The Discovery of Heaven

Third Intermezzo

— I thought we were never going to get there.

— I told you at the outset that the mission had been accomplished, didn't I?

— It's probably because of your compelling narrative. That's inevitable with a good story: you don't experience it as a report in retrospect; it happens in the telling, as it were.

— In my case there isn't that much difference.

— Yes, you are those people's destiny, and to tell you the truth, I've been really astounded on occasion. What a disaster! Take the end of Max Delius — wasn't that a very draconian step?

— What do you expect? He was on the point of discovering us!

— He was on the threshold; I won't deny it. He was peering through the keyhole, as it were — but he was drunk- The next morning, he would have dismissed the whole thing as colossal nonsense. He was a specialist, after all, not an inventor of science fiction!

— That's just the reason. I felt we couldn't take any risks. Suppose he had taken himself seriously and possessed the same persistence as his son. He didn't have a huge reputation to lose in astronomy; he might have been ready to go for broke at that turning point in his life. And after all, the last straw we cling to is people's belief; the moment our existence becomes a matter of knowledge, they'll abandon us completely. They'll shrug their shoulders and say "So what?" Besides, they always get dangerous when they discover different kinds of beings, or what they imagine to be. When they discovered the Indians, they were very enthusiastic about it for a while, but after that they lost interest and exterminated them. Or think of what they're doing with animals to this day.

— Stop it. They've virtually reached the "So what" stage anyway. And they've also been busy exterminating us for some considerable time, without realizing it — for about as long as those Indians. Did you really not suspect that Delius would present you with a surprise like that one day?

— Of course. After all, he was singled out to be the father of our agent, and given the laws of heredity it was obvious that he too would possess exceptional gifts. In a certain sense he owed them to his son.

— The triumph of the causa finalis over the causa efficiens.

— That's one way of putting it, although not everyone would immediately understand. Moreover, his death was necessary to get our man out of Holland at last. All that demolition was needed for that, too.

— Yes, Holland is a unique country, but even apart from our envoy, enough is enough at a certain moment. Sometimes I wonder if it's still part of reality. In the human year 1580 a certain Joannis Goropius published a book in which he demonstrated that Adam and Eve had spoken Dutch in the Garden of Eden — and certainly Holland is the world's ideal of paradise. Every country would love to be like it, so peaceful, so democratic, tolerant, prosperous and orderly, but also so uniform, provincial and dull — although that seems to be changing a bit in the last few years.

— Think of what happened to Onno Quist, for example.

— I always think of everything at once, my dear friend. Now, for example, I'm thinking of the fact that you made it happen to him of course. I even suspect that you allowed that rotten environment to emerge in Amsterdam that made what happened to Helga possible.

— You'll soon see the necessity for that. I only intervened when it was strictly necessary. I always use my resources as sparingly as possible, but I simply had to work with the tough rubber that people are made of. If it was still our habit to address them, everything would be a lot simpler — but you've already touched on that: since those dreamers have fooled themselves that it didn't come from on high but from their own depths, we've stopped.

— Reluctantly.

— You were talking just now about the causa finalis. We too started out of course from the simplest way in which our aim could be achieved in theory — namely, that our man would go where we wanted him to be and do what we wanted him to do. But as we calculated back, more and more new obstacles appeared, which made that aim more and more difficult to achieve — until, by improvising, we found the complicated route of efficient causalities, which turned out to be the only possible one. It was not nearly as complicated as our efforts to get him into the spirit and the flesh, but still complicated enough. In my department we sometimes compare it with the course of a river. The simplest way for the Rhine to go from its source in the Alps to the Hook of Holland is of course a straight line about four hundred miles long; but in reality it's twice as long, because the landscape forces it to be. In the same way, our man's route through the human landscape was strange and twisting and now and then quite violent — for example, exactly what happens in Schaffhausen; but — to change imagery — you can't appoint someone as a carpenter and at the same time forbid people to cut down trees. Wait a moment. We're not going to have the same conversation again, I hope?

— The same conversation about the necessity of evil in the world will be conducted forever and ever — that awesome question of the theodicy, on which mankind has been breaking its teeth for centuries. But yes, the grain simply has to be threshed, so that it can be changed into sacred bread.

— These days it's also done with combine harvesters. They're monsters, sometimes twenty feet wide, with six-cylinder diesel engines, which crawl across the fields like prehistoric grasshoppers. At the front of those combines the stalks are swallowed up, after which the grains are shaken loose in the revolving threshing drum; then a compressor separates the chaff from the corn with compressed air. It works pretty well.

— You've put your finger on it. But it's precisely the machine itself that represents the much greater, radical, evil. That technological Luciferian evil is not in the optimistic service of the Chief in the best of all possible worlds, like the providential havoc that you must wreak, but it feeds on it; it eats it away and takes its place, like a virus usurps control of the nucleus of a cell: a malicious putsch, an infamous coup d'état. Cancer! Royal assassination!

— Don't get so excited all the time. This is just how things are. We have failed. We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration — but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. What we made has turned out to be more than what we thought that we had made. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!

— Your optimism is indestructible too, just like Leibniz's. What you are despite all your competence is obviously ultimately an irresponsible bohemian, an artistic rake, who thinks Here goes! But you might ask yourself whether it isn't precisely the reflection of the Chief that makes our creativity greater than ourselves.

— Ha ha! But if that's the case, then our successful failure isn't our responsibility either, but the Chief's — including man's susceptibility to the devil and hence the downfall of the Chief himself, as you have just so eloquently outlined to me. Then with mankind he has dug his own grave.

— This conversation is starting to take a turn I don't like at all. I very much hope that your closeness to human beings and your manipulation with evil hasn't also brought you closer to Lucifer-Satan.

— I wouldn't be making such efforts in that case. But if I can be honest: I do feel a bit sorry for him. Ultimately he's a poor sucker too, who can't be any different than he is. The fact of the matter is that we are playing with white, and he with black. If there is anyone who is condemned to hell for infinity, then it's him.

— He'd like nothing better!

— Yes, that too. That's hell within hell.

— Come on. It's as though someone on earth were to claim that he whose name I won't mention was also a poor sucker and himself actually his most pitiable victim.

— It isn't for people to claim that kind of thing. Them least of all.

— I'm glad that you are saying it, because your post was suddenly hanging by a thread.

— I had the feeling it might be.

— Let's leave it at that, before things get out of hand. Of course it's sad that things had to reach this stage, but at the same time I'm dying of curiosity to hear how you finally managed it. Go on. I'm listening.

51. The Golden Wall

In order to make the decisive event possible, it was necessary to mellow Onno Quist's frame of mind after all those years of solitude — and so I sent to him a stray young raven from the hills. One sunny day around noon it suddenly descended into the open window, shook its feathers, folded its wings, turned once around its axis, and walked in as though it lived there.

Onno looked up from his notes, perplexed.

"What do you want?" he asked. Not having said anything the whole morning, he cleared his throat.

The raven fixed him with one eye and croaked.

"Cras?" repeated Onno. "Yes, of course you're speaking Latin. 'Tomorrow'? What about tomorrow?"

The bird jumped off the windowsill onto the table, stirred through the chaos of papers a few times with its tail feathers, left some droppings, and then went over to a plate on which there were a few remnants of bread. With a loud tapping of its beak, as blue-black as fountain-pen ink, it devoured them and again looked at Onno, as if wanting to know if that was all. After it had eaten its fill, it jumped onto the windowsill, spread its wings, and disappeared — but the following afternoon it was back, at the same time.

In this way something resembling a friendship had begun. Onno had never had anything to do with animals before; they did not feature in his thinking. He had been brought up to believe that they had no souls, but after just a few days he found himself becoming anxious when the bird was late. Although he had not worn a watch since leaving Holland, he always knew what time it was thanks to the church bells. When on one occasion the raven missed a day, he could no longer concentrate. He looked mournfully at the untouched plate of birdseed and leaned outside every ten minutes to scan the sky.

"You don't treat people like this, Edgar," he said the following day with a reproachfully wagging index finger. "Not even as a bird. You don't stand your host up with the food. I trust it won't happen again."

While his pitch-black visitor scratched about around the room, over the chairs, among the rubbish under the bed, it constantly croaked and squawked, and Onno had the impression that it stayed longer if he himself talked a lot, too. From then on he made a habit of speaking while it was there. At the beginning he found it difficult; except for a few words in a shop, a restaurant, or in his bank, he had said nothing for four years. But one can no more forget how to speak than how to ride a bike or swim, and he of all people would be more likely to forget how to ride a bike than how to speak; he could not swim.

"Of course you're wondering what I'm doing here, Edgar. I'll tell you. I'm working on a letter to my father. But it's a rather strange kind of letter, because even when I get it down on paper I won't be able to send it. Kafka wrote a letter to his father too — Max read it to me once, long ago, in far-off innocent days — but poor Royal and Imperial Franz-Josef never dared mail it. My own problem is more serious, because what's the address of a dead person? Perhaps you know, being a black bird; unfortunately you won't be able to tell me. But I want to do it precisely because it's absurd. Since everything is ultimately absurd, the whole of life and the whole world, conversely only the absurd makes any kind of sense. Can you understand that? If everything's absurd, then within that absurdity only the absurd is not absurd! True or not? Have you ever heard of Camus? He was the philosopher of the absurd, and he died in an absurd car accident. For many people that was a confirmation of his thesis that everything is absurd. But for the philosopher of the absurd, an absurd death is of course an extremely meaningful end! Think hard about that. Everything is far more absurd than even he thought. Now of course you're curious about what I'm trying to tell my dead father in my absurd way. It's about the nature of power. In the last few years I've thought of a few things, on which I want his impossible judgment. It's rather sinister, and in political terms you must translate the word sinister not by 'left,' but rather by 'right': then you get dexter. Another difference with Kafka is that I'm not able to get my ideas into order. They're not in an orderly succession; they're still chaotically juxtaposed. In the past when I wrote an article or a speech, academic or political, it was always as if my thoughts were numbered in some way and I immediately knew the sequence of the sentences. But I've lost that priceless ability. Now I feel as if I have to complete a jigsaw puzzle as big as the room, while all the pieces are plain white — or, rather, as black as you, Edgar. Look over there. Thousands of notes. Very personal, about Koos and Dorus and Bart Bork, but also very general ones, about the question of how power is possible and heaven knows what else. The mountain grows higher every day, but do you think that means I'm any closer to my goal? Each note takes me farther away from it! This stuff is like a tree, constantly branching, sprouting, growing, precisely when I'm trying to locate the trunk and the point where it comes out of the ground. Each time I start on my letter, I have to go through all those notes again, to build up momentum, but it never leads to a first sentence, just to new notes. In the meantime many of them have become illegible — because they've lain in the sun, or because I've spilled coffee or cola over them, or because they're stuck together with jam, or because you've relieved yourself on them with your leaching excreta, which are as white as you are black. I don't mind. Don't worry about it — that's nature."

A few weeks later the situation had reversed itself: Edgar no longer came to visit once a day, but occasionally left the house. Changed from a guest into a lodger, he generally slept in a corner of the room among the clothes lying on the floor. The first time the tame animal fluttered onto his shoulder and held onto his ear with its beak, Onno's reflex was to try to push it off, but he was glad that he hadn't, because there would have been no second opportunity. And now Edgar was given fragments to hear every day, sometimes these, sometimes those — and suddenly Onno had the feeling that reading them aloud was bringing him close to a structure, enabling him to make a start on sifting and organizing.

"Listen," he said, sitting at his desk with his reading glasses on his nose. "Take this. This is very important. Perhaps my patriarchal treatise should begin with this. The Golden Wall is the title. In front of the Golden Wall it's an improvised mess; people teem around in the noisy chaos of everyday life, and the reason things don't go haywire is due to the world behind the Golden Wall. The world of power lies there like the eye of the cyclone, in mysterious silence, controlled, reliable, as ordered as a chessboard, a sort of purified world of Platonic Ideas. At least that's the image that the powerless in front of the Golden Wall have of it. It is confirmed by the dark suits, the silent limousines, the guards, the protocol, the perfect organization, the velvety calm in the palaces and ministries. But anyone who's actually been behind the Golden Wall, like you and me, knows that it's all sham and that in there, where decisions are made, it's just as improvised a chaos as in front, in people's homes, at universities, in hospitals, or in companies. I've never had that impression more strongly than in the archaeological museum in Cairo. Once when I was a minister of state I was given a guided tour by my Egyptian colleague. We looked at the treasures from the grave of Tutankhamen — all those wonderful things that were reverently displayed there. But there were also a couple of large photographs of the state in which the tomb had been found. All the things were piled on each other, like old rubbish in a loft, and the mess had not only been caused by robbers. The wooden shrines that housed the sarcophagus had also been crudely and wrongly assembled; the granite lid of the sarcophagus did not fit and had been broken in two when it had been lowered. The same spectacle was presented by the pitiful human remains that had emerged from beneath that indescribably splendid golden mask of the pharaoh's. All politicians, some civil servants, and some journalists know that it's just as pitiful a junk shop behind the Golden Wall as in front of it, but almost none of the powerless citizens know. Should anyone discover how a policy is made — which is virtually impossible — he will spend the rest of his life with a fundamental feeling of insecurity. So it's a miracle that things don't go haywire behind the Golden Wall too: it points to a much higher power. For you that's no problem; for you that's God. But for me unfortunately not even the functioning of society is a proof of God's existence. How can it possibly have functioned up to now? You won't believe it, but I know. It's because of the existence of that very Golden Wall. The Wall itself is the highest power. Wait a moment. Of course — this is where that quote from Shakespeare belongs, from the opening of one of his sonnets. Where is it? Here: From what power hast thou this powerful might? It's about love, but the Golden Wall is connected with love, too. Look what we've got here: What is the nature of the Golden Wall? The powerless think that it consists of the congealed majesty of the mighty, who in some cases are even worshiped: the Liberator, the King, the Leader. But in reality it is not a product of the mighty but of the powerless themselves: it's the crystallization of their own reverence, awe, and fear. But if the powerless are hence in fact worshiping nothing but their own worship, are in awe only of their own awe, and are afraid only of their own fear, which at the same time excludes them from power, what is left for the powerful? What are they? Once someone has penetrated the Golden Wall, what does he see? Nothing special. Just ordinary people going about their business, no more interesting and no different in kind than the powerless. They exercise power not in some 'powerful,' inevitable, so to speak mathematically, certain way, as the powerless believe, but in just as messy and improvised a way as every powerless person manages his affairs. Dorus and Frans formed a cabinet over lunch; Churchill and Stalin carved up the Balkans over a drink. And yet. . they must have something extra, which the powerless experience, because not everyone can penetrate the Wall by acquiring power. That means, Edgar, that the 'powerful might' of Shakespeare's Dark Lady was also in a certain sense not her quality, because she didn't possess it for all men. So her answer to his question, where she got it from, must therefore be 'From you yourself, Billy.' He gave her that power over him — although. . yes, I'm saying it again: although… and yet.. what does that something extra consist of? Not of intelligence, because there have always been some unspeakable idiots in power. .; there are also always superintelligent people who never rise to power, although they would like to despite their intelligence. That something extra isn't the 'will to power,' because there are countless people who want it and will never succeed in achieving it, just as there are people who come to power who never wanted it but who, to their own amazement, are impelled toward it. So political instinct, you may say: there are lots of people with political instinct who never rise above the level of alderman in a country municipality. 'Charisma,' then? That's simply a Greek word that means gift, 'grace': that doesn't answer the question but asks one. No, something's involved that no one knows about, except me. Now I must write this down, before I forget: Of course the whole of society is as saturated with all forms of power as a sponge, between man and woman, in education, in business, over animals, nowhere is there no power — but what is political power? Political power is the fact that someone can achieve things that he knows nothing about; that he is in a position where he can decide the fate of people that he doesn't know — sometimes on matters of life and death, and frequently beyond his own death. The powerless see the powerful one, but he does not see them. That applies not only to Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin but also to our own good old Dutch rulers, to Koos and Dorus, and to you of course, and to myself a little too. I don't know what it's like among ravens, but in any case that's what it's like among people. Political power is an abstract, which only becomes concrete outside the field of vision of the powerful person. But what is that something extra that enables them to be in power? What does Dorus have in common with Hitler; what has Koos in common with Stalin? I'll tell you a secret that will make you sit up. In my own days in power I once had dinner at the Elysee; seated opposite me was a French professor of sociology. After Giscard d'Estaing's speech he told me that during the election battles, a couple of his students had hung up the posters with the portraits of Giscard and Mitterand on them in some backward country village in Thailand. The population had never heard of them and no one could read what was on the posters. On the day of the presidential elections they got them to vote, and what do you think? The results corresponded exactly with those in France. That made us laugh at the time — the professor regarded it as a good joke, and I don't believe that he was ever able to draw the dreadful conclusion from it; but I was suddenly reminded of it when I realized what power means. Listen to this: As a boy I identified power with property. My books were mine, but then in a higher degree yours, and in a still higher degree the mayor's; after that everything was yours a second time, as prime minister, but ultimately everything in Holland was the queen's. As an alderman, I thought that political power was simply the power of the word. Whoever had the best ideas and could express them best had the greatest power. Now I know that it's only in the third place a matter of ideas and words, and only in the second place a matter of who expresses them, the person. Most people find even that extremely undemocratic, but it's much worse. Power is the power of the flesh. Power is purely physical. No one has dared face up to that. No one attains power by what he says; his political program is incidental, and so is who he is: someone else may come along with the same program and nothing will happen. Someone gains power solely because he has the physical constitution of someone who gains power. If he were to say something different — the opposite, for example — in another party or movement, he would still gain power. He would always obtain power, Father, even with the Catholics, or the Communists. The powerful person is someone who gains power because he has a physical secret that makes other people say, 'Yes, that's our man'—or woman, of course. The something extra is solely that one thing: the body. I mean, politics isn't a branch of economics, as Marx thought, or theology, as my father thought, or sociology, as other people think, but of biology. That was proved scientifically by those yokels in Thailand. I virtually never read a newspaper, Edgar. I have no idea what's going on in the world anymore — I don't have television, radio, or even a telephone — but when I see a photo of Margaret Thatcher, who appears to be in charge in England at the moment, at a newsstand, then I know immediately: shrewd eroticism. A bourgeoise Cleopatra. Of course, she's intelligent and energetic and what have you, but so are other English-women, who never get any further than head buyer at Harrods. Why is that? Take Hitler. Freud demonstrated that illness must not be understood in terms of health, but health in terms of illness. Similarly, you mustn't try to understand Hitler's absolute power in terms of more or less normal power structures, because you'll never be able to; you must do it the other way around. You can explain Margaret and Dorus through Hitler, but not Hitler through Margaret or Dorus. Suppose Hitler had never existed but someone else had said and done the same things as him from his birth in Braunau— and there were such people. Do you think things would have gone as they did to the bitter end? Of course not! How long could that other person have kept it up? At a certain moment at the beginning of the 1920s Rohm or Strasser would have rounded on him with: 'Why don't you shut your trap!' But he wasn't anyone else — he was the dark man with that dogged face and the 'basilisk's stare,' as Thomas Mann once called it, with a pale forehead, those fanatical cheekbones, those smooth cheeks and pinched lips. That appearance accounted for 33 percent of his effect, and all the neo-Nazis are still in love with it. And Salvador Dali once said, 'I love his back.' You can dismiss that as a surrealist observation by a Spanish lunatic, but it also indicates a sense of all-determining physicality. And what do you think of a remark that Heidegger once made to Jaspers, who wondered how such an uncivilized creature as Hitler could rule Germany. Heidegger's answer was, 'Civilization has nothing to do with it… just look at his wonderful hands.' Apart from that, he had a voice that went right through you, which made everything he said different than if someone else had said it. A second 33 percent of the oratorical impact of his words on the masses can be attributed to that sound. I once saw an X-ray picture of his skull in a book somewhere, and it was observed that he had exceptionally large sinuses, with extraordinary resonance. And the third 33 percent of his power was due to his incomparable body language. On the one hand his terrifying outbursts of rage at the lectern, on the other hand his perhaps even more terrifying silence: his masklike face, the precision of his pose, the tension in even the smallest movement. The way he saluted at a parade, with that slight curve of the wrist, the position of his thumb, the way he brought his hand back to his belt: all of it had bewitching power. All rehearsed in front of the mirror, of course; there are photos of that. Some conductors have the same thing, that absolute control, like a hummingbird hovering stationary in the air and keeping its proboscis fixed motionless in the pistil of a flower. A fleur du mal in this case. Look, you don't feel left out by my mentioning a little bird?

Anyway, I've got something here that fits: Through his total physical discipline, Hitler was able to penetrate people's minds with the equally total chaos of his thinking. And his physical discipline continued in his monstrous parades and processions, all of which he directed himself and which were no more than reproductions of his body. He was actually a movement artist, a dancer, a ballet master of death. The choreography of those great fascist dances of death derives less from Prussian militarism than from expressionism, from the theater of Piscator, from the ballet of Mary Wigman, the teacher of Leni Riefenstahl, who immortalized the gruesome fascination of his Nuremberg rallies in her equally gruesome, fascinating film Triumph of the Will. It was the marriage of classicism and expressionism, Apollo and Dionysus: the realized tragedy, in Nietzsche's sense. Never, for as long as mankind has existed, has the beautiful form been so misused and put in the service of evil. Hitler himself was the real 'degenerate artist.' And the effect of all those creations was ultimately not aesthetic but erotic, like that of Hitler himself. What he had to say, his political aims, all those scandalous things, were no more important than the remaining 1 percent of his power. But the fact that it all happened, that it was all carried out by people who weren't basically any worse than any other people, the fact that 6 million Jews died, and 50 million others, including 8 million of those who had cheered him and paraded in front of him — that was because of that physical 99 percent. That was the enormous extra something he had; it was his unique body that made his power absolute. That's why it's impossible for him ever to be portrayed by an actor; even if only his back is shown in a film, it's completely wrong. Perhaps that's the best proof of my argument. But behind his Golden Wall even this envoy of Providence sat slumped with a cake and coffee in a flower-patterned armchair and spent the evening and half the night talking endlessly, as we know from the memoirs of his architect, Albert Speer. And he should know, because everyone was in love with Hitler; but Hitler was in love with Speer — probably even more than with Eva Braun. The German people thought that this Übermensch with his triumphant will was working tirelessly for the good of the nation, but he did almost nothing; he slept a good part of the day and, to the frustration of his ministers and generals, hesitated endlessly before making a decision. But in the meantime! Speer tells us that in the second half of the 1930s the bohemian's mood was starting to darken; during receptions at his country estate in the Alps he began to cut himself off and stared out across the mountains from a corner of the terrace, which made Speer think: As long as it doesn't mean war. Just imagine! One individual's mood darkens and it may mean war! And dammit, there was a war. How in heaven's name is it possible? Because of his body, Edgar, because of the accident of his body and nothing else. It was a natural phenomenon. All the powerful are natural phenomena and in that sense 'supermen'—but that 'super' resides in their spirit, not in their flesh. It has nothing to do with beauty. You can just as well be small and have a pot belly, like Napoleon, or be a semi-invalid like Kennedy, or have a face like Dorus; but it has to be there, that indescribable physical odor, they all had it and have it to a greater or lesser extent: Stalin more than Trotsky, Reagan more than Carter, and on and on in all countries and ages, all those Dark Ladies of power. People want to touch them, feel their flesh. Isn't it horrible? It's the same as with cult leaders and all other seducers. And it's even more horrible that there's no other way, and that it has to be like that. Because, listen: Dominance is indispensable because it is the axis of life itself. Power is exerted in every cell: by the DNA molecule in the nucleus. It contains the genetic material that calls the tune. From the first living cell, via animal communities to today's states, power has retained its physical quality, because only then is it possible: the condition of physicality is power and the condition of power is physicality. That's why for a long time power was hereditary. The first capitano of a dynasty himself had the physical presence of power of somebody like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill, Fidel Castro, or Napoleon; that was why it was sufficient to be flesh of his flesh. (In our case it runs in the family, too, for that matter.) In Holland the portrait of the queen hangs in the offices of all ministers and mayors, but you and I know who hangs in the queen's study: William of Orange. Come to that, those founders of lines are called 'born' leaders in many languages. For centuries, wars were dynastic wars, like with the Mafia, concerned with the interests of princely families, and hence with physicality—-just as republican wars originated in the physicality of new rulers. Where the royal families disappeared, continuity was ensured only by the civil service, which originated from the court and has existed without interruption since Babylon and ancient Egypt. Civil servants are eternal — they survive pharaohs, kings, and presidents — but it's no good without a leader. Civil servants without a leader are clothes without an emperor. That might well be the fate of a unified Europe. More important than the competence of a leader is the fact that he is there. With an incompetent leader things go badly, but without a leader everything sinks into abstract arbitrariness, from which a new leader irrevocably emerges — because despite the optimism of the anarchists, that is the fundamental DNA principle. Anyway, that principle governs not only life but everything that exists. The first living cell is preceded by the first atom, which also has a nucleus, with quarks and nuclear forces. The solar system also has a nucleus: the bright sun dominates the dull planets with magnetic attraction. There's no arguing with that, Edgar. But if the same thing therefore applies to inanimate as to animate matter, I suddenly realize, to everything in short, should we perhaps see the Big Bang as the 'nucleus' of the universe? I discussed that with Max in the past. I'm talking about Max again — I'll tell you another time who that was. Another seducer in any case. And now this: Everywhere the 'Führer principle' prevails: there has to be power, even in democratic societies, and that power can only be physical. In religion that's been known for a long time, and the first to formulate it was John: 'The Word is made flesh.' Do you know what Jesus Christ said: 'Take, eat, this is my body.' Hoc est enim corpus meum. If you eat it, then you're eating God and you're saved: that superleadership goes much further than Hitler's, but the principle is the same. Think of sacred relics, which are worshiped by the believers, the faithful. A hollow tooth of St. Peter's in a golden shrine! A toenail of St. Paul's! Body, body, body! But power can only be power by the grace of a Golden Wall. In order to consolidate his power, the representative of the naked Christ finally had to withdraw in full regalia as pope behind the Golden Wall of the Vatican. And that's where the problem begins. For the first time in the history of mankind, the Golden Wall is beginning to give way. Once, at the dawn of history, it was erected by the powerless with the material of their own adoration, awe, and fear; now it's beginning to show ominous cracks, like a medieval castle, through which everyone can peer inside. In your time you were still 'His Excellency the Prime Minister, Professor H.J.A. Quist,' now you would be 'Henk to everyone — which you weren't even for us, only for Mother. Because they can see that the chambers of the castle are as big a mess as everywhere else, the powerless rapidly lose their veneration for their own veneration, the awe at their own awe, and fear of their own fear, which at the same time undermines the authority of the powerful and makes the power of their physicality descend toward the ridiculous. In so doing, the powerless blow all the built-in fuses. What the hell does it matter to us anyway? Why shouldn't we smash that public telephone over there to pieces? Yeah, why not? What a laugh. Any police anywhere? No, nowhere. Not even in ourselves. Right, so we'll wreck it. A joke. Why do we think it's such a joke? Just because. Why has that suddenly happened, after all those eons? Perhaps it's something to do with technology — I don't know; at any rate, technology is the only thing that is suddenly developing just as fast. I don't understand the connection, and I'm confused by the fact that the telephone is also part of technology; but if that's the case, then the future looks grim. If it goes on like this, the whole social contract will crumble and the whole of society will gradually be smashed to pieces. Then everything will start to sink into anarchy without a nucleus, which contradicts the nuclear principle of being. Moreover, virtually no one in the West believes in a God of vengeance anymore, and it won't last very long in the East, either, and in twenty-five years' time not even a dog will believe in Allah, when they all have a fridge and a car over there. How can we avoid an invasion of fascist tyrants, who will lodge in the empty nuclei like cancer viruses? I've written down the answer here, Edgar. I scarcely dare read it aloud, and it's just as well that my father will never see it. As a boy — in a time that was still yours — it once happened that my ball rolled onto the grass in the park. Because walking on the grass was forbidden, I waited for a good five minutes until a certain moment when there was no one else to be seen; only then did I dare to step over the low fence, with my heart pounding, to take the few steps across the grass and to jump back again as soon as I could. That inhibition, that pounding heart, that's what it's about. Did I feel unfree? Not at all. It was simply forbidden to walk on the grass. At the moment I don't feel unfree, either, because I'm not allowed to kill anyone. That's simply not allowed. How do you prevent everyone killing everyone else without a pounding heart one day? How can we get that heart pounding again? Only by forcing respect. I say 'respect'—not fear as a result of some dictatorial regime or other, but respect for respect's sake: a new Golden Wall for the sake of the Golden Wall. This can only be done by means of the authoritarian rule of an enlightened despot — with the emphasis on 'enlightened.' Someone whom everybody knows, who puts the interests of his fellow citizens first, therefore making him the complete democrat. Someone like Pericles, in short. But how can you institutionalize that? How do you know in advance that the despot is indeed enlightened? Even Plato wrestled with that problem, but within twenty-five years it must be possible to select him by means of DNA analysis — and that brings us to the way in which in Tibet the new Dalai Lama is tracked down among the babies in the villages. The question is simply: how do we get through those last twenty-five years without accidents? I have a presentiment of changes without end, followed by dreadful disasters. That democratic institutions will not have to function for long, a century perhaps; afterward, based on the Ten Commandments, everyone can be incarnated genetically as a reasonable human being and the government will consist of a computer network, with a mongoloid or a stone as dominus mundi. Once the king is ruler by the grace of God, then technology will personify divine omnipotence. By that time no telephone booth will be vandalized and no one will walk on the grass anymore — not even if a ball is there. Probably, no one will even play with a ball. Isn't that awful? It's just as well that my son will never see this. Yes, Edgar, I had a son too. Quinten was his name. Shame you'll never meet him. I'll tell you about him too. But first of all my letter. It isn't completely clear yet, but how about simply beginning with: Most Honored Father!' "

Wings flapping, Edgar jumped onto his shoulder.

"Cras. Cras."

52. Italian Journey

On May 11, 1985, as a pope was flying to the Netherlands for the first time, beneath him on the ground Quinten was traveling south by train. Under the ground, actually, through Alpine tunnels, beyond which Italy suddenly unfolded: blue and green and descending, like at Groot Rechteren when he emerged from of the chilly cellar into the warm sun on the forecourt. Sophia had taken him to the station, hugged him with a stony face, but as soon as he had said goodbye she had disappeared from his thoughts. On the way he had not read or slept, but simply looked out the window the whole time, at all those countless towns and villages in Germany and Switzerland where his father might be.

However, while he was looking for his connection in Milan in the throng on the platforms, even that had receded and gradually an exciting feeling of freedom took possession of him, which became more and more intense when near Mestre he traveled out to sea along a railway embankment and saw Venice on the water in the distance; a vague blue phantom, as though on the horizon the sky had been lifted up a little and a glimpse of another world came through the crack. Was it a mirage? Was that where the Citadel was?

Emerging from the station with his blue-gray nylon backpack, he stopped. On the wide stairs of the terrace and on the square in front of the station hundreds of young people were sitting in the sun. On the other side was a white church. Between, it looked as though the water of the Grand Canal was being stirred by giant, invisible white bird's feathers: everything was moving, it was as though the light itself were undulating and waving and glittering in the sun — gondolas, vaporetti, water taxis, swaying and crying everywhere, everything foaming like a breaking wave in the surf. At the same time he had the impression that when he stood there, more eyes were focused on him than had ever happened at home. He went to a simple hotel nearby, in the out-of-the-way working-class district of Cannaregio, where few tourists went. On the arch above the entrance were Hebrew letters, most of which could no longer be deciphered. His window gave onto a small courtyard with flues and flaking plaster. The bed took up virtually the whole room, and the shower was in the corridor, but he didn't need any more room: he had the city for that.

After a few days Holland was so far away that it was if he had never been there. His mother's body in her white bed, Max's empty grave, his vanished father — none of that seemed to be his life anymore. He didn't get involved with anyone; he communed with things the whole day long. He wandered from morning till night through the maze of alleys, canals, bridges, dark doorways, silent squares; ate some tortellini here, a plate of spaghetti there; went into and out of churches and museums and allowed himself to get lost. If it took too long, he glanced at the little compass around his neck, with the plan of Venice in his head: those two relaxed intertwined hands, divided by the Grand Canal.

That labyrinthine quality sometimes reminded him of his dream, as did the absence of trees and plants and wheels. Behind the Piazza San Marco he also discovered a church, San Moisè, the black facade of which was covered from top to bottom with a baroque eczema of statues and ornaments; when he stood close to it and threw his head back, it might be a fragment of the Citadel. The high altar was a wild monument, entitled St. Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai.

But apart from that his Citadel, where he was still the only person, was more the reverse of Venice. Not only because of the stream of people, which always moved along the same ant paths, and which he was soon able to avoid, but because it wasn't an interior without an exterior but more an exterior as an interior. Each time he emerged via a doorway or a narrow street into St. Mark's Square, it was like a bang on a drum. That gigantic marble-coated banqueting hall, with the sky as the ceiling as painted by Tiepolo with a real blue sky and feathery cloud! All that lightness and floating, whether it was Byzantine, Gothic, or Renaissance, the filigree arabesques of the basilica, the four horses that pulled it through the centuries, with the pink, newly built Doge's palace with its gallery of keys, with the teeth as balustrades, the shafts as pillars, the Gothic perforated eyes seem to carry the actual weight of the building — to think that such a thing could exist! At the end of the piazzetta, like a gateway to the great outside, the wide world, with the two colossal pillars of red and white granite, their capitals topped with the winged lion and a patron saint seated on a crocodile, between which for centuries death sentences had been carried out. Even criminals were allowed to die in beauty here: the last thing they had seen was the living water of the lagoon — and the church on the small island on the other side: Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore.

So there it finally was — no longer in Mr. Themaat's books, but in the sun and the Adriatic sea wind. The white marble facade with the two superimposed temple fronts, as harmonious as a fugue: behind it the bare redbrick nave, with the gray cupola at the intersection. Of course he also took the vaporetto to see everything at close quarters and from inside, sailing across the spot where for centuries the Doge had thrown a ring into the water annually, to seal his marriage with the sea.

