Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

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.