The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  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.

  Quinten looked at his watch. Five to twelve. He stood up and said: "We must go."

  When he made to leave the chapel, Onno whispered: "Shouldn't we clear up in here? We can't leave it like this, can we?"

  "We're coming back in half an hour."

  Onno stiffened.

  "To do what? They're not here, Quinten. You were wrong. Everything has gone well up to now, let's call it a day."

  Quinten put a finger to his lips—and for the umpteenth time Onno realized that there was nothing he could say.

  Back for the second time in the chapel of San Lorenzo, sitting next to each other in the dark on a bench, Onno thought of the mess that they had made—picked locks, opened doors, tools lying everywhere. Imagine an insomniac father of the Holy Cross taking his prayer book and going for a walk through the building, praying as he went, and then seeing that chaos in the sanctum! But he was even more tormented by the question how he could support Quinten.

  For reasons that were obscure to him, the boy had invested so much in this adventure that he could obviously not stand the fact that it all had been for nothing. How could he get it through to him that this was how things were in life? When you were seventeen, you thought that the world was made of the same substance as your own theories, so that you had control of it and could turn it to your own advantage. But one day everyone had to confront the bitter truth that it wasn't like that, that the world was soup and thought was generally a fork: it seldom resulted in a good meal. Today the moment of truth had struck for Quinten—differently than for other boys, that was true, but it amounted to the same thing.

  "Quinten?"

  "Yes?"

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Have another good look."

  "We did have a good look."

  "But still no better than Grisar. Or Flavius Josephus."

  Onno sighed in resignation. Again he was encountering granite. He could keep his wise sermons to himself; it was as though Freud's father were to try to convince his son that the subconscious did not exist—and it was very questionable whether it existed. At the same time it gave him a feeling of satisfaction: Quinten still had the kind of unspoiled self-confidence that he himself had long since lost—if he'd ever possessed it; he wasn't even sure of that anymore. He mustn't try to talk him around at all; he had to empty that cup to the dregs. What's more, he might otherwise have to hear for the rest of his life that the tablets might have been in that damn altar after all. On their ascetic beds the fathers meanwhile rose for a short while to the second stage of their sleep, before sinking back to the fourth.

  At quarter past twelve, Quinten took the flashlight and said: "Now for it."

  By now they both felt at home in the chapel that they kept going in and out of. Quinten squatted down, laid the flashlight against the marble step, rested his elbows on his knees, put his hands on his cheeks, and looked intently at the shrine. He had to finish in ten minutes.

  It had not surprised him that the four drawers were empty, because he knew that. But where else could two flat stones have been hidden? Actually, only behind the treasure chest. At the back, the altar was built against the wall; it couldn't be reached from the side. But it must be possible to take the box out: it had once been put in. In the center of the lower frame he noticed a ring, obviously intended to pull the whole thing forward; but that was impossible, since the marble pillars of the altar blocked the sides of the box. So this meant that the shrine had not been pushed into the altar but that the altar had been built around the shrine. And that had happened in about the year 800, while the tablets of the Law had only been brought here from the basilica four centuries later. In other words: they couldn't be behind the box. So? So they must be underneath.

  The box was not resting on the ground; there was a narrow chink. Obviously it was on legs, but they were obscured from view by the pillars. Quinten lay down on his stomach, put his cheek on the step, and shone the flashlight underneath. Had Grisar done this too? What reason would he have had to do that? There was all kinds of rubbish that
was difficult to distinguish—shards, pieces and fragments, perhaps remains of masonry work. On either side the shrine was supported not by feet but by flat stones.

  Quinten looked inside numbly, feeling the blood draining from his face. From his backpack he produced a long skeleton key and put the key around the back of the right-hand stone. Helping it along with the flat of his hand, which just fitted through the gap, he tried to see if it could be moved. Scraping over the dust, the stone moved forward. It was not supporting anything!

  "Dad . .." he whispered flatly. "I've got them."