How could he be so fascinated by Venice when the city had so little to do with his Citadel? All things considered, Palladio's severe symmetries were completely out of place here too, because in Venice everything was precisely asymmetrical. The piazza wasn't an oblong but a trapezoid, the basilica was not on the axis; the windows of the Doge's palace did not reflect each other. Was he on the track of a law? Might it be that beauty was geometrically and musically calculable but that, in turn, perfection somehow diverged from it? Just as a straight line drawn with a ruler was always somehow less than a straight line when Picasso drew it without a ruler? Was there a difference between a dead and a living line? Should he perhaps start studying art history? But you couldn't study without your high school exams; besides, art didn't interest him at all for its own sake, but because of what was behind it.

On Ascension Day he took an excursion to the mainland, to Vicenza. With a mainly English group he visited the Teatro Olimpico, with its fairytale interior without an exterior, and all those other churches and palaces that he knew so well from the library at Groot Rechteren, under the P of Palladio. They were no longer framed by the silent white of the page, but turned out to be standing next to other buildings, in certain streets, full of the din of cars and scooters, where in the squares old gentlemen stood and talked indignantly to each other, and then walked on arm in arm, where fruit sellers cried and young pizza bakers tossed their spinning circles of dough in the air, to allow the laws of nature to do their work in the spirit of Galileo and Newton.

On the way back, the bus stopped at two other Palladian villas. First, just outside Vicenza, the Villa Rotonda: a vision in stone on top of a green hill, with its round central building another descendant of the Roman Pantheon, but now equipped with four entry doorways with staircases and Greek temple fronts, one in each direction — just as in families certain features suddenly recur double or fourfold.

There, walking across the marble, between trompe l'oeil frescos of pilasters and divine figures, making the interior look like an exterior, he first noticed the dark-blond woman in the party. While he looked at an illustration of Diana hunting with her breast bared and a black dog, he suddenly felt her eyes focused on him. In a long white dress, with her hair worn loosely up, and her head slightly bent, which made her smile and the look in her large brown eyes even more sensual, she was standing on the other side of the Rotonda, near a depiction of a swaggering Hercules. He found it unpleasant. It interrupted his concentration, and he tried to ignore it; but back in the bus, too, where he was sitting in the front seat, he noticed that she was constantly looking at the back of his head. She was fifteen or twenty years older than him, but even if she'd been young, he still wouldn't have liked it. Those kinds of things were not for him. He knew that for many boys and girls there was nothing else, that it existed mainly for Max and possibly for his father too; he was less sure about his Granny, and he didn't want to think of his mother at all in this connection. For him sexuality had as little meaning as sports — up to now at least. He felt it was something for people who wanted to reproduce, but he had no need. He was sufficient unto himself.

In the afternoon they drove from Padua along the provincial highway by the Brenta, lined with that unreal, poetic vegetation that only rivers create around themselves, which makes them sacred in innocent eyes. Not far from the river's mouth, as a conclusion to the excursion, they stopped at the Villa Foscari, nicknamed La Malcontenta. Because he felt overfed artistically, and also to escape the woman, he took only a quick look at the interior and then sat down on the grass under a weeping willow at the edge of the water.

He hadn't expected that she would come to him. Suddenly she sank down right in front of him, cross-legged, in a way that reminded him of the string puppet he had once had: when you pulled the string in its crotch, its arms and legs shot upward. She was sitting so close to him that he could smell her: a smell that reminded him of autumn leaves and which perhaps did not come from a bottle. Around her neck and wrists she had at least twenty gold chains and bracelets.

"Do you speak English?" she asked in English with a smile, but with a kind of German accent. When he sat up and nodded, she put a hand with long, slim fingers and red nails high on his thigh, no more than half an inch from his sex, and brushed her other hand through the hair on the back of his head. "Do you know how well that white lock of hair suits you?"

Before he could push her away, which he probably wouldn't have dared to do anyway, both hands had disappeared. Then her right hand came forward again.

"Marlene," she said. "Marlene Kirchlechner."

"Quinten Quist."

He shook hands with her and tried to withdraw his hand, but she kept hold of it.

"Your hand's tense," she said, still looking at him. "It's as though you don't really want to touch mine. Relax it."

At the same moment he realized she was right. He relaxed his muscles and only then felt the warm palm of her hand against his, which to his alarm produced warmth not only in his hand but in his whole body. She obviously saw what was happening, because as she let go of his hand, she leaned her head forward and looked at him with the same look as just now in the Villa Rotonda. Within a minute she had succeeded in confusing him completely. He wanted to hold her hand again and at the same time wanted not to want that. But the touching was suddenly over.

"How old are you, Quinten?"

"I'll be seventeen in two weeks."

She hesitated for a moment and looked at him. "Are you in Venice with your parents?"

"No," he said curtly. "I'm alone."

"So am I," said Marlene Kirchlechner. She lived in Vienna, she told him; she came here every year in May, to the place where she had been on her honeymoon with her dead husband — on the Lido in the Hotel Excelsior, always in the same suite, with a view of the sea. "What's stopping you?" she said as they sat together on the front seat as the bus drove across the embankment toward Venice, to the Piazzale Roma, the terminus for all motor traffic. "Come with me. There's a wonderful swimming pool; you won't find a pool in the whole of Venice. You can move in if you like. Where are you staying?"

Quinten realized that undreamt-of adventures were suddenly possible, as they were in the kinds of novels that Clara Proctor was always reading. Here was a mature, pretty, voluptuous woman, obviously also stinking rich, who wanted to take him under her wing — but at the same time he knew that it was not to be for him. He felt that he mustn't be carried away by chance meetings, although it wasn't clear what that would distract him from, because he had nothing special to do. He was simply messing around: he could just as well have been somewhere else.

When he said that he preferred to go back to his own room, she insisted on walking with him for a little while; she'd never been in Cannaregio, and she could take the water taxi back to the Lido. On the way she talked nonstop about herself, about her husband's vineyards in the Wachau on the Danube, which she now managed; fortunately she didn't ask him about his own circumstances. At the door of his hotel, under the laundry that hung like garlands from one side of the alley to the other, he was about to say goodbye; but she suggested having a drink somewhere first. A hearty Conegliano-Valdobbiadene prosecco, for instance, which went straight to your head: when you were in a place, you must always drink the local wine. Quinten never drank wine, but he was thirsty too.

Looking for a terrace, a rarity in this district, they emerged via a wooden bridge and a low, dark sottoportego onto the inner courtyard of the sixteenth-century ghetto, to which all later ghettos owed their name. The houses were taller than in the rest of the city and there were even a few trees, like almost nowhere else in Venice. By a round well with a marble lid they sat down on a bench. Most of the shutters were closed; in many plant tubs there were spinning paper windmills. Apart from the doves in the alcoves and on the weathered windowsills, there was not a living thing to be seen — and in the falling dusk they looked in silence for a while at the great silence that hung over the stones.

Suddenly Mrs. Kirchlechner put her cheek against his shoulder and began sobbing.

"What's wrong?" he said in alarm.

With her great eyes helplessly flooded, she looked up to him as if he were her father.

"I don't know what's got into me.. I'm in love with you, Quinten. The moment I saw you, it was like seeing a gold coin in the mud. At first I thought it was simply an impulse — I have those quite often; but now I realize that I obviously won't see you again. I can see that it's something completely different. I don't go for young boys at all, if that's what you're thinking perhaps. It's never happened to me. My husband was twice my age, and now I'm more than twice yours. Why aren't you twenty-six or sixty-six for all I care? Sixteen! It's impossible, I must be crazy!" Suddenly she stood up, took his face between her hands, and kissed him on both eyes. "Farewell, angel.. may things go well with you."

Before he could say anything, he saw her white figure waft across the campo, like a sheet that had freed itself from the clothespins, and disappear into the dark doorway.

He looked at the black hole in alarm. What havoc had he caused? Should he go after her? And what then? No, it was best like this of course. That kind of woman simply existed in the great wide world; you had to get used to it. While store shutters rattled in the distance as they were pulled down, he walked back to his hotel. He put his mouth under the tap and splashed water on his face with both hands. On his bed he was going to read some more of his guide, but he fell asleep almost immediately — and was visited not by the SOMNIUM QUINTI but by fire..

First he is living on the attic floor of a tall house, like those in the ghetto, where the square chimneys run along the outside walls. He calls out the window that the fire brigade should be summoned, at which everyone looks up and shrugs their shoulders. No problem. It'll be okay; just panicking over nothing. When the house is ablaze and all the beams have been transformed into architraves of fire, he turns out to be living somewhere in a basement. Suddenly smoke starts curling up there, too, between the slabs, and again no one listens to him, so everything goes up in flames. .

He was awakened by hunger. Outside it had grown dark; it was ten o'clock. He cracked his thumbs and got up with aching limbs. In a small restaurant near the Grand Canal he ate a plate of ravioli, surrounded by locals and gondoliers in striped tunics, everyone talking loudly in a language sometimes reminiscent of Italian. Now and then he had a vision of Marlene from Vienna. In the Excelsior, surrounded by Sikhs, Japanese magnates, and American oil barons, she was now of course eating lobster and caviar under crystal chandeliers; but it was as though his dream had already thrown up a barrier, relegating her to the past once and for all.

Thanks to the baron he was fortunately rich himself. He allowed himself a second espresso, put a five-hundred lire additional tip on the bill, and wandered into town for a little while.

In that deserted midnight Venice, with all the shutters closed, the terraces cleared away and no life anywhere, he stopped on a bridge over a narrow canal. To the left and right, weathered house walls with rainpipes rose up out of the motionless seawater; a little farther on, across a side canal, was a second bridge; at the end the view was blocked off by the refined back of a Gothic palazzo, which was of course really the front. He looked at the green seaweed-covered steps, which everywhere led down to the water from dark arches with barred gates and continued underwater. The complete silence.

Had his mother ever been here? His father? Max? Suddenly the silence filled with a scarcely audible rustling, and a little later a gondola appeared under the bridge he was standing on, the gleaming halberd on the prow. Three silent Japanese girls appeared, and then the gondolier, straightening and with the merest push steering the gondola slightly toward the side, where with an indescribably perfect movement — which formed a unity with the gondola, the water, the silence, the city — he propelled himself by pushing off from a house with his foot for a second to keep up speed.

At that moment Quinten saw a white glimpse of Marlene Kirchlechner on the other bridge, immediately disappearing when she realized that he had seen her. His eyes widened. While he slept she had been waiting for him all that time, had followed him to the restaurant, waited again, and again followed him. It was clear: he had to leave Venice at once — preferably this evening.

Maybe it was the sound of its name, Florence, that made him expect the town would be even more silvery and silent. But he found himself in a noisy, stinking cauldron of traffic that he had forgotten after five days in Venice. Moreover, if everything there was light and open, everything here was heavy, closed. The function of the sea, which protected Venice sufficiently, was here fulfilled by thick walls, colossal blocks of stone, bars, buildings like fortresses; the beauty was virtually only indoors, in palaces and museums. But exactly what distinguished Florence from Venice gave it a Citadel-like quality: that reconciled him a little with his disappointment. Because all the affordable hotels were full, he had to make do with a grubby hostel, where he shared a room with seven others, most of them students but also a few older men; apart from a bed he had only a chair to use, on which he could look at the crucifix above the door.

Surrounded by international snoring, he thought back for the first time to his room at Groot Rechteren. Or did it no longer exist? Had Korvinus gotten his hands on everything by now? Of course it wouldn't happen as quickly as that. He felt as if he had been away from home for months, but it was scarcely a week. He hadn't sent any message from Venice, and he now resolved to write to his grandmother as soon as possible. But not only did he not write a letter, even when he passed a stand with postcards on it — Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Pitti, Ponte Vecchio, Battistero — an uncontrollable revulsion took hold of him, which prevented him buying one and writing even "Greetings from Florence" on it.

He did, however, buy a series of cards in the Uffizi, to put on the chair next to his bed. In the cataract of art treasures that was poured out into that exuberant museum street, he was struck by an Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci: an angel who was approaching the Virgin Mary rather furtively, with his head bent and the guilty look of someone who knows that what he has in mind is no good. No wonder the Mary seemed to be thinking: "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Quinten had learned at high school that annuntiare meant "announce": the angel was going to announce to her that, at a later date, she would be impregnated by the Holy Ghost; but according to him there was something much more going on here than simply an "announcement"; this was the event itself. In a moment he was going to pounce on her. Because why wasn't Joseph there? Surely he had the right to know for certain that his fiancee had not deceived him with the window cleaner? Every woman could maintain that she had become pregnant out of pure piety. He began to look for Annunciations in the other rooms too, but in none of them was Joseph there. The sucker was obviously in the carpenter's workshop, where he was earning his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, making crosses for the Romans perhaps, while at home his bride-to-be was listening to the seductive angel patter and letting herself go with an envoy of God. Suddenly he now remembered a relief of the Annunciation on the front of the Rialto bridge in Venice. On the left-hand pillar, at the beginning of the arch, you saw the angel Gabriel, at the highest point of the bridge the dove that he had thrown up, and on the right-hand pillar Mary, waiting for the Holy Ghost in complete abandon. So that dove was no less than the angel's holy seed!

How he would have liked to talk to his father about this. Would he have agreed with him? Perhaps he would have agreed and called depictions of the Annunciation "religious peep shows"; perhaps he would have exclaimed in alarm: "The shameful thought will crush that head of yours!" He burst out laughing. The latter struck him as most probable.

Wandering among the sculptures in the Museo Bargello, on the second day of his stay, he was suddenly reminded of Theo Kern, who had of course been here too, to learn how his colleagues had removed the superfluous stone. Through the windows of the old palace he occasionally saw the Florentines in the street and in the smoky buses, and wondered how many of them had looked at these wonderful things here. Which of them knew that their city had invented the Renaissance? Perhaps the memory of most people in the world didn't extend much farther than their own lifetime; perhaps they didn't even realize that they were living a thousand years after a thousand years ago. Between their birth and their death, they were trapped in a windowless cell; for them everything was as it always had been. Of course that wasn't the case — but in a certain sense it was, because that's how it had been a thousand years ago for almost everybody, and two thousand years ago, and ten thousand. By simply living, working, having fun, eating, reproducing, they had in fact become much more eternal than the eternal masterpieces of all those unique individuals!

He stopped at an arbitrary sculpture and thought: Take that thing there. What was it? A beautiful, naked boy, with his right hand on his crown, his left hand on that of a great eagle, which was sitting at his feet and looking at him devotedly, BENVENUTO CELLINI, 1500–1571. Ganymede. He didn't know the myth, but that didn't matter; he knew in any case that there was an old story behind it. There was a story behind everything. Only someone who knew all the stories knew the world. It was almost inevitable that behind the whole world, with all its stories, there was another story that was therefore older than the world. You should find out about that story!

"Did you pose for that?"

He started. A tall man, who seemed vaguely familiar, looked at him and smiled, but he didn't like the smile. He was about fifty, balding, with dull eyes, a pointed nose, and thin lips; out of his sleeves, which were rolled up, protruded two pale arms with a golden chain around each wrist. Suddenly Quinten remembered who he was: he slept in the same room, on the other side of the gangway.

"No," he said gruffly.

"I saw your guidebook on your chair, that's how I know you're Dutch too. My name's Menne."

Quinten nodded, but he didn't intend to give his own name. What did this guy want? Had he followed him too, perhaps? Menne looked back and forth between him and the statue.

"You two look very like each other, do you know that? I'm sure you have little pointed nipples just like that, and beautiful legs. Except that your eyes are much more beautiful. And that little dick — I bet you've got a much bigger one than that. Am I right or not? Tell me honestly. ." Panting a little, he bent toward him. "Have you got hair on it yet? Do you play with it sometimes? I expect you do, don't you?"

Quinten couldn't believe his ears. What a dirty bastard! Without a word, he turned on his heel and left the room.

"Don't act so offended," the man called after him. "It was only a joke. Let's go and have a cappuccino."

As soon as Quinten got to the top of the steps, he immediately went down three steps at a time, outside, and ran criss-cross through a couple of alleyways to shake him off. It turned out to be unnecessary: of course because Menne knew that he would find him again in the hostel at the end of the day. When he went to bed at eleven o'clock Menne fortunately still wasn't back. Who knows; perhaps he'd gone.

But in the middle of the night he was awakened by a hand wandering around under the blanket between his legs. The guy was sitting on the edge of his bed, stinking of alcohol and with his fly unbuttoned, with a thick penis sticking out of it as blue-white as detergent, at which he was tugging with his other hand at a speed that reminded Quinten of the rod of Arendje's locomotive when he forced it along the rails at full speed. The thing was also a little bent — because of all that jerking of course.

"Get lost, you dirty creep!" he said.

"Oh darling, darling," whispered Menne. "Let me let me. It'll be over in a moment…"

He tried to put his lips on Quinten's, and for the first time in his life Quinten clenched his fist, lashed out, and hit someone as hard as he could with his knuckles. His lover got up with a groan and fell forward onto his own bed, where he stayed with his back heaving. Of course he was crying.

No one had noticed anything. For a few seconds Quinten listened in astonishment to the snores around him. He realized that for the second time he was being driven out of a city. He got angrily out of bed, dressed, packed his things in his backpack, and put the postcards with the Annunciations into his guidebook. He paid the porter, who was sitting on a brown imitation-leather bench reading the Osservatore Romano, and walked down the cool nocturnal streets to the station. In the hall, he sat down among scores of other young people on the ground and tried to get a little more sleep.

53. The Shadow

Even when Onno went shopping in the mornings, Edgar was in the habit of sitting on his shoulder. People no longer paid any attention in the shops. In the street the bird sometimes spread its wings, took off, and after one flap on Onno's crown flew up to a gutter or disappeared behind the houses, but it always came back. Onno was more attached to it than he was prepared to admit — perhaps to protect himself against the possibility that one day it might not come back. Imagine some bastard or other shooting it! Humanity after all contained that kind of scum, who should be ashamed at what they did to animals, none of which had any knowledge of evil and for that reason had to be killed.

"Of course there are decent people too," he said to Edgar in the street, without paying any attention to the looks that passersby gave them. "I estimate them at about eight percent of mankind. But another eight percent always and everywhere consists of the worst rabble imaginable, who are capable of anything. If they get the chance, the first thing they will do is to exterminate the good eight percent. The rest are neither good nor bad; they cut their coat according to their cloth. The first and the thirteenth in every hundred are the ones to watch; the other eleven don't matter. That means the first must make sure he gets them on his side, to keep the thirteenth down, because they could just as well follow him. In the best possible case number thirteen finally hangs himself, like Judas, or is hanged, like in Nuremberg, or he is put in front of the firing squad, like in Scheveningen; but always only after they have done their work, when it doesn't really matter anymore. My head's spinning again, Edgar. The grip of the first is gradually loosening; everywhere the thirteenth is probing his limits, seeing how far he can go, slashing the seat on a train here and there, then vandalizing another telephone booth. That's what's happening now, Edgar, in a world without God and with a Golden Wall that is about to collapse. I contributed to it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And when he appears in court, then a psychiatrist will probably immediately appear as devil's advocate and explain his behavior from causes. Wretched childhood, abused a lot, parents divorced. But causal explanations can never be justifications for his behavior. Man is not a machine, or simply an animal, like you — and I'm not even so sure about you. That's why behavior must be judged not causally but finally.

"Do you mind my taking a scientific tone for a moment? The moral judgment has disappeared from the causal description, and the residue is subsequently presented judicially as mitigating circumstances, resulting in a reduction in sentence. But that of course implies a denial of human freedom, and man is dehumanized by taking away his responsibility. I vaguely remember that there was something like that in the sentence on Max's father; the fellow had probably been betrayed in his childhood by his mother. Denial of punishment is inhuman punishment. Moreover, it's an unacceptable insult to people who have had an equally rotten childhood and who do not commit crimes. According to the same principle, they should actually be rewarded by the government. That would cost the state dear, but if this system is not introduced, then justice demands that psychiatrists be driven out of court, like the moneychangers from the temple. No, what the judge needs is an iron hand, like Gotz von Berlichingen. Unless you have the sweetest flesh of the Messiah, you can only fight evil brutally with evil. In the service of good you must necessarily and tragically embrace evil, but that's the price you must pay. 'No one can rule innocently,' said Saint-Just before he went to the guillotine himself."

The glances cast by the passersby at the eccentric, talking to himself with unintelligible guttural sounds, did not move him. He no longer belonged among people; all he did was think about them, like an ornithologist about birds. When he crossed a busy, square piazza, with full café terraces at the foot of orange-plastered houses, Edgar jumped to the ground and mingled with the pigeons, who gave way to his black figure in alarm.

"Good idea, Edgar. Let's inspect thirteen people here in the sun at our leisure."

He sat down on the steps of a fountain and put his plastic shopping bag next to him. From the basin rose a sculptured pedestal, with dolphins spouting water, on top of which was an obelisk, eighteen feet or so high, covered with hieroglyphics, crowned by a gold star, from which sprouted a bronze cross.

"Thirteen men, that is — as a gentleman I'll leave women out of it. You know what Weininger said: 'Woman is man's fault.' Hitler was a man, but through three elections he only came to power thanks to the lovelorn women of Germany; so let's shroud that in the democratic and feminist mantle of love. Take him," and he nodded toward a carefully groomed, graying gentleman with a newspaper under his arm and his coat draped loosely over his shoulders. "Decent man, chief accountant at a medium-sized bank, manager of some department or other. Reliable, bit vain, in any case not the first and not the thirteenth. And neither is that one over there," he said, and his eyes followed a man in overalls walking past and studying some machine component or other that had to be repaired or replaced. "He's doing his job. He's too busy to murder or perform miracles. But those two talking over there — one of them I don't like at all. That smile is no good. And that face is just a bit too pale and too smooth."

The man was in his late twenties and noticed immediately that he was being watched. Instantly, his smile vanished completely, as though a switch had been turned off, and a cold, threatening expression remained focused on Onno. Onno averted his gaze.

"Dammit, Edgar, if you ask me there's the thirteenth. But don't look, because he's dangerous. He's dangerous because he can control his emotions, like someone else's car; what he uses to steer them with is itself not an emotion. Hopefully, he'll get run over by a car today. Who have we over there?" he said, looking at a boy who crossed the square diagonally, stopped open-mouthed, and took in the building opposite. At the same moment Onno caught his breath. He began trembling and slowly stood up.

The Pantheon! There it was! Quinten felt as though what he was looking at was not real. The Roman temple of all the gods, twenty centuries old: gray and bare, scraped clean from top to bottom by barbarians, emperors, and popes, it stood there as something not only from a different time but from a different space — like sometimes during the daytime an alarming image loomed up from the dream of the preceding night.

MAGRIPPA L•F•COS•TERTIVM•FECIT

The Quadrata! There they were, those wonderful, inspired letters on the architrave above the eight pillars, under the two triangular pediments, which Palladio had studied so closely: Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, who had allegedly made this during his third consulate; but in reality it was the emperor Hadrian, as Mr. Themaat had taught him. He wondered how Mr. Spier was getting on there in his Pontrhydfendigaid.

To the left and right of the doorway and the round building behind with the cupola, grooves many feet deep had been cut down to Roman street level, which made the temple appear to be rising from the earth, like the erratic stones in Drenthe. At the front, he knew, the entrance steps were still buried below the asphalt. Slowly he walked along past the row of waiting horse carriages, toward the shadow of the high, rectangular portico, supported by another eight pillars — together making as many columns as he had years. A group of visitors was already waiting. A little later one of the bronze doors, over twenty feet high, was opened a fraction by two men, which required all their strength.

As he crossed the threshold, the colossal empty space took his breath away. As in the impenetrable interior of a crystal, the shadowless light hung on the blond marble floor, against the columns and alcoves and chapels, where the proud Roman gods had been replaced by humble Christian saints. The highest point of the cupola was occupied not by a keystone but by the blue sky, a round hole measuring almost thirty feet across, through which a diagonal beam of sunlight shone like an obelisk, producing a dazzling egg on a damaged fresco. The cupola with the hole in it reminded him of an iris with a pupil: the temple was an eye, which he was now inside. From outside, the hole must be black. The building was an observatory.

What had Mr. Themaat said again? That the Pantheon, though it might not be the building, because that didn't exist, was a "good second" and you could see it as a depiction of the world. Perhaps he had meant by that not simply nature, the earth, the moon, the sun the stars, but all the other worlds, such as for example those of numbers, geometrical figures, and music. For that matter the building was also a clock — a sundial, which indicated the time not with a shadow but with light itself. He went and stood in the middle of the space, directly beneath the opening, and took out his little compass. The entrance was due north.

He looked in the direction the needle indicated, where his attention was caught by a seedy figure by the bronze doors, who was staring at him. He was large and heavily built and was wearing a pair of dark glasses; on his shoulder sat a black crow, no, it was more like a raven. An unkempt gray beard hid the rest of his face too. His long hair had been gathered into a ponytail at the back; his grubby shirt was half open and hanging out of his trousers, exposing his navel; worn sneakers covered his bare feet. Quinten started. Not again, surely? In Venice the woman from Vienna, in Florence that sleazy type, and now a tramp — things were going from bad to worse. He felt himself turning away in irritation, but at that moment the ebony-colored bird flew off the man's shoulder, described a circle through the temple with wings flapping, sat for a moment on the ledge where the cupola rested on the rotunda, then flew up and disappeared croaking through the blue opening.

Everyone in the Pantheon watched it go. The Japanese quickly took photos, and Onno knew immediately that it would not come back. He had not intended to speak to Quinten; he just wanted to see him for a moment. He was about to call the bird back, but was frightened that Quinten would recognize his voice. Now he had not even said goodbye to Edgar — and suddenly he felt so utterly abandoned that he could not bear it.

When Quinten saw the shabby figure coming toward him, trembling and supporting himself on a stick, he would have preferred to run around him in a wide arc and dash outside; but he decided to tell him plainly that he wanted nothing to do with him — at least if he spoke French, German, or English — and then to make a dignified exit from the temple. When the man arrived opposite him, he took off his sunglasses.

Quinten felt himself changing into an image of himself. His breathing his heart, his brain, and his intestines — all came to a stop; for a moment he turned to marble as he looked into Onno's eyes, which he knew so well and through which at the same time someone completely different from his father seemed to be looking at him. Then they fell into each other's arms and for a couple of seconds stood hugging each other without moving.

"Dad…" sobbed Quinten.

Onno looked around, searching for something. "I have to sit down for a moment."

Hand in hand, they walked toward a wooden bench, a few yards away from the sarcophagus containing the bones of Raphael, where they stood and surveyed each other in silent astonishment. On the one hand Quinten had the feeling that it couldn't be true that his father was suddenly sitting there; on the other hand it was quite obvious that he had found him without really trying. How disheveled he was! It couldn't be from lack of money, and yet he looked completely down and out. Uncle Karel had been right: Auntie Helga's death had turned him into a dropout. Was what was happening really the right thing?

Onno, too, was completely confused. He realized that he had again undermined his whole life with his sudden impulse. By speaking to Quinten, he had done something irrevocable: it was of course impossible for him to say goodbye forever in a moment, and equally unthinkable that he should resume his earlier existence. At the same time he felt something like relief that everything was suddenly completely different from the past four years. When he had left Holland, Quinten had been a boy of twelve, and now there was almost a man sitting there. For the first time he was ashamed. He lowered his eyes and did not know what to say.

Quinten watched him and asked: "Shall I go?"

Onno shook his head. "Things are as they are," he said softly. "Quinten.. how are you? You look well. You've grown two heads taller."

"I suppose I have, yes."

"How long have you been in Rome?"

"Since yesterday afternoon."

"Are you here with the whole class? I came here for the first time when I was in school."

"I'm not in school anymore."

Onno, who had given up so much more, realized that he was in no position to comment; the very fact that he had not known about this deprived him of his right to speak. What's more, he heard a sort of decisiveness in Quinten's voice that dismissed all criticism in advance. He wanted to ask about Ada, but perhaps she was no longer alive.

"I still can't believe that we're suddenly sitting here, Quinten."

"Perhaps we aren't."

A smile crossed Onno's face. "Perhaps we're dreaming. Both having the same dream." He looked at him shyly. He had to inquire about Ada. "How's Mama?"

"The same, as far as I know. I haven't seen her." He didn't want to talk about his mother; he also suddenly felt irritated that his father had to ask about her. She might have been dead. Or had she died in the meantime perhaps? His granny still did not know where she could reach him. He'd want to know in a moment how Max was doing, and then he would have to tell him what had happened. To give the conversation a different turn, he asked, "Why are you using a walking stick?"

Onno put the stick on his lap and looked at it. It was a crudely trimmed, gnarled branch, with its unprotected tip transformed into a weathered brush; the curved handle had been artistically shaped into a serpent's head.

"Nice, isn't it? Found it in a secondhand shop." Slowly he turned to face Quinten and said, "I had a slight stroke, a brain hemorrhage eighteen months ago." And then he saw that Quinten was alarmed. "Don't worry, it's over now. But it happened very deep, in a dangerous place, in the thalamus, as it's called. Less than an inch farther forward, and I would have been in a wheelchair — the neurologist said I should consider myself lucky. Do you know that feeling? When you fall under a tram and lose your leg, you should be happy that you didn't lose both legs. Whenever something serious happens, you're supposed to count yourself lucky and be happy."

"Did it hurt a lot?"

"Not at all. In real life things are always different than you've imagined them. Shall I tell you about it?"

Quinten gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. He didn't really want to know, but he wanted to put off the question about Max for as long as possible.

One cold winter's day, said Onno, he was walking down the street not far from here. Suddenly he felt something hanging over his head. It was as if he were not completely there. His left hand began tingling, and a moment later his left foot. He felt as if he had a couple of stones in his shoe, but a minute later his whole left shoe was full of stones and all those stones together formed his left foot. After another minute he realized that something was seriously wrong. His whole left leg, his left side, and the left-hand half of his face had gone numb. Because it had all been on the left, he thought of his heart, but he had no pain in his chest, though he did have a little in his head, though not even enough to require an aspirin. Now and then he had to stop.

When he felt his pulse, his heart was racing so fast that he couldn't count. He tried to take off his left glove, but he never wore gloves; he realized that he was busy pulling his fingers. He tried to tell from the faces of the people who came toward him whether there was anything strange to be seen about him; but he didn't see anything special. And yet he knew they were now in a different world from him. He sat down on the edge of the pavement and a woman asked if she should call for an ambulance. He said it wasn't necessary, but she did anyway; a little later he was driven to the hospital with wailing sirens. There they pushed him into a kind of gigantic, turning oven, for taking brain scans. Three days later he was back home.

"All that happened was that I wasn't allowed to smoke or drink anymore. Well, three glasses of wine a day, but that makes you more or less a teetotaler. The left-hand side of my body is still a little numb, and I'm almost always giddy when I walk. Perhaps it will pass eventually; but as you get older, things usually don't pass. That's why I use a walking stick now. I can do without it, but I feel safer with one."

"Why did you suddenly have that hemorrhage?"

"I've a hunch about that. Do you remember I used to work on deciphering archaic script? I once published a theory about Etruscan, for which I received an honorary doctorate."

"Yes, Auntie Dol said the other day that you told her to send it back."

"Dol.." repeated Onno, and was silent for a moment. "How's Dol?"

"They live on Menorca now."

Onno looked in a melancholy way through the space, which was filling with tourists.

"You probably also know that after that Etruscan thing I turned my attention to the Phaistos disc, but I couldn't crack it. I went into politics to have a private excuse for not being able to work on it anymore. But things didn't work out in politics either, and when Auntie Helga died I didn't know what to do anymore. I wrote to you all about that. I wanted to go away for good — but where? Then I thought: I'm back where I started. Perhaps I won't want to do anything anymore, but you never know for sure. Nothing is final in life, apart from death — as you can see yet again now. So I thought: if ever I want to do anything else, then I must continue where I left off, with that disc. The script had still not been deciphered. Actually, my old notes were the only thing I took with me from Amsterdam, although I could scarcely understand them any longer. And since I had to go somewhere, that settled my destination. Rome. You won't find as much material anywhere else. Maybe in London, but it rains most of the time there."

"Of course!" cried Quinten. "I could have thought of that myself! I only thought of Crete."

Onno looked at Quinten. "Did you want to find me?"

"Yes, of course. Do you think that's crazy?"

Onno looked down. Somehow he must have been groggy from the blow all these years, like a boxer hanging on the ropes and being constantly pounded by his opponent, even though the referee with his bow tie occasionally stepped between them. He hadn't really admitted the thought of Quinten to himself. Since Quinten's birth he had told himself that though the boy might be physically the son of himself and Ada, he'd actually been Max and Sophia's son from day one. What a mistake! What a dreadful lie! It was as though from minute to minute more and more crusts were falling off him, as they did off a croute emerging from the oven.

"No, I don't think it's crazy." He looked at him again. "Did you visit Hans Giltay Veth?"

"Of course. But I wasn't any the wiser for that."

Onno was silent for a moment — but then he forced himself to say: "Do you forgive me, Quinten?"

Quinten looked straight at him with his azure eyes. "There's nothing to forgive."

It was as though Onno were sitting opposite his father — as though his son were his superior, and he could raise no objections.

"I was telling you what may have been the reason for my hemorrhage," he continued. "Those linguistic things were lying around in my room and I never looked at them again. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, I went to the market in the square around the corner from my place to get something to eat. I bought a piece of San Pietro, sunfish, I remember exactly; I can remember the fishwife wrapping it in a newspaper with her swollen red hands. I hadn't read a newspaper since I'd left Holland, but as I was unwrapping the fish at home, I suddenly saw my own name — spelled as Qiuts. When you're famous later and in the paper, you'll also notice that: it's as though the letters of your name jump off the page at you. The report was about my former rival Pellegrini, who was a professor here in Rome and had never been convinced by my Etruscan theory. In the past he had even written letters to Uppsala to block my honorary doctorate, as I heard from the vice-chancellor there. And I now read that in his old age he had been visiting his son's new country house in Tuscany, somewhere near Arezzo, and was walking through the garden when he suddenly fell into a hole in the ground. And what do you think? He'd landed in an Etruscan burial chamber. He had broken his hip, but the first thing he saw inscribed on a stela was a new bilingue—the same text in two languages, in this case Etruscan and Phoenician. From this it emerged that il professore islandese Qiuts had gotten it all wrong in any case. That meant there was virtually nothing of my life left."

