Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"What's in that block?"

"Text. Commandments."

Quinten felt jealous. So much attention had never been paid to him. Why that boy and not him? Just because the boy was Jewish and he wasn't? But over and against that, he had discovered something on his own initiative that the boy and all those people had never dreamed of!

"Shall we go up now?"

On the right-hand side of the wall an asphalt path led upward in a gentle curve. Passing an unbroken line of photographing and filming tourists, they came to a gate, where policemen with submachine guns over their shoulders inspected all bags. Larger items of luggage had to be left behind.

"Do you see what it's like here?" asked Onno softly as they waited for their turn. "Steep walls on all sides with guarded gates. Down below is the most sacred place of the Jews; up here for more than a thousand years the third holy place of Islam, unless I'm mistaken — after Mecca and Medina. The situation is a kind of religious atom bomb: if they clash, the critical mass will be exceeded and the whole world will explode. The Israelis understood that very well, and you'll never get through with your stones, even though no one knows what you take them to be in your infinite optimism. You can forget that so-called 'returning' of yours, because you're not dealing here with a crowd of sleepy old fathers made of butter. Unless your name is Nebuchadnezzar or Titus, you'll have to think of something else."

Quinten jerked his shoulders impatiently. "I'll see."

He felt tense. In the gate was a table where women whose legs were too bare had to put on gray ankle-length skirts; when he came out of the shadow on the other side, he stopped in amazement and looked out over the silent expanse of the temple terrace. The atmosphere of absence reminded him for a moment of his meadow of Groot Rechteren, with the red cow, the two alder trees, and the three erratic stones. Not only were there far fewer people than down below in the square, but the silence had a strange, expectant nature, like the seconds that elapsed between a flash of lightning and the clap of thunder… or was it simply the exhaustion of the past — of all the religion, murder, and devastation that this plateau had witnessed over the centuries? A hundred yards farther on, slightly to the left of the center, on a raised terrace, stood a wide sanctum in brilliant blue and green colors: an octagonal base, crowned with a golden cupola, framed in the cloudless sky like a second sun. It was topped by a crescent. From the cypresses and the olive trees, which rose from their shadows everywhere here, came the twittering of birds; on one side there was a magnificent view of a green hillside covered with churches, monasteries, chapels, and cemeteries.

Quinten glanced at the map and pointed to the poetic hillside. "That's the Mount of Olives."

"My God," said Onno. "That too. You were right: everything really exists."

A thin elderly gentleman, conventionally dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and a tie, approached them hesitantly; on his cheek was a minimal tuft of cotton wool. He gave a little cough behind his hand, as though he had not spoken for a long time, and then said hoarsely in English:

"My name is Ibrahim. I'm a poet and I've lived in Jerusalem for sixty-three years. With me you'll learn more in an hour than without me in a week."

Onno burst out laughing. "Since we're not tourists, you're just the man we need."

Ibrahim went straight to work. He half turned and pointed to a great mosque with a silver cupola, which they were close to and which Quinten had not yet noticed. In front of it stood a group of Arab schoolgirls with white headscarves on and with dresses over their long trousers.

"Al-Aqsa," he said.

" 'Farthest point.' " Onno nodded.

Ibrahim looked at him flabbergasted. "You know?"

"But not why it's called that. Farthest point from where? From the other side of the earth?"

"The farthest point the Prophet ever reached. One night he was sleeping at the Kaaba in Mecca—"

"What's that?" Quinten asked Onno automatically.

"The holiest place in Islam, but much older than Islam. A great cube with a black stone in it: probably a meteorite."

"… when a horse with a woman's face and a peacock's tail transported him at lightning speed to Jerusalem. He tethered it to the Wailing Wall down below and came up the same way as you, after which he undertook his nocturnal journey to heaven."

"We assume he was dreaming?" asked Onno cautiously.

"There are scholars who assume that." Ibrahim nodded. "There are also scholars who assume that he came here physically but that his journey to heaven was a vision?"

"And as a poet, what do you assume?"

"That there is no difference between dream and action, of course," said Ibrahim with a smile. "The dreams of a poet are his deeds."

"Bravo, Mr. Ibrahim!"

"Did Mohammed ascend from that exact spot?" asked Quinten, nodding toward the mosque.

Ibrahim pointed to the building with the golden cupola. "From that spot. He didn't ascend, come to that. He climbed, up a ladder of light. And he came down that way too, and before day broke al-Buraq took him back to Mecca."

"Lightning?" asked Onno. "He went there on a horse and returned on the lightning?"

"That was the name of the horse: Lightning." Ibrahim beckoned them. "Shall we first have a look at the mosque? This Gothic gate was built against it nine hundred years ago by the Crusaders; they made it a temporary church, which they called Templum Salomonis."

Quinten glanced at the pointed arches without interest. "And the real Jewish temples — where were they?"

Ibrahim again pointed at the golden cupola. "There."

"There too?" asked Quinten with raised eyebrows. Ibrahim looked at him with his dark eyes and again cleared his throat. "Everything is there."

"That's a lot, Mr. Ibrahim," said Onno.

"You know of course what the Jews usually say: 'Jews always exaggerate, Arabs always lie.' Judge for yourself. You obviously have no interest in the mosque."

They walked past a deeply inset basin for ritual washing, surrounded by stone armchairs, straight toward the wide staircase, which led up about twelve feet to the terrace; at the top of the stairs there was a free-standing row of arcades of four weathered arches. Quinten felt the gold-domed building becoming more and more forbidding the closer it came, like a lighthouse, which is also meant to be seen only from a distance. The bottom half of the base, covered in white marble, gave way to exuberantly colored tiled ornaments, crowned at the eaves by verses from the Koran in decorative Arabic script.

Ibrahim told him that the cathedral, called The Dome of The Rock, was usually regarded as a mosque, but it wasn't one; it was a shrine, built in the seventh century by Caliph Abd al-Malik — but, thought Quinten as he took off his shoes at the entrance, according to the design of a Christian architect, because that octagonal style didn't seem very Muslim to him. The octagon was the shape that baptismal chapels had, such as he had seen in Florence and Rome; he remembered Mr. Themaat telling him that this was connected with the "eighth day": the resurrection of Christ — which had also taken place somewhere near here. But Mr. Themaat had never told him anything about this building. They entered across the carpets in their stocking feet. Quinten stopped after a few steps. He caught his breath. Could what he was seeing be true?

A stone. In the center of the dimly lit space, within the ring of columns bearing the dome, surrounded by a wooden balustrade, there was nothing except a huge boulder, as tall as a man, with a rugged surface. As he looked at it, he felt his father's eyes trained on him, but he did not return his gaze. The stone, shaped a little like a trapezoid, was golden-yellow, like the whole of Jerusalem; obviously it was the summit of the Temple Mount. How heavy might such a thing be? In the past three weeks everything had gotten much heavier: after the lightness of Venice, the somber house fronts of Florence, then the sunken Roman ruins, just now the enormous blocks of the Wailing Wall, and now he stood eye to eye with the heaviest thing of all: the earth itself — but at the same time, Max had once told him, it was actually weightless, as it orbited the sun.