Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"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.