The Discovery of Heaven (85 page)

"Good idea, Edgar. Let's inspect thirteen people here in the sun at our leisure."

He sat down on the steps of a fountain and put his plastic shopping bag next to him. From the basin rose a sculptured pedestal, with dolphins spouting water, on top of which was an obelisk, eighteen feet or so high, covered with hieroglyphics, crowned by a gold star, from which sprouted a bronze cross.

"Thirteen men, that is—as a gentleman I'll leave women out of it. You know what Weininger said: 'Woman is man's fault.' Hitler was a man, but through three elections he only came to power thanks to the lovelorn women of Germany; so let's shroud that in the democratic and feminist mantle of love. Take him," and he nodded toward a carefully groomed, graying gentleman with a newspaper under his arm and his coat draped loosely over his shoulders. "Decent man, chief accountant at a medium-sized bank, manager of some department or other. Reliable, bit vain, in any case not the first and not the thirteenth. And neither is that one over there," he said, and his eyes followed a man in overalls walking past and studying some machine component or other that had to be repaired or replaced. "He's doing his job. He's too busy to murder or perform miracles. But those two talking over there—one of them I don't like at all. That smile is no good. And that face is just a bit too pale and too smooth."

The man was in his late twenties and noticed immediately that he was being watched. Instantly, his smile vanished completely, as though a switch had been turned off, and a cold, threatening expression remained focused on Onno. Onno averted his gaze.

"Dammit, Edgar, if you ask me there's the thirteenth. But don't look, because he's dangerous. He's dangerous because he can control his emotions, like someone else's car; what he uses to steer them with is itself not an emotion. Hopefully, he'll get run over by a car today. Who have we over there?" he said, looking at a boy who crossed the square diagonally, stopped open-mouthed, and took in the building opposite. At the same moment Onno caught his breath. He began trembling and slowly stood up.

The Pantheon! There it was! Quinten felt as though what he was looking at was not real. The Roman temple of all the gods, twenty centuries old: gray and bare, scraped clean from top to bottom by barbarians, emperors, and popes, it stood there as something not only from a different time but from a different space—like sometimes during the daytime an alarming image loomed up from the dream of the preceding night.

M•AGRIPPA L•F•COS•TERTIVM•FECIT

The Quadrata! There they were, those wonderful, inspired letters on the architrave above the eight pillars, under the two triangular pediments, which Palladio had studied so closely: Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, who had allegedly made this during his third consulate; but in reality it was the emperor Hadrian, as Mr. Themaat had taught him. He wondered how Mr. Spier was getting on there in his Pontrhydfendigaid.

To the left and right of the doorway and the round building behind with the cupola, grooves many feet deep had been cut down to Roman street level, which made the temple appear to be rising from the earth, like the erratic stones in Drenthe. At the front, he knew, the entrance steps were still buried below the asphalt. Slowly he walked along past the row of waiting horse carriages, toward the shadow of the high, rectangular portico, supported by another eight pillars—together making as many columns as he had years. A group of visitors was already waiting. A little later one of the bronze doors, over twenty feet high, was opened a fraction by two men, which required all their strength.

As he crossed the threshold, the colossal empty space took his breath away. As in the impenetrable interior of a crystal, the shadowless light hung on the blond marble floor, against the columns and alcoves and chapels, where the proud Roman gods had been replaced by humble Christian saints. The highest point of the cupola was occupied not by a keystone but by the blue sky, a round hole measuring almost thirty feet across, through which a diagonal beam of sunlight shone like an obelisk, producing a dazzling egg on a damaged fresco. The cupola with the hole in it reminded him of an iris with a pupil: the temple was an eye, which he was now inside. From outside, the hole must be black. The building was an observatory.

What had Mr. Themaat said again? That the Pantheon, though it might not be
the
building, because that didn't exist, was a "good second" and you could see it as a depiction of the world. Perhaps he had meant by that not simply nature, the earth, the moon, the sun the stars, but all the other worlds, such as for example those of numbers, geometrical figures, and music. For that matter the building was also a clock—a sundial, which indicated the time not with a shadow but with light itself. He went and stood in the middle of the space, directly beneath the opening, and took out his little compass. The entrance was due north.

