Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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."

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.