"Except for me, that is."

"Yes," said Onno, looking away. "Except for you, of course. But nothing else. And I also knew that no one in the field would take me seriously again if I came up with a solution to the Phaistos disc. So I threw away all my notes, hundreds of pages, the work of years. What shocked me most perhaps was a remark of Pellegrini's. When the journalist asked him how on earth he had contrived to fall into that chamber of all chambers, the old villain said, 'A question of talent.' He was right. I had no talent. The following day there was that incident in my bedroom."

"In your bedroom? You just said it happened in the street."

"That's what thalamus means: 'bedroom,' 'bed,' 'marriage bed.' " Quinten looked at the dazzling egg: it had left the fresco, sunk slightly, and moved right, toward a chapel with a terracotta-colored Annunciation. The building had become crowded, but it was still just as quiet, as though the sound of the voices was being sucked like smoke through the opening at the top of the cupola.

Quinten sighed deeply. His father had been spared few things, and much should be forgiven him. Was that the same with everyone? Was that how life was? If everything finally came to nothing, what was the point of it? So was something like that waiting for him? The thought seemed ridiculous to him. Of course not! He didn't know what he was going to do, but once he had made a decision, then he would see it through to the end — nothing and no one would stop him: that was absolutely one hundred percent certain.

"Aren't you frightened that it'll happen again?"

"A stroke?" Onno shrugged his shoulders. "If it happens it happens. I'm not so worried about my body — I've always felt as if it belonged to someone else. A kind of pet." He glanced upward, at the disc of light through which Edgar had disappeared.

"And what do you do all day long?"

"Nothing. Sleep. Make notes. Think a bit. But everything I think is just as awful." He looked at Quinten. "I don't exist anymore, Quinten. I once read a story about a woman without a shadow, but I'm a shadow without a man."

That was it. Quinten could scarcely imagine it was the same man sitting there who in the past, in answer to the same question, would have shaken his index finger above his head like a prophet and cried, "I'm devoting myself to the spirit: the call of the abyss!" He wanted to ask him about the raven, which had just flown off through that blue pupil, but at the same moment Onno too opened his mouth. Quinten restrained himself and knew what was coming next.

"Is Max in Rome too?"

Quinten did not answer, but looked straight at him.

"Why aren't you saying anything?"

With a shiver, Quinten saw that Max's death was now getting through to his father even without words, like water trickling through rock.

"When?" Onno stammered finally.

"A few months ago."

"How?"

"Hit by a meteorite."

Without saying anything, Onno stared through the whispering space. Was it perhaps this news, the possibility of this news, from which he had fled four years ago, unable to bear that too? But now it sank in like a meal that he had eaten — perhaps because he had regained Quinten in place of Max? After a minute he took a deep breath and said: "Him too."

"What do you mean 'Him too'?"

"Lack of talent."

That evening in the youth hostel, unable to get to sleep, Quinten kept seeing a drawing from a book that he had once been given by Max for his birthday: one moment it looked like the outline of a vase, the next like the profiles of two faces looking at each other: space and matter were constantly changing places, matter became space, space matter. When he finally fell asleep, his father's face had disappeared, and his own too — only what was between them remained: that vase, filled with liquid air, blue water close to absolute zero. .

54. The Stones of Rome

The following morning Quinten went to the address that Onno had given him. The Via del Pellegrino was a tall, narrow, winding street that led into the Campo dei Fiori, a large square where there was a market. In the corner near a cafe there was a large heap of rubbish, but it wasn't a slum; there were orange and red plastered housefronts, lots of shops with secondhand furniture alternating with displays of plastic kitchen equipment, a piano repair workshop, a small grocer's.

Opposite a shop selling clocks there was a covered passage, hung with mirrors in gold frames; flanked by two ancient weatherbeaten columns, the greater part of which must be in the ground, the gateway led to an intimate courtyard, with plants in large pots and parked scooters and motorbikes around it. Under an array of drying laundry, a carpenter was at work; from the open windows came the sound of voices and music. Quinten took it all in, wide-eyed. So this was the point on the globe that he had been looking for all those years and which had been here all the time. Now that he was here, he found it incomprehensible that he had not known before that here was where he should have gone.

Via the outside staircase that his father had described to him he reached a very drafty stairwell, filled with the noise of playing children, constantly interrupted by mothers calling out "Paolo!" or "Giorgio!" at intervals. On the top floor the door to his father's room was half open. He stood shyly on the threshold.

"Dad?"

"Entrez!"

Onno was leaning forward at a sink brushing his teeth, his torso bare. His long hair was loose, his beard disheveled: it was now even more obvious how much weight he had put on.

"Good morning," he said into the small shaving mirror, with white tooth paste foam on his lips. "I'd like to say make yourself comfortable, but you'll find that a problem here."

The disorder came as no surprise to Quinten. The bed also served as a wardrobe; undefined rubbish bulged out of cardboard boxes; the chaos around a gas ring in the corner of the room scarcely suggested a kitchen. Nowhere was there a telephone or a radio, let alone a television. He glanced out the attic window above the desk. A rippling sea of rust-brown tiles, television aerials, church towers silhouetted against the deep blue sky. In the distance he could just see the gigantic angel on the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, on the other side of the Tiber. The windowsill was covered in a thick layer of bird droppings.

"What a mess it is in here. Shall I tidy up?"

"There's no point. But go ahead and throw everything away."

They said no more about Max. While Onno told him about Edgar, who had kept him company in recent weeks, Quinten cleared the table, filled two waste-disposal bags with rubbish, and gathered up the dirty clothes that were lying everywhere.

"Why did you call him Edgar?"

"After Edgar Allan Poe, of course. He wrote a famous poem called 'The Raven.' " He stood up, looked in the round mirror that hung on a nail against the wall, and said: " 'Other friends have flown before — on the morrow he will leave me as my Hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said, 'Nevermore.' But he did leave me and I've got a feeling that he won't be back. Perhaps he was frightened by the Pantheon. But I've already come to terms with it, because I have you back in his place." And in exchange for Max, he thought, but he kept that to himself.

Each felt the other's uncertainty about the new situation, but neither could find words to talk about it. They took the washing to the laundrette, a couple of houses along, and sat down on the cafe terrace on the corner. In the middle of the crowded, rectangular square stood a somber statue of a monk with his cowl covering his head.

"Who's that?" asked Quinten.

"Giordiano Bruno."

Quinten nodded. "Who made the universe infinite."

"Did Max tell you that?"

"No, Mr. Verloren van Themaat."

"And you remembered that."

"Yes, why not? I hardly ever forget anything."

Onno looked at the statue for a while, lost in thought.

"That's the spot where they burned him as a heretic." He pointed with his stick at the crowd between the stalls. "Do you know what all that is? All that is also what it is not."

"I don't understand."

"The world will now always also be the Max-less world."

Quinten knew that Max had meant more to his father than to him, that long ago there had been a friendship between them of a kind that he had never had or would ever have with anyone. He looked at his father out of the corner of his eye. His head had sunk slightly forward; there was something elusive about the closeness of the hairy face with the sunglasses, as if at the same time it were too far away to reach.

The waiter came out of the cafe and greeted Onno like an old acquaintance, calling him "Signor Enrico." As he wiped the tabletop with a damp cloth, he glanced at Quinten with slightly raised eyebrows.

"This is my son, Mauro," said Onno in Italian. "Quintilio."

Mauro shook hands with him, without the ironic expression disappearing from his face. It was clear that he only half believed it; the old eccentric had obviously taken up with a rent boy, on the Via Appia — but he didn't begrudge him that.

"Everyone knows me here as Mr. Enrico," said Onno, when Mauro had gone inside. "Enrico Delius," with a diffident note in his voice. "They think I'm an Austrian from the Tyrol."

Quinten nodded again with an expression that seemed to say that it was all quite natural. "That Mauro gave me a rather funny look." He told his father about the advances made to him in Venice and Florence, and Onno asked:

"Didn't you leave some great love behind in Holland?"

"No," said Quinten curtly.

That didn't exist for him, and he didn't want to talk about it. Onno was about to say that he should keep it that way, since every love ended inexorably in heartbreak; but he decided not to encumber Quinten with his own gloom. That belonged not to the beginning but to the end of a life. They sat in silence and looked at the swarming activity in the market.

When the waiter put down caffe latte and croissants at their table, Onno said: "I suddenly fancy rissoles again."

"I like these much better. If only Granny could see us sitting down to breakfast like this."

"Have you already let her know that we've met?"

"No. I haven't written at all yet."

"Perhaps you should keep it to yourself for now."

"Why?"

"I don't know.. otherwise your uncles and aunts will get to hear of it, and I'm not sure I want that yet."

Quinten nodded. He was also glad to be able to share a secret with his father.

Onno rested his elbows on his knees and dipped his bread in the coffee. He still felt at a loss, but suddenly he asked: "What would you say to moving in with me, Quinten? I don't know how long you plan to stay in Rome, but it's ridiculous being stuck in a hotel somewhere when you can live with me, isn't it?" When Quinten looked up in astonishment, he went on: "Let's buy a camp bed. You can pick up your things, and then that problem's solved."

A broad smile appeared on Quinten's face. This was it at last: he was living with his father!

He had never been with Onno for so long at a stretch before. Now they went into town together every day. Entering St. Peter's Square for the first time, Quinten was struck by the obelisk in the center of Bernini's embracing colonnades, more than by the awe-inspiring front of the basilica, which also obeyed the Pantheon principle.

"Well, what do you make of that?" said Onno. "An Egyptian obelisk in the heart of Christendom. This is where they crucified Peter upside down, in the circus of Nero. You find obelisks everywhere in Rome."

"Perhaps," said Quinten, "that might be connected with the Egyptian exile that Moses liberated the Jews from."

"Who can say?" said Onno, laughing. "But that connection can only be grasped with your inimitable way of thinking."

Quinten looked at the long shadow cast by the obelisk, like a sundial, and then at the sides without inscriptions. "There's nothing on them. There should be something written on them."

Onno focused his eyes on the smooth granite, pointed at the top with his stick, and then a little lower with each word:

" 'Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa Heroe men ab mad kheroe sa Ast auau Asar.' That means—"

"I don't want to know. It sounds much too beautiful for that."

Everything became new again for Onno, too. In the past he had been in Rome repeatedly — the last time as a minister of state: preceded by police outriders with blaring sirens, a government car had borne him straight through all the red lights from the airport to the Quirinal; but since he had been living there, he had not left his own district.

In the colossal basilica he helped Quinten translate the gigantic words that stood in a circle in the cupola above the high altar:

TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM

AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM

"At first sight it seems to say: 'Thou art Peter and on this Peter I shall build my church.' But you need to know that petra is a Greek word meaning 'rock.' Peter's grave is supposed to be under this altar, and hence the church is built on it — not only this building, but the Catholic Church as a whole. The popes regard themselves as his successors."

They visited the Vatican museums and the precious shrine of the Sistine Chapel, where they were allowed to talk only in whispers but where the cardinals behind their Golden Wall of course screamed and shouted when they had to elect a new pope from among their number, at least to the extent that they had not nodded off to sleep dribbling. On seeing Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, which had emerged in bright colors from the dark-brown candle smoke of ages, Onno suddenly remembered the neon Communist version on the Rampa in Havana eighteen years before, when everything had begun. But he did not mention that.

"Do you think Adam had a navel?" asked Quinten, as they came back out. "He didn't have a mother, did he?"

"It's just as well you're not a Dutch vicar. They've branded each other as heretics on that kind of issue for centuries."

Quinten also took him to all kinds of places where he had never been, such as the Aventine, "to look through the keyhole." In a quiet district, on the edge of the hill that dropped steeply down to the Tiber, there was an oblong excrescence from the street with walls on three sides, shaded by cypresses and palms. The Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta could scarcely be called a square; the space was more like an unfinished temple.

There was no one there, and Quinten was immediately seized by a shudder, whose origin he knew: the Citadel. Onno saw that something was preoccupying him, but did not ask him about it; Quinten simply said that it was a design of Piranesi's. While Onno sat down on a stone bench to allow his dizziness to pass a little, Quinten started climbing along the wall, which was twelve or fifteen feet high, glancing at his compass. On the long southern side and the shorter western side it was interrupted by obelisks, stelae, pla-quettes, and mysterious ornaments in such a strange kind of style, or non-style, that he could scarcely believe his eyes. Lyres, globes, points, helmets, crosses, swords, wings, panpipes. Set in the northern side, the wall was the gateway to the monastery of the Knights of Malta, a broad theatrical structure that at first sight reminded him of Palladio, but on second sight was as odd as the other constructions, with its Manneristic ornaments, blind alcoves like windows, and the row of great-urns on the roof.

The sacred domain exuded the atmosphere of the Carceri, which Mr. Themaat had shown him, Piranesi's endless dungeons, but at the same time that of his dream — and all of it now tightly compressed in an oblong pattern. He bent down and looked through the famous keyhole of the gate. In the distance, exactly along the axis of a long, carefully trimmed hedge of laurel trees, one could see the cupola of St. Peter's. Yes, of course. For many people that was "the center of the world," but not for him.

He was about to wave to his father, but when he saw him sitting there on the other side with his stick, like a homeless alcoholic who ate out of trash cans, he checked himself. The abandoned square lay in the subdued light of the spring sun. Destiny had finally brought them together, but now it had happened, it was as if he had more contact with the stones of Rome than with his father. Even in the evenings in the Via del Pellegrino they said little, and never spoke about the past; all of that was somehow on the other side of a barrier that neither of them wanted to surmount. And yet he knew for certain that they had to stay together, like two companions who were at each other's mercy.

They looked at each other. There was something remorseless about that boy, thought Onno. Something inhuman. A touch of interstellar coldness.

On the Piazza Venezia a policeman in a white helmet was directing the traffic with such fascinatingly immaculate body language that Onno was reminded of his theory of the physicality of power. But so as not to let himself be intimidated, he himself raised his gnarled stick in the air at the edge of the pavement and, laughing all the while, they made their way to the other side through the stream of speeding cars, as if through a trumpeting, stampeding herd of elephants. A few minutes later they had descended into the silent pit of the past.

The Forum Romanum, the extended strip of white and reddish-brown ruins, fragments, and pieces, weeds, pillars broken in two, boulders, holes, remains of walls, all crushed by the flat hand of time, presented Onno with a gloomy image of his own life — but it had an entirely different effect on Quinten. The area caused a strange agitation in him, such as other boys might feel at an air show, when formations of jet fighters swooped low overhead. Again it reminded him of the Citadel, but now of what remained in his memory after he awoke. He was getting close to something; somewhere, something was waiting for him! But where? What was it? By the edge of the open cellar the traffic roared along the Via dei Fori Imperiali; on the other side rose the somber, threatening slope of the Palatine, where the imperial palaces had stood; the sun revolved around the column of Phocas and for hour after hour they wandered through the delicate ruins.

After the frothy lightness of Venice, which floated like a cork on the water, and after the massive reticence of Florence, the things here were so heavy that they had sunk many feet deep into the ground. As he listened to Onno, with the guidebook of the Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato in his left hand, the index finger of his right hand on the page, the stones ordered themselves before Quinten's eyes, tugging and shifting. Comitium. Regia. An ugly, badly proportioned brick building, which obscured the triumphal arch of Septimus Serverus and definitely needed clearing away, suddenly turned out to be the Curia, the Roman senate; according to the guidebook, the original bronze doors were in the basilica of the Lateran.

"What's the Lateran?" he asked.

"In the Middle Ages the popes lived there, before they moved to the Vatican."

"We have to go there too."

"Of course," said Onno. "Anything you say. It's not far — over there, behind the Colosseum. The original palace no longer exists, though."

With each step they took along the great stones of the Via Sacra, the Holy Way, the Forum was in a different century. Every broken column, Onno told him, every fragment of brickwork, every piece of marble that lay in the sun on the dry grass had been constantly pushed backward and forward in time in thousands of publications, until it had been assigned its place in history: the beginning of the millennium, third century A.D., sixth century B.C, Renaissance, medieval. A monstrous ruin, which Quinten had taken for something from the Second World War, suddenly turned out to be the basilica of Maxentrus. The three remaining columns of the temple of Vespasian, with a fragment of architrave still on them: Onno pointed to it with his hand, and said it was the perfect logo for classical antiquity. The round temple of Vesta cut vertically in two and half blown away by time. The triumphal arch of Titus, which spanned the Via Sacra at its highest point, opposite the Colosseum.

Onno pointed out to Quinten a frieze in the tunnel of the arch, which depicted the return of Titus's triumphant troops from Jerusalem, after the conquest of the city in A.D. 70. Titus was the son of the emperor Vespasian, whom he succeeded a few years later. Despite the damage, the relief was a masterly depiction of the soldiers, marching into the Forum along the same street where they were now standing, full of movement and as if the music and hurrahs could still be heard, above their heads the trophies from the destroyed Jewish temple: the silver trumpets, the golden table for the shew-bread, the golden, seven-branched candelabra.

"What's shewbread?"

"A sacrifice," said Onno. "Twelve round unleavened loaves, in two piles of six. They were replaced every Sabbath and the old ones were then eaten by the priests. You find the same thing in Christianity in a different form. Christ said that he was holy bread himself."

"Really? Did he say he was made of bread? Then I suppose he had to be eaten too?"

"That's right. It's still the climax of the Catholic mass."

"But then the Catholics are cannibals!"

"That's what your grandfather always said, but cannibals eat people, while the Catholics regard themselves as God-eaters."

"Perhaps it's something like that with cannibals too."

"Quite possibly. But because the Catholics ultimately only eat bread, not people, they're more like sublimated cannibals — or perhaps one should say transubstantiated cannibals. The strange thing, though, is that you don't find that magic eating-of-the-god figure in Judaism. That seems to derive from Egypt, from the cult of Osiris, who by the way also rose from the dead. In the temple of Jerusalem the only other sacrifices were lambs, and Christ said that he was also a sacrificial lamb. Besides that, he compares his own body with the temple itself."

"The building obviously made a big impression."

"You could say that."

If the Pantheon was an image of the cosmos, thought Quinten, the temple of Jerusalem was obviously an image of man. Together they were everything.

"And the candelabra?"

"That was the Jews' holiest object. The menorah. God told Moses personally how it should be made."

"And the Romans simply took it away with them?"

"As you can see. Though it's not quite accurately depicted here, but for some reason Israel chose this version as its state symbol."

Quinten looked at the thing, which was almost the same height as he was.

"Where is it now?"

"No one knows. Probably stolen, by the Vandals in the fifth century. They were a Germanic tribe that had founded a state of its own in North Africa. That's where our word vandals comes from." As he said it, he suddenly felt a great surge of weariness.

Separate capitals, flagstones, worn steps, inscriptions, caves. . wildcats everywhere, stalking each other. Once this had been the center of the world, thought Quinten, to which all roads led, not only Titus's road from Jerusalem, but now his own from Westerbork too — but that was something different than the center of the world. Or not? He stopped on the other side of the Forum by the "black stone," Lapis Niger.

A secret! No one knew the meaning of that square block of marble down there in a hollow, as if in a navel. According to his guidebook, it might be connected with the overthrow of Etruscan domination. Perhaps it was a grave: the grave of Romulus, the mythical first king, from the eighth century B.C. The spot had been sacred since the time of Julius Caesar. He descended a few steps, further into the past with each step, and knelt down by a weathered oblong stone beneath the Lapis Niger, in which there were remnants of archaic inscriptions. He wanted to ask his father if he could read them, but Onno had stayed at the top.

"Dad?" he shouted. "Come over here. What does it say?"

Onno looked down at him, wiping his brow with a sleeve. "Probably some ritual law or other. It's very early Latin, but almost unreadable. Just that whoever defiles that spot is cursed. So come on up quickly."

"Why can't you come down for a moment?"

"I'm aware that you've inherited it from me, Quinten, but I don't want anything to do with writing. You must understand that. Let's go. I'm dizzy."

The following day, Whitsunday, the weather changed. Dark purple clouds drifted quickly over the city and in the distance there was now a faint rumbling. After breakfast at Mauro's, Quinten wanted to go immediately to San Pietro in Vincoli, rushing as though he had an appointment for which he must not be late. The medieval church stood on the site of the Roman prefecture, where Peter and Paul had been chained, on a silent, enclosed square not far from the Forum; the black entrance reminded him of a mousehole.

Although there was no service in progress, the pews were full of people absorbed in prayer. He looked around in the semidarkness — and in the right-hand aisle he suddenly discovered the figure with whom he had had an appointment for so long. Speechless, he looked at the remnant that remained after Michelangelo had carved away the superfluous marble: the horned Moses, which he knew so well from the photograph in Theo Kern's studio fastened to a beam with a drawing pin, full of strength and much more colossal than he had imagined, the expression on his face much more furious, his veined hand clawing agitatedly at his beard. At a stand with a telephone on it a boy and girl stood with their ears almost touching, the receiver between them, and looked at the seething figure.

"He's bloody angry," said Quinten softly.

Onno had to laugh. " 'Wrathful,' it's called, and he had reason to be."

"Why?"

Onno looked at him with something like alarm. "Do you know anything about the Bible?"

"Only a bit. Almost nothing about the Old Testament."

"Doesn't matter. That's what your father's there for, he knows it by heart — at least, he used to, thousands of hours of Bible reading by my father and at school and at catechism class made sure of that. You obviously know at any rate that Moses led the Jewish people out of exile in Egypt. After that the refugees wandered through the desert for forty years, looking for the promised land. At the very beginning of that period, Jahweh had given him all sorts of instructions on Mount Horeb — like for example about that seven-branched candelabra that you saw yesterday on the triumphal arch of Titus. Finally he was given—" Suddenly there was a flash of light in the church, followed immediately by a loud, violent clap of thunder, which rumbled away over the city like an iron ball as big as the cupola of the Pantheon. Onno looked at Quinten in astonishment and said, "That's very appropriate."

Quinten didn't seem to understand what he meant. "What was he given finally?"

"Finally he was given the Ten Commandments, which Jahweh had written on two stone tablets with his own finger. Come on, you've heard of the Ten Commandments, I hope? The Decalogue?"

"Of course. 'Thou shalt not kill.' "

"That's immediately an incorrect, Christian translation. 'Thou shalt not murder' is what it says: lo tirtsach. Killing is allowed, under certain circumstances. But anyway, he was gone for more than a month. The Jews thought something had happened to him and had started worshiping a golden calf instead of Jahweh. It made Moses so furious that he dashed the stones to pieces. That's the moment that Michelangelo depicted."

Quinten looked at the tablets under Moses' arm, which he had always taken to be folders, like the ones in which Theo Kern kept his drawings.

"And then?"

"Well then, of course, he had to go back up again, with two new tablets, which he had to pay for himself this time. If I remember correctly, it's not completely clear in the Bible whether God wrote the Ten Commandments the second time himself or whether he simply dictated them. Let's assume he did that. If I were a writer, I wouldn't feel like doing the same thing twice."

"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 Gothic 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 disappointment — 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:

NON EST • IN • TOTO • SANCTIOR • ORBE • LOCUS

He beckoned his father. "How would you translate that?" he whispered.

"Quinten," said Onno sternly. "You've been to secondary school for five years. You can do that perfectly well."

"There is not," Quinten tried, "at all.. more sacred.. world place?"

"Compelling prose. Of course you could also say: 'Nowhere in the world is there a more sacred spot.' Just because those popes were here? That seems slightly exaggerated."

Quinten pointed out to him the great icon, which stood on the altar: a triptych with opened side panels. The scene could scarcely be distinguished in the dim light, but he told his father what he had just read: the image of the most holy savior on the central panel, acheiropoeton, had been painted not by a human hand but by an angel. Only the head painted on silk had not been covered by gilded, heavily worked silver, but that head was not the original one; that was underneath. The panel was covered by a semicircular canopy, crowned by two gilded angels.

"Yes, Quinten," said Onno with a laugh. "We're not in Holland here." He put his hand on the bars. "To my taste it's more like a torture chamber here. Look at this, between those turned columns above the altar: there are also two barred windows. Of course from there the holy fathers were watched as they sat praying. And the bottom part of that altar itself is also all bars. Look at those locks."

Quinten looked at the padlocks, which he had not yet noticed. The top one was a gigantic iron thing, a sliding padlock, as large as a loaf — the moment he saw it, he was overcome by alarm. Where was he? Was he dreaming? Was he in his dream? He looked at his father with his eyes wide.

"What's wrong?" asked Onno in alarm. "You've gone as pale as a ghost."

"I don't know. ." he stammered.

Was that vanished Lateran palace his Citadel? Was he there? Those steps, four times seven steps, that chapel, his mother… In confusion, he turned away from the bars and for the moment met the glance of an old woman, who had mounted the twenty-eighth step, stood up groaning, crossed herself, smiled at him for a moment, and, rubbing one thigh, went to the other staircase.

"Let's go," said Onno. "It's unhealthy here. You have to eat something."

Quinten shook his head. "That's not why. ." He could not possibly tell his father what was going on inside him, because that was a deep secret. "Perhaps it's not that chapel which is behind bars, perhaps we're the ones who are behind bars… He looked around him wide-eyed. "I know for certain that something very strange is going on, I can't say why, but I must and I will get to the bottom of it."

Onno gave him a searching look for a few seconds. Suddenly there was a hard glint in Quinten's eyes. Onno nodded, leaned on his stick, and looked around as though he were searching for something too. His dizziness was more intense than usual; perhaps it was because of the steps.

"I don't know what you're getting at, but something strange has struck me too in the meantime."

"What then?"

"That chapel is called Sancta Sanctorum, isn't it?" And when Quinten nodded, "Precisely, and I don't really understand why."

"Why not?"

"Well, it means Holy of Holies."

"Stands to reason."

"But that expression doesn't occur at all in the Christian religion."

"In which one does it occur, then?"

"Only in Judaism."

56. Biblical Scholarship

"How does it occur there, then?"

"Let's not stand here," said Onno, "where those people can see us."

They walked back. On the left of the Sancta Sanctorum, where there was a Renaissance chapel with two small altars, named after San Silvestro, they sat down in one of the dark-brown choir pews, which occupied the three walls. Onno saw that Quinten could scarcely wait to hear what he had to say; his otherwise gentle face was as taut as a sail in a storm. He could not understand, and it alarmed him. Perhaps he should have kept his observation to himself.

"What's gotten into you suddenly, Quinten?"

"Tell me!"

Amazed that someone should not know such a thing, Onno explained to him that in Judaism the Holy of Holies was a space in the former temple of Jerusalem. That was an oblong complex, consisting of three parts — or, actually, of four. First there was the court, where no Gentiles were allowed, only Jews — that is, Jewish men. There was the burnt-offering altar. The entrance to the actual temple building was flanked by two pillars: Jachin and Boas.

Oblong? Like his mother's bed? Hadn't he talked to Mr. Themaat about that?

"Pillars with names on?" he asked, thinking for a moment of the two columns on the piazzetta in Venice. "Why was that?"

Onno sighed. "Sometimes I amaze myself with my knowledge, but I still don't know everything. But I do know how you can look everything up, and that's a very useful alternative to knowing everything. When you went in," he continued, leaving the pillars for what they were, "you entered the dimly lit sanctum via a doorway — at least if you were a priest; otherwise you weren't allowed in. In that sanctum stood the incense-offering altar and the seven-branched candelabra and the table with the shewbread on it. The back room was in the shape of a cube, with a great curtain, or veil in front of it. Inside it was always completely dark. That was the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was allowed to enter once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement."

Quinten stretched his back in excitement. "It's like the setup here! Outside on the square there is that obelisk of Thutmoses, so that's the court; then there's a doorway; then the Holy Stairs, so that's the sanctum; and then the Sancta Sanctorum! It isn't a cube, but it is a square."

"That's precisely the odd thing about it," said Onno, grimacing slightly. "In Christianity the Holy of Holies is never anything architectural, as with the Jews; Christians use that concept only symbolically. For example, in the gospels it says that in the temple the veil between the sanctum and the Holy of Holies was rent at the moment that Jesus died—'split open,' it actually says in Greek — and that was explained by saying that Christ through his crucifixion and resurrection had made the Holy of Holies, that is Heaven, permanently accessible to everyone, as a kind of super high priest. For Christians it is never an earthly building."

"And in that Jewish Holy of Holies? What was in that?"

"The ark of the covenant."

A priest shuffling past glanced at them, put a finger to his lips, and disappeared through a small door between the choir stalls.

"What was that?" asked Quinten softly.

With a sigh Onno looked at him and said: "On the one hand I think it's dreadful that young people nowadays know almost nothing anymore; on the other hand I consider you fortunate that you no longer have to carry around all that ballast with you. But obviously nature will out. The ark of the covenant was a golden box, the most sacred thing that the Jews possessed: something like the throne of Jahweh. In a certain sense it was actually Jahweh himself."

"And yesterday you said that the candelabra was the most sacred object of the Jews."

"That was the case at the time of Vespasian and Titus. Come on, let me explain the whole thing to you at once, then."

Onno raised one finger of his left hand and three on his right and said that Quinten must distinguish four things: the tabernacle and the three successive temples in Jerusalem. When Moses was given the Ten Commandments in the wilderness, Jahweh also gave him the responsibility of making a tabernacle, with all its dimensions precisely noted. At that time it was only a collapsible tent, which they could take with them on their wanderings, but it already consisted of a court, a sanctum, and a Holy of Holies. Moses was also told exactly what appearance the ark should have; and it could all be looked up in the Bible. On the golden lid there were two golden angels with outspread wings, facing each other. To one side there were golden rings for two sticks so that the box could be carried with them. A few hundred years later, in approximately 1000 B.C., King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem according to the same principle. In the Holy of Holies in it, the ark was flanked by two huge angels fifteen feet high, again with outspread wings.

"What had happened to those first two angels?"

"I don't know, Quinten," said Onno, and sighed again. "Listen a moment. The temple of Solomon was laid waste by Nebuchadnezzar, and from that moment on the ark disappeared. Later again, in the sixth century B.C., the second temple was built on the same spot, that of Zerubbabel — without an ark, that is. That building fell into disrepair; Herod demolished it and built the third temple. Jewish tradition, however, makes no distinction between the second and third temples, since the rabbis did not accord Herod the honor, because he collaborated with the Romans. For them the third is still the second, renovated by Herod into a huge monster, again on the same spot. But that temple existed for no more than a few years: it was destroyed by Titus, as you know. It appears from eyewitness reports that the Holy of Holies was empty at that time too."

"That can't be right," said Quinten, pointing with his index finger to the two small altars, behind which was the Sancta Sanctorum; "because the ark of the covenant is inside."

Onno looked at him for a couple of seconds speechless.

"That's the stuff!" he said with a laugh. "Generations of theologians, rabbis, historians, and archaeologists have confirmed that the ark has vanished since the Babylonian exile, but Professor Doctor Quist, M.L., M.E. knows better. Listen, I agree it's odd that this chapel is called the Sancta Sanctorum, but perhaps we shouldn't take it too literally."

"The chapel isn't just called that, it also says that there isn't a holier place in the whole world. There's nothing figurative about that."

"All true. But how do you explain, then, that on the triumphal arch of Titus the candelabra can be seen, and the table with the shewbread, but not the ark? If Titus had taken that, too, then surely it would have been depicted at the very front?"

"Well, there could be a reason for that, couldn't there?"

"Such as?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know.. perhaps Titus and Vespasian were a little frightened of that God of the Jews and it seemed safer not to make too much fuss about the ark."

"Not such a stupid idea in itself," said Onno with a small movement of his head. "It's difficult for us to imagine — we are the heirs of that Jewish monotheism that recognizes only one God and none other; in fact that's even the content of the First Commandment. However, when the Romans defeated an enemy, they not only imprisoned their soldiers, but sometimes they incorporated their gods into their own pantheon. But suppose it's as you say, what happened then?"

"Well, it's quite logical," said Quinten. "Titus took the ark, but didn't show it in the procession. Then Vespasian hid it in the imperial palace, after which Constantine later gave it to the popes in deepest secrecy. They then hid it behind bars somewhere here. And that's also the reason why the chapel had to be spared when the Lateran was demolished."

"Not a bad solution," nodded Onno. "But in that case that architect, Domenico Fontana, must have known about it — otherwise he wouldn't have quoted the temple in this building with the Scala Santa. No, of course he knew nothing himself, but his patron, Sixtus V, did."

"Of course."

"Wasn't that terribly risky, in combination with the name of the chapel and that inscription? Wouldn't that have given someone the clue that the ark of God is here?"

"Have you heard about something, then?"

"No, it's not that," said Onno, and was silent for a moment. "It's true, some ideas are so obvious that you can scarcely believe that no one has hit on them before. For centuries everyone believed that the Iliad was a myth; but with Homer in hand Schliemann simply started digging and immediately found Helen's Troy. He was obviously someone just like you. If only we had that historioscope of yours, we could simply check it in the past." He looked at Quinten in amusement. "Have you any idea what it would mean if what you're saying were true?"

"What do you mean?"

Onno turned to him. "The ark, Quinten! The whole world would be turned on its head if it suddenly emerged that it still exists and is here in Rome. That could have some very strange consequences."

But that aspect didn't interest Quinten. Lost in thought, he stared at the wall behind which was the Sancta Sanctorum and asked: "How large was that ark?"

"I'm sorry, I can't remember off the top of my head. Moses on Mount Horeb remembered hundreds of measurements and specifications without noting them down, but even I haven't got a memory like that."

"But we can check it."

"Of course, everything can always be checked. You just say the word. It's all in the Torah."

"In the what?"

"In the Torah. The Law. The Pentateuch, in Greek. The first five books of the Bible, which Moses is supposed to have written: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. I can still recite it all by heart, but of course you've never heard of them."

"I've heard of Genesis," said Quinten, and got up. "So we must manage to get hold of a Bible somewhere."

"I'm sure we'll be able to in Rome."