He looked in the direction the needle indicated, where his attention was caught by a seedy figure by the bronze doors, who was staring at him. He was large and heavily built and was wearing a pair of dark glasses; on his shoulder sat a black crow, no, it was more like a raven. An unkempt gray beard hid the rest of his face too. His long hair had been gathered into a ponytail at the back; his grubby shirt was half open and hanging out of his trousers, exposing his navel; worn sneakers covered his bare feet. Quinten started. Not again, surely? In Venice the woman from Vienna, in Florence that sleazy type, and now a tramp—things were going from bad to worse. He felt himself turning away in irritation, but at that moment the ebony-colored bird flew off the man's shoulder, described a circle through the temple with wings flapping, sat for a moment on the ledge where the cupola rested on the rotunda, then flew up and disappeared croaking through the blue opening.

Everyone in the Pantheon watched it go. The Japanese quickly took photos, and Onno knew immediately that it would not come back. He had not intended to speak to Quinten; he just wanted to see him for a moment. He was about to call the bird back, but was frightened that Quinten would recognize his voice. Now he had not even said goodbye to Edgar—and suddenly he felt so utterly abandoned that he could not bear it.

When Quinten saw the shabby figure coming toward him, trembling and supporting himself on a stick, he would have preferred to run around him in a wide arc and dash outside; but he decided to tell him plainly that he wanted nothing to do with him—at least if he spoke French, German, or English—and then to make a dignified exit from the temple. When the man arrived opposite him, he took off his sunglasses.

Quinten felt himself changing into an image of himself. His breathing his heart, his brain, and his intestines—all came to a stop; for a moment he turned to marble as he looked into Onno's eyes, which he knew so well and through which at the same time someone completely different from his father seemed to be looking at him. Then they fell into each other's arms and for a couple of seconds stood hugging each other without moving.

"Dad ..." sobbed Quinten.

Onno looked around, searching for something. "I have to sit down for a moment."

Hand in hand, they walked toward a wooden bench, a few yards away from the sarcophagus containing the bones of Raphael, where they stood and surveyed each other in silent astonishment. On the one hand Quinten had the feeling that it couldn't be true that his father was suddenly sitting there; on the other hand it was quite obvious that he had found him without really trying. How disheveled he was! It couldn't be from lack of money, and yet he looked completely down and out. Uncle Karel had been right: Auntie Helga's death had turned him into a dropout. Was what was happening really the right thing?

Onno, too, was completely confused. He realized that he had again undermined his whole life with his sudden impulse. By speaking to Quinten, he had done something irrevocable: it was of course impossible for him to say goodbye forever in a moment, and equally unthinkable that he should resume his earlier existence. At the same time he felt something like relief that everything was suddenly completely different from the past four years. When he had left Holland, Quinten had been a boy of twelve, and now there was almost a man sitting there. For the first time he was ashamed. He lowered his eyes and did not know what to say.

Quinten watched him and asked: "Shall I go?"

Onno shook his head. "Things are as they are," he said softly. "Quinten .. . how are you? You look well. You've grown two heads taller."

"I suppose I have, yes."

"How long have you been in Rome?"

"Since yesterday afternoon."

"Are you here with the whole class? I came here for the first time when I was in school."

"I'm not in school anymore."

Onno, who had given up so much more, realized that he was in no position to comment; the very fact that he had not known about this deprived him of his right to speak. What's more, he heard a sort of decisiveness in Quinten's voice that dismissed all criticism in advance. He wanted to ask about Ada, but perhaps she was no longer alive.

"I still can't believe that we're suddenly sitting here, Quinten."

"Perhaps we aren't."

A smile crossed Onno's face. "Perhaps we're dreaming. Both having the same dream." He looked at him shyly. He had to inquire about Ada. "How's Mama?"

