Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"You'll have to do your beard yourself," he said, brushing the hairs off his clothes.

When Onno went to the basin to shave himself, Quinten bent over a corner of one of the stones, where a small, gleaming spot had struck him. He licked the tip of his middle finger and rubbed it, whereupon a deep blue glow showed itself. He sat up. The two stones were sapphires. They were gems. Since one gram cost five thousand guilders, they were worth hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion. He thought it better not to tell his father. He thought for a moment and then out of his blue nylon backpack he took the beige envelope with the heading SOMNIUM QUINTI, which he had not opened for weeks, since he had not dreamed of the Citadel anymore and nothing needed to be added to the plans. He put it with the stones and closed the suitcase.

When they drove out of the city in a taxi at about six o'clock via the Porta San Paolo and pyramid of Cestius, it was already growing light. Onno was again wearing the gray suit in which he'd arrived from Holland four years earlier; he enjoyed the feel of the cool air against his cheeks and on his neck. How could a human being let himself become so overgrown! He remembered a conversation that he had had years ago during the conference in Havana with a man who had spent years in a Stalinist work camp. The conversation was about beards, apropos of Fidel Castro and his friends, and he himself had said that he would only let his beard grow if he were one day to land in prison. Whereupon the other looked at him in silence for a while and then said, "When you land in prison, you'll shave yourself four times a day."

The sky was beginning to grow red, as though beyond the horizon the lid of an oven were being slowly opened. It was Sunday; there was little traffic.

"And what if the first plane that's leaving is going to Zimbabwe?" asked Onno.

"Then we'll go to Zimbabwe. We've got plenty of money."

"It's not a matter of money, and anyway I'm paying. But surely we've got time to pick something? I'd rather go to San Francisco than Zimbabwe. Do we absolutely have to be dependent on chance?"

"I don't know," said Quinten impatiently. "I think so."

"And when we're in Zimbabwe — what then?"

Quinten shrugged his shoulders and looked outside. In the distance the cupola of St. Peter's had almost disappeared. Here and there were large postmodern buildings in the countryside, such as he had seen in Mr. Themaat's catalog. He really didn't know. All he knew was that from now on he must not intervene anymore. From now on everything had to be determined by circumstances, just as a skier adapted himself to the terrain, avoiding trees and ravines and not trying to glide upward.

As they got out of the taxi at Leonardo da Vinci airport, the sun rose above the countryside and drenched the planes on the runway with dazzling gold, which a moment later changed to silver. It was already busy.

In the noisy departure hall Onno, pulling his case on wheels behind him, said: "Look. All thieves, making off with their booty."

Quinten carried the suitcase with the stones in it; he had his backpack on his back. They stopped in front of the great board with departure times and looked up at the destinations for the next few hours: Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Santo Domingo, London, Cairo, Vienna, Nicosia, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Amsterdam. .

"And what if it's Amsterdam?" asked Onno.

"Then it will be Amsterdam."

At the counter where they sold last-minute tickets sat a girl with her name on a badge; ANGIOLINA. Obviously she came from the deep south. Her hair was blacker than black; there was a dark shadow on her upper lip. Onno said they had decided to go abroad for a few weeks on impulse and that they wanted to book.

"Of course," she said, rearranging her silk scarf, which Quinten thought was back to front around her neck. She picked up her ballpoint pen. "What destination?"

"We'll leave it up to you. We want to leave on the next plane that has room in it."

"That's how I'd like to live," she said with a face that showed that nothing surprised her anymore. She glanced at the clock and looked at her monitor. "You can't make Vienna anymore. It will be Cairo or Santo Domingo. Perhaps you can just catch the eight o'clock British charter flight to Nicosia."

"Two singles to Nicosia," said Onno quickly, before it became Santo Domingo.

"Nicosia?" repeated Quinten. "Where's that?"

"On Cyprus. Nice island. Lots to see."

"Your passports, please." While she began to fix the tickets, she asked, "Would you like travel insurance?"

Onno looked sideways with a smile. "Do we need travel insurance, Quinten?"

"Of course not."

"We're trusting to our lucky stars, Angiolina."

She nodded. "At twelve-twenty local time, there'll be a short stopover in Tel Aviv."

Onno looked at Quinten, who answered his look in silence. He turned to Angiolina and said: "Make that two to Tel Aviv."

"So we're taking them home," said Quinten, after he had been given his boarding card.

Onno made no reply. He could feel that everything was not over yet. The check-in counter was in a corner of the hall, closed off with barriers. Cara-binieri with submachine guns and bullet-proof vests strolled in twos across the marble floor; other men, too, in plain clothes, leaned against the pillars here and there. Outside, close to the high window, there was an armored police car on the pavement. It was busy, mainly older vacationers bound for Cyprus, obviously in a group, as could also be seen from their bright leisure clothes; the passengers for Tel Aviv were recognizable from an absent look on their faces. After they passed the barrier, everyone was interrogated separately at a row of iron tables.

"Let's sit down here until it's our turn," said Onno. "I'm getting tired out, and my head's spinning without my stick."

Quinten looked at him in concern. Only now did he realize that he had not for a moment taken his father's state of health into account. "Perhaps you should take a few days off in a little while."

"Good idea, Quinten. Israel seems to me just the country to have a rest in. Have you thought of what we're going to say when we open the case?"

"No."

"Everything will be all right, won't it?"

"Yes."

"So when they ask us what kinds of stones they are, we'll say 'The tablets of Moses.' "

"Yes, why not? No one will believe it, and then we won't be lying."

"But once they've stopped laughing, they'll ask again." Onno looked at him with a sigh. "It looks as though we've got a choice between prison and the madhouse." That there was the slightest chance the stones actually were what Quinten supposed them to be again seemed to him completely idiotic.

"Have you got a better idea, then?" asked Quinten.

"I've always got a better idea. Do you know what we're going to say? That it's art. Artistic creations by a modern artist. No one will dare doubt that — plastic arts have succeeded in making themselves as invulnerable as— you name it… as Siegfried. Even the police can't do anything about that."

"Quinten looked at the patrolling policemen. "Just look: it's quiet at all the other counters, and here it looks like there's a war going on. What is it about the Jews?"

Onno nodded. "After all those thousands of years, their existence is beginning to take on the features of a proof of God's existence more and more clearly."

The remark reminded Quinten of what Mrs. Korvinus had once said. The day after Max's death, he told his father, he had heard Nederkoorn in the hall saying to Mrs. Korvinus that as far as he was concerned, all the Jews could be stoned out of the universe like that — and then she had said that they were still being punished because they had crucified Christ.