St Paul's Labyrinth

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  ‘I got the better of you by guile,’ he had written. But nobody had ever realised the extent of his cunning, or the genius of the scheme with which he had exacted his revenge.

  Until now.

  37

  Saturday 21 March, 9:50am

  Peter leaned against the wall of the Boerhaavemuseum and tried to look nonchalant but he couldn’t help peeking inside every few seconds to see if someone was coming to open the door.

  The sound of a key finally being turned in a lock felt like a release, as though he was a prisoner being taken out for his daily hour on the yard.

  He entered the museum’s spacious lobby. He hung his coat on the coat rack but kept the cap on. The employee who had opened the door was already sitting at the till. The lobby was otherwise empty.

  He had a Museumkaart, an subscription card that gave him entry to all the state museums in the Netherlands, but he bought a ticket anyway, and avoided making eye contact with the receptionist.

  Peter pushed open the glass doors that led to the gift shop and the café, went past the anatomical theatre and took the stairs to a hall that housed a display of medical instruments. Then he went into the hall on the right, which contained the museum’s stunning collection of planetaria. He examined the magnificent Leidsche Sphaera planetarium, with its planets that hung fixed in their orbits around the sun, but saw nothing that might be a clue to his next move. He stared at the sun, the planet that protected the Sun-Runner, but there was nothing unusual about that either.

  The museum had other solar system models which were smaller but their construction was every bit as ingenious as the two-and-a-half-metre-tall Leidsche Sphaera. He examined those too, and again, found nothing. What had he expected? A note taped to the sun with a new number on it?

  At a loss, he wandered through the room, hoping he might stumble upon something he had missed earlier. He paused to look at an old bible in a glass case, surprised to see it here. Weren’t the bible and science supposed to be at odds with each other? Then again, the very first scientists had seen it as their duty to use scientific research to support God’s revealed truths in the bible. If the facts didn’t agree with God’s word, then the scientist had surely made a mistake and ought to re-examine his evidence. Like Galileo Galilei, who claimed that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around. The church pointed out that in the bible, God clearly answered Joshua’s prayer for the sun to stand still so that he could have a few more hours of daylight, and that therefore, Galileo must be wrong.

  When he thought about it, Peter realised that it wasn’t so odd to see a copy of the Statenbijbel here. It was the first official Dutch-language version of the bible, translated directly from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The information label next to it said that it had been commissioned by the Synod of Utrecht in 1618. Eight years later, a group of translators in Leiden had begun the enormous task and completed it almost twenty years later in 1635. After it had been approved by the States General, it went into print. The City of Leiden paid 2500 guilders for the rights to print the text in Leiden, an immense sum in those days. Half a million copies were printed over the next twenty years. One of those copies was now on display here behind thick glass, open at one of the Psalms. At first, Peter thought that this particular chapter had been selected for practical reasons because the Psalms were in the middle of the bible. But when he looked more closely, he saw that it had been chosen for a deeper reason, one which was relevant to this room, and relevant to a museum dedicated to the history of science.

  The bible was open at Psalm 19. The title read: ‘God’s Glory Revealed in Creation and the Law’. In other words: by studying God’s work, his creation, you could draw closer to God and develop a deeper understanding of him.

  Peter read the first verses.

  Psalm 19 God’s Glory Revealed in Creation and the Law

  1 To the Overseer, a Psalm of David.

  2 The heavens are recounting the honour of God, and the work of His hands, the expanse is declaring.

  3 Day to day uttereth speech and night to night sheweth knowledge.

  4 There is no speech and there are no words, their voice has not been heard.

  5a Into all the earth their line hath gone forth, and to the end of the world their sayings.1

  This translation still played a central role in church services in the Netherlands, yet you almost needed a dictionary to be able to understand it.

  5b For the sun he placed a tent in them.

  6 And he, as a bridegroom, goeth out from his covering; he rejoiceth as a mighty one, to run the path.

  7 From the end of the heavens is his going out, and his revolution is unto their ends, and nothing is hid from his heat.2

  At that point, Peter realised he was looking in the wrong place.

  38

  Saturday 21 March, 10:00am

  As a student, Daniël had often attended the services held by the Leidse Studenten Ekklesia, an ecumenical church for students in Leiden. The services were held in the Hooglandse Kerk every Sunday morning at half past eleven, a fairly reasonable time for students, although they attracted people from all walks of life. People in his social circle had often given him pitying looks when he confessed – because that’s how it felt – that he went to these services.

  He had been raised as a Catholic, but like many teenagers, he had almost completely lost interest in his parents’ faith by the time he was fifteen or so. However, he hadn’t lost interest in religion. He enjoyed the RE lessons at his Catholic high school much more than the other pupils.

  He borrowed books from the library about spiritual subjects like chakras, channelling and auras, with titles such as The Seth Material, The Aquarian Conspiracy or The Dancing Wu Li Masters. He read Carlos Castaneda, Baghwan and Sai Baba, core titles in the New Age movement that had become fairly mainstream by then. He was impressed by The Empty Mirror by Janwillem van de Wetering, an account of the many months the author had spent in a Japanese Zen monastery, and its sequel, A Glimpse of Nothingness, both books that Daniël devoured.