"The same, as far as I know. I haven't seen her." He didn't want to talk about his mother; he also suddenly felt irritated that his father had to ask about her. She might have been dead. Or had she died in the meantime perhaps? His granny still did not know where she could reach him. He'd want to know in a moment how Max was doing, and then he would have to tell him what had happened. To give the conversation a different turn, he asked, "Why are you using a walking stick?"

Onno put the stick on his lap and looked at it. It was a crudely trimmed, gnarled branch, with its unprotected tip transformed into a weathered brush; the curved handle had been artistically shaped into a serpent's head.

"Nice, isn't it? Found it in a secondhand shop." Slowly he turned to face Quinten and said, "I had a slight stroke, a brain hemorrhage eighteen months ago." And then he saw that Quinten was alarmed. "Don't worry, it's over now. But it happened very deep, in a dangerous place, in the thalamus, as it's called. Less than an inch farther forward, and I would have been in a wheelchair—the neurologist said I should consider myself lucky. Do you know that feeling? When you fall under a tram and lose your leg, you should be happy that you didn't lose both legs. Whenever something serious happens, you're supposed to count yourself lucky and be happy."

"Did it hurt a lot?"

"Not at all. In real life things are always different than you've imagined them. Shall I tell you about it?"

Quinten gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. He didn't really want to know, but he wanted to put off the question about Max for as long as possible.

One cold winter's day, said Onno, he was walking down the street not far from here. Suddenly he felt something hanging over his head. It was as if he were not completely there. His left hand began tingling, and a moment later his left foot. He felt as if he had a couple of stones in his shoe, but a minute later his whole left shoe was full of stones and all those stones together formed his left foot. After another minute he realized that something was seriously wrong. His whole left leg, his left side, and the left-hand half of his face had gone numb. Because it had all been on the left, he thought of his heart, but he had no pain in his chest, though he did have a little in his head, though not even enough to require an aspirin. Now and then he had to stop.

When he felt his pulse, his heart was racing so fast that he couldn't count. He tried to take off his left glove, but he never wore gloves; he realized that he was busy pulling his fingers. He tried to tell from the faces of the people who came toward him whether there was anything strange to be seen about him; but he didn't see anything special. And yet he knew they were now in a different world from him. He sat down on the edge of the pavement and a woman asked if she should call for an ambulance. He said it wasn't necessary, but she did anyway; a little later he was driven to the hospital with wailing sirens. There they pushed him into a kind of gigantic, turning oven, for taking brain scans. Three days later he was back home.

"All that happened was that I wasn't allowed to smoke or drink anymore. Well, three glasses of wine a day, but that makes you more or less a teetotaler. The left-hand side of my body is still a little numb, and I'm almost always giddy when I walk. Perhaps it will pass eventually; but as you get older, things usually don't pass. That's why I use a walking stick now. I can do without it, but I feel safer with one."

"Why did you suddenly have that hemorrhage?"

"I've a hunch about that. Do you remember I used to work on deciphering archaic script? I once published a theory about Etruscan, for which I received an honorary doctorate."

"Yes, Auntie Dol said the other day that you told her to send it back."

"Dol . .." repeated Onno, and was silent for a moment. "How's Dol?"

"They live on Menorca now."

Onno looked in a melancholy way through the space, which was filling with tourists.

"You probably also know that after that Etruscan thing I turned my attention to the Phaistos disc, but I couldn't crack it. I went into politics to have a private excuse for not being able to work on it anymore. But things didn't work out in politics either, and when Auntie Helga died I didn't know what to do anymore. I wrote to you all about that. I wanted to go away for good—but where? Then I thought: I'm back where I started. Perhaps I won't want to do anything anymore, but you never know for sure. Nothing is final in life, apart from death—as you can see yet again now. So I thought: if ever I want to do anything else, then I must continue where I left off, with that disc. The script had still not been deciphered. Actually, my old notes were the only thing I took with me from Amsterdam, although I could scarcely understand them any longer. And since I had to go somewhere, that settled my destination. Rome. You won't find as much material anywhere else. Maybe in London, but it rains most of the time there."