  61

  The Flight

  When Onno saw the oblong, gray, almost black stone appearing from the crack, he remembered for an instant how as a little boy he'd sometimes stood by the mailbox when the postman came. The flap suddenly opening, the letters falling into the hall from nowhere. He began trembling.

  "You're crazy!" he whispered, while it seemed as if he were screaming. "It's impossible! Let me see!"

  "Not now," said Quinten with determination. "Give me the suitcase."

  "Let me see if there's anything written on it!"

  "In a moment. Hurry up."

  With trembling hands, Onno gave him the suitcase, and Quinten snapped open the locks. The stone was lighter than he thought, but still almost as heavy as a paving slab; carefully he laid it among the newspapers that he had put in at home—the Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, the Herald Tribune. When Onno saw the second stone appearing too, his head began to spin. It was inconceivable that these could really be Moses' tablets of the Law! Surely this was the most inconceivable thing of all! Of course they were simply two old flagstones. Quinten was seeing what he wanted to see—he was simply making a bigger and bigger hangover for himself!

  Quinten snapped the locks of the suitcase again, collected his tools, and put them into the backpack. As he stood there with it in his hands, he surveyed the shrine, opened the upper right-hand drawer, and put his backpack into the compartment.

  "Treasure trove," he said, closing the door, "in a thousand years' time." Then he closed the bronze doors, took the large padlock off the steps, put it through the rings, and pushed it into the lock with a loud click. Next the barred gate was shut—two clicks of the padlocks and this was also barred. Together with Onno, he pushed the iron rod through the rings and put the large sliding padlock on it. When he pushed the parts together with all his strength, it produced such a penetrating sharp click that it was as though someone were striking an anvil with a hammer. Onno stopped to see if anyone had heard it, but Quinten gave him the case and pushed him in the back. "Let's go now, before someone comes." They went quickly through the narrow passage to the chapel of San Lorenzo, where Quinten closed the entry door behind him and put on the two locks, again with loud clicks.

  "Right," he said, and listened. "Not much more can happen to us now." With his left hand Onno pointed to the suitcase in his right. "If the Ten Commandments are really in here, which God forbid, then more can happen to us than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams, my dear friend. That would be more explosive than an atom bomb."

  "Only if you can't hold your tongue. No one will ever know." What did his father know about his wildest dreams? Only because of his dream of the Citadel had he been able to fetch the tablets from the center of the world— thus, as it were, removing the sting from the SOMNIUM QUINTI. The sting was now in that suitcase.

  When everything remained quiet in the convent, they again sat down on a bench opposite the altar. They now had to wait for the following morning, Sunday, when it would become busy. Their plan was simply to leave a quarter of an hour or half an hour after the opening of the Sancta Sanctorum: none of the fathers would notice that they were leaving without having arrived—since they were leaving, they obviously had also arrived. But that they should be uncertain about the contents of the case for the whole night was an unbearable prospect for Onno.

  "I have to see it now, Quinten," he whispered, "otherwise I'll go mad." "Then you'll have to go mad. Just imagine someone coming and seeing us peering at those things with a pocket flashlight. Haven't we agreed that we're here out of piety? If anyone comes, we go down on our knees and then we'll be praying. We have to get rid of that flashlight too, for that matter. Where should we leave it? Why didn't I think of that?"

  "Is there really something you haven't thought of?" said Onno with a touch of mockery in his voice; but immediately he looked uncertainly around in the dark. "For that matter I keep having the feeling that there's something missing."

  "What?"

  "I don't know . . ." Suddenly Onno stiffened. "My stick! Quinten! I left my stick lying in the chapel. In the hurry when we had to put that iron rod—"

  Quinten had already gotten up. He grabbed the flashlight and ran silently to the barred window at the top of the Holy Stairs. He shone it inside. As if in prayer, his father's stick lay on the papal prayer stool opposite the altar—the tip on the kneeling bench, the handle against the silk cushion with the tassels. He nodded. This was irrevocable. The flashlight had now also served its purpose, and on the way back he hid it behind a confessional against the wall.