"Shall we see if we can walk around it?"

The medieval chapel was indeed in the center of the Renaissance building, like the core in a nuclear reactor. At the back, too, there was a sacred area; on the right was the chapel of San Lorenzo. When they got there, Quinten stopped in shock and looked at a door that also seemed to be looking at him.

The center of the world! A bronze double door from the fourth century, which gave access to the Sancta Sanctorum. In the two top panels were round decorations, like irises with a pupil. They were locked by two heavy, sliding padlocks, one below the other, as large as that on the altar, which looked like a nose and a mouth. The wide marble doorpost was crowned by two short pillars, bearing an architrave; in the space below was an inscription:

SIXTVSV•

PONTMAX•

Quinten knew of course that "Pont. Max." was the abbreviation of Pontifex Maximus, the papal title Great Bridgebuilder; nevertheless he looked in alarm at Max's name, which suddenly appeared here above that bronze face that he knew from his Citadel. He returned to the familiar look of the door and this time felt no fear.

Suddenly he turned to Onno. "What was in it?"

"In what?"

"In that ark of the covenant."

"The two stone tablets of Moses, with the Ten Commandments on them."

The following morning they took the bus to the Via Omero, where the Istituto Storico Olandese was located. Initially, Onno had hesitated about going there; perhaps he would have to give his name and would be recognized: in the past he had had it in his portfolio and had cut its grant, in order to release funds for Max's thirteenth and fourteenth mirrors. On the other hand he knew that an arbitrary minister of state was not only forgotten years afterward but often while he was still in office. Anyone who had been a minister of state, or even a minister, imagined that he and his family would bask in the glory for all eternity, but apart from them no one generally remembered. And perhaps that was right; because everything always repeated itself. Without people's poor memories, politics would be completely impossible. Moreover, it didn't really matter to him if he was recognized.

In the quiet reading room, where a few students sat hunched over their papers, Onno went to the librarian, an exceptionally small, graying lady, who was standing on tiptoe with a pencil between her teeth in front of an open drawer of index cards. He had to force himself to suppress the image of Helga before he could ask whether she had a Dutch Bible that they could consult.

She glanced at his untidy appearance and said: "You've come to the wrong place. Perhaps at the embassy."

"Are you sure?" asked Quinten.

She looked up at him, and Onno saw her change at the same moment, like a landscape when the sun breaks through.

"You look as though there's a hurry," she said, laughing.

"That's true."

"Wait. Perhaps I can help."

When she'd gone, Onno said: "What is it with you and women that I haven't got?"

Quinten looked at him in such astonishment that Onno thought it better to leave it at that remark. A few minutes later she came back with a small Bible, which she handed to Quinten.

"There you are. For you. It was in the bedside table in a guest room. If you ask me, no one ever looks at it, so it's going to a better home now."

"It would have been incredible," said Onno severely. "A Dutch institution without a Bible on the premises!"

In the nearby park, the Villa Borghese, they sat down on a bench. The silence among the trees and lawns, made even deeper by the distant roar of the traffic around, had an air of timelessness. The soft green veil that the spring had drawn over everything, like a child breathing against the windowpane, reminded Quinten of Groot Rechteren — and he wondered in astonishment what the connection was between nature and the things they were now concerned with.

"What kind of covenant are we talking about, actually?" he asked, while Onno leafed through the printed cigarette paper with his legs crossed.

"The one between God and Israel, the so-called Old Covenant. With Christ you later got the New Covenant, between God and those who believed in Christ. According to the Christians, the Old Covenant was thereby fulfilled and transcended."

"And how did the Jews react to that?"

"Well, how do you think? They weren't too impressed. Jesus of Nazareth was a rabbi who said that he was the Messiah, but the other rabbis considered that sacrilege. You know what rabbis are like. According to them, the true Messiah was still to come, and they still believe that." Onno laid a hand on his crown. "Good God, if only my father could hear me going on like this." Suddenly he stiffened and stared straight ahead with a look that Quinten didn't understand.

"What's wrong?"

Onno glanced at him, handed him the Bible, and said: "Hold this. I've got to put something right."

Quinten looked in astonishment as his father fished an envelope out of his inside pocket, took a box of matches from his trouser pocket, and lit the envelope at one corner.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm mailing a letter."

He turned the burning envelope between his fingers until he could no longer hold it. He ground the charred remains, which had fallen, into the earth with his heel and scattered them with his stick, until nothing more could be seen. Quinten watched in astonishment.

"Don't pay any attention and don't ask me anything." Onno took back the Bible and looked in St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews for the passages whose existence he remembered. "It's a long time, son, since I devoted myself to Bible study. Thank goodness it's the Authorized Version, in the language of Canaan, and not one of those new-fangled versions of the God-Is-Dead school."

While an occasional lady with a child or a gentleman with a dog passed them along the path, or a jogger trotted by, he read aloud to Quinten about Christ, who had not entered the "the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us."

" 'Christ,' " he recited with a solemn voice, " 'being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.' It says here that he consecrated man 'through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.' Come now, come now. And here it talks about 'the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched and not man.' If you ask me, all that contains a prohibition against ever building an earthly Holy of Holies with human hands again."

"But," said Quinten, "over there is a Christian building that is called Sancta Sanctorum and is the holiest place on earth."

"That's what I mean."

"So perhaps it's not so very Christian at all. That is, Christian but at the same time not Christian."

Onno nodded. "I take your point, but where do you want to go from here?"

Quinten pointed to the Bible. "Look at the ark of the covenant again. I want to know how big it was."

Onno looked up the book of Exodus and did not have to look for long. It was as though when he saw all those names and turns of phrase he again smelled the smell of his parents' house.

"Two and a half ells long, one and a half ells wide, and one and a half ells high."

"And how long is an ell?"

"Well, from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger, so about eighteen inches."

"So about forty-three inches long, twenty-seven inches wide, and twenty-seven inches high."

"That's about right."

Quinten looked through the hilly park, but all he saw was the heavy padlock. "If you ask me, that's also the size of the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum."

"Let's hope," said Onno with a little laugh, "that it's a bit bigger, otherwise the ark won't fit in it."

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because everything is always right — if you want it to be. Just think of that crazy Proctor, in the castle. Do you remember? Look, I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven buttons on my shirt; the top one is open. So that tallies with the six days of creation and the Sabbath."

"But something can really be right, can't it?"

"Of course."

"Why else would there be such thick bars in front of that altar? And on that canopy above there are two angels with outspread wings, aren't there? We're on the track of something, Dad! Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus— that could also have been in the temple of Jerusalem!"

Onno closed the Bible, looked at Quinten seriously and made a gesture. "Yes."

"Well, then! I have to know what's going on here."

"Why on earth do you have to, Quinten?"

"I don't know," said Quinten with something impatient in his voice, while he was thinking of the center of the world.

57. Discoveries

The origin of the urge that had seized Quinten was a mystery to Onno. Max and Sophia had brought the boy up to be agnostic — he scarcely knew the Bible, and religions had never interested him, as far as Onno knew. If this was a kind of religious mania, then he could understand. But it was obviously nothing of the kind. And besides, the question of the ark of the covenant being in the Sancta Sanctorum was of course total nonsense — but Quinten's reasoning had the enthusiasm of youth and the beauty of simplicity, though Onno himself knew the traps of this kind of simple conclusion all too well.

Things were almost never like that; something always turned up that suddenly changed the beautiful simplicity into a disheartening chaos, in which one could discover an order only with the greatest effort, which then turned out to be much more complicated. But the fact that he regarded Quinten's theory as nonsense did not stop him from immersing himself in the literature for a few days — or was it precisely the obvious absurdity of the project that attracted him?: in an absurd world only the absurd had meaning, as he had said in the letter that he had written to his father.

Because most books he had to consult would be in Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Quinten went his own way, while Onno himself started research the following morning in the Biblioteca Nazionale. He polished his shoes as well as he could with an old rag, tucked his shirt neatly into his trousers, and for the first time in years put on a tie.

The very first day, after a few hours, he realized what he had suspected: that through the centuries the writings about the temple of Jerusalem and the ark of the covenant had formed as vast a conglomerate as Rome itself, in which one thing was built on another and most things were under the ground. He couldn't restrain himself from browsing a little in the countless rabbinical commentaries, having a quick glance at what Philo had written about the ark; in the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas; in the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, Francesco Giorgi, Campanella; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Fludd and Kepler and even Newton; down to the watered-down views of modern freemasons, Rosicrucians, and anthroposophists.

The existence of all those speculations made him realize even more acutely what a commotion it would cause if the ark actually appeared — but apart from that, it was all much too interesting. He knew from experience that he would never finish if he went into that any further. Via entries in Jewish encyclopedias, not only Hebrew ones, through notes, references, bibliographies, he had to follow the trail closely, trot like a police dog with its nose close to the ground, not looking up or around, ignoring everything that did not immediately serve his purpose. And that purpose was not religious or metaphysical or symbolic but very concrete: did the ark still exist — and if so, where was it?

The following morning he checked all references to the ark, closer to two hundred than a hundred, with the help of a biblical concordance; and in the afternoon he looked with Quinten's eyes at the history of the Lateran palace, the basilica, and the Sancta Sanctorum. When the library closed that evening, he had made a couple of discoveries that would surprise Quinten; but he decided only to talk to him about it when he had more or less sewn things up. At the last moment he had found in a systematic catalog a promising Italian title about the treasure of the Sancta Sanctorum, and because he did not feel like going to the same library again, he first phoned the art historical institute on the Via Omero; it turned out to have a copy too, indeed in the German original. Only when he was on his way there did he realize that he had again put on a tie.

When the librarian saw him, a smile crossed her face. "Did you leave your pious companion at home today?"

"That's my son. He's wandering through the city somewhere, looking for the secrets of antiquity."

"Congratulations. I've never seen such a beautiful boy. The spitting image of John the Baptist in that painting by Leonardo da Vinci." She put out her hand and said, "Elsa Schulte."

Onno started. He put his stick into his other hand, shook hers, and was going to say Enrico Delius, but before he realized it he had said: "Onno Quist."

He realized that he had now driven a hole through his isolation once and for all, but no sign of recognition appeared on Elsa Schulte's face. The book that he had asked about was already on the reading table: Die römische Kapelle Sancta Sanctorum und ihr Schatz: Meine Entdeckungen und Studien in der Palastkapelle der mittelalterlicheren Päpste, published in 1908 by a certain Grisar, an Austrian Jesuit. Now he learned everything — even that the altar was about five feet long, twenty-two inches wide, and three feet high, so that the ark could have fitted into it fairly exactly. But it wasn't in it. He himself of course hadn't doubted that for a moment, and he was apprehensive about having to tell Quinten shortly.

At lunchtime he ate two panini in the canteen and went back to order his notes. Gradually he began to feel like a student who had to do research for his crazy professor, and who would now definitely fail his master's exam, since the results didn't tally with the exaggerated expectations. But at the same time the crazy work filled him with nostalgic memories of the days of the Phaistos disc.

An hour later an intellectual-looking gentleman came toward him. He glanced at Onno's stick, which lay on the chair next to him, and then at his ponytail. With an expressionless face he said: "Hello, Mr. Quist. Nordholt. I'm the director here."

"I know." Onno nodded and looked at him over his reading glasses. He knew because he had appointed him at the time.

"I'm pleased that you are kind enough to make use of our institute. Our budget was cut drastically a few years ago by the then-minister of state, and people have been dismissed, but I hope you find what you are looking for." With a short nod of his head he turned on his heel and disappeared.

Again a score had been settled. Onno had had no opportunity to say anything else, but what could he have said? That the director should go and have a look at Westerbork? That thanks to his financial cuts in the foreign cultural institutes the universe had become twice as big? That it had been a favor to a friend? In any case, the news of his presence in Rome would now quickly get back to Holland; perhaps Nordholt was on the telephone at this very moment, to report that Quist — you know, that one — had gone completely to the dogs. Onno shrugged his shoulders and again bent over his book, but could no longer concentrate. He took off his glasses, looked out the window for a moment, and strolled toward a round reading table in the corner, where international art periodicals were displayed, and also a few Dutch newspapers and weeklies.

As he stood there, he read that yesterday in Rome the trial had begun of a Turk, who four years previously had tried to assassinate the pope. "I am Jesus Christ," he had cried from his heavily barred cage—"the end of the world is at hand!" To think that he had to learn about this from a Dutch newspaper. He leafed on a little, sat down in amazement, and for the first time in four years filled himself in on the situation in Holland and the world.

When he looked up an hour later and realized where he was, he felt as though he were returning from the dead. Nothing was the same anymore. From political commentaries he discovered that Dorus's cabinet, in which he was to have been minister of defense, had survived no longer than nine months; after that Koos and the Social Democrats had left, or had been driven out, after which the cabinet had soldiered on for a little, and meanwhile Dolf had become prime minister. Dolf! Of course! Called a "domestique" teasingly, a term from cycling he understood, Dolf was always underestimated by Koos too. He was welcome to it; during that dreadful boat trip, the last day of his previous life, Dolf was the only one to put a hand on his shoulder. Yes, that's how things went — they had kept the front door in their sights, the gentlemen, but not the back door: the classic error. But not only in Holland had the political situation changed. If he'd become minister of defense, then he would have had to deal with massive demonstrations against the stationing of American cruise missiles; but in the Soviet Union a new secretary-general seemed to have been in control for the past few months — a man of his own age, not with the usual concrete features, but with an open, human face and a calm, determined look.

Suddenly he had the feeling that the world had begun a transformation. How was he to picture it? Was the end of the Cold War at hand? The thought was of course absurd — East and West were still armed to the teeth — but he felt as though he had just looked at the world like a chess player, who on first seeing a game played by two other people immediately saw a possible conclusion, which still escaped the two players. He closed the papers and magazines and stared out of the window. Was it conceivable that by the year 2000 the Communist party in the Soviet Union would be forbidden? Of course that was inconceivable, but was the inconceivable precisely about to happen? Was his numb left side — as the result of a right-wing breakthrough in his head — perhaps a political prophecy? He was amazed at that brainwave; was he in the process of adopting Quinten's way of thinking? At the same time that thought reconciled him a little with his discomfort. Lenin, he remembered, had had a stroke at about the same time, but he had had his right side paralyzed.

That same day Quinten had gone for the third time to the building containing the Sancta Sanctorum, which by now he knew almost as well as his room at Groot Rechteren. He did not notice the affectionate looks of the fathers of the Holy Cross out of the corner of their eyes when again he stared through the bars at the locked papal altar with his beautiful blue eyes, or when in one of the side chapels he leafed through his little Bible piously with his slim hands. The immediate proximity of a secret, which he could walk around in half a minute, but which at the same time was as inaccessible as his dream of the Citadel during the day, shut him off completely from what was happening around him. It was difficult to assess from a distance, but it seemed to him that the space under the top of the altar was large enough to contain the ark.

He realized that it was difficult to look properly at something like this. But meanwhile he had seen that behind the bars was a bronze door, again closed with a large padlock. He had never been as certain of anything else as now: something extraordinary was kept inside — he felt it with his whole being, like a compass needle feels the pull. After the priests had motioned visitors to leave with solemn gestures, he walked around the complex a few times on the piazza and looked at the square outer walls of the chapel, framed by Fontana's slightly lower new building. On the small lawn at the side some Tamils were stoking a fire; a half-dressed man with one arm stood washing himself, while someone in a parked car took a photo of him with a telescopic lens.

On his way home Quinten went back to the triumphal arch of Titus on the Forum Romanum. With his eyes screwed up, he tried to make out whether the ark had perhaps been on the relief and deliberately removed by a pope. The sharp shadows now cast by the sun made the depiction even more lively and inspired than when he had first seen it. Close by was the roaring of cars and buses — but the excitement and the noise of the triumphal entry, almost twenty centuries before, here on this spot, now resounded through it like a real storm in a theater where a pastoral scene was being played. The grim faces of the soldiers, each with a laurel wreath; above them, agitated movement of regimental standards, the captured candelabra on their shoulders, the silver trumpets, the table with the shewbread. Everyone was doing something, carrying something. Only the last figure looked a little lost; he was the only one whose head had virtually completely disappeared. The relief was weathered. There were details missing, and the exhaust gas would obviously demolish much more, but there was no sign of an ark that had been spirited away.

When he got home, Onno was lying on his mattress reading the International Herald Tribune.

With his hand on the door handle Quinten stopped. "Since when have you read the newspapers?"

Onno dropped the paper, looked at him over his reading glasses, and said: "I've come down to earth, Quinten."

He told him what had happened to him in the institute and that it would now soon be the end of his anonymous existence, but that in exchange he had rediscovered the world.

"I would never have thought that it would happen again. I thought I would be in mourning till I died, and without your arrival in Rome that would have happened, but obviously this was meant to be."

"At least that's how it is," said Quinten, who had sat down on the chair at Onno's desk.

Onno folded his hands on the newspaper and looked for a while at a large black feather from Edgar's wing, which was in an empty inkwell on the windowsill.

"Do you know what may be the most terrible of all sayings? 'Time heals all wounds.' But it's true. There's always a scar that may hurt when the weather changes; but one day the wound heals. As a boy of eight I once stumbled with one of those curved pointed nail clippers in my hands. It went deep into my knee, and I can still remember exactly how I screamed with pain. So like everyone else I got a scar on my knee, but I couldn't tell you which one anymore. You must have scars, too, that you can't remember how you got. There's something dreadful about that. Because it means that looking back on it, those wounds might just as well have never existed. What happened to me is a trifle compared with what has happened to other people — in the war, for example, and that wound has obviously healed — but your mother's still in a coma and Auntie Helga is still dead. There's something wrong about that."

Quinten became confused by those words, and when Onno saw that he sat up a bit and laughed.

"Don't you listen to your old father. Humanity could not exist at all if it were any different, and for animals it's no problem at all. Very soon, when we've solved all mysteries, we'll still be left with the mystery of time. Because that's what we are ourselves. That's why I'm reading this newspaper here. I don't have the feeling that you're interested in world politics, but shall I tell you what I've discovered?"

"Yes," said Quinten. "But not what you've discovered in world politics."

Onno drew a deep breath, threw the paper on the floor, and got off the mattress. "Let me get over there." Quinten stood up and leaned against the windowsill, Onno sat at his notes. "I learned a lot, but I doubt whether you'll be happy about it." Like someone about to play a game of solitaire, he spread his notes over the table in four long rows, folded his arms, and looked at them for a few seconds. "Where shall I begin?"

"At the beginning."

"Could it also be the probable end?" He picked up a sheet. "According to II Kings, verse 9, the temple of Solomon was plundered and set alight by the Babylonians, together with all Jerusalem. The general view is that the ark was also lost when that happened. You knew that already, of course. This seven-branched candelabra and all those other things were later remade, but the ark was not. If you open your Bible at Jeremiah 3, verse 16, you'll read that Jahweh had told the prophet that no one must speak about the ark of the covenant anymore, that no one must think about it anymore, that no one must look for it anymore, and that no new ark must be made. That's the last mention of the ark in the Old Testament."

"But if no one was supposed to look for it," said Quinten, "that meant surely that it hadn't gone, although it was no longer in the second or third temples."

"You could come to that conclusion. And you find support for that in a couple of apocryphal texts. For example, the so-called Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch. It says that when the Babylonians approached, an angel descended from heaven into the Holy of Holies and ordered the earth to swallow up the ark. That would mean that it's still in Jerusalem on the site of the temple. The annoying thing is that the story was not written until a century after Christ — that is, even later than the destruction of the temple of Herod by the Romans. Perhaps a legend that I found in Rabbinical literature connects with that. After the destruction of Solomon's temple, a priest is supposed to have found two raised tiles in the floor of the ruin; the moment he told that to a colleague, he dropped down dead. So that was the proof that the ark had not been stolen or burned, but that it was buried in that spot. There was another nice story in the second book of the Maccabees. There you read that the same Jeremiah of just now took the ark on the orders of Jahweh and hid it."

"Really?" said Quinten expectantly. "Where?"

"In a cave on the Nebo. That's the mountain from where Moses saw the Promised Land on the other side of the Jordan, and which he himself was forbidden to enter for some reason by Jahweh."

"And have they never looked for it there?"

"Of course. From the very start. The people who were with him wanted to mark and signpost the way to the cave, but they could not find it again. When Jeremiah heard about it, he reproached them and said — let's have a look… where is it? There is only a Greek text of it left, but you can see that it's been translated from Hebrew. Here, I'll just translate off the top of my head: 'No man shall find this or know this spot until Jahweh again unites his people and has mercy on them. Then he will reveal it.' " He looked in amusement at Quinten, who was leafing through his Bible. "You might well say that the moment has now come with the state of Israel. It's just a shame that that story, too, was only written down about a hundred and fifty years before Christ."

"I can't find that book of the Maccabees anywhere."

"That's right, because it's not in there. It's also an apocryphal book, but that doesn't mean very much; it could just as well have been canonical. All that was decided fairly arbitrarily by those Church Councils. Conversely, that letter of Paul to the Hebrews, you remember, in which Christ is compared with the temple, could just as well have been apocryphal, because of course it wasn't written by Paul but by an Alexandrine follower of Philo."

"Who's that?" asked Quinten, without really paying attention. He was trying to understand what all those facts meant to him.

"A Jewish scholar, Philo Judaeus, a contemporary of Christ's, who wanted to combine Judaism with Greek philosophy. Interesting man. But let's not digress, because then we'll sink farther and farther into the historical quicksand. Right. If all that's true then, and if according to you the ark is hidden in the Sancta Sanctorum at this moment, how did the Romans get hold of it? Isn't it a little too improbable that they should have found it in that cave in the Nebo?"

"Yes," said Quinten. "That's true. But why is it called the Sancta Sanctorum? Why is it supposed to be the most sacred place in the world, then? You yourself said that that's very strange, didn't you?"

"Wait a bit, we're not there yet. The most probable answer is that the ark is not on the arch of Titus because the Romans simply didn't have it. Pompey had previously penetrated the Holy of Holies and hadn't seen anything there. And that was all confirmed by Flavius Josephus — he was a Jewish writer in Roman service, in fact a kind of collaborator. He reported the whole Jewish war at close hand, up to and including that procession across the Forum, with the table of the shewbread and the seven-branched candelabra and all those things; he mentions them in exactly the same order as they are on the triumphal arch. Anyway, in his young days he had served in the temple of Herod, and according to him, too, the debir was completely empty."

"The debir?"

"That's what the Holy of Holies is called in Hebrew. It's true that he himself never looked inside, of course; only the high priest was allowed in. Well, that's all on one side. But!" said Onno, sticking up his index finger and putting his other on a sheet of notes. "Because — and let this be your consolation — there's always a but in life, Quinten. The other side of the matter— and that will give you false hope — is a text from the twelfth century by a certain Johannes Diaconus. In it, the term Sancta Sanctorum occurs for the first time. But it doesn't yet refer to the papal chapel but to a treasure of relics that was supposed to be found under the high altar of the old Lateran basilica."

"That altar with the heads of Peter and Paul in the ceiling?"

"Yes, but down below. And what was supposed to be there, according to the deacon? Not only Moses' rush basket, the foreskin of Christ, and all other conceivable rarities, but also — pay attention: arca foederis Domini. What do you say to that?" said Onno, leaning back with the satisfaction of a generous giver. "God's ark of the covenant."

Quinten looked at him perplexed. "Why false hope? We're there, aren't we!" he asked excitedly. "Since when has the papal chapel been called Sancta Sanctorum?"

"I know that, too. Since the end of the fourteenth century."

"Well, then! That means that the ark was taken from the basilica to the chapel sometime between eleven hundred and fourteen hundred. The name simply went with it."

"In itself what you're saying is not at all implausible. In the thirteenth century the chapel was completely restored and the relics were taken out of it for those months; afterward the ark could have been added to them. Except that you're forgetting the minor point that the ark, in the best possible case, is still lying somewhere in a cave in Jordan. It's never been in Rome." With both his hands Onno made a gesture of resignation. "Realize that it's all based on a medieval legend. What do you think of that foreskin and that rush basket?"

Quinten shook his head decidedly. "That's as may be, and I don't know either how it happened, but I know for certain that the ark is there in the altar."

"And I," said Onno, who now felt like a surgeon who has to put the scalpel into the patient without anesthetic, "know even more for certain that it isn't."

"How can you be so sure of that?"

"Because I know what's in it," said Onno, without taking his eyes off Quinten.

Quinten looked back at him in disbelief. "What, then?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" repeated Quinten after a few seconds.

"An empty box."

"How do you know that?"

"Because the altar was opened in 1905 and emptied. Here," said Onno, and took the book that he had borrowed from the institute — giving his address, so that wouldn't stay secret for very much longer, either. "Here you find an exact description and photographs of everything that was in it. There were extraordinary things there — the umbilical cord of Christ, for example, and a piece of the cross — but no ark. On the orders of the pope, this Professor Grisar from Innsbruck took all the things personally to the Vatican Library, where you can go and look at them tomorrow in the chapel of Pius V."

Quinten leafed through it a little, glanced at an illustration of the decorated shrine, and put it back on the table. It didn't interest him now.

"And yet," he said, "that chapel is called Sancta Sanctorum. And there are two angels above the altar. And it says above the altar that there is no more holy place in the world."

"It won't let go of you, will it?" laughed Onno. "You trust your intuition more than the facts. I regard that as a heroic quality, but you can actually take it too far. I hope you don't mean to say that there's a conspiracy — that for example this whole book was only written to hide the fact that the ark is definitely in the altar."

"Of course not," said Quinten. "I'm not crazy."

"But what are you, then? A dreamer perhaps? Forget it. As far as this is concerned, your intuition has been refuted. Another time you wouldn't have been far off the mark. The last time you suggested that Vespasian may have been frightened of the God of the Jews and had therefore hidden the ark in his palace. Well, there was no question of an ark, but yesterday I read in Flavius Josephus that after the great triumphal procession through the Forum, he did have the veil of the Holy of Holies taken to his palace."

"How strange," said Quinten suspiciously. "And not those costly gold things — that candelabra and that table with the shewbread?"

"No, they were displayed in a temple. Only the purple veil and the Jewish Law."

"The Jewish Law?" Quinten raised his eyebrows. "What was that?"

"That's a name for the Torah, the five books of Moses. He's also called the Law Giver."

Quinten thought for a moment. "How am I to imagine the Law?"

"You must have seen an illustration of it at some point. A great role of parchment, such as you now see in the ark of every synagogue."

"How large?"

"I assume that the Torah roll from the temple of Herod will have been very big. Perhaps even fifty-four inches long."

Quinten nodded. "That monster was therefore also carried in that procession through the Forum."

"Of course. According to Josephus, the Jewish Law passed as the last trophy."

"Did it?" said Quinten. "And if that thing was so important to the emperor that he took it into his palace, even more important than the menorah, why doesn't it appear on the arch of Titus?"

"How are you so sure that it doesn't appear?"

"Because I've just been back there. But something else did strike me," said Quinten, suddenly hectic. "The last figure, at the extreme left, a man without a face, who in that case ought to be carrying the parchment, is standing there as though he's got nothing to do, with his arms hanging straight down beside him. Like this," he said, demonstrating. "You can't see his left hand; but if you look carefully, you can see that at least he's got something in his right hand, something heavy and oblong, that comes approximately to his elbow." He took the book from the table and let it rest on his bent fingers against his thigh.

"Shall I tell you what he's got with him, then?"

"I'd really like to know."

"Moses' two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on them."

58. Preparations

Onno stared at him in astonishment.

"That was the so-called Jewish Law!" cried Quinten vehemently. "How large were those stone tablets?"

Onno bent over a note. "According to R. Berechiah, a rabbi from the fourth century, six tefah long and two tefah wide."

"And how long was a tefah?"

"The width of a hand."

"And how wide is a hand?" said Quinten, looking at his own hand. "Three inches or so? That means? Eighteen inches by six! So that's exactly right!"

"But that Mr. Berechiah never saw them."

"Everything's clear now, isn't it, Dad!?" Quinten began pacing the room passionately. "Listen…" he said, his eyes focused on the floor. "Jeremiah took the ark with him and hid it in a cave, but that doesn't mean that he left those stone tablets in it. Or does it say in that book of the Maccabees that they had to disappear as well?"

"No."

"Right, so he took them out. And they were seen by that priest from that rabbinical legend, who thought that they were raised tiles. They were preserved and later they were placed in the Holy of Holies in the second and third temples. It would be too stupid if that had been really empty for centuries! A high priest who goes in through the curtain every Yom Kippur— and then nothing? An empty cube? Surely he'd look a fool. Just as if God didn't exist. Then that temple would have been in a kind of coma for all those centuries — like Mama."

"What dreadful things are you saying now, Quinten?" asked Onno in dismay.

"In a manner of speaking, of course. Just let me go on for a moment, otherwise I'll lose the thread. So in the Holy of Holies those two tablets were there the whole time with the Ten Commandments on them. Just as those two pillars stood in front of the entrance of the court. Flavius Josephus had simply allowed himself to be convinced by the high priest when he wrote that the debir was empty. They were taken from Jerusalem together with the veil. So then you had the entry here in Rome. Are there any other eyewitness accounts of that?"

"No."

"And how reliable is that Flavius Josephus?"

"Not terribly reliable."

"Well, then I think that in all that tumult and jostling he wasn't able to see everything exactly himself; but afterward when he started writing about it, he used what he heard from other people. And they said something vague about a 'Jewish Law,' which had been carried at the end of the procession; they were Romans, they had no idea about the Jewish religion. But he as a Jew thought immediately of the Torah roll from the temple. The Ten Commandments didn't occur to him, because for him they had disappeared with the ark. But Vespasian was better informed. He had plenty of gold that hadn't meant anything to him for a long time. He only had brought to his palace what was connected with the most holy — and that was the veil and the so-called Jewish Law. A parchment that was only used in the sanctum of the temple wasn't part of that; of course it was an exceptional thing in this case, but not anything unique — you yourself say that a roll like that can be found in every synagogue. No, it was the original manuscript of the Decalogue, noted down by Moses himself on Mount Horeb in the Sinai Desert. The carver of that relief was obviously better informed." Quinten glanced at his father, who was following him about the room with eyes wide open. "And apart from that, things happened as I thought they had happened with the ark. Constantine converted to Christianity and presented the two stones to the pope of his day, who hid them in the treasury under the high altar of his basilica. As a result that came to be known as Sancta Sanctorum; and that Johannes Diaconus wrote about the arca foederis Domini because he had heard the rumor but didn't know the whole story. He didn't have the ark under the high altar of his church, but he did have the contents of the ark. In the thirteenth century the papal chapel was restored, and afterward Moses' stone tablets were transferred to it, after which the name Sancta Sanctorum transferred to that chapel. And when Grisar opened the altar in 1905, he simply overlooked the two flat stones, just like Pompey when he was in the Holy of Holies and just like Flavius Josephus during the procession in Rome, and just like everyone who up to now has looked at that relief on the arch of Titus. So they're still there."

With a triumphant cry Quinten suddenly leaped in the air and let himself fall back on his mattress, where he thrashed his legs in the air excitedly, suddenly got up again, ran to the windowsill with floating dance steps, sat down on it with a twisting leap, and looked at Onno with his hands held between his knees.

Dusk had fallen. The window was open, and Onno saw only Quinten's black silhouette outlined against the purple evening sky, in which the first stars had already appeared.

"A tempting line of argument," he said. "I like that kind of reasoning. Yes, it could have happened like that. But perhaps it didn't happen like that."

"You bet it happened like that!" Now Quinten's mouth could no longer be seen; it was as though his voice were higher-pitched that usual. "Those people who for centuries have been climbing that Scala Santa in that Sancta Sanctorum have been kneeling down before something completely different than they think."

Onno gave a melancholy nod. "It's as though I am listening to myself, Quinten. But I was also once exceptionally certain of a hypothesis — until one day someone fell through a hole in the ground in Arezzo."

"The fact that your hypothesis wasn't true surely doesn't mean that no hypothesis is ever true?" said Quinten indignantly.

"Of course not." Onno made a dismissive gesture. "Don't listen to me."

"Well, state an objection then."

"There aren't that many objections to be made, I think. Why were only the high priests during the time of the second and third temples allowed to know that Moses' stone tablets were in there? That knowledge would surely have been a great motivation for the Jews?"

"Because," said Quinten immediately, "Jeremiah had actually pulled the wool over their eyes. God had made him bury the ark and told him that no one must think about it again. He had said nothing about the tablets. Jeremiah took those out on his own initiative, and of course it is questionable whether that was in God's spirit. Just to be on the safe side, the high priests let that fall under the vow of silence."

