"What's the Lateran?" he asked.
"In the Middle Ages the popes lived there, before they moved to the Vatican."
"We have to go there too."
"Of course," said Onno. "Anything you say. It's not far — over there, behind the Colosseum. The original palace no longer exists, though."
With each step they took along the great stones of the Via Sacra, the Holy Way, the Forum was in a different century. Every broken column, Onno told him, every fragment of brickwork, every piece of marble that lay in the sun on the dry grass had been constantly pushed backward and forward in time in thousands of publications, until it had been assigned its place in history: the beginning of the millennium, third century A.D., sixth century B.C, Renaissance, medieval. A monstrous ruin, which Quinten had taken for something from the Second World War, suddenly turned out to be the basilica of Maxentrus. The three remaining columns of the temple of Vespasian, with a fragment of architrave still on them: Onno pointed to it with his hand, and said it was the perfect logo for classical antiquity. The round temple of Vesta cut vertically in two and half blown away by time. The triumphal arch of Titus, which spanned the Via Sacra at its highest point, opposite the Colosseum.
Onno pointed out to Quinten a frieze in the tunnel of the arch, which depicted the return of Titus's triumphant troops from Jerusalem, after the conquest of the city in A.D. 70. Titus was the son of the emperor Vespasian, whom he succeeded a few years later. Despite the damage, the relief was a masterly depiction of the soldiers, marching into the Forum along the same street where they were now standing, full of movement and as if the music and hurrahs could still be heard, above their heads the trophies from the destroyed Jewish temple: the silver trumpets, the golden table for the shew-bread, the golden, seven-branched candelabra.
"What's shewbread?"
"A sacrifice," said Onno. "Twelve round unleavened loaves, in two piles of six. They were replaced every Sabbath and the old ones were then eaten by the priests. You find the same thing in Christianity in a different form. Christ said that he was holy bread himself."
"Really? Did he say he was made of bread? Then I suppose he had to be eaten too?"
"That's right. It's still the climax of the Catholic mass."
"But then the Catholics are cannibals!"
"That's what your grandfather always said, but cannibals eat people, while the Catholics regard themselves as God-eaters."
"Perhaps it's something like that with cannibals too."
"Quite possibly. But because the Catholics ultimately only eat bread, not people, they're more like sublimated cannibals — or perhaps one should say transubstantiated cannibals. The strange thing, though, is that you don't find that magic eating-of-the-god figure in Judaism. That seems to derive from Egypt, from the cult of Osiris, who by the way also rose from the dead. In the temple of Jerusalem the only other sacrifices were lambs, and Christ said that he was also a sacrificial lamb. Besides that, he compares his own body with the temple itself."
"The building obviously made a big impression."
"You could say that."
If the Pantheon was an image of the cosmos, thought Quinten, the temple of Jerusalem was obviously an image of man. Together they were everything.
"And the candelabra?"
"That was the Jews' holiest object. The menorah. God told Moses personally how it should be made."
"And the Romans simply took it away with them?"
"As you can see. Though it's not quite accurately depicted here, but for some reason Israel chose this version as its state symbol."
Quinten looked at the thing, which was almost the same height as he was.
"Where is it now?"
"No one knows. Probably stolen, by the Vandals in the fifth century. They were a Germanic tribe that had founded a state of its own in North Africa. That's where our word vandals comes from." As he said it, he suddenly felt a great surge of weariness.
Separate capitals, flagstones, worn steps, inscriptions, caves. . wildcats everywhere, stalking each other. Once this had been the center of the world, thought Quinten, to which all roads led, not only Titus's road from Jerusalem, but now his own from Westerbork too — but that was something different than the center of the world. Or not? He stopped on the other side of the Forum by the "black stone," Lapis Niger.
A secret! No one knew the meaning of that square block of marble down there in a hollow, as if in a navel. According to his guidebook, it might be connected with the overthrow of Etruscan domination. Perhaps it was a grave: the grave of Romulus, the mythical first king, from the eighth century B.C. The spot had been sacred since the time of Julius Caesar. He descended a few steps, further into the past with each step, and knelt down by a weathered oblong stone beneath the Lapis Niger, in which there were remnants of archaic inscriptions. He wanted to ask his father if he could read them, but Onno had stayed at the top.
"Dad?" he shouted. "Come over here. What does it say?"
Onno looked down at him, wiping his brow with a sleeve. "Probably some ritual law or other. It's very early Latin, but almost unreadable. Just that whoever defiles that spot is cursed. So come on up quickly."
"Why can't you come down for a moment?"
"I'm aware that you've inherited it from me, Quinten, but I don't want anything to do with writing. You must understand that. Let's go. I'm dizzy."
The following day, Whitsunday, the weather changed. Dark purple clouds drifted quickly over the city and in the distance there was now a faint rumbling. After breakfast at Mauro's, Quinten wanted to go immediately to San Pietro in Vincoli, rushing as though he had an appointment for which he must not be late. The medieval church stood on the site of the Roman prefecture, where Peter and Paul had been chained, on a silent, enclosed square not far from the Forum; the black entrance reminded him of a mousehole.
Although there was no service in progress, the pews were full of people absorbed in prayer. He looked around in the semidarkness — and in the right-hand aisle he suddenly discovered the figure with whom he had had an appointment for so long. Speechless, he looked at the remnant that remained after Michelangelo had carved away the superfluous marble: the horned Moses, which he knew so well from the photograph in Theo Kern's studio fastened to a beam with a drawing pin, full of strength and much more colossal than he had imagined, the expression on his face much more furious, his veined hand clawing agitatedly at his beard. At a stand with a telephone on it a boy and girl stood with their ears almost touching, the receiver between them, and looked at the seething figure.
"He's bloody angry," said Quinten softly.
Onno had to laugh. " 'Wrathful,' it's called, and he had reason to be."
"Why?"
Onno looked at him with something like alarm. "Do you know anything about the Bible?"
"Only a bit. Almost nothing about the Old Testament."
"Doesn't matter. That's what your father's there for, he knows it by heart — at least, he used to, thousands of hours of Bible reading by my father and at school and at catechism class made sure of that. You obviously know at any rate that Moses led the Jewish people out of exile in Egypt. After that the refugees wandered through the desert for forty years, looking for the promised land. At the very beginning of that period, Jahweh had given him all sorts of instructions on Mount Horeb — like for example about that seven-branched candelabra that you saw yesterday on the triumphal arch of Titus. Finally he was given—" Suddenly there was a flash of light in the church, followed immediately by a loud, violent clap of thunder, which rumbled away over the city like an iron ball as big as the cupola of the Pantheon. Onno looked at Quinten in astonishment and said, "That's very appropriate."