  He would sit in his little attic room and open his atlas to the maps of Nepal and Tibet and dream of distant travel to remote monasteries with ascetic monks in orange robes, living on a strict diet of water, vegetables, rice, and yak butter.

  He made a short-lived attempt at meditation, complete with burning joss sticks, which his parents weren’t particularly thrilled by.

  The exotic nature of these eastern religions and philosophies which had made them so attractive to him was ultimately also what repelled him. They were too strange, too foreign. It made his study of them feel like an empty theoretical exercise rather than a meaningful part of his life.

  He left his eastern phase behind him when he went to study archaeology in Leiden, but he was still vaguely interested in religion. As the cliché goes, the criminal always returns to the scene of his crime, and so Daniël eventually began to attend church services again. In the beginning, it was because he’d been invited by a girl he liked. But the second time they’d gone to church together she’d brought her boyfriend along and held his hand throughout the entire service, even during the prayers. However, Daniël had found the services pleasantly relaxed and welcoming, and so he carried on going to them. The sermons often had a philanthropical theme, and the various pastors, both men and women, gently encouraged the congregation to turn their faith into deeds. Sometimes they sang psalms, but usually, the hymns were modern songs by the poet and theologian Huub Osterhuis, or catchy sing-alongs from the Taizé repertoire. He could still remember the words to his favourite song, based on the words of Saint Teresa of Avila.

  Let nothing disturb you,

  Let nothing frighten you,

  All things pass away:

  God never changes.

  Patience obtains all things.

  He who has God

  Finds he lacks nothing;

  God alone suffices.3

  But just as the philosophies
of the east had failed to stick, he found that the ecumenical, neither-fish-nor-fowl Ekklesia services were ultimately too informal to become a permanent part of his life .

  So, after many churchless years in which his empty Sundays lacked focus and purpose, he went back to the bosom of the mother church.

  The church he returned to was the Coelikerk in the middle of the Haarlemmerstaat, a house of God built in the neoclassical style. He had always found it a beautiful building, but his main reason for choosing it, at least initially, was its location within walking distance of his student digs. To a large extent, the liturgy was fixed of course, and very little had changed since his youth. It gave him the warm feeling of being part of an ancient tradition, with its ‘call and response’ prayers, the way the liturgical colours changed according to the season of the church year, the candles, and the familiar smell of incense rising from the silver censer as the altar boy swung it back and forth.

  He could have found all of this at another church, but the priest, Tiny Strauss, quickly became his reason for staying. Tiny’s short sermons had an intensity that Daniël had never witnessed from other Catholic ministers. He celebrated communion by breaking the enormous host – the same size and shape as a small frisbee – blessing the wine, and reciting the standard formulas with such passion that an observer might think that the priest was doing all of these things for either the first or last time in his life, and that for him, the host truly was transformed into the body of Christ, and the chalice truly was filled to the brim with the precious blood of the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world.

  And it was at the Coelikerk that Daniël met Mani.

  He had assumed that Mani was an asylum seeker at first, someone who had converted from Islam to Catholicism. Or a Christian who had fled a Middle-Eastern country torn apart by war and bigotry.

  He turned out to be neither.

  Mani belonged to the Parsis, an Iranian-Indian religious group descended from the Zoroastrians in the former Sasanian Empire of Persia, currently Iran. From the third century to the seventh, the main religion in this region was Parsism.

  Mani had been in need ‘spiritual food’, as he called it, and the Coelikerk suited his needs. He recognised a lot of his own religion in the services, although Daniël didn’t realise just how similar they really were until later.

  By chance – or at least, Daniël had assumed for a long time that it had been by chance until Mani eventually told him otherwise – Mani and Daniël found themselves sitting next to each other on a pew one day. They got on well, despite Mani being ten years older than Daniël. He was progressing in his career and had a family, while Daniël was wrestling with his thesis, which ironically, considering the grand dreams of his youth, was about the archaeology of the Lowlands. They had shared interests in religious ideas, literature and music, but also in football and certain TV programmes.

  Daniël soon started looking for Mani in the crowd of faces every Sunday morning. He usually found him quickly; his dark skin and black hair stood out in the sea of grey. They often went for coffee together at Annie’s Verjaardag or on the bridge next to Café van Engelen. Sometimes they took a walk around town or the Hortus.

  His wife and children never joined them, but Daniël met them when Mani invited him to his home for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year celebration with Zoroastrian roots that dated back to a time long before Islam’s arrival in Iran.

  Mani had explained that he and his family believed that the haft sin, literally ‘the seven S’s, should be present in every home for the new year. They carefully set a table with seven symbolic things that began with the Persian letter ‘s’. There was wheat for rebirth, a pudding for abundance, dried fruit for love, garlic for healing, apples for health and beauty, sumac berries for the colour of sunrise, and finally, vinegar for a long life and patience. And they kept up a cherished tradition of growing seven different plants or seeds to symbolise the fact that a new life cycle had begun.

