Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"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.

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.