The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  On the way to the runway a taxiing plane turned its back on them and for a few seconds emitted a deafening din. Quinten waited for a moment.

  "And what is it based on?"

  Onno put his hand on the suitcase, which Quinten had on his lap. "On this. At least, if what you think is in there is in there. On the fact that the God of the Jews had sanctified his people by entering into a covenant with them, which no other people can boast. Obviously an intolerable thought for many people. Anyway, give me that thing. I'll do the talking if it's necessary." He got up. "Remember, you don't know a thing, you're just tagging along."

  At the tables, a few yards apart, they were questioned separately by the security officials, Quinten in English, Onno in Italian. They were asked whether the suitcases and that backpack was their property. Whether they had packed their luggage themselves. If they had lost sight of it since they had packed it. If anyone had given them anything to take along. In reply to the question what he was going to do in Israel, Quinten said that he was accompanying his father and that he wanted to visit the holy places, while Onno said:

  "On business."

  "What kind of business?"

  "I try with moderate success to make my living as an art dealer."

  The official looked at the two pieces of luggage from all sides, put two red stickers on them, gave Onno his ticket and passport back, and allowed him to pass with a brief wave of his hand.

  "If we check in the suitcase," said Onno as they were standing in the back of the queue at the counter, "the stones may break, and of course they sling them around on the platform. But if we take it as hand luggage, we're almost bound to have to open it. What shall we do?"

  "Hand luggage."

  "Of course." Onno nodded—and he couldn't resist adding with a smile, "The first set was smashed to pieces as well, after all."

  Through passport control, too, in the crowded departure lounge by their gate, there were heavily armed policemen and all kinds of people whose function was not immediately clear. Bent over the screen of the detection apparatus sat a fat woman in a blue uniform; behind her, a blond girl with her arms folded watched. Onno put the suitcase on the conveyor belt, whereupon it disappeared under the rubber flaps. A little later the belt stopped. Perhaps it won't come out again, thought Quinten—slowly the X-ray picture faded and disappeared from the screen; even after the machine was dismantled down to the last screw, nothing would be found of the suitcase.

  When it appeared after half a minute on the other side under the rubber flaps, the girl came forward and invited Onno with a razor-sharp smile to open the case. He could tell from her accent immediately that she wasn't Italian but Israeli. Quinten helped him with the locks, and to his amazement Onno saw a beige envelope marked WESTERBORK SYNTHETIC RADIO TELESCOPE, with an astronomical mirror as a logo. The girl put the envelope aside and folded open the newspapers.

  "What on earth is this?" With her fingers wide apart, she raised her hands in the air and looked with a distaste at the gray stones. She lifted one up and asked, "What kind of material is this? Its lighter than you'd think. Lava?"

  "Maybe some plastic or other," said Onno as well as he could in ancient Hebrew. "Modern art, at any rate. A creation of a promising young German: Anselm Buchwald. An atmospheric evocation of the Grail legend."

  She looked up and said in modern Hebrew: "To me it looks more like an atmospheric evocation of the Third Reich."

  "Who knows, perhaps it amounts to the same thing."

  She looked at him piercingly with her green eyes. "You speak Hebrew like Jeremiah."

  "Like Job would be more correct," said Onno with feigned sadness.

  "The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away: praised be the name of the Lord!"

  After they had been let through, he asked Quinten what was in the envelope.

  "Secret," said Quinten gruffly.

  Onno shook his head. "You mustn't do such unexpected things. As if we didn't have enough problems already."

  "You see," said Quinten with a laugh when they were off the ground, "we've gotten away."

  "As long as they're not waiting for us in Tel Aviv," said Onno, looking worried. "It's a quarter past eight. Those fathers have probably already discovered my stick, or else they will within an hour. Padre Agostino will turn to Gorgonzola from fright, and in two hours Angiolina will give a precise description of that strange father and son who wanted to leave on the very first flight, and they'll hear from that Israeli policewoman that there was something very strange about the pair," he said, and pointed up at the baggage locker. "In three hours' time, when we land, there will be an expatriation request waiting for us at the airport, and we'll be taken back on the same plane under guard via Cyprus to Rome, where we shall languish until we die in a dungeon of the Castel Sant'Angelo, rattling our chains and gnawed by the rats."

  "Then they'd be missing something really special in the Holy Land," said Quinten. "Besides which, you're forgetting the time difference."

  Onno looked at him inquiringly. "What do you mean I'm forgetting the time difference?"

  "It's an hour later in Israel than in Italy, isn't it?"

  "What about it?"

  "That means that for that hour we haven't existed. And if you've been able not to exist for an hour, no one can find you anymore, if you ask me."

  Onno watched calmly while Quinten put his Mickey Mouse watch an hour forward, then crossed his arms and glanced sideways out of the window in front of him. The plane toppled the earth and in a wide arc they reached the sea above Ostia, which glittered in the morning sunlight like an aging skin. Confronted with Quinten's invulnerability, he felt like a bird trying to open a safe with its beak. He should surrender to Quinten, just as Quinten himself had surrendered to ... well, to what? To something that he probably didn't know himself.