  On the haft sin table, there were also coins for wealth and good luck, eggs for fertility, and an orange floating in a dish of water to represent earth floating in space. A goldfish in a bowl symbolised life, and a double-sided mirror reflected the light from burning candles, one for each child in the family, one for each new life …

  Mani had told him about Zoroastrianism, the religion founded by the prophet Zarathustra in Ancient Persia somewhere around the sixth century BC. Its central ideas were about the eternal battle between good and evil, light and darkness, god and devil … You could be on the side of the good god, the creator Ahura-Mazda, or his wicked adversary, Ahriman, the destructive spirit who sought to drive a wedge between god and man out of spite. The good god had other gods around him, like Mitra, whose name meant ‘agreement’, ‘alliance’, or sometimes: ‘testament’. There were also gods with names like Varuna, Agni and Indra which would later appear in Hinduism. Zarathustra was murdered in the fire-temple at Bakh and his last words, spoken to his killer, were: ‘May Ahura-Mazda forgive you, as I do now.’

  It was believed that a saviour, a Saoshyant, would appear at the end of time, a messiah who would destroy all evil. After the final battle, Mitra would be one of the three judges to separate those who had done good from those who had done evil, so that their souls could be judged. By doing good deeds, speaking good words and thinking good thoughts, everyone could play their part in the battle, everyone could be a soldier in the good god’s army. The good god was symbolised by an eternal flame which the priests kept burning in the temples. These were the very same priests or magoi in the Gospel of Matthew, who came from the east to witness the birth of Jesus that had been predicted by Zarathustra, and who honoured him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

  As Daniël later realised, he was slowly but surely being drawn towards the inner circle. Until one day, after mass, the priest invited him and Mani for coffee in the sacristy.

  It was then that he became properly acquainted with Tiny Strauss on a personal level. He spent an increasing amount of time with him, usually together with Mani. Daniël was honoured to be invited to his study house in the Mierennesthofje where they had long discussions about religious and philosophical matters. Tiny and Mani always listened attentively to what he had to say in a way that he was sure no one had ever listened to him before, except perhaps his Dutch teacher, during oral exams in high school.

  After a year or two, when he had gained their trust, he was finally introduced to ‘the group’. It began with veiled remarks that hinted at a sort of society, a men’s club that met regularly. The comments gradually became more overt until the day came that he was told that they were part of an ancient fellowship and that the members had agreed to recommend that he become one of them.

  At Tiny’s house, he was blindfolded and his head was covered with a black hood so that he was unable to see anything at all. Tiny and Mani took hold of his hands and he followed where they led him, shuffling uncertainly like a little old man.

  They went down some stairs and into the basement. He had seen it many times on his way into the house, but never been in it. To his surprise, they didn’t stop here, but carried on, descending again via a long staircase. The temperature plunged as they went lower, and the air grew damper.

  They walked a long way, or so it felt to Daniël, and every so often, Tiny and Mani stopped and let go of his hands. Then he heard stone scraping over stone, hinges squealing, and the men’s breaths becoming laboured.

  Eventually, they came to a set of stairs that was too narrow for the three of them to go up at once. Only Mani held onto him here, with his soft, well-cared-for hands, like a father about to take a shy child into a room full of grown-ups.

  They walked up the stairs and he tripped over the top step, not realising it was the last one. Then the hood was removed, followed by the blindfold. But he didn’t screw up his eyes against a bright light as he had expected to. It was almost dark.

  He was in a long room, a cave, and in front of him, twenty
men sat opposite each other on long benches. Warm light came from four small torches and two braziers that burned in front of an impressive, coloured relief of the god Mithras. Many of their conversations had been about Mithras lately and he recognised the god immediately.

  Each of the members stood up in turn to shake his hand and welcome him, the aspiring member, ready to take his first step on the ladder of the via salutis.

  Now, many years later, Daniël stood in the house on the Rapenburg where one of the seven entrances to their underground world was hidden. He had progressed to the grade of Lion.

  His position in the city council’s archaeology department had allowed him to play a crucial role in the execution of the Father’s plan. He had been able to weaken the bottom of the hole where the first waste container was to be placed in such a way that it would be certain to collapse as soon as the digger touched it. He hadn’t intended for the whole machine to tip over into the hole of course, but there had been surprisingly little fuss made about it afterwards.

  A section of the covered-over Roomgracht lay beneath the house they were in now. The canal had led from the Rapenburg canal to the Doelengracht. Centuries earlier, it had been the site of a large nunnery. The Roomgracht had separated the lay sisters’ areas of the nunnery from that of the cloistered nuns. After the Reformation, the nunnery’s buildings had gradually made way for houses, and this house had belonged to the society from the very beginning. When it was built, somewhere between 1630 and 1635, the Roomgracht was covered over and the society connected the resulting tunnel to the system of passageways underneath the house.

  Daniël had come to the Rapenburg house along with many of the society’s other members, except for the six who had fallen away. Five, now, because one of them had been accidentally shot by his co-conspirator in the Hortus. Daniël could see Augustinus, his old student association, through the living room window.

  They had all been sitting here for a while now, not knowing what to do. The Father was still absolutely committed to carrying out the plan, despite it not having gone as expected the day before.