding light on the white marble slabs of the temple terrace, he said, "I really don't intend to put them back there."

  "You won't be able to anyway."