  "Have you decided in the meantime what you plan to do in Israel?"

  "We'll see." Quinten really didn't know. All he knew was that everything would turn out for the best.

  "I know a colleague there from one of my former lives," said Onno, making a final attempt without much hope. "He might be able to help us a bit— at least if he's still alive. They've got fantastic laboratories there, where they can clean the stones; on that score there's no better equipment anywhere than in Israel. All Israelis are archaeologists—every potsherd they find is a political argument to justify their state."

  "And what about the Third World War?"

  "Of course it would have to be done in the deepest secrecy."

  "And that colleague of yours . . . what's his name?"

  "I can't remember. Yes I can: Landau. Mordechai Landau."

  "When he sees that he's got the authentic Ten Commandments in front of him, will he keep his mouth shut, then?"

  Onno sighed deeply. "He would immediately phone the prime minister."

  "Well, then."

  Onno said nothing. He was giving up. It was obvious that he would never even know for certain that those two stones were not Moses' stones. Quinten might perhaps hide them in a cave at the Dead Sea, near Qumran, all of which had been searched scores of times and where no one would look anymore; or bury them somewhere, in the Negev, in a place where he himself wouldn't be able to find them again. Israel was small; he could get everywhere on the bus in a few hours—nowadays even into the Sinai Desert.

  He could put them back on Mount Horeb and drive straight on to Egypt, thus completing the biblical circle. Then he could finally let himself be shut up in the throne room in the pyramid of Cheops, through which he had struggled on his official visit through hot, stuffy passages, and lie down in the empty, black sarcophagus. According to the pyramid freaks, there were definitely supernatural forces at work there, which would remove him from the earth like Enoch. Onno unfastened his safety belt and put his seat back a little. He must resign himself to the whole episode's taking on the character of a dream, which he couldn't even talk about decently without being considered crazy.

  The b
reakfast that was put in front of them seemed to be of the same substance as the plastic knives and forks with which they had to eat it. Quinten helped his father open the transparent packaging—not because he wouldn't have been able to do it himself, but because he obviously didn't want to know how to do it; and the sort of rage threatened to take control of him that led him even to putting his teeth into the plastic, which could only end in defeat for his teeth.

  "This kind of food is the end of human civilization," he grumbled, twisting and turning his large body behind the lowered table.

  "But we're in the air now," said Quinten with his mouth full.

  When their neatly ordered trays had been transformed into repulsive heaps of rubbish, which were pushed with a smile into steel trolleys, Quinten pressed his forehead against the window. Space. World. Like irregular gray-brown grease stains, the first Greek islands floated into view. Above his head were the Ten Commandments, on their way back: he felt as though he had been working toward this situation from the moment of his birth. What else could happen now? Of course something else would happen—but what then? Simply go on living? Go back to Holland and live to be eighty? Look back at this like an incident from the distant past, an unknown event from the last century? Suddenly the feeling seized him that these might be his last days on earth; but that didn't worry him.

  Perhaps everyone had something special to do in their existence and then their life was fulfilled. It might be something very insignificant, or apparently insignificant—for example, helping someone without being asked, without the other person knowing it. Everyone really ought to search their past to see if something like that had already happened; otherwise they ought to think about doing it.

  Down below Quinten saw a faint white comet in the blue water: a ship, itself too small to be seen, sailing in the opposite direction. Had the tablets and the menorah and all those things from the temple been taken to Rome by Titus like that, or had they gone overland? Only after he had asked Onno did he see that he'd woken Onno up.

  "I'm sorry."

  "You won't allow me a moment's rest," said Onno plaintively, and loosened his tie. "How the booty was transported! No idea. To be on the safe side, I'd say overland. Actually, I think you're the one who ought to know that kind of thing by now. But you don't study—you just do what you want."

  "Isn't that enough, then?"

  "Far too much! But you're right. Anyone can study—there are other people to do that, like me. When I was involved in politics in my modest way, I also knew less about it than the political scientists, who knew more than Hitler and Stalin put together but who hadn't an ounce of power and who would never get it. Except that in your case you go a step further. You're firmly convinced that at this moment you're taking the stone tablets of the Law back to Israel—I can still scarcely bring myself to say it—but if you ask me, you don't even know how your author got his inspiration there on that mountain in the Sinai. You've never read up on it in the Bible."

  "No," said Quinten, thinking: they're not stone, but sapphire tablets. "What happened,then?"

  "The usual things. In a volcanic production, with thunder and lightning, smoke, earthquakes, blaring trumpets, the voice of Jahweh visible in a dark cloud."

  "Visible? A visible voice?"

  "Yes, according to Philo that was the real miracle. Jahweh spoke visible words, in letters of light, which were not written on anything. That's what Moses had to do. That visible voice of God, Moses said later, was the greatest miracle since the creation of man."