"Right," said Onno in amusement. "Let's sum up. On the basis of a number of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts you have constructed a theory, and we'll assume that the theory is consistent. It's a big step from the literature to reality, Quinten. And that can only be checked by looking inside that altar. We can only do that with the permission of the pope, as I know from Grisar. And you'll never get that permission — not because it's you, but because no one would be given it on the basis of your theory. Suppose you write and tell the pope what you've discovered. Of course many strange letters are written to him, which he never sees — every madman always writes letters to the pope; but via Cardinal Simonis, the archbishop of Utrecht, opposite whom I once sat at a gala dinner in the Noordeinde palace, and with whom I got on very well, I could ensure that your letter actually got onto his desk. Okay. Papa Wojtyla will read your story with his shrewd eyes. You'd think that he would have known for a long time that those stone tablets are in that altar. Via the camerlengo—that is, the cardinal-treasurer, who is in control in the period between two popes — the popes naturally would of course all have passed on that secret to each other, just as previously the Jewish high priests did. According to your own theory, that continuity must in any case have existed up to the thirteenth century, when the stone tablets were transferred from the basilica to the chapel. But I know for certain that the present pope doesn't know, because at the beginning of the twentieth century Pius X no longer knew. Otherwise he would never have given Grisar permission to open the altar; he could work out very easily that he would inevitably be confronted afterward with Jewish claims and all the fuss that it would entail. That ignorance doesn't itself necessarily argue against your theory, because since the thirteenth century it's quite possible that a camerlengo will have died in the interval between two popes, or was murdered together with his holy father, thus breaking the thread. And for that matter it may be down somewhere in black-and-white, in a deed of gift from Constantine, which then may have gotten lost in Avignon, because take it from me that things are always a complete mess everywhere. But those Jewish claims, Quinten, that's the tricky point. Through the existence of the state of Israel they have meanwhile taken on a political dimension, and our John Paul wouldn't dream of sticking his head in a hornet's nest. He's got enough on his plate with frustrating communism in Eastern Europe, as I learned today. Even if he considered your theory complete rubbish, even then he wouldn't want to take the slightest risk of its being right. Why should he? He can only lose. Suppose the tablets were actually to come to light. What then? Give them back to the Jews? Such a superholy relic? The Holy See hasn't even recognized Israel. Not give them back? Then subsequently to have to hear about the Christian roots of anti-Semitism? About the weak attitude of Pius XII toward the Nazis? About German war criminals who were given asylum in Catholic monasteries after the war? Protests by the Jewish lobby in the United States? Diplomatic problems with Washington? Excommunication of the pope by the chief rabbi? Landing of Israeli paratroopers on the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, in order to hijack the Ten Commandments and take them back to Jerusalem? Subsequent triumphalism of ultra-orthodox Judaism vis-a-vis Islam? Driving of the Muslims from the Temple Mount? Founding of a fourth temple for the tablets? Declaration of el-Jihad — Holy War? Rocket attack by Iranian fundamentalists on Tel Aviv? Outbreak of the Third World War? No, lad, take it from me, not even the most famous and most Catholic archaeologist in the world would be given permission. In a polite letter he would be informed on behalf of His Holiness that Professor Hartmann Grisar S.J. had previously investigated the altar with absolute thoroughness and that there was nothing more in it. Forget it. That thing is not going to be opened for another thousand years."

Onno stopped speaking. Hopefully, he had finally persuaded Quinten by now. "Anyway. . Grisar mentions that he was given permission on May 29, 1905—and I just saw in the Herald Tribune that that's exactly eighty years ago today."

There was a silence.

"Then I'll be seventeen tomorrow," said Quinten in astonishment. He had not thought of his birthday for a moment. Since he had left Holland, the time had assumed the endless quality of earlier summer vacations.

"Indeed!" cried Onno. "That too! The omens are favorable — and we're going to celebrate that, on the dot of twelve at Mauro's on the corner. Just say what you want, and you'll get it sight unseen."

After a few seconds Quinten's voice came from the black window, in which his contour was scarcely distinguishable from the night sky behind him:

"Your help."

"My help? What with?"

"With recovering the Ten Commandments."

"Dear Quinten," said Onno after a few moments of feigned calm. "Even as a joke I don't think that's very good. You're surely not going to tell me that you are really toying with the idea of violence?"

"Yes. That is. . I'm not playing. And violence? No. At least. . if everything that happens without permission is violence then yes, yes."

Onno groped over the table, found a box of matches, and lit a candle. When he saw Quinten's face, with two small flames in his dark eyes, he realized that he was serious. But that was inconceivable! Up to now he had let himself be manipulated by Quinten's enthusiasm, which was as infectious as it was inexorable, as if he had no will of his own; but this was really the moment to call a halt to it.

"That's really enough now, Quinten," he said decisively. "You must know when to stop. It's gradually beginning to show signs of an obsession. Listen, I know exactly what the excitement and the suspense of a new theory are like, particularly if you've formulated it yourself; and I don't need soccer matches or wars for that. But you're threatening to cross a borderline, and that could go completely wrong — you could wind up in prison. And I don't think I can recommend Italian jails to you."

Because his back was starting to get cold, Quinten climbed off the windowsill and closed the window. "Aren't the Ten Commandments worth the risk of prison?"

"Yes!" cried Onno, and raised both his arms. "If you put it like that — of course! Life imprisonment! The stake!"

Quinten gave a short laugh. "Tell me honestly, Dad. Do you think it's a crazy idea?"

"I don't really know," sighed Onno. "An anecdote of Max's about Niels Bohr occurs to me. When somebody once developed a new physics theory, Bohr said, Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true.' " He looked at Quinten ironically. "As far as that's concerned, yours is in excellent shape."

"So it's almost certainly true."

"So it's almost certainly true. Credo quia absurdum."

Onno felt that he was losing ground again. He got up and started pacing around the room in his threadbare brown slippers with the worn heels, without a walking stick, looking for support as he turned around. How was he to tackle it, in God's name? Now, if it was a question of the treasure of the Romanovs or the Treasure in the Silver Lake — but the stone tablets of the Law! Did Quinten really know what he was talking about? Of course God didn't exist, and perhaps Moses had never existed, but the Ten Commandments existed: there was no doubt about that. On the other hand it seemed as if the existence of the Decalogue — the foundation of all morality — on the one hand crystallized into God, on the other hand into Moses, and in between also into those stone tablets. Was it that what was primary was not things but the relations between things? Did love create lovers, and not the other way around? Could love itself subsequently take on the form of a stone, or of two stones?

"What are you thinking about?"

Onno stopped and was lost for words. Quinten looked at him, half his face in black shadow cast by the candlelight. The calm that the boy exuded suddenly infuriated him.

"Dammit, Quinten, you must be out of your mind!" he exploded. "What are you getting into your head? How do you imagine it happening? How are you proposing to get into the chapel? And then into that altar? Were you going to saw through all the bars perhaps? Read Grisar! In the sixteenth century you had the Sacco di Roma, when the chapel was plundered by French troops, but they could only get in by forcing the priests to open the door. But they didn't have the key to the altar, and there was no other way of getting in. Otherwise even in 1905 all those gold and silver treasures wouldn't have been in there anymore. And you think you can do it? Without anyone noticing?"

"Yes."

"How, then?"

"By opening those locks."

"And you can do that?"

"Yes."

"Without keys?"

"Yes."

"While it's bristling with priests everywhere and the Holy Stairs are full of people?"

"But not at night. Of course we're going to let ourselves be locked in."

"We? Do you really think I'm going to allow myself to get involved in such a crazy undertaking?"

"I hope so."

"But there's bound to be an electronic security system!"

"There isn't."

"How do you know?"

"I checked."

"And do you by any chance know what the Eighth Commandment says?"

"No."

"Thou shalt not steal."

"I don't regard it as stealing."

"And how do you regard it, then?"

"As a confiscation."

"A confiscation — how on earth do you think up these things?" Helplessly, Onno turned half around his own axis and said entreatingly, "Quinten, don't make me unhappy. Till I suddenly saw you at the Pantheon about ten days ago, I lived here like a kind of Lazarus in someone else's grave, if I can put it like that. The only person I talked to all that time was that dear Edgar. You helped me out of that hole, and I'm grateful to you for that. But what you want now really goes beyond all limits! Letting yourself be locked in the Sancta Sanctorum to see whether the stone tablets of Moses are in there! While I'm saying it, I can't believe my own ears. Just imagine the carabinieri suddenly charging in with their pistols drawn: Young art thief caught red-handed in Sanctum! I can already see it in La Stampa."

"Art thief?" repeated Quinten. "And you yourself say that according to Grisar there's nothing left in that altar."

"Yes, just you appeal to the archaeological literature when you talk to the police. Do you really understand what the police is? Anyway, there's something on that altar, you're forgetting that for convenience: the acheiropoeton—Christ depicted by an angel's hand and for more than a thousand years carried through the streets of Rome in procession by one pope after another. You can count yourself lucky if they don't beat you to death on the spot. There are things in the world that it's best to keep away from."

Quinten stared at him for a moment. "Right," he said. "Then I'll do it alone." He put the light on, sat down on the edge of the table, and opened Grisar's book.

Onno realized in despair that nothing would keep Quinten from his fateful plan. What was the force that was driving him on? That iron remorse-lessness with which he tackled everything had in a certain sense dumbfounded Onno since his birth. What was he going to do now? If he let him do it alone, of course he would lose him — while, he suddenly realized, they had found each other thanks to the same fury. Could you reject something that you owed your life to? Moreover, he had brought it all on himself with his remark that Christianity had no architectural Holy of Holies.

It began to dawn on him that he was losing. With a groan he sank onto the mattress and put his chin on his folded hands. He couldn't handle his son. And, all things considered, what had he really got to lose? There was of course no question that Quinten would be able to pick even one of those locks. Perhaps they would be caught in their absurd attempt and indeed land in jail — what would happen then? After having expounded their theory and watched the pitiful shaking of heads, they would be released again. It would undoubtedly be in the paper. The pope would shroud himself in silence, everywhere all over the world rabbis would raise their eyebrows over all this meshuggah nonsense, and old Massimo Pellegrini would explain on television that while he had always known that Qiuts was a talentless dilettante, he had not known that he had meanwhile turned into a mentally disturbed person, who even involved his under-age son in his absurd and dangerous delusions. Subsequently, the Dutch embassy would leap into action, after which his ex-colleague at the ministry of culture would put them quietly on the plane to Holland, and then the business would be over with — but he would have kept Quinten. He decided he might as well play along, dammit.

He turned to look at Quinten. "And what if they're not there, Quinten? There is a minimal chance of that, isn't there?"

"Then nothing. Then I'll close it up and we'll leave," said Quinten without looking up. "But they're there."

"And what are you going to do, in that case?"

"Then I'll take them with me, what did you think? No one will ever know. You yourself said that the altar won't be opened for another thousand years, but even then no one will miss them, because no one knows that they were there."

Onno looked at him, perplexed. "Now I don't understand anything anymore. You make a earth-shattering discovery, which would make you immortal, and you keep it secret?"

"Didn't you yourself say that otherwise it might end in a war?" "That's true. But what do you plan to do with them, then?" That question surprised Quinten. He looked up in astonishment. He had not thought about it for a moment. "I don't know," he said with a helpless note in his voice. After a few seconds he jerked his shoulders back and bent over the book again. "I'll see when I get there."

The following morning — it was Quinten's birthday — they read Grisar's minute account seated next to each other at the table, examined the photographs and drawings, and ran their index fingers over the plans. Supplemented with Quinten's own observations in the chapel they constructed a plan, that, according to Quinten, couldn't fail. According to Onno, however, everything could always fail, even failure — then he leaned back and told Quinten about the phenomenon of the failed suicide: the intention was to call attention by a failed attempted suicide, but that failed because unexpectedly the suicide succeeded.

"Can you imagine anything more sad?" he asked with a laugh.

It had not been said with so many words that he would assist in Quinten's crazy enterprise, but Quinten appeared ultimately not to have any doubts — and since at his wit's end he had finally plunged into the adventure, something like a paternal frivolity had taken hold of him. The idea that the stone tablets would be in that altar was of course monumental nonsense — the whole enterprise would culminate in a dreadful anticlimax, since they would not even manage to get the first door open, and that blow would be a hard one. But who had a son with such fantastic aspirations? What did other sons want? Equipment. Money. Fun. Who had a son who wanted the Decalogue?

Because the relief in the arch of Titus was up quite high and couldn't be examined closely, in the afternoon they went to the Piazza Monte Citorio, where there was a large bookshop opposite the parliament building.

As they passed the Pantheon, Onno suddenly stopped and asked: "Shouldn't you give your grandmother a call?"

"No," said Quinten at once.

"But, Quinten! She's all by herself in that castle, and she knows that it's your birthday too. As far as I'm concerned you can say that you're living with me. Can't you imagine that she's getting worried? You've been away from home for three weeks already."

"You were away longer without calling."

That remark shut Onno up; he didn't say anything more for the rest of their walk. Quinten may have forgiven him, but he would never forget something like that. The fact that he had abandoned Quinten for so long also obliged him to collaborate in his whim.

In the art history section in the bookshop they found a bulky standard work on the monument, in which there was a series of detailed photographs of the relief. Onno studied the faceless man at the far left intently.

"Yes," he said finally. "If you want to see it, then you can see that he's carrying something flat with him."

"Didn't I say so?"

"Absolutely."

In the Via del Corso they took the bus and went to the Sancta Sanctorum, to find out the opening times and to test their plan against reality. It was as though the kneeling faithful on the stairs were the same; it was just the same, too, in the silent chapel. Onno looked with satisfaction at the huge bars and locks: what French looters had not succeeded in doing 450 years ago, Quinten would not succeed in doing now. But Quinten didn't even deign to look at the altar; obviously, he was by now so sure of himself that he was only interested in technical details.

As though he were admiring the ceiling paintings, he showed Onno that cameras had not been installed anywhere. The sanctum was obviously regarded solely as a place of pilgrimage and not a museum; the supernatural painting ot the Savior on the altar might be miraculous, Onno reflected; in the art trade, of course, it was not worth a penny. When the old priests, gnarled like olive trees, saw Quinten again, a glow of affection lit up their faces; perhaps they did not even know themselves what he reminded them of.

"They're all deaf," whispered Quinten.

"Let's hope so."

When they got outside again, Onno suggested that they should say no more about it for now.

"It's just like with an exam: on the last day you mustn't do any more, and take distance from everything — so that your mind can recover. Now we're going to celebrate your birthday. I know a reasonable restaurant behind the Piazza Navona. Tomorrow you can make your criminal purchases, I'll read up on the Ten Commandments, and to kill time we'll go and collect them the day after tomorrow. Okay?"

Of course Quinten saw the ironic twist in the corner of his father's mouth, but he didn't mind.

"Agreed," he said.

59. Waiting

The evening of the following day, Friday, they found another table on a terrace opposite the Pantheon, where they went to eat. The square was full of Romans out for a stroll; young tourists in jeans formed blue garlands on the steps of the fountain with the obelisk, where Onno had left his plastic bag full of shopping ten days before. When dusk fell and the rattling of steel shutters being let down in front of shop windows rang out on all sides, it seemed as if the temple — in the sophisticated light of floodlights on the surrounding roofs — gradually began to phosphoresce from its journey through the day, through all those hundreds of thousands of sundrenched days.

Shortly afterward a couple of small bats flapped around the ancient walls, like charred snippets of paper from a distant fire. What Quinten had never seen on the photographs and drawings of Mr. Themaat he now suddenly saw: the building looked like a weathered skull, with the cupola as the cranium, the architrave as the triangular hole of the mouth, and the columns as a row of teeth.

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.

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.

"If we ever get out of this alive," he whispered, "we must get in touch with your grandmother immediately."

"All the same to me," said Quinten indifferently.

Everything that followed lay before him as though on the other side of a mountain, of which he could see only the summit ridge at the moment: beyond that might be the sea, or a city, or a desert, or a mist-filled abyss. He felt as if up to now he had done everything by himself, and as if he still had to do the most important thing in the next few hours — afterward, he knew with absolute certainty, events would take their own course and he would see what happened to him. He slowly nodded off, though nothing escaped his ears, like a dozing dog…

"Quinten?"

"Yes?" He looked at the luminous child's watch that he had bought yesterday for a few thousand lire, with a Mickey Mouse wobbling to and fro as a second hand. It was almost nine o'clock.

"Were you asleep?"

"Just dozing."

"You're completely calm, aren't you? Nothing can happen to you."

"I don't think so."

"I wish I could say the same. I'm dying a thousand deaths, and I feel claustrophobic."

"Why did you wake me up?"

"I didn't know you were asleep."

"What did you want to say, then?"

"I keep thinking of Max," said Onno. "Have you ever had a bosom friend?"

"A bosom friend?"

"That means you haven't. A bosom friend is someone you even tell something that you'd never tell anyone."

"Do you mean a secret?"

"I don't know what you mean by a secret, but I mean something shameful, something that you are so shamed of that no one must know."

"I haven't got anything like that."

"Really?"

"What sort of thing would it be? Of course I've got a secret that I'll never tell anyone, but not because I'm ashamed of it."

"Not even your mother?" asked Onno after some hesitation.

"No one."

Quinten said no more. Hadn't his father himself said that his mother was really "no one"? So precisely by telling his secret to no one, he was actually telling it to his mother. Should he tell his father this now? He'd understand immediately, but then of course he would have betrayed something of the secret. Was his mother perhaps ultimately the secret?

Again the silence was disturbed by stumbling in the distance.

"There they are," whispered Quinten.

Everything went as expected. In the chapel of San Silvestro the priests were now gathering for complines, after which they would go to bed. A few minutes later the sound of old men's singing rang out.

With eyes closed, squeezed shut by the darkness, Onno and Quinten listened to the thin Gregorian chant, which hung in the air like a silver cobweb. For Onno it exuded a desperate loneliness, a metallic freezing cold, which seemed to flow in through a chink straight from the Middle Ages— but for Quinten its harmonic unanimity evoked the image of ten or fifteen men, sinking after a shipwreck but holding each other to the last. The psalms, intended to help them through the night, were interrupted only by a short chapter prayer.

After a quarter of an hour the door to the convent was closed again.

"Quarter past nine," whispered Quinten. "At ten past ten, then."

In a quarter of an hour the fathers would be in bed and by approximately a quarter past ten they would have gone to sleep. Because Onno had remembered once reading something about the periodicity of sleep, he had looked up a study of it in a university bookshop at Quinten's insistence. Besides the fantastic periods of "paradoxical sleep" — that of the dreams, from which one was easily awakened — sleep consisted of four degrees of depth. The first and longest period of the deepest sleep occurred twenty-five minutes after falling asleep and itself also lasted approximately twenty-five minutes. The second period came seventy minutes later, lasted no longer than ten minutes, but was followed after less than half an hour by the even shorter third and last period.

For Quinten that was enough to decide to work only during the deepest, dreamless phases, from which sleepers could be roused only with difficulty. So, over the course of the night, he had three quarters of an hour in all to play with. That ought to be enough.

60. The Commandos

"Ten past ten."

When Mickey Mouse showed the correct time to the second, Quinten stood up and silently pushed the curtain aside. Through the three stained-glass windows, the streetlights ensured that there was not quite total darkness. On the altar a red lamp was lit. Quickly and silently, he walked in his soft thief's shoes around behind the Sancta Sanctorum to the choir chapel on the other side, but the light was out there too; by the door to the sacristy he squatted down and peered around the corner: no one had remained behind in silent prayer; only a sour smell indicated that the old men had been there. Back in the chapel of San Lorenzo he saw the shadow of Onno, who was rubbing his left leg painfully. Quinten took his backpack from the confessional, gave his father the pocket flashlight, and walked between the rows of pews to the double door opposite with the two eyes in it, which gave access to the Sancta Sanctorum.

Like a doctor feeling his patient's pulse, he laid his hand momentarily on the top sliding padlock, which formed the nose of the bronze face. Then he knelt down, unfastened the backpack, and carefully spread out on the floor a chamois cloth containing ten or twelve long steel pins, in different sizes, gleaming with oil. With the lamp at its lowest, Onno lit his work.

At home he had seen Quinten busy with his preparations and they had seemed to him so ridiculous that he had found it too embarrassing to inquire about them — but what he saw now filled him with astonishment. Quinten tucked a hammer with a rubber head into his trouser belt and like a professional burglar picked up a couple of pins, which fitted into the H-shaped keyhole. While he slid them slowly into the colossal lock, leaning with one ear against the door, he averted his eyes in order to concentrate fully on what his hands felt on the inside. Suddenly Onno remembered something from his earliest childhood, from before the war: the photographer on the beach at Scheveningen. After he had taken the cover off the lens behind his tripod, he put his arms in the two black sleeves that hung down from his huge camera and performed mysterious movements inside, which must not see the light of day, while he kept his eyes focused just as blindly on the horizon as Quinten now did on the invisible ceiling paintings. While his movements became even more minute and precise, Quinten closed his eyes and parted his lips a little. Finally he pulled the hammer from his trouser belt, looked precisely at what he was doing, and gave the pins a short, dull tap. From the inside of the lock came a stiff click. He looked up at his father with a smile and carefully pulled the heavy shackle from the box and the rings on the door.

"One down," he whispered.

Onno looked at him open-mouthed. Quinten had told him about Piet Keller, the locksmith at Groot Rechteren, whom he had often visited as a little boy; but it had seemed to him impossible that after so many years it could result in what he now saw: the opened lock. While Quinten wasted no time and immediately took the lower lock in hand, Onno realized that everything had now suddenly become much more dangerous.

If they had been discovered before or afterward, they would have said that they had wanted to spend the night in the proximity of the acheiropoeton out of devotion; he had been convinced that after fiddling with the lock a bit, they would have gotten no farther than the chapel of San Lorenzo. But in the meantime the lock had been picked and the pins were already in the second lock. His initial lightheartedness had disappeared instantly — but at this stage there was obviously no stopping Quinten any longer. The only way of putting an end to it was to go immediately to the convent door, bang on it with his stick, and rouse the fathers from the deepest level of their sleep. But then he would have lost his son for good.

By the time the second lock had also admitted defeat with a click, things had still gone without a hitch. Quinten looked at his watch: twenty-three minutes past eleven. In the bronze of the right-hand half of the door there were a couple of keyholes in incomprehensible places; he had read in Grisar that the door was originally Roman, and hopefully they were simply separate relics from that time. He cautiously pushed against the left-hand side, and it immediately gave way. .

The center of the world!

He took his backpack and, lit by his father's flashlight, stepped across the threshold. He would have preferred to do it more solemnly, striding slowly, like a Pontifex Maximus — but now that he had gotten here he was suddenly in a hurry: there were twelve minutes left for the first part of the operation. Was it always like this, perhaps? Did the real work lie in the preparations and was the actual achievement nothing more than a bonus?

As he went down a passageway, approximately four yards long, that led into the chapel, a Chinese fairy tale that Max had once told him came back to him: the emperor had once commissioned a draftsman to draw a cockerel, and the latter had said that he needed ten years for the work; after he had lived at the emperor's expense for ten years and had drawn a thousand cockerels every day, he went to the palace again; when the emperor inquired if he had the drawing with him, the draftsman asked for a pencil and paper and drew a cockerel with a single line, whereupon the stupid emperor became so furious that he tore up the drawing and had the draftsman beheaded.

The low, narrow passageway, the fifteen-hundred-year-old connection with the former papal palace, seemed to explode at its end into the high, square space of the Gothic chapel. Without looking up or around, Quinten went to the altar and knelt down with his tools. Onno followed him with the flashlight, and although he had not been drinking, he gradually felt as if he were becoming tipsy. Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus. The things that were happening now were so outrageous that he could scarcely comprehend them. Probably he was dreaming. Unlike the fathers, he was in the state of paradoxical sleep: any moment now he would wake up, bathed in sweat, as the saying went; Edgar would be sitting on the windowsill and the sun would have risen over another hot day in Rome, full of politics, tourism, and things that twenty-four hours later would all be forgotten for all eternity. He glanced back and now saw the barred window from the inside, in a dim light that came through the windows on the ground floor up the Holy Stairs.

"Hold the flashlight still," whispered Quinten in a commanding tone.

The door to the chapel was probably still regularly used, but the locks of the barred doors in front of the altar had not been opened since 1905. There were just over ten minutes left for the first phase, but he did not have to force himself to be calm, because he was calm. He'd seen that the two bottom padlocks, no bigger than a hand, were conventional in construction and proof only against force, not careful thought: from the five simple skeleton keys, which he had had made by a locksmith behind the Pantheon, he immediately selected the right one.

Without much effort the locks clicked open; obviously they had been restored in the days of Grisar, and so the same would probably apply to the monstrous sliding padlock. For the first time Quinten saw it from close quarters. He smiled and thought: what an angel. It locked a heavy iron rod, which prevented the barred doors opening across their whole length. A few minutes later, after a tap with the rubber hammer, this item had also capitulated.

With a small can he quickly applied some oil to the four hinges, put the tools into his backpack, and laid it next to him on the altar.

"Give me a hand," he whispered. Onno put his stick on the papal prayer stool — and in order not to make any noise, they carefully moved the bar from the two rings and laid it down on the worn marble step, upon which for a thousand years 160 popes had celebrated mass daily.

Quinten looked at his watch.

"Twenty-five to eleven. It's time."

After hanging back the locks of the entrance door temporarily, Quinten lay down on a prayer stool opposite the altar in the chapel of San Lorenzo and immediately felt himself dropping off. .

The reddish-brown wall, at reading distance from his eyes, is a little darker in the middle, so it is as if he is looking into a tunnel. A little later a small tangled violet sphere, like a turning ball of wool, no larger than a marble, starts revolving; shortly afterward it sheds its skin for a moment to reveal the accurately drawn snout of a monkey, also very small, and immediately disappears, while another new little whirlpool emerges, turning into a small, monstrous mouth with sharp teeth, again just as precisely etched. Even in his semisleep he is completely conscious; he looks in fascination at the spectacle unraveling before his eyes; watches as it evaporates and is replaced by a fish, a woman's face, with disheveled hair, a strange pig, a cat, a jar, a man with a furrowed brow and a beard, each in sharp focus, like in a photograph. Where does it all come from? He's not imagining it; he's never seen the apparitions before and has no idea what the next one will be. Were they all there before he saw them? Do they still exist when he no longer sees them? They remind him of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch — so Bosch didn't invent anything; he simply remembered everything well. But then something begins to change. The wall, about a foot away from him, suddenly becomes transparent, as he had once seen with Max and Sophia at the Holland Festival, in a Mozart opera, The Magic Flute—when a front-lit gauze curtain, which closed off the whole proscenium arch, was slowly lit from behind, gradually revealing an enormous space with perspective decor in the style of Bibiena. .

Onno had not gone back to the confessional, either; with Quinten on one side of him and his stick on the other, he stared into the darkness and listened to the sounds, his legs outstretched, his hands folded behind his neck. A soft hum surrounded the building, Saturday-night traffic; far away he heard the siren of an ambulance or a police car. The Romans were going out for the evening.

Everywhere, the restaurants and the cafes and the theaters were full, the city was blossoming around them; but they themselves were sitting here, on their metaphysical commando raid, like an incredible anachronism in search of the tablets of a Law about which not only could no one care less any longer, but which most people had never even heard of. He glanced sideways at Quinten, who was breathing deeply and now descending in his turn into the deepest stage of his sleep, while the fathers of the Holy Cross began rising into dreamier regions. Onno sighed deeply. For as long as he lived he would never forget the sound of those clicking locks. Whenever anyone said to him that this or that was impossible, he would hear click and laugh in the person's face.

Now and then he dozed off for a moment or two. In the convent a toilet was flushed. It was past eleven; it seemed that the sleep theory was true. He thought of the rigid way in which Quinten had drawn up his schedule, down to the minute, as though it were a matter of mathematics instead of psychology. Where did he get that scientific bent from? Not from him. He himself was convinced that nothing made sense apart from math; come to that, even in the heart of mathematics something seemed to be not quite right.

Everything was always a mess. Perhaps that impressive tendency derived from Ada, from music, which was after all in a certain sense audible mathematics. But the technical triumphs that Quinten had tasted up to now with all those locks had of course made his expectations much greater; shortly the disillusion would hit him all the harder. There was no way there would be any tablets of the Law in the altar. Emptiness. Dust. Perhaps a short note from Grisar, with greetings from 1905…

Quinten looked up, cracked his thumbs, and got to his feet. Twenty to twelve. Outside the pounding of loud music rang out, obviously from a stationary car with its door open. His father was asleep; leaning forward on the next bench, his head on his crossed arms, he breathed through his mouth with a deep rattling sound. Quinten shook his shoulders.

"Wake up!"

Onno got up with a groan. "Are we still here?"

A little later he stumbled after Quinten, feeling as if he were only now beginning to dream.

At the door Quinten turned around and whispered: "Have you got the case with you?"

The case! Without saying a word Onno went to the confessional, where it was still under the bench. Meanwhile Quinten had lifted the lock off the entrance door, and back in the chapel the oil turned out to have done its work: the barred gates of the altar opened without a sound.

Now there appeared two bronze doors, with depictions of Peter and Paul on the top panels; on these two was another heavy lock. He could see it properly for the first time. It seemed to be a different type, but to his relief he saw that it was a classic key lock. When it failed to respond to any of his skeletons, he looked for a hook from his backpack and inserted it in the keyhole. After fiddling around for a bit, he pressed down on the body of the lock with it so that the locking bar was pressed against the tongues of the levers; then with a second hook he carefully took out the levers, until the bar went into the connecting grooves and the lock could move. He pulled the shackle forward out of the lock, slid it off the four bronze rings, and put it on the step, alongside the three that were already there.

"There you are," he whispered, and looked at his watch. "Two minutes left. We're on our way."

He pulled the doors open with both hands.

From the illustration in Grisar's book Onno also immediately recognized the carved cyprus-wood relic shrine. Although it was over eleven hundred years old, it looked as fresh as though it had just recently been delivered by the joiner. On its top edge it said in Latin that the box came from Leo III, the unworthy servant of God; but the text was interrupted by a wooden shield, on which was written in gold letters:

SCA

SCORV

An extremely illiterate abbreviation of Sancta Sanctorum. It was obvious that the inscription had been put on later: when the relics had been brought here from the Lateran basilica and the chapel had been given that name.

Because Moses' tablets of the Law were contained in them from that moment on? Onno looked at Quinten. Quinten looked at the four square, decorated doors, which looked like the luggage lockers in a station. On each door there was a small ring to pull it open with. Everything was in turn guarded with locks, but he saw immediately that they were not locked. He pursed his lips and pulled the top left-hand door open. While the silver covering of the acheiropoeton gleamed on the altar, Onno focused the beam of light into it. The drawer was empty. Quinten pulled out the top right-hand drawer: empty. The lower left-hand drawer; the right left-hand drawer: all empty.

Quinten looked at his watch. Five to twelve. He stood up and said: "We must go."

When he made to leave the chapel, Onno whispered: "Shouldn't we clear up in here? We can't leave it like this, can we?"

"We're coming back in half an hour."

Onno stiffened.

"To do what? They're not here, Quinten. You were wrong. Everything has gone well up to now, let's call it a day."

Quinten put a finger to his lips — and for the umpteenth time Onno realized that there was nothing he could say.

Back for the second time in the chapel of San Lorenzo, sitting next to each other in the dark on a bench, Onno thought of the mess that they had made — picked locks, opened doors, tools lying everywhere. Imagine an insomniac father of the Holy Cross taking his prayer book and going for a walk through the building, praying as he went, and then seeing that chaos in the sanctum! But he was even more tormented by the question how he could support Quinten.

For reasons that were obscure to him, the boy had invested so much in this adventure that he could obviously not stand the fact that it all had been for nothing. How could he get it through to him that this was how things were in life? When you were seventeen, you thought that the world was made of the same substance as your own theories, so that you had control of it and could turn it to your own advantage. But one day everyone had to confront the bitter truth that it wasn't like that, that the world was soup and thought was generally a fork: it seldom resulted in a good meal. Today the moment of truth had struck for Quinten — differently than for other boys, that was true, but it amounted to the same thing.

"Quinten?"

"Yes?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Have another good look."

"We did have a good look."

"But still no better than Grisar. Or Flavius Josephus."

Onno sighed in resignation. Again he was encountering granite. He could keep his wise sermons to himself; it was as though Freud's father were to try to convince his son that the subconscious did not exist — and it was very questionable whether it existed. At the same time it gave him a feeling of satisfaction: Quinten still had the kind of unspoiled self-confidence that he himself had long since lost — if he'd ever possessed it; he wasn't even sure of that anymore. He mustn't try to talk him around at all; he had to empty that cup to the dregs. What's more, he might otherwise have to hear for the rest of his life that the tablets might have been in that damn altar after all. On their ascetic beds the fathers meanwhile rose for a short while to the second stage of their sleep, before sinking back to the fourth.

At quarter past twelve, Quinten took the flashlight and said: "Now for it."

By now they both felt at home in the chapel that they kept going in and out of. Quinten squatted down, laid the flashlight against the marble step, rested his elbows on his knees, put his hands on his cheeks, and looked intently at the shrine. He had to finish in ten minutes.

It had not surprised him that the four drawers were empty, because he knew that. But where else could two flat stones have been hidden? Actually, only behind the treasure chest. At the back, the altar was built against the wall; it couldn't be reached from the side. But it must be possible to take the box out: it had once been put in. In the center of the lower frame he noticed a ring, obviously intended to pull the whole thing forward; but that was impossible, since the marble pillars of the altar blocked the sides of the box. So this meant that the shrine had not been pushed into the altar but that the altar had been built around the shrine. And that had happened in about the year 800, while the tablets of the Law had only been brought here from the basilica four centuries later. In other words: they couldn't be behind the box. So? So they must be underneath.

The box was not resting on the ground; there was a narrow chink. Obviously it was on legs, but they were obscured from view by the pillars. Quinten lay down on his stomach, put his cheek on the step, and shone the flashlight underneath. Had Grisar done this too? What reason would he have had to do that? There was all kinds of rubbish that was difficult to distinguish — shards, pieces and fragments, perhaps remains of masonry work. On either side the shrine was supported not by feet but by flat stones.

Quinten looked inside numbly, feeling the blood draining from his face. From his backpack he produced a long skeleton key and put the key around the back of the right-hand stone. Helping it along with the flat of his hand, which just fitted through the gap, he tried to see if it could be moved. Scraping over the dust, the stone moved forward. It was not supporting anything!

"Dad.." he whispered flatly. "I've got them."

61. The Flight

When Onno saw the oblong, gray, almost black stone appearing from the crack, he remembered for an instant how as a little boy he'd sometimes stood by the mailbox when the postman came. The flap suddenly opening, the letters falling into the hall from nowhere. He began trembling.

"You're crazy!" he whispered, while it seemed as if he were screaming. "It's impossible! Let me see!"

"Not now," said Quinten with determination. "Give me the suitcase."

"Let me see if there's anything written on it!"

"In a moment. Hurry up."

With trembling hands, Onno gave him the suitcase, and Quinten snapped open the locks. The stone was lighter than he thought, but still almost as heavy as a paving slab; carefully he laid it among the newspapers that he had put in at home — the Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, the Herald Tribune. When Onno saw the second stone appearing too, his head began to spin. It was inconceivable that these could really be Moses' tablets of the Law! Surely this was the most inconceivable thing of all! Of course they were simply two old flagstones. Quinten was seeing what he wanted to see — he was simply making a bigger and bigger hangover for himself!