  "Yes," he said when he arrived back, and sat down next to Onno again. "So that's how it is. That changes our whole plan."

  "Quinten ..."

  "Forget it, it's my fault. I hurried you along. There's no point in talking about it again. So now we have to get out of here before someone discovers it."

  Onno felt a drop of sweat running from his armpit along his side. "And how are you proposing to get out? We're caught like rats in a trap."

  Quinten thought for a moment. "There's only one way. What time are those services that come next? What are they called again?"

  "Matins. Usually at about four o'clock."

  "Then we'll simply go into the other chapel and say that we fell asleep, and can we please leave."

  "And what if they ask what's in that suitcase?"

  "Why should they ask that? There's nothing to steal here, is there? Anyway, what of it? Two dirty stones."

  "Let's pray that they really are just two dirty stones," whispered Onno. "But we're not there yet. Tomorrow morning a father suddenly discovers my stick in the Sancta Sanctorum—and what then? What will happen then? The police will see from the oil on the hinges that we've been in the altar too. They'll open it, and they'll find your backpack. Apart from that, it will be empty—but who will remember that it's been empty for eighty years. The fathers, perhaps, but they've got no interest in making that known, given the reputation of their chapel. They'll give our descriptions and tomorrow morning identikit pictures of our faces will appear on Vatican television, together with a close-up of that stick. Father and son. Desecrators. Ten million lire reward. What will Mauro do then? Signor Enrico from Tyrol! And Nordholt? He'll realize immediately why I borrowed that book, and he's got my address at the institute. He's still got a score to settle with me, but to be on the safe side he'll probably first call the embassy for advice. In consultation with The Hague, they'll tell him that he should keep in the background for the time being."

  "And I'll be recognized by the locksmith who made those things for me. He gave me a rather funny look when I got him to do it."

  Onno turned to look at him. "I can't see your face properly, but it looks a bit as if you're smiling."

  "So I am."

  "What in heaven's name is there to smile about?"

  "I don't know . . . perhaps the prospect of the journey."

  "Our journey, of course. Ever heard of popular religious fury? How can we show ourselves in the street, here in the lion's den? Before the Sancta Sanctorum opens in the morning, we must be out of the country—it doesn't matter where we go."

  Because St. Benedict of Nursia had understood that all that dreaming in paradoxical sleep can easily entangle the monk in the snares of physical temptation, and that therefore it has to be drastically interrupted at least once a night by the thistles and thorns of prayer, the convent began t
o come to life at about four o'clock. Stumbling. In the chapel of San Silvestro the light went on, and the reflection also pierced the darkness where they were. Relieved that things had finally happened, they sat up. All those hours they had discussed at greater and greater intervals what they were going to do shortly, and where they were going to flee to—but according to Quinten they would see what happened, and Onno himself had also finally said they'd better stop, because it was like playing chess: often you thought for a long time about the right move, and when you'd finally found it and made it, you knew that it was wrong. That was quite simply the fundamental difference between thinking and doing. At that Quinten had fallen silent. His experience was different. When he'd thought and then done something, it had never been wrong but always right; and the fact that the Decalogue was now in the air-travel suitcase was proof of that. And soon it would all come right. They had not said anything more about the tablets and what was to be done with them.

  While in the city the music gradually stopped, even in the last nightclubs, the building was again filled with ancient Gregorian unanimity. As he listened, Quinten was suddenly struck by the sense that old works of art were always old things: old bricks, old marble, old paint—but that old music was at the same time always brand-new, because it came from living throats. Apart from that, only old stories could also be new. That was of course because music and stories existed not in space but only in time.

  "We've woken up now," he said, not whispering again for the first time. He stretched with a groan. "We look around, surprised to see where we are. In the Sancta Sanctorum! Oh no! How can it have happened? We must have fallen asleep. Come on, let's go."