  Even after Onno had finished, Quinten felt that Onno was still looking at him from the side. Probably he really wanted to ask whether Quinten still believed that he had the stones in his possession; but he had obviously lost heart.

  Quinten looked back at him and said: "So now the Francis Bacon is the Sancta Sanctorum."

  "The Francis Bacon ?"

  "Didn't you see when we got on? That's the name of this plane."

  When they were flying over the Peloponnese, Quinten became sleepy too. With heavy eyelids he looked at the large black fly sitting on the window. It had never flown as fast before without flying—how was it to get home again? Because the creature disgusted him, he brushed it away with his hand, after which it landed a few rows in front on the shoulder of the Orthodox gentleman, who had kept his hat on. Gradually his eyes closed, while the droning of the engines changed into majestic harmonies of gigantic orchestras. . .

  The voice of the captain woke him from his sleep. He told them in English that Crete was down below on the right. Looking past Onno, Quinten saw the gloomy, violet mountains in the distance, but Onno didn't open his eyes.

  "Dad. Crete."

  "Don't want to see it," said Onno, with his head turned to one side and his eyes still closed. "I hate Crete."

  A few minutes later the sound of the engines suddenly faded and Quinten could tell from his ears that the plane was beginning to descend.

  His father opened one eye for a moment, closed it again and said: "Luhot ha'eduth can smell the stable."

  "What are you talking about now?"

  " 'The tablets of the testimony.' Another way of describing the covenant."

  Quinten turned away with a jerk and looked wide-eyed through the plane without seeing anything. It was as though that word testimony were also deep in himself, like a cut, sparkling diamond in the blue earth.

  In Lod, at Ben Gurion airport, it was full of policemen and armed security troops, which reminded Onno of Havana eighteen years before, when all these men had been in their cribs playing with rattles; but no one was looking for them. The vacationers bound for Cyprus, who had applauded after the landing, had remained in the plane. Their baggage was inspected again at long tables; for the third time people were checked to see if they resembled the photos in their passports. The suitcase was opened again and Parsifal had to help again. Next to them was the Orthodox man, who also glanced at the stones without interest.

  "If only he knew," said Quinten.

  "Careful," said Onno softly. "Even abroad there's always a chance that someone will understand you. Certainly in Israel." When they were finally given permission to leave and he had drawn some money—shekels, according to him the currency back in Old Testament times—he asked, "Now what?"

  "Well, fairly logical. We're going outside."

  It was almost one o'clock. On the square in front of the departure hall it was swelteringly hot; people had scarcely any shadows coming from their feet. They walked through the throng of cars and buses toward a low, white office for tourist information and hotel reservations.

  "If there's one thing I need," said Onno, "it's a civilized bath. Do you realize we haven't taken our clothes off for twenty-four hours? Don't you feel grimy?"

  "I'm okay."

  "Sherut?" shouted a man with a yarmulke on his crown, who was hastily loading suitcases into a small bus. "Yerushalayim?"

  There were still two free seats in his shuttle to Jerusalem, and Onno had gradually realized that all they had to do was to get in. On the backseat they found themselves next to a graying lady reading L'Express; all the others were intellectual-looking men, Americans, in shortsleeved shirts, some of them wearing bow ties. When the driver started the engine, he turned around and asked them what hotel they wanted. The lady was going to the King David; the Americans had to get to the Hilton. When Onno didn't reply immediately, he asked impatiently: "The Hilton too?"

  Onno made a gesture that they might as well go there, and a little later they drove into the dry, stone-strewn hills.

  They did not speak during the forty-five-minute drive. Onno had never been in Israel, but he felt as if the metaphysical violence that had raged here for four thousand years, and was still raging, could be read from the landscape. Of course that was a romantic thought, deriving from what he knew of history, from Bible readings with his father and the vicar and from sugary catechism prints from his early childhood, with breaking clouds that let through fans of holy rays. For him,
too, Israel had always been "the Promised Land," but that he should finally get to see it under these circumstances was the most unbelievable thing of all: accompanied by his son, who had a suitcase on his lap that supposedly contained the tablets of the Law.

  It was as if in this scorching light, undisturbed by any Dutch cloud, time curled up like an insect in a flame. Gradually the hills became more rugged; here and there they were in bloom, and in the verge of the four-lane highway there were the wrecks of shot-up trucks and armored cars preserved with rust-colored red-lead paint. The driver told them that they were from the wars of 1948 and 1967; but they might just as well have been from the time of the Crusaders, the Romans, the Babylonians . . .

  The tower of the Jerusalem Hilton, with each balcony rail bedecked with an Israeli flag, was in the western part of the city; the excavations that were going on next to it showed that it had once been different. In the cool, sumptuous lobby, surrounded by small boutiques, the Americans reported to excited ladies at a table with miniature flags and papers on it; a board on an easel welcomed delegates to the international conference on the irrigation of the Negev. At the counter Onno put down their passports and asked for two rooms. Perhaps because he saw that they were Dutch passports, the receptionist directed him in English to the hydraulic engineers' table.