Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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."