Quinten snapped the locks of the suitcase again, collected his tools, and put them into the backpack. As he stood there with it in his hands, he surveyed the shrine, opened the upper right-hand drawer, and put his backpack into the compartment.

"Treasure trove," he said, closing the door, "in a thousand years' time." Then he closed the bronze doors, took the large padlock off the steps, put it through the rings, and pushed it into the lock with a loud click. Next the barred gate was shut — two clicks of the padlocks and this was also barred. Together with Onno, he pushed the iron rod through the rings and put the large sliding padlock on it. When he pushed the parts together with all his strength, it produced such a penetrating sharp click that it was as though someone were striking an anvil with a hammer. Onno stopped to see if anyone had heard it, but Quinten gave him the case and pushed him in the back. "Let's go now, before someone comes." They went quickly through the narrow passage to the chapel of San Lorenzo, where Quinten closed the entry door behind him and put on the two locks, again with loud clicks.

"Right," he said, and listened. "Not much more can happen to us now." With his left hand Onno pointed to the suitcase in his right. "If the Ten Commandments are really in here, which God forbid, then more can happen to us than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams, my dear friend. That would be more explosive than an atom bomb."

"Only if you can't hold your tongue. No one will ever know." What did his father know about his wildest dreams? Only because of his dream of the Citadel had he been able to fetch the tablets from the center of the world— thus, as it were, removing the sting from the SOMNIUM QUINTI. The sting was now in that suitcase.

When everything remained quiet in the convent, they again sat down on a bench opposite the altar. They now had to wait for the following morning, Sunday, when it would become busy. Their plan was simply to leave a quarter of an hour or half an hour after the opening of the Sancta Sanctorum: none of the fathers would notice that they were leaving without having arrived — since they were leaving, they obviously had also arrived. But that they should be uncertain about the contents of the case for the whole night was an unbearable prospect for Onno.

"I have to see it now, Quinten," he whispered, "otherwise I'll go mad." "Then you'll have to go mad. Just imagine someone coming and seeing us peering at those things with a pocket flashlight. Haven't we agreed that we're here out of piety? If anyone comes, we go down on our knees and then we'll be praying. We have to get rid of that flashlight too, for that matter. Where should we leave it? Why didn't I think of that?"

"Is there really something you haven't thought of?" said Onno with a touch of mockery in his voice; but immediately he looked uncertainly around in the dark. "For that matter I keep having the feeling that there's something missing."

"What?"

"I don't know. ." Suddenly Onno stiffened. "My stick! Quinten! I left my stick lying in the chapel. In the hurry when we had to put that iron rod—"

Quinten had already gotten up. He grabbed the flashlight and ran silently to the barred window at the top of the Holy Stairs. He shone it inside. As if in prayer, his father's stick lay on the papal prayer stool opposite the altar — the tip on the kneeling bench, the handle against the silk cushion with the tassels. He nodded. This was irrevocable. The flashlight had now also served its purpose, and on the way back he hid it behind a confessional against the wall.

"Yes," he said when he arrived back, and sat down next to Onno again. "So that's how it is. That changes our whole plan."

"Quinten…"

"Forget it, it's my fault. I hurried you along. There's no point in talking about it again. So now we have to get out of here before someone discovers it."

Onno felt a drop of sweat running from his armpit along his side. "And how are you proposing to get out? We're caught like rats in a trap."

Quinten thought for a moment. "There's only one way. What time are those services that come next? What are they called again?"

"Matins. Usually at about four o'clock."

"Then we'll simply go into the other chapel and say that we fell asleep, and can we please leave."

"And what if they ask what's in that suitcase?"

"Why should they ask that? There's nothing to steal here, is there? Anyway, what of it? Two dirty stones."

"Let's pray that they really are just two dirty stones," whispered Onno. "But we're not there yet. Tomorrow morning a father suddenly discovers my stick in the Sancta Sanctorum — and what then? What will happen then? The police will see from the oil on the hinges that we've been in the altar too. They'll open it, and they'll find your backpack. Apart from that, it will be empty — but who will remember that it's been empty for eighty years. The fathers, perhaps, but they've got no interest in making that known, given the reputation of their chapel. They'll give our descriptions and tomorrow morning identikit pictures of our faces will appear on Vatican television, together with a close-up of that stick. Father and son. Desecrators. Ten million lire reward. What will Mauro do then? Signor Enrico from Tyrol! And Nordholt? He'll realize immediately why I borrowed that book, and he's got my address at the institute. He's still got a score to settle with me, but to be on the safe side he'll probably first call the embassy for advice. In consultation with The Hague, they'll tell him that he should keep in the background for the time being."

"And I'll be recognized by the locksmith who made those things for me. He gave me a rather funny look when I got him to do it."

Onno turned to look at him. "I can't see your face properly, but it looks a bit as if you're smiling."

"So I am."

"What in heaven's name is there to smile about?"

"I don't know. . perhaps the prospect of the journey."

"Our journey, of course. Ever heard of popular religious fury? How can we show ourselves in the street, here in the lion's den? Before the Sancta Sanctorum opens in the morning, we must be out of the country — it doesn't matter where we go."

Because St. Benedict of Nursia had understood that all that dreaming in paradoxical sleep can easily entangle the monk in the snares of physical temptation, and that therefore it has to be drastically interrupted at least once a night by the thistles and thorns of prayer, the convent began to come to life at about four o'clock. Stumbling. In the chapel of San Silvestro the light went on, and the reflection also pierced the darkness where they were. Relieved that things had finally happened, they sat up. All those hours they had discussed at greater and greater intervals what they were going to do shortly, and where they were going to flee to — but according to Quinten they would see what happened, and Onno himself had also finally said they'd better stop, because it was like playing chess: often you thought for a long time about the right move, and when you'd finally found it and made it, you knew that it was wrong. That was quite simply the fundamental difference between thinking and doing. At that Quinten had fallen silent. His experience was different. When he'd thought and then done something, it had never been wrong but always right; and the fact that the Decalogue was now in the air-travel suitcase was proof of that. And soon it would all come right. They had not said anything more about the tablets and what was to be done with them.

While in the city the music gradually stopped, even in the last nightclubs, the building was again filled with ancient Gregorian unanimity. As he listened, Quinten was suddenly struck by the sense that old works of art were always old things: old bricks, old marble, old paint — but that old music was at the same time always brand-new, because it came from living throats. Apart from that, only old stories could also be new. That was of course because music and stories existed not in space but only in time.

"We've woken up now," he said, not whispering again for the first time. He stretched with a groan. "We look around, surprised to see where we are. In the Sancta Sanctorum! Oh no! How can it have happened? We must have fallen asleep. Come on, let's go."

"I suppose we'll have to." Onno sighed.

"You do the talking. And give me the suitcase, otherwise you'll forget that too."

As they walked through the rear chapel, where it was already lighter and the singing louder, Onno felt like an amateur actor forced to go onstage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the role of King Lear. They turned the corner and stopped.

In the choir stalls a dozen old faces above black cassocks turned in their direction, the nocturne on the Resurrection died on their lips. No one showed a sign of alarm; there was only mild surprise. When they saw Quinten, a smile appeared here and there.

Quinten realized that he now had to throw this weapon into the battle. With his free hand he rubbed his eyes and made as if to yawn, but immediately he really yawned: the silence was filled with the long, touching yawn of a resplendent boy.

"Forgive us, Fathers," said Onno in Italian, "for disturbing you in your nocturnal vigil. My son and I fell asleep here yesterday. The whole day we had been wandering around your very beautiful city and we sat down for a moment in a confessional to rest. And only just now—"

With his hands clasped, as other people only do in an armchair, his head cocked to one side, an old man came forward. He introduced himself in a weak voice as Padre Agostino, the rector. He separated his hands for a moment and then put them back together again and said: "The guest is Jesus Christ. Would you like something to eat? A cup of coffee?"

Thrown off balance, Onno looked at him. Such pious simplicity and goodness rendered him helpless. The fathers had been robbed, hopefully only of two worthless stones, and they would never realize that they had lost anything; but in a few hours' time they would discover that they had been lied to by two burglars who had desecrated their holy chapel. He wanted nothing better than a cup of coffee, but he had the feeling that he would only really be committing a mortal sin if he accepted; apart from that, they had to make their getaway as soon as possible. He said that he didn't want to burden them any longer, whereupon the rector made a gesture of resignation, let his left hand float over Quinten's crown for a moment, and blessed him with the right. Thereupon Onno put out his hand to say goodbye, but at that moment the rector started back in alarm, looking at the hand as though he were being threatened with a knife. Immediately afterward another father accompanied them to the door of the convent, while all the heads turned to follow them, smiling and nodding.

In the white-plastered cloister, where a portrait of the pope hung, the father said with an apologetic gesture: "Please excuse the rector. You mustn't touch him. Padre Agostino has believed for the last few months he is made of butter."

A little later they left the place of pilgrimage via the tradesmen's entrance.

Breathing in the night air deeply, they walked into the square. By the obelisk Quinten turned around and glanced back at the building as if to say farewell.

"This is now no longer the holiest place in the world," he said.

The suggestion that he himself was therefore now the holiest place in the world was so shocking that Onno didn't know what to say. He raised his hand and hailed a taxi; at that point the driver was added to the company that would shortly recognize them, but by that time they would be far away abroad. He gave his address, Quinten put the suitcase on his lap, and, enjoying their freedom in silence, they roared toward the Colosseum and over the broad Via dei Fori Imperiali to the Piazza Venezia.

As they screeched around the corner, Onno suddenly cried: "Made of butter! How in God's name do you dream up that one!"

"Do you find that so crazy?"

"Don't you, then?"

"Not at all. On the contrary, it's logical."

"Of course," said Onno with his eyebrows raised. "That strikes me as just the sort of thing that you would understand. So explain to me why it's not senile but logical."

"Because Christ said that he was made of bread."

Onno did not reply. He looked outside, at the deserted pavements of the somber Corso Vittorio Emanuele. How did the boy's brain work? Was he really human? The rector who had spread himself on Christ to make a sandwich — in what kind of a head could such a thought occur? What kind of world did he live in? Was what he said even true, maybe? Did theology have a psychological dimension, of which psychology had no knowledge, for someone like the old padre?

In the courtyard on the Via del Pellegrino all the windows were dark. They went quietly up the stairs, and when they had gotten to his room, Onno said:

"And now I want to see it at once."

Quinten looked at his Mickey Mouse watch. "We've got no time for that. "You have to sort your things out. What are you taking with you?"

"Nothing. Just my passport and a few clothes."

"And all those notes there?"

"They've served their turn. I'll leave a letter for the landlord, to say I've gone traveling for a few weeks. The rent has been paid for two months in advance; and if I'm not back by then, he'll make sure that things are cleared up."

"Just as long as you hurry. We've got to be out of Italy in a few hours."

"Five minutes!"

"Then I'll quickly put some coffee on."

"Nothing that I need more in the world! And be prepared for the biggest disappointment of your life, Quinten."

Onno took the suitcase and laid it on the table under the window. "Could anything be more idiotic? Thanks to my stupidity, we now have to leave the country — and why? For nothing!" In vain he tried to get the locks open. "How do these bloody things work?"

With a paper filter in his hand, Quinten came and made the locks spring open, and immediately went back to making coffee. It was a mystery to Onno. That boy had done everything to get those things into his possession — and now he had them. On the one hand he was convinced that they were the tablets of the Law; on the other hand they seemed to leave him completely indifferent.

Onno opened the lid, pulled down the desk lamp, put on his reading glasses, and opened the newspapers.

He saw at first glance that it wasn't as easy as that. The surface consisted on all sides of a gray-caked layer, which seemed to be made of congealed time. Was there something underneath? He scratched at it with a thumbnail, causing something of the grainy substance to loosen. This was work for an archaeological laboratory, but he had understood from Quinten that the stones would never find their way there. They had more or less the dimensions that Rabbi Berechiah, without ever having seen them, had given.

With lips tightly clenched, he leaned back. Was it really conceivable that these things here were the original of all those depictions which were to be seen in every synagogue, above the ark? The tablets of the Law: symbol of the Jewish religion, just as the menorah was that of the Jewish state and the Magen David—the "shield of David" — of Zionism. Was it really conceivable that these things which were now lying on the table had once lain in the ark of the covenant, had been lugged through the desert year after year, had been preserved for centuries in the Holy of Holies of the three temples, and then taken by Titus. . Was it conceivable that Quinten was right after all? Was Moses' handwriting hidden beneath that crust? Those signs, scratched into the stone as a result of some inspiration or other? Suddenly his heart started pounding. The oldest known inscriptions in Canaanite writing dated from approximately 1000 B.C.; Moses' writing would therefore be a thousand years older still. Undoubtedly, it would be very close to Egyptian hieroglyphics — and perhaps the Phaistos disc was connected in some way? That writing came from the same period! Suddenly he thought of the sign that looked a little like a sedan chair — was that perhaps the ark? However small the chance was that Quinten was right, it had to be proved beyond doubt that he was not! But how? What was he intending to do?

Hearing a creaking sound near his neck, he looked around in alarm. Smiling, with a pair of scissors in one hand, Quinten was holding up his ponytail. They had decided on that metamorphosis so that no one at the airport would recognize them when their descriptions appeared — and then be able to say where they had gone to. Quinten pulled the rubber band off, and a few entangled gray hairs got stuck in it; but he gathered his own hair behind him and wound the rubber band around it. At the same moment Onno saw a boy changing into a man, like when in a change of scene in a film the role of a young actor is suddenly taken over by an older one. He couldn't remember ever having seen Quinten's ears.

"Drink your coffee," said Quinten. "But keep your head still."

Like a real barber, he held the comb upside down in his left hand, the thumb of his right hand through one ring of the scissors, not the middle but the ring finger through the other, now and then making rapid snips in the air. After each snip his father resembled more and more the memory that he had of him: within five minutes the tramp had largely given way to the minister who had come and fetched him occasionally at Groot Rechteren in the car. Meanwhile he glanced over his shoulder at the tablets of the Law, like a barber glances at the illustrated magazine that the customer has on his lap.

"You'll have to do your beard yourself," he said, brushing the hairs off his clothes.

When Onno went to the basin to shave himself, Quinten bent over a corner of one of the stones, where a small, gleaming spot had struck him. He licked the tip of his middle finger and rubbed it, whereupon a deep blue glow showed itself. He sat up. The two stones were sapphires. They were gems. Since one gram cost five thousand guilders, they were worth hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion. He thought it better not to tell his father. He thought for a moment and then out of his blue nylon backpack he took the beige envelope with the heading SOMNIUM QUINTI, which he had not opened for weeks, since he had not dreamed of the Citadel anymore and nothing needed to be added to the plans. He put it with the stones and closed the suitcase.

When they drove out of the city in a taxi at about six o'clock via the Porta San Paolo and pyramid of Cestius, it was already growing light. Onno was again wearing the gray suit in which he'd arrived from Holland four years earlier; he enjoyed the feel of the cool air against his cheeks and on his neck. How could a human being let himself become so overgrown! He remembered a conversation that he had had years ago during the conference in Havana with a man who had spent years in a Stalinist work camp. The conversation was about beards, apropos of Fidel Castro and his friends, and he himself had said that he would only let his beard grow if he were one day to land in prison. Whereupon the other looked at him in silence for a while and then said, "When you land in prison, you'll shave yourself four times a day."

The sky was beginning to grow red, as though beyond the horizon the lid of an oven were being slowly opened. It was Sunday; there was little traffic.

"And what if the first plane that's leaving is going to Zimbabwe?" asked Onno.

"Then we'll go to Zimbabwe. We've got plenty of money."

"It's not a matter of money, and anyway I'm paying. But surely we've got time to pick something? I'd rather go to San Francisco than Zimbabwe. Do we absolutely have to be dependent on chance?"

"I don't know," said Quinten impatiently. "I think so."

"And when we're in Zimbabwe — what then?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders and looked outside. In the distance the cupola of St. Peter's had almost disappeared. Here and there were large postmodern buildings in the countryside, such as he had seen in Mr. Themaat's catalog. He really didn't know. All he knew was that from now on he must not intervene anymore. From now on everything had to be determined by circumstances, just as a skier adapted himself to the terrain, avoiding trees and ravines and not trying to glide upward.

As they got out of the taxi at Leonardo da Vinci airport, the sun rose above the countryside and drenched the planes on the runway with dazzling gold, which a moment later changed to silver. It was already busy.

In the noisy departure hall Onno, pulling his case on wheels behind him, said: "Look. All thieves, making off with their booty."

Quinten carried the suitcase with the stones in it; he had his backpack on his back. They stopped in front of the great board with departure times and looked up at the destinations for the next few hours: Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Santo Domingo, London, Cairo, Vienna, Nicosia, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Amsterdam. .

"And what if it's Amsterdam?" asked Onno.

"Then it will be Amsterdam."

At the counter where they sold last-minute tickets sat a girl with her name on a badge; ANGIOLINA. Obviously she came from the deep south. Her hair was blacker than black; there was a dark shadow on her upper lip. Onno said they had decided to go abroad for a few weeks on impulse and that they wanted to book.

"Of course," she said, rearranging her silk scarf, which Quinten thought was back to front around her neck. She picked up her ballpoint pen. "What destination?"

"We'll leave it up to you. We want to leave on the next plane that has room in it."

"That's how I'd like to live," she said with a face that showed that nothing surprised her anymore. She glanced at the clock and looked at her monitor. "You can't make Vienna anymore. It will be Cairo or Santo Domingo. Perhaps you can just catch the eight o'clock British charter flight to Nicosia."

"Two singles to Nicosia," said Onno quickly, before it became Santo Domingo.

"Nicosia?" repeated Quinten. "Where's that?"

"On Cyprus. Nice island. Lots to see."

"Your passports, please." While she began to fix the tickets, she asked, "Would you like travel insurance?"

Onno looked sideways with a smile. "Do we need travel insurance, Quinten?"

"Of course not."

"We're trusting to our lucky stars, Angiolina."

She nodded. "At twelve-twenty local time, there'll be a short stopover in Tel Aviv."

Onno looked at Quinten, who answered his look in silence. He turned to Angiolina and said: "Make that two to Tel Aviv."

"So we're taking them home," said Quinten, after he had been given his boarding card.

Onno made no reply. He could feel that everything was not over yet. The check-in counter was in a corner of the hall, closed off with barriers. Cara-binieri with submachine guns and bullet-proof vests strolled in twos across the marble floor; other men, too, in plain clothes, leaned against the pillars here and there. Outside, close to the high window, there was an armored police car on the pavement. It was busy, mainly older vacationers bound for Cyprus, obviously in a group, as could also be seen from their bright leisure clothes; the passengers for Tel Aviv were recognizable from an absent look on their faces. After they passed the barrier, everyone was interrogated separately at a row of iron tables.

"Let's sit down here until it's our turn," said Onno. "I'm getting tired out, and my head's spinning without my stick."

Quinten looked at him in concern. Only now did he realize that he had not for a moment taken his father's state of health into account. "Perhaps you should take a few days off in a little while."

"Good idea, Quinten. Israel seems to me just the country to have a rest in. Have you thought of what we're going to say when we open the case?"

"No."

"Everything will be all right, won't it?"

62. Thither

"Yes."

"So when they ask us what kinds of stones they are, we'll say 'The tablets of Moses.' "

"Yes, why not? No one will believe it, and then we won't be lying."

"But once they've stopped laughing, they'll ask again." Onno looked at him with a sigh. "It looks as though we've got a choice between prison and the madhouse." That there was the slightest chance the stones actually were what Quinten supposed them to be again seemed to him completely idiotic.

"Have you got a better idea, then?" asked Quinten.

"I've always got a better idea. Do you know what we're going to say? That it's art. Artistic creations by a modern artist. No one will dare doubt that — plastic arts have succeeded in making themselves as invulnerable as— you name it… as Siegfried. Even the police can't do anything about that."

"Quinten looked at the patrolling policemen. "Just look: it's quiet at all the other counters, and here it looks like there's a war going on. What is it about the Jews?"

Onno nodded. "After all those thousands of years, their existence is beginning to take on the features of a proof of God's existence more and more clearly."

The remark reminded Quinten of what Mrs. Korvinus had once said. The day after Max's death, he told his father, he had heard Nederkoorn in the hall saying to Mrs. Korvinus that as far as he was concerned, all the Jews could be stoned out of the universe like that — and then she had said that they were still being punished because they had crucified Christ.

"It's just as well you've gotten away from that castle," said Onno, making a face. Because he wasn't sure that anti-Semitic platitude had not taken root in Quinten, he decided to nip it in the bud immediately. "The Jews didn't crucify Christ at all, Quinten; the Romans crucified Christ. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment for serious criminals. Over there, that Orthodox Jewish gentleman, with the beard and the black hat on the back of his head — if you say to me, 'Kill him,' and I kill him, does that make you his murderer and not me? I don't have to do what you tell me, do I? Now, if I were completely in your power, then it would be different, but I'm not. You can say so many things. The Jews cried, 'Crucify him,' but Pilate did it. He could have stood his ground, at the top of those sacred stairs, and said, 'Get lost, I wouldn't dream of it, he's innocent,' couldn't he? He was the boss, wasn't he? Yes, he was responsible for keeping the peace in the occupied area. He didn't want any problems with the emperor here in Rome. All understandable — that's how it goes in politics — but why should the descendants of those loudmouths later be persecuted and exterminated and not the descendants of the actual murderers — that is, the Italians? Peter and Paul were also crucified by the Romans, and without the Jews demanding it. But not only were the Italian people not forced into the gas chambers; until recently, Christ's representatives on earth were virtually exclusively Italian descendants of the Romans. And the popes still have their seat in Rome, just like the Roman emperors. All very strange, isn't it? God moves in ironic ways, shall we say. I also used to think that the hatred of Jews was all about Christ, but that isn't the case; it existed long before Christ. They keep thinking up new reasons for it: that they're rich and showy, that they're poor and dirty, that they pull the strings of plutocratic world capitalism, that they're revolutionaries and have communism on their conscience, that they've got no homeland, that they're reestablishing their homeland — it's all grist for the mill, as long as it's bad. The fact that one accusation contradicts another doesn't matter, because hate is primary. And the fact that hate has always been there is another proof for anti-Semites that there must be a basis to it."

On the way to the runway a taxiing plane turned its back on them and for a few seconds emitted a deafening din. Quinten waited for a moment.

"And what is it based on?"

Onno put his hand on the suitcase, which Quinten had on his lap. "On this. At least, if what you think is in there is in there. On the fact that the God of the Jews had sanctified his people by entering into a covenant with them, which no other people can boast. Obviously an intolerable thought for many people. Anyway, give me that thing. I'll do the talking if it's necessary." He got up. "Remember, you don't know a thing, you're just tagging along."

At the tables, a few yards apart, they were questioned separately by the security officials, Quinten in English, Onno in Italian. They were asked whether the suitcases and that backpack was their property. Whether they had packed their luggage themselves. If they had lost sight of it since they had packed it. If anyone had given them anything to take along. In reply to the question what he was going to do in Israel, Quinten said that he was accompanying his father and that he wanted to visit the holy places, while Onno said:

"On business."

"What kind of business?"

"I try with moderate success to make my living as an art dealer."

The official looked at the two pieces of luggage from all sides, put two red stickers on them, gave Onno his ticket and passport back, and allowed him to pass with a brief wave of his hand.

"If we check in the suitcase," said Onno as they were standing in the back of the queue at the counter, "the stones may break, and of course they sling them around on the platform. But if we take it as hand luggage, we're almost bound to have to open it. What shall we do?"

"Hand luggage."

"Of course." Onno nodded — and he couldn't resist adding with a smile, "The first set was smashed to pieces as well, after all."

Through passport control, too, in the crowded departure lounge by their gate, there were heavily armed policemen and all kinds of people whose function was not immediately clear. Bent over the screen of the detection apparatus sat a fat woman in a blue uniform; behind her, a blond girl with her arms folded watched. Onno put the suitcase on the conveyor belt, whereupon it disappeared under the rubber flaps. A little later the belt stopped. Perhaps it won't come out again, thought Quinten — slowly the X-ray picture faded and disappeared from the screen; even after the machine was dismantled down to the last screw, nothing would be found of the suitcase.

When it appeared after half a minute on the other side under the rubber flaps, the girl came forward and invited Onno with a razor-sharp smile to open the case. He could tell from her accent immediately that she wasn't Italian but Israeli. Quinten helped him with the locks, and to his amazement Onno saw a beige envelope marked WESTERBORK SYNTHETIC RADIO TELESCOPE, with an astronomical mirror as a logo. The girl put the envelope aside and folded open the newspapers.

"What on earth is this?" With her fingers wide apart, she raised her hands in the air and looked with a distaste at the gray stones. She lifted one up and asked, "What kind of material is this? Its lighter than you'd think. Lava?"

"Maybe some plastic or other," said Onno as well as he could in ancient Hebrew. "Modern art, at any rate. A creation of a promising young German: Anselm Buchwald. An atmospheric evocation of the Grail legend."

She looked up and said in modern Hebrew: "To me it looks more like an atmospheric evocation of the Third Reich."

"Who knows, perhaps it amounts to the same thing."

She looked at him piercingly with her green eyes. "You speak Hebrew like Jeremiah."

"Like Job would be more correct," said Onno with feigned sadness.

"The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away: praised be the name of the Lord!"

After they had been let through, he asked Quinten what was in the envelope.

"Secret," said Quinten gruffly.

Onno shook his head. "You mustn't do such unexpected things. As if we didn't have enough problems already."

"You see," said Quinten with a laugh when they were off the ground, "we've gotten away."

"As long as they're not waiting for us in Tel Aviv," said Onno, looking worried. "It's a quarter past eight. Those fathers have probably already discovered my stick, or else they will within an hour. Padre Agostino will turn to Gorgonzola from fright, and in two hours Angiolina will give a precise description of that strange father and son who wanted to leave on the very first flight, and they'll hear from that Israeli policewoman that there was something very strange about the pair," he said, and pointed up at the baggage locker. "In three hours' time, when we land, there will be an expatriation request waiting for us at the airport, and we'll be taken back on the same plane under guard via Cyprus to Rome, where we shall languish until we die in a dungeon of the Castel Sant'Angelo, rattling our chains and gnawed by the rats."

"Then they'd be missing something really special in the Holy Land," said Quinten. "Besides which, you're forgetting the time difference."

Onno looked at him inquiringly. "What do you mean I'm forgetting the time difference?"

"It's an hour later in Israel than in Italy, isn't it?"

"What about it?"

"That means that for that hour we haven't existed. And if you've been able not to exist for an hour, no one can find you anymore, if you ask me."

Onno watched calmly while Quinten put his Mickey Mouse watch an hour forward, then crossed his arms and glanced sideways out of the window in front of him. The plane toppled the earth and in a wide arc they reached the sea above Ostia, which glittered in the morning sunlight like an aging skin. Confronted with Quinten's invulnerability, he felt like a bird trying to open a safe with its beak. He should surrender to Quinten, just as Quinten himself had surrendered to… well, to what? To something that he probably didn't know himself.

"Have you decided in the meantime what you plan to do in Israel?"

"We'll see." Quinten really didn't know. All he knew was that everything would turn out for the best.

"I know a colleague there from one of my former lives," said Onno, making a final attempt without much hope. "He might be able to help us a bit— at least if he's still alive. They've got fantastic laboratories there, where they can clean the stones; on that score there's no better equipment anywhere than in Israel. All Israelis are archaeologists — every potsherd they find is a political argument to justify their state."

"And what about the Third World War?"

"Of course it would have to be done in the deepest secrecy."

"And that colleague of yours. . what's his name?"

"I can't remember. Yes I can: Landau. Mordechai Landau."

"When he sees that he's got the authentic Ten Commandments in front of him, will he keep his mouth shut, then?"

Onno sighed deeply. "He would immediately phone the prime minister."

"Well, then."

Onno said nothing. He was giving up. It was obvious that he would never even know for certain that those two stones were not Moses' stones. Quinten might perhaps hide them in a cave at the Dead Sea, near Qumran, all of which had been searched scores of times and where no one would look anymore; or bury them somewhere, in the Negev, in a place where he himself wouldn't be able to find them again. Israel was small; he could get everywhere on the bus in a few hours — nowadays even into the Sinai Desert.

He could put them back on Mount Horeb and drive straight on to Egypt, thus completing the biblical circle. Then he could finally let himself be shut up in the throne room in the pyramid of Cheops, through which he had struggled on his official visit through hot, stuffy passages, and lie down in the empty, black sarcophagus. According to the pyramid freaks, there were definitely supernatural forces at work there, which would remove him from the earth like Enoch. Onno unfastened his safety belt and put his seat back a little. He must resign himself to the whole episode's taking on the character of a dream, which he couldn't even talk about decently without being considered crazy.

The breakfast that was put in front of them seemed to be of the same substance as the plastic knives and forks with which they had to eat it. Quinten helped his father open the transparent packaging — not because he wouldn't have been able to do it himself, but because he obviously didn't want to know how to do it; and the sort of rage threatened to take control of him that led him even to putting his teeth into the plastic, which could only end in defeat for his teeth.

"This kind of food is the end of human civilization," he grumbled, twisting and turning his large body behind the lowered table.

"But we're in the air now," said Quinten with his mouth full.

When their neatly ordered trays had been transformed into repulsive heaps of rubbish, which were pushed with a smile into steel trolleys, Quinten pressed his forehead against the window. Space. World. Like irregular gray-brown grease stains, the first Greek islands floated into view. Above his head were the Ten Commandments, on their way back: he felt as though he had been working toward this situation from the moment of his birth. What else could happen now? Of course something else would happen — but what then? Simply go on living? Go back to Holland and live to be eighty? Look back at this like an incident from the distant past, an unknown event from the last century? Suddenly the feeling seized him that these might be his last days on earth; but that didn't worry him.

Perhaps everyone had something special to do in their existence and then their life was fulfilled. It might be something very insignificant, or apparently insignificant — for example, helping someone without being asked, without the other person knowing it. Everyone really ought to search their past to see if something like that had already happened; otherwise they ought to think about doing it.

Down below Quinten saw a faint white comet in the blue water: a ship, itself too small to be seen, sailing in the opposite direction. Had the tablets and the menorah and all those things from the temple been taken to Rome by Titus like that, or had they gone overland? Only after he had asked Onno did he see that he'd woken Onno up.

"I'm sorry."

"You won't allow me a moment's rest," said Onno plaintively, and loosened his tie. "How the booty was transported! No idea. To be on the safe side, I'd say overland. Actually, I think you're the one who ought to know that kind of thing by now. But you don't study — you just do what you want."

"Isn't that enough, then?"

"Far too much! But you're right. Anyone can study — there are other people to do that, like me. When I was involved in politics in my modest way, I also knew less about it than the political scientists, who knew more than Hitler and Stalin put together but who hadn't an ounce of power and who would never get it. Except that in your case you go a step further. You're firmly convinced that at this moment you're taking the stone tablets of the Law back to Israel — I can still scarcely bring myself to say it — but if you ask me, you don't even know how your author got his inspiration there on that mountain in the Sinai. You've never read up on it in the Bible."

"No," said Quinten, thinking: they're not stone, but sapphire tablets. "What happened,then?"

"The usual things. In a volcanic production, with thunder and lightning, smoke, earthquakes, blaring trumpets, the voice of Jahweh visible in a dark cloud."

"Visible? A visible voice?"

"Yes, according to Philo that was the real miracle. Jahweh spoke visible words, in letters of light, which were not written on anything. That's what Moses had to do. That visible voice of God, Moses said later, was the greatest miracle since the creation of man."

Even after Onno had finished, Quinten felt that Onno was still looking at him from the side. Probably he really wanted to ask whether Quinten still believed that he had the stones in his possession; but he had obviously lost heart.

Quinten looked back at him and said: "So now the Francis Bacon is the Sancta Sanctorum."

"The Francis Bacon?"

"Didn't you see when we got on? That's the name of this plane."

When they were flying over the Peloponnese, Quinten became sleepy too. With heavy eyelids he looked at the large black fly sitting on the window. It had never flown as fast before without flying — how was it to get home again? Because the creature disgusted him, he brushed it away with his hand, after which it landed a few rows in front on the shoulder of the Orthodox gentleman, who had kept his hat on. Gradually his eyes closed, while the droning of the engines changed into majestic harmonies of gigantic orchestras. .

The voice of the captain woke him from his sleep. He told them in English that Crete was down below on the right. Looking past Onno, Quinten saw the gloomy, violet mountains in the distance, but Onno didn't open his eyes.

"Dad. Crete."

"Don't want to see it," said Onno, with his head turned to one side and his eyes still closed. "I hate Crete."

A few minutes later the sound of the engines suddenly faded and Quinten could tell from his ears that the plane was beginning to descend.

His father opened one eye for a moment, closed it again and said: "Luhot ha'eduth can smell the stable."

"What are you talking about now?"

" 'The tablets of the testimony.' Another way of describing the covenant."

Quinten turned away with a jerk and looked wide-eyed through the plane without seeing anything. It was as though that word testimony were also deep in himself, like a cut, sparkling diamond in the blue earth.

In Lod, at Ben Gurion airport, it was full of policemen and armed security troops, which reminded Onno of Havana eighteen years before, when all these men had been in their cribs playing with rattles; but no one was looking for them. The vacationers bound for Cyprus, who had applauded after the landing, had remained in the plane. Their baggage was inspected again at long tables; for the third time people were checked to see if they resembled the photos in their passports. The suitcase was opened again and Parsifal had to help again. Next to them was the Orthodox man, who also glanced at the stones without interest.

"If only he knew," said Quinten.

"Careful," said Onno softly. "Even abroad there's always a chance that someone will understand you. Certainly in Israel." When they were finally given permission to leave and he had drawn some money — shekels, according to him the currency back in Old Testament times — he asked, "Now what?"

"Well, fairly logical. We're going outside."

It was almost one o'clock. On the square in front of the departure hall it was swelteringly hot; people had scarcely any shadows coming from their feet. They walked through the throng of cars and buses toward a low, white office for tourist information and hotel reservations.

"If there's one thing I need," said Onno, "it's a civilized bath. Do you realize we haven't taken our clothes off for twenty-four hours? Don't you feel grimy?"

"I'm okay."

"Sherut?" shouted a man with a yarmulke on his crown, who was hastily loading suitcases into a small bus. "Yerushalayim?"

There were still two free seats in his shuttle to Jerusalem, and Onno had gradually realized that all they had to do was to get in. On the backseat they found themselves next to a graying lady reading L'Express; all the others were intellectual-looking men, Americans, in shortsleeved shirts, some of them wearing bow ties. When the driver started the engine, he turned around and asked them what hotel they wanted. The lady was going to the King David; the Americans had to get to the Hilton. When Onno didn't reply immediately, he asked impatiently: "The Hilton too?"

Onno made a gesture that they might as well go there, and a little later they drove into the dry, stone-strewn hills.

They did not speak during the forty-five-minute drive. Onno had never been in Israel, but he felt as if the metaphysical violence that had raged here for four thousand years, and was still raging, could be read from the landscape. Of course that was a romantic thought, deriving from what he knew of history, from Bible readings with his father and the vicar and from sugary catechism prints from his early childhood, with breaking clouds that let through fans of holy rays. For him, too, Israel had always been "the Promised Land," but that he should finally get to see it under these circumstances was the most unbelievable thing of all: accompanied by his son, who had a suitcase on his lap that supposedly contained the tablets of the Law.

It was as if in this scorching light, undisturbed by any Dutch cloud, time curled up like an insect in a flame. Gradually the hills became more rugged; here and there they were in bloom, and in the verge of the four-lane highway there were the wrecks of shot-up trucks and armored cars preserved with rust-colored red-lead paint. The driver told them that they were from the wars of 1948 and 1967; but they might just as well have been from the time of the Crusaders, the Romans, the Babylonians. .

The tower of the Jerusalem Hilton, with each balcony rail bedecked with an Israeli flag, was in the western part of the city; the excavations that were going on next to it showed that it had once been different. In the cool, sumptuous lobby, surrounded by small boutiques, the Americans reported to excited ladies at a table with miniature flags and papers on it; a board on an easel welcomed delegates to the international conference on the irrigation of the Negev. At the counter Onno put down their passports and asked for two rooms. Perhaps because he saw that they were Dutch passports, the receptionist directed him in English to the hydraulic engineers' table.

"No, we're not with them."

"Why not?" asked Quinten.

"For God's sake!" said Onno, raising his arms. "Not again! You're just like Max."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you sometime."

But there were no other rooms free, all the hotels were full; there were four or five conferences being held in Jerusalem at the moment. Only in the Old City might there be still something available, but of course security was not all it might be there. When Onno said that they weren't so easily frightened, and anyway had to find accommodation somewhere, the receptionist made a couple of telephone calls and noted down the name and address of a hotel.

After they had had a bite to eat in the bar — with Quinten being refused a glass of milk with his ham roll — a taxi took them to the eastern part of the city. At the end of a wide shopping street jammed with traffic the ground sloped gradually downward, and a little later, on the other side of a valley full of vegetation, really more a gully, the massive walls of old Jerusalem rose up above them. Behind them, in a flood of sunlight, were countless towers, with a gold and a silver cupola in the center. Quinten bent deep over his suitcase to be able to see it better through the front windshield.

"Look at that," he said softly. "There it is. It really exists."

Although the Arab on his camel belonged to the same order as the heavy, sandy yellow stones of the city wall that he was riding past, the driver hooted at him to move aside, drove through the Jaffa Gate, and stopped in a small square. A little later there they were in the throng of tourists, Palestinian merchants wearing headscarves, Roman Catholic monks and nuns, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic priests in exotic robes, religious Jews in kaftans, military patrols made up of boys and girls, with Uzis and Kalashnikovs slung around them. The pealing of church bells and the cries of the merchants merged into a din that effortlessly absorbed the two dull thuds with which a jet broke the sound barrier in the distance.

Hotel Raphael, probably not mentioned in any travel guide, sat wedged unimposingly between a bureau de change and a grocer's, which had displayed its boxes and sacks of herbs like the palette of Carpaccio: vermilion, rusty-brown, terra-cotta, cornflower blue, olive-green, saffron-yellow. The reception desk consisted of a corrugated wooden counter in a narrow hallway leading via a couple of steps into what was obviously the lounge-cum-breakfast room; slumped in a chair with a torn plastic back, a man in his sixties sat watching the television, which was fed by a V-shaped indoor aerial. He put his cigarette in an ashtray and got up.

"Quist?" he asked with a melancholy smile. "Shalom," — and then in English—"My colleague said you were coming." He shook hands with them and introduced himself as Menachem Aron.

He had not made things easy for himself. On his head was a wig of chestnut-colored hair that was too thick and too even, out of which reddish-gray hair protruded by his ears; what's more, there was a light-blue yar-mulke pinned to its crown, which in this case may not have been strictly necessary liturgically — unless he was taking account of the possibility, Onno reflected, that God could not see he was wearing a wig. Aron put two forms on the counter and asked how many nights they wanted to stay.

"Two?" asked Quinten. "Three?"

"I'm not saying anything. It's your undertaking, you must know."

"Two, then." That should be enough.

"Shower in the hall," said Aron, putting down their room keys.

"I don't know about you," said Onno, "but I'm going straight to bed. I've had it." He pointed to the suitcase. "What do you think? Shall we ask if he's got a luggage locker?"

Aron disappeared through a door behind the counter and a little later came back with a narrow iron drawer, into which a wallet fitted. When it was explained to him what was needed, he asked Quinten to follow him. In a cluttered little office, also used to store crates of empty bottles, a girl looked up from her typewriter and nodded to Quinten with a look that made him a little uncertain. Her black hair was cut very short, like his mother's.

In the corner stood a head-high green safe from a bygone age; in the center of the door was a heavy brass plate with the name Kromer on it. Quinten had seen at once that the monster had an old-fashioned letter combination lock, which had long since ceased to be used. Aron put one knee on the tiled floor and turned the knob back and forth four times, making sure that the combination was invisible to his guest. When the colossal steel door, a good ten inches thick, slowly swung open, Quinten saw that there was room for a hundred commandments.

"Heavy," said the hotel keeper, putting the case on the bottom shelf, but he asked no other questions. After he had closed the door with a bang, he struck the knob twice with the side of his hand. "All right?"

"Yes."

The girl turned around and asked something in Hebrew, perhaps just to be able to see Quinten again, with the white lock of hair in his black pony-tail. But Aron stood guard over his daughter and motioned to Quinten that he could go back to the counter.

Something had happened in the meantime. Onno stood open-mouthed on the threshold to the lounge, with his eyes obviously focused on the television. With an imperious gesture at hip height, he motioned to Quinten to be quiet.

Quinten went up to him and also looked at the screen: pictures of an exalted praying and singing throng on a square, most of them kneeling, with arms opened wide, their faces raised ecstatically to heaven; dotted among them were pizza stands. He could not catch what the voice of the Hebrew commentator was saying. When the camera swung around, he suddenly saw where it was: in the Sancta Sanctorum! The crowded Holy Stairs, the chapel, through the bars a close-up of his father's stick on the papal prayer stool opposite the altar! A little later an old woman came into the shot, gesturing excitedly, talking in Italian with a breaking voice, of which he understood only the word miracolo, followed by a priest choosing his words and subtitled in Hebrew, but not the one made of butter. After the stick with the snake's-head handle had been shown again, the Israeli newsreader concluded the item with an ironic look at the viewers.

Speechless, Onno sank into a chair.

"Tell me!" said Quinten. "What's happened?"

"I'm going crazy. This morning my stick was discovered — by that old woman. She's the first one to go up the Holy Stairs on Sundays, and she alerted the fathers of the Holy Cross. When she saw their amazement, she began screaming that a miracle had happened, since no one could get into the chapel. Within an hour the news had spread through the city and people began flooding in from all directions. Guess what? They believe that my stick is Moses' staff, with which he struck water from the rock. This is proved by the handle in the shape of a snake's head: at the pharaoh's court, Moses once threw his staff on the ground and it changed into a snake. At the same time, they say, the serpent from paradise is now worshiping the acheiropoeton in the papal Holy of Holies, and that indicates the end of Original Sin and the second coming of Christ. At the moment there seem to be jams on all the approach roads to Rome."

It took a while before Quinten could say: "But those fathers know that it's your stick, don't they?"

"So they're obviously leaving it at that." Onno nodded. "They didn't take proper care, and now it's not in their interest for it to become known. What's more, they feel that the rise in appreciation for their chapel is marvelous, of course."

"And what if Mauro recognizes your stick?"

"He won't dare say anything. Perhaps he'll accept a bribe to keep quiet. There's no turning back for anyone."

"And why didn't the rector speak just now? Could there be something else wrong?"

"Perhaps Padre Agostino will be canonized in a while. Patron saint of the dairy industry."

"Who was that priest at the end?"

"Cardinal Sartolli, the archpriest of San Giovanni in Laterano. He was being diplomatically noncommittal. He said that the Church was of course pleased by the piety of the people but that they should now wait for an official reaction from the Vatican." Onno looked up at him. "Quinten! What have we done?"

Quinten looked at him for a moment — and suddenly, as if struck by lightning, he fell about laughing.

63. The Center of the Center

"I've never seen you laugh like that," said Onno the following morning at breakfast, after he had read the latest news of the situation in Rome to Quinten from the Ha'aretz: by now pilgrims from all over the world were streaming to the Sancta Sanctorum; the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano had been closed to all traffic, and, like the Holy See, the chief rabbi's office in Jerusalem was making no comment.

"Doesn't it make you laugh yourself silly? All those praying people precisely when there's nothing more to worship? Only that silly walking stick of yours."

Onno folded the paper. "Right. So we've traded the Ten Commandments for my walking stick, and you're going to take them back." He looked at Quinten over his reading glasses. "Might those two stones perhaps be just the same as that rod of Moses they're worshiping?"

"How can you think such a thing?" said Quinten indignantly. "Your stick isn't Moses', is it?"

Onno nodded and silently spooned up his egg. "But I assume that the safe in Hotel Raphael isn't their final destination."

"Of course not."

"I wasn't able to sleep too well, as you may perhaps understand, and so I tried again to put myself in your shoes… I know that that's impossible, but why shouldn't someone attempt the impossible.. and I think you want to deliver them exactly where Titus got them from. Or am I wrong?"

"I don't know," said Quinten. He had not thought about it himself — he would see — but perhaps it was a good idea.

"That means the spot where the temple of Herod stood."

"But," Quinten added, "it must in the exact spot where the Holy of Holies was."

Onno wiped his mouth with a sigh.

"Of course, you can never be too exact. So that means some more learning. I hadn't thought that I'd get to know so much because of you." He pushed back his chair with an unbearable scraping sound and got up. "Shall we go and take a look at the situation, then?"

Quinten was a little surprised at the initiative his father was suddenly showing. It was as though he were in a hurry all at once; perhaps he felt that it was time they put an end to the whole affair, after what was now happening in Rome. But he himself was curious about the spot where all those temples had stood. In the doorway, Aron pointed out the narrow street that they had to take: straight ahead — that would bring them directly to the Temple Mount, Moriah, ten minutes' walk.

The heat was becoming more intense again after the cool night. The crowded street, adorned with drying laundry, like all streets around the Mediterranean, was the beginning of the souk: an uninterrupted string of tiny shops selling souvenirs, pottery, multicolored cloth, sweets, indeterminate workshops, copper smithies, a barber's, but above all of yelling tradesmen trying to offload their wares onto the tourists. And every ten yards men with headscarves forced themselves on one as guides; hearing where they came from, all of them without exception shouted the Dutch shibboleth "Allemachtig achtentachtig!" with its string of guttural sounds.

Onno stopped at a display of walking sticks with primitively carved wooden handles.

"Suppose I took this one," he said, pointing to a snake's head. "That would really be tempting fate."

"I'd be careful about that in Jerusalem."

"Forty shekels," said the shopkeeper, and pulled out the stick.

Since he found them all equally ugly, Onno shook his head and walked on, but the man followed them and a few steps farther the price had fallen to thirty shekels, twenty-five, twenty.

"Wait a bit," said Onno, "and we'll get it for nothing."

"If we simply go on walking, we'll automatically become millionaires," added Quinten — thinking for a moment of the disguised hotel keeper, who had no idea that his safe had been temporarily transformed into the ark of the covenant and was housing a billion guilders' worth of sapphires.

For ten shekels Onno purchased a heavy stick with an uncarved handle, almost a truncheon, helpfully fetched by the salesman from his workshop. Relieved that he again had something to lean on, he walked on. By now they had been walking for a quarter of an hour, but there was no sign of the Temple Mount anywhere. Farther on, the street was topped by arches, and a little later they found themselves in the shadows of a crowded, labyrinthine bazaar, which made it impossible to walk straight ahead.

When Quinten looked to see where they were at a street corner, he read: " 'Via Dolorosa.' "

"Yes, that's what it's like here. The way of the cross of our Lord and Savior." Onno pointed to a relief above a church door with his stick. "This is the fourth station, where Jesus met his mother. But," he said, and looked left and right, "this route leads to Golgotha, over which the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built; and it must start from Pilate's Citadel Antonia, where the Holy Stairs come from. So we have to go that way, because the fortress, I think, is also on the Temple Mount."

At that moment Quinten grabbed his arm and pulled him into a shop selling jewels. "What's wrong?"

"There's Aunt Trees."

Behind a man holding a closed red parasol over his head, she was walking in the middle of a group of white-haired ladies, looking as alike as their flowered dresses.

Crouched in his hiding place, Onno followed her with his eyes. He felt quite moved. "How old she's become," he said softly, "the shrew. But as devout as ever. She's going to put her hand in the hole where the cross of Jesus Christ stood."

"Or did you want to meet her?" asked Quinten. "She would have recognized you too, of course."

"I don't really know." Onno stood up with a groan. "I've no idea anymore what to do with my life, but of course I can't go on acting as if everything's the same as before. You've made sure of that."

Obsequiously, the shopkeeper held up a silver chain — or what was supposed to be a silver chain — with a small Star of David on it.

Onno looked into the eyes of the old Arab, who wore a blob of fine white lace on his head. "We'll have to buy this," he said. He paid the absurd price he was asked and put the chain around Quinten's neck.

Quinten felt it and asked: "Are you allowed to wear one of these if you are not a Jew?"

"Only if you've been given it by your father. That's bound to be somewhere in the Talmud."

A few houses farther on, they bought a map at a newspaper stand, which quickly showed them the way back to the Jewish quarter. The crossing point was clearly on a kind of border, formed by soldiers, who were standing around in a bored fashion on either side of a narrow street. As they descended a wide staircase, they passed another group of soldiers shortly afterward; in the shadow next to radio equipment with a long aerial, they sat and relaxed on chairs, automatic rifles at the ready on their laps.

"God and violence," said Onno. "It's been like that here for four thousand years." The stairs made a ninety-degree turn — and suddenly they stopped.

For a moment Quinten was reminded of Venice, when he had emerged into the Piazza San Marco from the maze of alleyways. But there art and beauty reigned, full of wind and sea and with a floating lightness. Here something else very different was going on: it was not beautiful; it was crushing. He had the feeling that the scene he was watching was not only where it was but in himself, too, like a pit in a fruit — like the word testimony on the plane yesterday.

Hot as an oven, filled with the buzzing of voices, the sound of drums and exotic high-pitched trills from women's throats, a great square extended before them, enclosed on the far side by the massive, yellow Wailing Wall. It did not form a division between two spaces, like a city wall; it was like a cliff. On the area above it gleamed the golden and silver cupolas that he had seen from a taxi; and from there came the electronically amplified wail of a muezzin. In this city the religions not only existed side by side, they were even piled on top of one another.

"That wall," said Onno, "is all that is left of the temple complex of Herod. It stood on top of that plateau. As far as I know it's not called the Wailing Wall because people have been lamenting Jewish persecution there for centuries, like Auschwitz and the gas chambers, but because of the destruction of the temple by the Romans. It will appeal to you." He glanced uncomfortably at Quinten. "They pray for its rebuilding and the coming of the Messiah."

Quinten looked up. Here and there soldiers with rifles were sitting on the wall. "How can we get up there?"

Onno began climbing down the last few steps feeling giddy. "Now that I'm finally in Jerusalem, I want to have a look around down here first. Do you realize what all this means to me? All through my childhood this hoo-ha was pounded into me with a sledgehammer. It's no accident that my sister's walking around here too."

The mood at the foot of the wall was more festive than plaintive. Part of the square was fenced off and reserved for men, a smaller area for women; at the entrance they were given paper yarmulkes — perhaps folded in prisons by Palestinians — and for half an hour they mingled in the religious throng. All along the wall, out of which clumps of weeds were growing, the faithful stood facing the huge blocks, the bottom two rows colored brown by the hands and lips that had been pressed on them for twenty centuries. Orthodox Jews, in knee-breeches, with round hats and ringlets down their cheeks, were indulging in strange jerking movements, like puppets, while reading books; old men with gray beards sat on chairs facing the wall, also reading. When Quinten began to pay attention, he saw that everything related to reading. The cracks between the stones were cemented with countless folded pieces of paper, obviously with wishes written on them.

"That's right," said Onno. "Here you're in the world of the book. I come from there myself. Perhaps you should be glad you've been spared that, but perhaps not."

Here and there were tables with books on them, which people occasionally leafed through; now and then someone took a copy with him to the wall. Through a stone archway in the left-hand corner of the square Quinten took a few steps into a dark space, which for a moment reminded him of his Citadel, where there were many more books on shelves. Suddenly a small, untidy procession appeared from the caves: men in prayer clothes, with cloths over their heads, carried an opened wooden box into the light. It contained two large scrolls with writing on them.

"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 columns 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 had 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."

"I don't know about that, but they'd be found the very next day by the Arabs, and that might be an even bigger disaster than if they fell into the hands of the Jews."

"Do what you want. In any case I don't want to hear another word about it. But I'd be careful if I were you. If you want to be murdered by Muslims foaming at the mouth, then you should try something here. You're playing with fire, you are."

Ibrahim, who had kept politely in the background, resumed his task and pointed to a small silver dome, close to the gate, with scaffolding around it, surrounded by a fence. That was the Dome of the Chain — so called after a silver chain that King David had hung up in it, a gift from the angel Gabriel: if one lied while holding it, then a link fell out of it. Onno was no longer listening — he was no longer interested — but Quinten peeped inside through a small gap.

The supernatural lie detector was a miniature version of the Dome of the Rock, but open around the sides; the ground was strewn with fragments, broken stones, pieces and fragments, tools, dented cans, plastic bottles, and rags: in the center stood an electric masonry saw. To the north of the Dome of the Rock there were more small buildings, but Quinten too felt that he had seen enough. He joined Onno, who was standing at the top of the eastern staircase of the temple terrace in the shade of the arcades, looking out at the Mount of Olives.

Ibrahim was indefatigable. "There," he said in the tone of a proud owner, pointing to the foot of the hill, "is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus Christ—"

"I know, I know."

"Over there is his mother's grave, and there on the top of it… do you see that small dome? That's the spot from where she ascended into heaven."

Onno felt giddy and leaned heavily on his stick.

"I hope," he said to Quinten, "they've got some official here in Jerusalem who directs vertical traffic, to prevent jams."

Quinten burst out laughing; he was glad that the fit of rage had passed. Although it might annoy his father again, he asked Ibrahim: "Do you know where Titus's encampment was?"

Ibrahim pointed to the north slope of the Mount of Olives. "Somewhere over there. The conquerors of Jerusalem always came from the north."

Quinten looked around him and opened the map. So that meant that the tablets of the Law and the menorah and all those things had been taken out of the temple along this same route, down the terrace here, and then across the valley of Kidron to the other side. He was struck by a strange gatehouse obliquely opposite, in the east wall of the plateau, surrounded by grass and trees. It was deeply embedded in the ground, with a double nave, crowned by two low towers with flat domes; both gateways had been bricked up. At the front, where the battlements were, stood Israeli soldiers in green berets.

"What gate is that?"

"Ah!" said Ibrahim raising both hands. "The Golden Gate! According to the Jews, that's the gate through which God once entered their temple to mount his throne there. It must stay closed until the coming of the Messiah, at the end of time. That is why every religious Jew wants to be buried over there on the slopes of the Mount of Olives."

Onno pointed to the soldiers on the roof with his stick.

"The Messiah would be gunned down immediately."

A crooked smile appeared on Ibrahim's face. "Not only that — the Messiah has a second problem. On the other side of the wall there are Muslim graves, and that's unclean; he mustn't walk over them."

"What a rotten thing to do," said Quinten, "putting them there."

"So you see," — laughed Onno—"they ride rough-shod over dead bodies here — or precisely not, how shall one put it?"

"For the Christians," added Ibrahim, "the Golden Gate is a symbol of Mary, through whom Jesus came into the world and who remained a virgin before during and after his birth: closed, so to speak."

Those words made Quinten rather uncertain. He glanced timidly at the mysterious gate and thought of his mother for a moment; to hide his embarrassment he looked at the map, which he still had unfolded in his hand. Suddenly he was struck by the fact that the whole temple square had the shape of a trapezoid, and the raised terrace with the Dome of the Rock too. He showed his father.

"What's so special about that?"

"Well, that stone that we just saw is a trapezoid too."

"Yes," said Onno. "That's right."

Quinten did not know what to make of it either. Had the rock served as the model for the terrace and the square? The Piazza San Marco in Venice was in the shape of a trapezoid, too — he'd thought that so beautiful. Were all those trapezoid-shaped things connected in some way through that shape? Or all spherical objects? Was an eye connected with the sun? Yes of course, profoundly. And with a soccer ball? The sphere, the circle, the octagon, and square, the ellipse, the rectangle, the triangle, the cube, the pyramid — all those shapes with which Mr. Themaat had first acquainted him; what was their real message? What were they themselves? Did they actually exist somewhere? Perhaps where music came from too? He looked back at the map, and saw that it was not the Dome of the Rock but the Dome of the Chain that was exactly in the center of the temple square.

"To tell you the truth," said Onno, letting his eyes wander over the Mount of Olives, Mount Scopus, Mount Zion, "all this metaphysics here is starting to make me sick. Anyway, it's getting far too hot. What would you say if we got a bus and had a drink in the west, in the new city? Nothing can happen to us there, I think." He turned around. "What's happened to our poet? We've still got to pay him."

"There he goes."

Hands behind his back, his head cocked a little to one side, like a real gentleman, they saw Ibrahim just descending the northern staircase of the temple terrace.

64. Chawah Lawan?

They got off at a busy junction and crossed to a row of shops, where a table was just being vacated on a shady terrace.

"Look at that," said Onno, rubbing his left thigh. "Here we can finally have a normal conversation."

The priests and Orthodox Jews had vanished from the streets; even the tourists had largely given way to women shopping, workmen, and groups of schoolchildren. Although there wasn't an Arab in sight, there were again fully armed male and female soldiers sitting on the edge of a large container of plants.

"Why is it," asked Quinten, "that Ibrahim knew so much about all those biblical figures? Muslims have got the Koran, haven't they?"

Onno looked at him for a few seconds. "Is that what you understand by a normal conversation?"

"What's so abnormal about it? It's an ordinary question, isn't it? All these things exist, don't they?"

"All right, I'll answer," said Onno with resignation. "The Bible and Koran overlap to a great extent. According to Islam, Allah in heaven has the original copy of the Holy Scripture; the Torah and the Gospels are corrupt editions and forgeries of it; the Koran is a true copy." He nodded, looking at Quinten. "Yes, you need quite a nerve to declare your grandfather and your father to be your son and your grandson. .. Right. And now could we change the subject perhaps? Or don't you have any sense of everyday reality anymore?"

"This is everyday reality to me."

"That's what I was afraid of. But do you never have the feeling that it might get utterly exhausting for other people in the long run?"

"But you don't get tired from thinking and learning things? I only get tired when I'm bored."

"I admit," said Onno, "boredom doesn't get much of a look in around you." He looked around. "Of course you're right, it all exists, but not everything exists in the same way. Have you ever listened to other people's conversations? Here on this terrace you can't understand them, but people usually talk about people — about their family and friends, or people at work, or people in politics and sports, and mostly about themselves."

"And what if I were to get completely sick of that kind of chatter? When they talk about things, it's almost always about the things you can have, like cars, money. I never talk about people, and not about myself, and not about what I've got."

"No, you talk about trapezoids, or sacred stones — and you're not concerned with those stones but with their sacredness, their meaning. You only care about meanings and connections. I admit I may have lumbered you with that — concrete things are not my strong point, either; but even I'm not as abstract as you. Did you really examine that rock just now? Do you know what kind of stone it is? Granite? Limestone?"

"Why should I examine it if it doesn't mean anything? There are so many rocks."

"Can you hear what I'm saying? If a rock means something you don't have to examine it, and not if it means nothing, either. So you really never have to examine anything. Do you belong in this world?"

Quinten did not reply. No one knew who he was — not even himself. What was "this world"? The boys playing soccer in Westerbork, they belonged in this world — but the feeling that they got when they scored a goal was what he got when something interesting occurred to him.

All these people here were sitting chattering about other people or about things that you could have, like those two white-haired ladies at the next table: none of it had anything to do with him. So would it be best if he went into a monastery? Became a father of the Holy Cross? Had a black ribbon tied around his arm at the Wailing Wall? Then he thought of what he himself possessed — the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them, which he had seen were made of sapphire; the testimony, which was at the same time not his possession and which today or tomorrow at the latest he would give away somehow. After that there was nothing more for him here, not even in a monastery. Yesterday, in the Francis Bacon..

His thoughts were interrupted by a girl who came to take their order. He pointed to the neighboring table, where an old lady with her back toward them had an orange drink in front of her. "What's that?"

"Carrot juice."

"Carrot juice? Never had it."

"Order that, then," said Onno. "Don't you want anything to eat? What time is it?"

"A quarter to twelve. I'm not hungry."

After Onno had ordered a cup of coffee for himself, he asked: "Shall we go to a post office in a bit and phone Granny Sophia? We were going to do that in the Holy of Holies."

"And are you going to tell her everything?"

"You must be joking! That would probably cause a short circuit in the telephone exchange. Just to let her hear from us. I don't know what else you've got in mind, but it will probably mean us eventually going back to Holland."

"Yes?" asked Quinten. "And what then?"

Onno sighed. "That's a mystery to me, too. When I saw Auntie Trees just now in the Via Dolorosa, I took it as a signal that the world is after me again. But what am I supposed to do there? For you that's no problem— you're seventeen, you can go in any direction you like; but I've got no point of reference anymore. Really, I'm just a kind of walking Tower of Babel. What's someone like that supposed to do? In our family everyone lives to be ninety; I can't go on roaming the world for another forty years." He put his stick between his parted legs, his hands on the handle, and rested his chin on them, looking at the passersby.

Quinten found that attitude much too old-looking and asked: "Can't you start something completely new?"

"Something completely new.. Tell me something completely new."

"Or something very old," said Quinten. "What did you want to be when you were little?"

Onno put his cheek on his hands and looked at Quinten reflectively. "What did I want to be when I was small.."

"Yes. The very first thing you wanted to be."

"The very first thing I wanted to be…" repeated Onno, with a sing-song tone in his voice, like in a litany. He raised his head. "A doll doctor."

"A doll doctor?" Quinten repeated in his turn. "What's that?"

"Someone who repairs broken dolls." Onno had not thought about that for almost half a century, but now that he said it, he suddenly realized it was of course connected with his mother, who for years had dressed him up like a girl.

"Well," said Quinten, "then you must become a doll doctor!"

At the same instant Onno saw himself sitting in a small shop in the center of Amsterdam, in a narrow cross street, surrounded by shelves filled with hundreds of pink, gleaming dolls, repairing broken eyelids, installing new "Mommy" voices..

"I'll think about it," he said. "What would Lazarus have done after he'd been raised from the dead?"

"Isn't that in the Bible?"

"Not if you ask me. I vaguely remember a legend about him going to Marseilles, where he became the first bishop."

"Perhaps he simply bored everyone stiff with his experiences while he was dead."

"But then we'd have some information about it. As far as I know he never talked about it." He turned his head to Quinten. "Just as I shall never be able to talk about a certain experience." When Quinten did not react, he said, "In any case we will need a roof over our heads in Amsterdam. The first few weeks we can stay in a hotel, but then I'll have to rent or buy something. I'll telephone Hans Giltay Veth right away. Won't he be surprised!"

Quinten knew that he wouldn't be going with him, but he couldn't say so. What was he to say in reply if his father asked why not? He didn't know himself. Not because he didn't want to, but because it wouldn't happen.

"Aunt Dol said that your things are in storage in Rotterdam, at the docks."

"I don't want any of that," said Onno immediately, while at the same moment the dark-brown Chinese camphor box appeared before his eyes, decorated all around with heavy carving, in which Ada's clothes had lain for seventeen years.

"Mama's cello is in my room in Groot Rechteren now," said Quinten.

Onno nodded in silence.

The girl put their order in front of them. Quinten took a mouthful of his carrot juice and to his amazement it tasted of carrots — or, rather, to his astonishment the taste of carrots could also appear without loud cracking and crunching. He wanted to tell his father this, but then saw that astonishment had taken hold of him too.

"Look," said Onno, perplexed, and pointed to the dark-brown cookie with caramelized sugar and peanuts that was on the saucer next to his coffee. "A gingersnap! Do you remember? We were always given those at Granny To's. The ones that make such a noise in your mouth." He took the round brown cookie carefully in his fingers, raised it with both hands like a priest lifting the host, and it was on the tip of his tongue to say "Mother! Hoc est enim corpus tuum!" — but he simply cried out rapturously, "A gingersnap!"

At that the amazement spread still further. At the next table, two old ladies were about to leave. One was already waiting in the street; the other— dressed in a creamy white dress with sleeves reaching just below her elbow — was still paying the waitress and turned to look at Onno for a moment.

"A gingersnap," she said in Dutch with a strong Hebrew accent. "I haven't heard that word for a long time."

Quinten did not look at her. His attention was caught by the blue number on her wrinkled forearm—31415. When they had gone, Onno opened his mouth to speak, but Quinten asked:

"Did you see that number on her arm? I thought only the rabble had themselves tattooed."

For a few seconds Onno looked straight into Quinten's eyes. "Did she have a number on her arm?" he asked, as if he couldn't believe what he had heard.

"Three-one-four-one-five. What's wrong? Why have you got that funny look in your eyes?"

Onno began trembling, feeling as if the trembling came from his chair, from the earth, like at the beginning of an earthquake. He did not take his eyes off Quinten.

"What's wrong? Dad?" asked Quinten in alarm. "Why aren't you saying anything?"

What he had seen, and what Quinten had not seen, was the color of her eyes — that indescribable lapis lazuli, which in his whole life he had seen in only one person: Quinten. He was going to say that she had eyes just like his, but when Quinten told him about her tattoo, the numbers that people were given in Auschwitz, it immediately triggered a short-circuit in his head. Was he seeing ghosts? He didn't want to think what he was thinking; it was too terrible, too much to cope with. He tried to put it out of his mind, to grab it and crush it underfoot, like a hornet; but it was there and it wouldn't budge. He had to think about this, think it out of existence, right away; but not with Quinten there — he had to be alone. Quinten must never know what he was thinking. He got up, swaying, holding on to his chair.

"I want to go. I'm going to the hotel. You stay here. I'll see you in a bit."

Quinten got up too. "It's not something to do with your brain, is it? Should I phone a doctor?"

"There's nothing wrong with my brain — that is. . please don't ask any more questions."

"I'm going with you."

Quinten paid the waitress, who was still clearing the table where the two old ladies had sat, and took hold of Onno's arm. At the end of the pedestrian precinct he hailed a taxi and helped Onno in. They did not speak during the short drive; he felt that his father was fighting a battle that he didn't understand. Had he had a slight stroke again, but refused to believe it? At any rate, he mustn't leave him alone. They drove past the wall of the Old City to the Jaffa Gate again and got out in the square, which was already as familiar as if they had been living there for weeks.

"Need a guide? Need a guide? Where are you from?"

Aron appeared from the office and put the keys on the counter, with a face that seemed to say that nothing in the world could surprise him anymore, since everything was as it was and would always be as it would be. Up winding stairs, punctuated by neglected corridors with steps up and steps down, they got to their rooms on the third floor, at the back of the hotel.

Quinten opened Onno's door and gave him the key. "I'll be next door," he said. "If you need me, just call."

"You don't have to stay in the hotel because of me. Go on into town, there's enough to see. I'll see you later."

"Try to get some rest."

When he had crossed the threshold, Onno turned and they looked at each other for a moment, as though each of them were expecting the other to say something else, but they did not.

Inside, Onno lay straight down on the bed, put his stick on the floor next to him, closed his eyes, and folded his hands on his chest. Laid out in this way, his thoughts immediately started up again.

He saw her in front of him again on the terrace, turning her head. "A gingersnap. I haven't heard that word for a long time." Those unique eyes. . 31415… How old was she? Late seventies? Almost eighty? Was the unthinkable really thinkable? Had he seen Max's mother? Eva Weiss? Could it be true that she was still alive? He tried to recall her wedding photo, which had been on Max's "shelf of honor" in Groot Rechteren, on the mantelpiece. Of course, that portrait from the 1920s was in black-and-white; all he remembered was that Max had his father's eyes and the nose and mouth of his mother. Number 31415 also had a pronounced nose, but that was nothing special around here, either in Jews or in Arabs; her mouth had perhaps retained a suggestion of sensuality. But if that was true, then he must confront the unimaginable consequence. In that case Quinten was not his son but Max's. In that case Ada had deceived him with Max. In that case Max had betrayed their friendship. He was disgusted with himself. What kind of figments of the imagination were these?

Suppose Max's mother had survived Auschwitz. Then she would have returned to Holland at once to trace her son, and she would have found him in that foster family in no time. But they were Catholics. Was it conceivable that they'd been able to keep Max hidden in those chaotic days because he would otherwise be brought up as a Jew, which would mean that his soul was lost for all eternity? That had happened a few times; once even involving abduction to a monastery. No, he remembered Max had told him that he didn't even have to cross himself before meals. Another possibility was that the Germans had told her that her son had been transported to an extermination camp, like her parents. Back in Holland, she had inquired if any of them had come back. They had not. But if her son had not come back, it was simply because he'd never been deported. Perhaps she would have found that out at the National Institute for War Documentation — the records were kept carefully during the war by the Jewish Council; but because she had lived for years in the conviction that he had been taken to Poland as well, the idea did not occur to her. After that there would have been nothing left for her in Holland, where there were only dreadful memories, and she had emigrated to Palestine.

But wait. Max's foster parents had obviously also inquired from their side whether his mother had returned, and obviously they'd been told not. How was that possible? Everything was always possible. Perhaps they'd inquired about Eva Delius, while Max's mother had had herself registered as Eva Weiss, because she could not bear to say Delius. If that was the case, it should be possible to find out at War Documentation. And everything could have happened completely differently; one couldn't reconstruct reality by thinking. He must simply find out whether that lady just now had been Eva Weiss. That must be possible — Israel was not that big. But if it really was, then she would probably have Hebraized her name and was now called Chawah Lawan. What's more, in 1945 she had not yet turned forty; such an attractive woman with such striking eyes would of course have remarried, and now she was a widow with a different name. So now he had to get up immediately and go to the Registry Office, and to that Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, where all the millions of dead were documented; perhaps they also had the German registration numbers from Auschwitz. But he did not get up. He lay there in his hot little room without air-conditioning. Had she had another child? Probably not. Her only son was now really dead — had she really sat next to her own grandson just now? Had Quinten sat next to his grandmother?

He found himself only holding on to all those speculations to avoid the most important thing of all. With his eyes closed, he frowned for a moment. Had Max been capable of that? Of course, he was capable of anything; for women he would have betrayed even God. But Ada? He thought back to that night in Havana, almost eighteen years ago, when according to their calculation Quinten had been conceived. Her shadow in the doorway of his hotel room late that evening.. Where had she come from? He opened his eyes. Dammit, that was it! She'd been to the beach with Max, without him, because he was deceiving her with Maria, the revolutionary widow — that is, he had let himself be seduced by her, just as Ada had seduced him that same night, in complete contrast to her passive nature! He sat up, and a fragment of the Saint Matthew Passion, in which Ada had played, came into his head: "Was dürfen wir weiter Zeugnis?" Had she been through a kind of repetition exercise with Max, a nostalgic episode that had turned out to be rather active, after which she'd come to cleanse herself with him — but in fact sullied herself with Maria? In that case Max had been the stronger: she couldn't become pregnant; she was on the pill. But his seed was as brazen as he was and had paid no attention. That would explain everything! He must have been afraid for months that the child would look like him, and his offer to bring it up had not been simply an act of friendship but a penance — and to that extent a deed of friendship in its turn. At the same time Max had saddled him with the feeling of guilt for not bringing up his own son, who perhaps wasn't his own son, and whom, moreover, he'd later completely abandoned! With his head turned to one side, Onno looked out the window at the blue sky, in which hung the invisible sound of church bells and cooing doves. What next? If that was all true, then the old lady was none other than Eva Weiss; but perhaps it wasn't true.

Had Max known that Quinten was his son? Quinten didn't look like either of them, but maybe Max had nevertheless discovered something in common between himself and Quinten. So did Sophia perhaps know about it, too? Obviously there had been something going on between those two! Or maybe Sophia had discovered that Max and Quinten had something in common, something unobtrusive, some odd trivial thing, but had not told him. And since she had not told him, Onno, she wouldn't do so now. Anyway, what good would that knowledge do anyone? Quinten least of all. For years he'd been looking for his father, while his father may have been sitting opposite him at the table every evening, and had been acting as his father in practice all along. The only person who would derive any joy from it was Chawah Lawan.

The news that her son had not been gassed at the age of nine but had become a leading astronomer, and had only just died at age fifty-one, would of course plunge her into an impossible mixture of happiness and despair; perhaps she'd even read the fantastic report of his death in the newspaper here, referring to a "Dutch astronomer in Westerbork," without mentioning his name, because he was not that famous. But if she survived that news, she could then look into the eyes of her grandson as if into a mirror.

Only by establishing the identity of that Mrs. 31415 could he get at the truth — and perhaps nowadays it was also possible medically. He hadn't read newspapers for years, but it wouldn't surprise him if all that DNA research had by now led to reliable determination of kinship. But in that case Quinten would also have to give blood or saliva — which would also be bound to have a poisonous effect on him, even if Onno emerged from such a test as the father. And apart from that: did he really want to know? After Ada's accident, Helga's death, and his political and academic disasters, it might be better for him not to have a son anymore. So was it not better to banish the eyes of that lady from Jerusalem from his memory? What was truth? If he did nothing, no one else would ever hit upon such misbegotten ideas and everything would stay as it was: Quinten would keep the father whom he had sought and found, and he himself would have a son like Max had had all that time, both his and not his..

He swung his legs off the bed, took hold of his stick, and stood up. He went to see Quinten, who was obviously still worried. He would tell him that he may have had a touch of sunstroke on the Temple Mount but that everything was fine now.

65. The Law Taker

After taking Onno to his room, Quinten had gone to his own. On his doorpost, too, there was a small white cylinder, a mezuzah, that his father had told him contained a small roll of parchment with the commandments from the Torah on it. He touched it briefly, closed the door behind him, and automatically put the small chain on.

It was hot. He undressed completely, threw his clothes on the bed, put his watch and compass on the washbasin, and freshened up. The window was open, but no one could see him; at the back of the hotel was a courtyard, surrounded on three sides by much lower houses. Without drying himself he tied the towel round his waist, knelt on the floor by the window, and crossed his arms on the windowsill.

He let his eyes wander languidly over the old city, from which rose the bronze pealing of church bells; the Temple Mount was on the other side. From the roof came the sound of cooing doves. A glance at the trembling needle of his compass told him that he was facing due northwest. He realized that on the other side of the gently sloping hills in the distance — beyond the sea, Turkey, the Balkans, Austria, and Germany — stood his mother's bed. Nothing had changed there, of course. He had been away from home for scarcely four weeks. Really? Wasn't it four years? Forty? How would Granny Sophia be getting on? Of course she was thinking that he was still in Italy wandering around churches and museums. Was Mr. Themaat, from whom he'd learned so much, still alive? If only he knew what Quinten had been up to in the meantime. What would he have said? "Well done, QuQu, you did it again!" And Piet Keller? Without him none of it would have been possible. Was Mr. Spier still living in Wales, in that place with all those strange letters in it? And Clara and Marius Proctor, and Verdonkschot with his Etienne, and Rutger with his huge carpet — where were they all? Was Groot Rechteren still there, or was the castle by now full of villains in black boots? Theo Kern was definitely still around, with his purple feet. He thought of Max for a moment too, but in a different way. Although he'd lived under one roof with him all his life, for some reason or other he couldn't recall him clearly. He had not forgotten anything — one of his oldest memories was of Max taking him on his knee at the grand piano and playing all kinds of chords to him — but it was as though everything were happening under water: visible and in close-up, but in a different element.

Perhaps that water was the war, which always surrounded Max. He knew in broad outline what had happened to Max: a different, unimaginable world, with which he had no link at all; he had little affinity with his father's family, either, but they were his own family after all. Jews and the murderers of Jews — that gruesome union was as alien to him as the history of the Aztecs, even if he was now keeping the Jewish Law downstairs in the safe. That had nothing to do with the fact that he was one-thirty-second-part Jewish, as he had discovered, because that was a very weak concentration, scarcely more than 3 percent, but with his dream about the Citadel. Max on the other hand was 50 percent Jewish. Had he ever been in Israel? Quinten wondered. Had he ever walked through the streets of Jerusalem? Once or twice a year he'd packed his bags for a conference abroad, sometimes as far away as America, Japan, or Australia, but Quinten couldn't remember ever having heard anything about Israel. Perhaps they didn't go in for astronomy here.

Max, Sophia, his mother, his father… it was though he were taking leave of all that. Drowsily, he let his chin sink onto his arms and looked at the dry, sun-drenched slopes that extended motionless to the horizon beyond the new city, which was at a lower level. It was as though the undulating lines, with which the blood-soaked earth stood out against the blue sky, had not been created by geological events but had been drawn by an inspired hand. He was dry. The sweltering heat that hung over the city and the countryside enveloped him again. . and suddenly he lifts his head in amazement. There's no more sound. The church bells are silent, perhaps because some sacred hour or other has passed, or come; but no voices come from the windows around the courtyard, either. Even the cooing of doves has disappeared. It is as though the world has fallen into a deep sleep — the houses, the landscape, the sky.. what has suddenly happened to everything? Is his father asleep next door, too? Nothing is moving anymore, and the shimmering heat over the roofs has gone. He feels as if he is not looking at reality but at an old-fashioned painted panorama, like the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, where he once went with his Aunt Dol; in that dune landscape there was just the sort of breathless silence as there is here now. Everything that he can see exists, but at the same time does not exist; only in himself has nothing changed. He hears his heartbeat and the roaring of blood in his ears.

But then something does happen. Suddenly a small black dot appears in the blue dome of the sky, like a hole — not far above the horizon, in the direction of Tel Aviv. It moves up and down a little and slowly becomes larger. But suddenly it seems to be much closer, as though it is something that is approaching: gradually it takes shape, stretches out lengthwise into a black strip, the ends of which move solemnly up and down. Is it a bird? If it is, it's a big one. He gets up in a rapid movement and his eyes open wide. Edgar! It's Edgar!

He is already above the steep valley and is making straight for the hotel. Is it really conceivable that he has followed Onno's trail here all the way from Italy? That's impossible! But no one understands birds; no one knows how they sometimes find their way half across the world. Once he's above the city wall, Edgar stops beating his wings and begins an elegant dive with wings outspread. A little later he lands on the windowsill with his claws stretched out in front of him, shakes his feathers, folds his wings, turns around once, lifts his tail, leaves some droppings, and looks at Quinten with one eye.

"You need the room next door," says Quinten, who has taken a step backward. He points to the side. "Next window."

Immediately, he's amazed at his own voice. Normally he always hears the sound from two directions: through his ears and from inside; now the words remain smothered deep in his chest, as though his ears are blocked. Edgar's arrival also took place in complete silence. Even if the bird had heard his words, he couldn't have understood them; in any case he pays no attention. With a fluttering leap, he lands on the floor and hops to the door with an unmistakably arrogant air.

"Of course," says Quinten, "as you prefer. You can go by the corridor too. What a surprise it will be for Dad."

But as he crosses the threshold he pauses. There is no hallway anymore. The wall opposite has given way to a balustrade with amphora-shaped uprights, beyond which stretches an immense space full of staircases and galleries. He turns around. Not only has the door of his father's room disappeared, but so has his own. The whole wall is gone: and on that side too in the distance, above and down below, there are endless flights of colonnades, alcoves, gateways, vaults… is this a dream? He is standing on a narrow footbridge, which leads to a carved windowframe with an architrave; farther on, borne by caryatids, it disappears in the shadow of a tall portico.

He looks around with a deep sigh. In all its sweet bliss, warm as his own body, the Citadel finally envelops him again. Time after time he has thought of it — in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, in Jerusalem — but now that it is there, it doesn't remind him of anything else: it is what it is, just as the sun needs nothing else to be seen. But sunlight does not surround him there, or simply moonlight, more something like the "ash-gray light," which can be seen just before or after a new moon on the lunar surface next to the thin crescent, and which is sometimes not ash-gray but more marble-gray— caused, as Max once explained to him on a winter evening on the balcony of his bedroom, by reflected sunlight from the earth, and it is brighter the cloudier that side of the earth is.

Edgar shuffles restlessly to and fro on the balustrade, looking down with his head on one side, or upward, or both at once; he spreads his wings and dives down, climbs up, soars over a row of massive buttresses, disappears in the distance behind the pillars of a brick bridge, and far below swerves around a colossal column with an extravagant capital; on the milk-white shaft are the letters XDX, one below the other. It is as though the trail of his soaring reconnaissance flight hangs in the space like a black ribbon. When he has seen enough, he lands on the end of the footbridge, turns his head back 180 degrees, and rummages among his feathers with his beak, extending one wing with outspread feathers. Quinten has the impression that he is only doing this to kill time — that the bird is waiting for him. When he reaches him, Edgar begins hopping and fluttering ahead of him like a guide. The colonnade ends in a wide marble staircase, flanked with statues leading down to a complicated series of blind arcades and narrow, sometimes covered, alleys, leading to a series of pontifical chambers.

When they in turn give way to an indoor street with immense facades to the left and right, divided from each other by pilasters, dripping with ornamentation, Quinten has lost all sense of time and direction. But he has no need of time or direction. He would prefer to follow Edgar forever, here in this deathly silent, blissful, constructed world, made only for him. At a spiral staircase around the blocks of a pillar many feet thick Edgar suddenly discovers a trick: with his claws and beak around the round rail, he lets himself slide down in an exuberant spiral, keeping his balance with his wings. Laughing, leaping down the stairs two at a time, Quinten tries to keep up with him. Having reached the bottom of the staircase after five turns, he stops with his head spinning and looks around inquiringly. What has happened to Edgar? Has he gotten playful? Has he hidden?

With a start Quinten sees where he is, but feels no fear. No, this is not a dream. All the rest is a dream — Israel, Italy, Holland. The Citadel is the only thing that really exists. Opposite him, about twenty yards away, the double door to the center of the world covered with a diamond-shaped pattern of iron bars stands wide open; the heavy rusty sliding padlock is lying on the ground. Black as the back of a mirror, Edgar sits on the threshold, like a sentry, and looks straight at him in a way that has nothing playful about it. As he slowly approaches, he sees behind him the green safe from the hotel.

Edgar turns around, flies onto the safe with a couple of short flaps of his wings, and begins sharpening his beak against the edge — but even without that Quinten understands what he has to do. He crosses the threshold with a slight shiver. The room is cube-shaped, about thirty feet long, wide, and high; although there are no openings in the walls, the same dusky light is everywhere. He kneels down by the knob of the combination lock and holds it between his fingers. He doesn't have to think about the combination— there is only one that comes into consideration: J,H,W,H. He pulls open the immense door and takes the suitcase from the bottom shelf. When he has opened the locks, the first thing he sees is the beige envelope with SOMNIUM QUINTI on it.

He picks it up almost tenderly. This is the place to bring the plans up-to-date, but at the same time it would be rather like a mathematician counting his own fingers and noting down the result. He opens the newspapers, takes out the gray tablets, and lays them carefully next to each other on the stone floor. Then he replaces the envelope, slides the suitcase back, and closes the safe door, which this time produces no sound. As he has seen Aron do, he gives the knob a final twirl with the side of his hand. Without knowing what else has to happen, he takes the two heavy stones in his hands under his outstretched arms and stands up, which is the sign for Edgar to leap onto his shoulder.

But when he crosses the threshold, another change takes place. He stops in alarm, with Edgar next to his ear, the leathery claws with their hard talons in his flesh. The masses of stone around him are losing their substance: it is as though they are turning to wood… and then painted linen.. and then Brussels lace, which he can see right through. . Everything is crumbling and evaporating, daylight is beginning to penetrate, and a little later there is just a momentary trembling afterimage of the Citadel left — but that suddenly gives him a sense of its dimensions: a block of at least six hundred miles to the east, as far as Baghdad, six hundred miles to the west, as far as Libya, six hundred miles to the north, as far as the Black Sea, six hundred miles to the south, to Medina, and over twelve hundred miles high, as far as the first radiation belts… he is suddenly standing outdoors in the sun with Edgar and the two tablets and sees immediately where he is: in the Kidron Valley.

Opposite him, up above, protruding above the temple wall, gleams the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock; behind it is the Mount of Olives. The distance he has covered in the Citadel must be approximately the same as that from the hotel to here. He feels uncomfortable with only the towel around him, but the world is still as silent and motionless as just now. Is the sun also standing still in the firmament? That's impossible, of course; in that case everything would go up in flames — he doesn't need Max to realize that. Has no time elapsed between just now and now perhaps? If this is not a dream, then what is "now"?

His eye lights on the Golden Gate, which protrudes a little from the wall here. The soldiers on the roof have disappeared; the two tall gateways are open. So should he go through them and lay the Ten Commandments back on the rock? But he told his father that he didn't intend to do that, since no one must lay hands on them. For that matter, at the side of the Temple Mount the gate is bricked up. Yet there's nothing for it but to climb up on that side: he'll see. After a few steps he stops. The rough ground is strewn with stones, which hurt his bare feet, especially because he is now much heavier with the tablets under his arms. He looks around to see if there are a few old rags or palm leaves anywhere — it would be best of course if there were a pair of shoes. Then he suddenly sees something moving out of the corner of his eye. From the right, in the distance, from the north, a white horse is approaching at a gallop along the ravine past the wall, with mane waving and tail flowing. Quinten looks at the apparition in the frozen landscape open-mouthed. Right in front of him, the horse stands on its hind legs and moves its head up and down while saliva sprays around, as though it wants to confirm something. And at the same moment Quinten realizes what the horse is confirming.

"Deep Thought Sunstar!"

Something snaps in him. Sobbing, he makes as if to put his arms around the horse's neck, but he is prevented by the two stones; when he gives the creature a kiss on its nose, it kneels down like a camel. While Edgar holds on to the ponytail at the back of his head, Quinten climbs onto the sweaty back; with short, rapid movements Deep Thought Sunstar gets up and proceeds toward the Golden Gate at a walk. With his naked upper body stretched, the raven on his shoulder, the stones in his hands, Quinten looks around him with a smile at the fairy-tale hills and the approaching temple wall. If only Titus could see him now, and the pope, and the chief rabbi! A little later Deep Thought Sunstar makes its way carefully between the graves and again kneels down at the gate.

After he has dismounted, the horse stands up again and trots back into the valley; then Edgar spreads his wings, strikes himself on the crown with them, and follows the horse. Sadly, Quinten watches them growing smaller: the horse at a gallop, the raven overhead, the one as white as the other is black.. when they have disappeared, everything is again motionless.

He turns around with a sigh and enters the gatehouse. The other side is now also open. With a solemn feeling he crosses the dim space, with a few columns standing here and there; there seems to be a soft roaring noise, like the sound of the sea in a shell. Outside, the sun receives him again and slowly he climbs the steps, which go up to the level of the terrace. There he stops and looks around. The space is about as large as that of Westerbork camp. Not a soul anywhere. Everything is just for him; the whole world is now only for him and is waiting for him. He walks across the grass to the wide staircase of the temple terrace. The row of arcades, which encloses it at the top, has five arches here; he stops again under the middle one. Straight in front of him is the small Dome of the Chain with its silver cupola, just behind it the golden Dome of the Rock: a child with its father. The restoration of the small sanctum is now complete: straight through the open space around it he can look into the dark interior of the Dome of the Rock.

He takes a deep breath and begins walking toward that black hole, without taking his eyes off it. But as he passes the center of the Dome of the Chain, surrounded by the double row of columns, the moment has finally come — I take things out of his hands. Suddenly he hears a soft rustling and stops. He looks around in amazement, but the sound is close by. It seems to be coming from the stone tablets. He rests them on his hips on either side and looks in astonishment at what is happening. It is as though the gray crust is alive, moving, melting. Something is trying to fight its way out from underneath, to free itself; a little later he sees tiny, glassy, translucent creatures appearing all over the surface, freeing themselves from the crusts of thousands of years, leaping out and swarming around him. Letters! They are letters! Letters of light! At the same moment the sapphire plates have become so heavy that he can no longer hold them — the towel also slides from his hips. They slip from his grasp and silently smash to smithereens on the marble slabs. But he does not care — he must have the letters; they must not escape! The ten words! Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt not kill! He grabs at them with both hands, but the swarm rises in the cupola, toward the green five-leafed clover at the highest point, hovers there butterfly-like, dives down, flutters to the Dome of the Rock, and disappears through the black entrance. He chases after them in despair.

Inside, in the dim light, the letters dance and gleam up and down above the holy rock. What in heaven's name is he to do? Suddenly he feels eyes being focused on him. The woman in white, who was sitting praying in the alcove, has turned around and looks at him with shining eyes, like a doe. The cloth has slid from her head; her face is framed in a square of black hair. He stiffens. Is this a dream after all then?

"Mama!" he cries — but no sound leaves his mouth.

As he stands there, the other women still sit in the gallery and look at him with does' eyes. In one leap he is standing on the rock: Adas all around! All the women are his mother! Slowly he spreads his arms, throws back his head, and sees the arabesques on the inside of the dome: a network of countless interwoven figures-of-eight — and at that moment Moses' swarm of letters envelops his naked body with such an endless, dazzling Light that his body disappears in it like the light of a candle in that of the sun. .

Standing in the hallway, Onno knocked on the door. When there was still no reply after a second knock, he gently opened the door; but after an inch or so it was held by the chain. Through the gap he could see only part of the washbasin, on which lay Quinten's watch and compass.

"Quinten?" he asked. "Are you asleep?" Again there was silence. He bent down and tried to look through the keyhole, but it was impossible. Then he shouted loudly, "Quinten!" and struck the door three times with his stick.

Nothing happened. What was wrong? Quinten must be in the room; the chain could not be put on from the outside. Something was very wrong! While Onno felt the blood rising to his head, he put his stick in the gap like a lever and pulled at it with all his might, so the chain flew out of the doorpost and the door banged against the wall. No one. On the bed lay the clothes Quinten had worn this morning, and his underpants. Onno looked at the open window in dismay. Had something terrible happened? Had Quinten suddenly had the same thoughts as himself about that Mrs. 31415 and in a fit of madness… but then he would have heard, surely! In a couple of steps he reached the windowsill, which was a little stained with bird droppings, and looked down.

In the courtyard an old woman was busy stuffing a pile of linen into large laundry bags; lying on a stone bench, a slim, ginger-haired woman was reading a book, mechanically rocking a carriage with her other hand. He looked left and right and upward along the outer wall — nowhere was there a fire escape or drainpipe down which he could have climbed. Anyway, why should he climb out naked? He looked in the built-in wardrobe and under the bed, and then stood unsteadily in the middle of the room. He must consider this very carefully. If Quinten was not here, and if he couldn't have left through the door or out through the window, then there was only one conclusion: something impossible had happened.

He had known from the day Quinten was born that he would end up doing something impossible. It was not quite impossible that he had actually taken the tablets of the Law from the Sancta Sanctorum but his own disappearance from this room had brought about something really impossible. When the impossible was surely impossible! Onno thought of the stones, which Quinten had put in the safe yesterday: did that have something to do with it? Did the impossible prove the almost impossible?

Once again he looked around, as if Quinten might suddenly have reappeared, then went downstairs. The reception area and the lounge were deserted; he pressed the button of an old-fashioned bell that stood on the counter. A little later a girl with short black hair appeared through the door behind the counter.

"Shalom."

"My son," said Onno, at the same moment surprised at the word, "put a suitcase in the safe here yesterday. Has he by any chance collected it in the last hour?"

"Sadly, I haven't seen your son today."

"And Mr. Aron?"

"My father left for Bethlehem early this morning to visit my grandmother, who is ill. The safe hasn't been opened since yesterday. You can check for yourself if you like."

He followed her to the office, where she knelt down by the safe and turned the combination lock. She pulled the door open and pointed to the suitcase lying on the bottom shelf.

Onno looked at it for a few seconds, and then said: "Can I have it for a moment?"

She handed it over — but the moment Onno took hold of it, it was as though the suitcase were trying to fly into the air, as though he were going to throw it at the ceiling, it was so light. The stones were gone!

"What are you doing?" said the girl with a smile.

"I'm giddy," said Onno, groping around. She hurriedly gave him a chair, and he sat down with the suitcase on his lap. This was impossible too. The stones could no more have vanished from that safe than Quinten from his room. Although he knew it was pointless, he asked, "Does anyone else know the combination of that lock?"

She looked at him in alarm. "Only my father and myself. Do you think you've lost something?"

Onno shook his head. With trembling fingers, against his own better judgment, he began fiddling with the locks, whereupon she bent forward and opened them. On the envelope he had seen yesterday when the luggage was inspected at the airport in Rome he now read: SOMNIUM QUINTI. Quinten's dream? Was it perhaps a farewell letter that Quinten had written previously? He took the papers out, but they were only architectural sketches and labyrinthine plans, with captions here and there captions like Footbridge, Center of the World, Spiral Staircase. The only explanation of the inexplicable… he suddenly grabbed his head in both hands. He couldn't think about it anymore! Perhaps Quinten was not his son, or was his son; but now he was gone, gone for good, vanished off the face of the earth, no one knew where.

Quinten had deserted him, as he had once deserted Quinten — but he would never find Quinten, as Quinten had found him. He was now really in the situation that he had placed himself artificially four years ago: he had no one else. .

"Are you all right?"

"No," he said, and searched frantically in his inside pocket. "Not at all… I have to. ." With trembling hands he began leafing through a notebook. "Can I make a telephone call from here?"

"Of course." The girl took the case off his lap and pointed out the telephone on the small desk next to the typewriter. "Local?"

"International."

"Then I'll put the counter on." She pressed the button of a black box on the wall, closed the safe, and said, "I'll leave you alone."

"Sophia Brons speaking."

"It's Onno."

"Who?"

"Onno. Onno Quist."

"Onno? Did I hear that right? Is that you, Onno?"

"Yes."

"It can't be true. Say it again."

"This is Onno, your son-in-law."

"Onno! How incredible! I knew you'd show up again one day! Where are you calling from? Are you in Holland?"

"I'm calling from Jerusalem."

"Jerusalem! Is that where you've been all these years?"

"No. I realize I've got a lot to explain, and I will, but I'm phoning now because—"

"It's incredible that you should have telephoned now of all times… as though you felt it…"

"Felt what?"

"Onno.."

"What is it?"

"Prepare yourself for a shock, Onno. I've just come from Ada's cremation. I've still got my coat on.. Onno? Are you still there?"

"I'm sorry, my head's spinning, it's all.. has Ada just been cremated?"

"I think they're putting her ashes in the urn now. There's no need for us to mourn — it should all have happened a long long time ago."

"Yes."

"That poor child… but it's all over now. After more than seventeen years — it's such a godawful business."

"Yes."

"Of course you want to talk to Quinten, but he's not here. I was the only one there just now. He's been in Italy for a few weeks; I haven't heard a word from him yet. He's had his birthday in the meantime, but I've no idea where he's gone. He doesn't know anything yet."

"Mother. . that's why I'm phoning you. About Quinten."

"About Quinten? What do you mean?"

"We met. By accident. In Rome."

"You met each other? You can't be serious! When? Why didn't you tell me? He must have been overjoyed, surely? And what are the two of you doing in Jerusalem now?"

"A lot has happened in the meantime, I can't explain it all now, and anyway it can't be explained but.. "

"But? Can't you say anything else? Has something happened to Quinten?"

"Yes."

"What? Onno! For God's sake! He's not dead too, is he?"

"I don't know. He's gone."

"Gone? Have you called in the police?"

"There's no point."

"How do you know? How long has he been gone?"

"An hour."

"An hour? Did you say an hour? You're not a bit overwrought, are you, Onno?"

"That too. I know it sounds idiotic, but…"

"Please stop it. If he's been gone for an hour, he'll be back in an hour. I know all about that boy wandering off — he was always getting lost as a toddler. Take something to calm you down, or try and get some sleep. You must forgive me, I've got other things on my mind now. I'll tell you something that you have to know but no one else must know."

"I can scarcely hear you anymore."

"I have to keep my voice down, because these days it's possible I'm being bugged by those scum here at the castle. Fortunately I'll soon be moving in with someone in Westerbork, Max's ex-girlfriend. Of course, you've heard about everything that's happened."

"Yes."

"Listen carefully, Onno. Weren't you wondering why Ada died so suddenly?"

"You mean. ."

"Yes. That's what I mean. In your farewell letter you wrote that Ada was flesh of my flesh and that I had the last word about her. She was in a terrible state, too awful to look at. Her kidneys had stopped functioning, she had cancer of the womb that had spread — I'll spare you the details. She'd gone completely white. It wasn't the kind of hospital where people had the last word; I had to do it myself."

"How?"

"With an overdose of insulin. I gave it to her last Saturday evening during visiting hours, at about seven-thirty, under the sheet, in her left thigh. No one saw me. They only discovered yesterday morning that she had died. Death must have occurred at about twelve-thirty in the morning, I was told when they called me up. That is, insofar as death hadn't occurred long ago. In the afternoon I was able to see her in the morgue. She reminded me of a fawn, she'd become so small."

"And she was cremated today? It's only Monday today. Isn't that very quick?"

"Of course that struck everyone. I called your lawyer, Giltay Veth, and he said that according to the Disposal of the Dead Act there was a minimum period of thirty-six hours. They kept to that exactly at the hospital. I think they were suspicious, just as Giltay Veth was for that matter. Perhaps they discovered the hole in her thigh at the postmortem and wanted to get rid of the evidence that anything untoward could have happened at their hospital as soon as possible. There was a short notice in today's newspaper saying that Mrs. Q. had died a natural death after seventeen years."

"Wait a moment.. this is. . this is just impossible… I have to write it down. So you gave her that injection on Saturday evening. It was seven-thirty. She died at twelve-thirty. In the morning she was taken to the morgue, where she lay yesterday. This morning she was put in a coffin and taken to the crematorium. And she was cremated there an hour ago."

"Yes. What's so important about those times?"

"What… how can. . I.. "

"Onno? Hello! Onno? Can you hear me? Are you still there?"

"There's something wrong with my head, Sophia, I can feel it… I can't write anymore. . the whole of my left side. . Eighteen months ago I had a. ."

"For heaven's sake, Onno! Where are you?"

"Hotel Raphael…"

"Get them to call for a doctor at once. I'll take the next plane. I'm coming to get you both."

Epilogue

— That's enough! You must know when to stop. Think of Goethe's words: "Restriction shows the master's hand."

— But to be on the safe side he also said: "The fact that you cannot end is what makes you great."

— Yes, those writers are like that. Always having the best of both worlds. You've accomplished your mission, and I've got six hundred and sixty-six questions about your machinations, but I won't ask them. The main thing is that we've got the testimony back just in time. Where's our man now?

— Returned to the Light.

— By now you might just as well say: to the Twilight. And what happened to the fragments of the two tablets?

— Collected by the Jerusalem Sanitation Department. Taken to a rubbish dump with all the other rubble in the Dome of the Chain.

— Well, for that matter, the testimony itself is a mess too. It looks like an upturned compositor's typecase.

— If you must use terrestrial imagery, you'd better choose a more modern one: like erased software.

— That is precisely the language of a world that we've no use for anymore. I suppose the sapphire tablets of the Law were the hardware, then?

— As it were.

— Yes, since Bacon the devil speaks English. It's becoming the world language. So let's keep to Latin: consummatum est. It has been accomplished. My strength is exhausted. We're done for. The world is done for. Humankind is done for. Everything is done for — except Lucifer. What we thought would never be possible has happened: time has gained a hold over us. Time — that was Lucifer's secret weapon. The only thing left to us after more than three thousand years was to take back those ten words. An impotent gesture, of course: like a jilted girl reclaiming her engagement ring. A poor consolation, a symbolic act, a melancholy farewell. But the Decalogue was the ultimate thing on earth: the Chiefs contract with humankind, concluded with its deputy, the Jewish people, represented by its leader Moses in the role of notary. From now on Lucifer has a free hand. Let him carry off all those human things. I really don't care anymore.

— Perhaps someone will appear on earth to put everything right.

— The person would have to come from here, but nothing can come from here anymore. In Moscow an enlightened character assumed power a short while ago — the greatest human being in the human twentieth century in a positive sense, just as he whose name I shall not mention was in the negative sense. Within five years the Berlin Wall will be demolished, Russia will lose its colonies, the whole world will rejoice at the dawning of a new age. . then in the liberated areas, the ultimate bloodthirsty backwardness will be in control again. Migrations of people will take place, shots will ring out again in Sarajevo, and as the third millennium approaches the disgusting twentieth century will be revived due to overwhelming popular success.

— I can't believe that.

— You'll learn to believe it. And it's all the same old thing — politics means nothing. The rise and fall of world empires has gone on forever. Politics are the rippling of the waves in a storm — makes no difference at all to the waves, because they come from somewhere completely different: they come from the moon. To the old global disasters are now added the ravaging tidal waves of the new: with their Baconian control of nature, people will finally consume themselves with nuclear power, burn themselves up through the hole they have made in the ozone layer, dissolve in acid rain, roast in the greenhouse effect, crush each other to death because of their numbers, hang themselves on the double helix of DNA, choke in their own Satan's shit, because that swine didn't conclude his pact out of love of humankind, only out of hatred for us. All hell will break loose on earth and human bangs will one day remember the good old days, when they still listened to us — and probably they won't even do that anymore. It won't even be tragic anymore, just wretched. It's hopeless. Forget it.

— And if they find out what we have done, won't that bring about a change of heart? I can see to that. At the moment there's one person on earth who knows about it.

— You've suggested that before. Don't fool yourself. If they find out, not a soul will believe it. The news will be reported here and there; perhaps a few thousand righteous people, a few hundred theologians, and ten archaeologists will get very excited, but then it will be drowned out by the constant cataract of other news items, and a few months later it'll be forgotten. No, drop it, it's over. Finis comoediae.

— We can at least try!

— No, I'm not even prepared to give that knowledge to those treacherous offspring of ours anymore.

— Am I hearing you correctly? Is Onno Quist in danger if he tells anyone else?

— That must be prevented. If that happens, just throw a stone at his head, like you did with Max Delius. Quiet a moment. . I'm being called. I have to give a report on what you've told me.

— Let's think of something else, then. We must fight to the last — we can still do it! Better to fail than to give up! Can't we do something about that pact that Lucifer concluded with Bacon? Give me another mission at once!

— Those days are gone. You're retiring. Thanks for everything, on behalf of the Chief, too. Adieu.

— Then I'll do it on my own initiative! Do you hear me? I'm not leaving it at that! How do they have the nerve! Who do they think they are, the upstarts! Answer me!