"I'm mailing a letter."
He turned the burning envelope between his fingers until he could no longer hold it. He ground the charred remains, which had fallen, into the earth with his heel and scattered them with his stick, until nothing more could be seen. Quinten watched in astonishment.
"Don't pay any attention and don't ask me anything." Onno took back the Bible and looked in St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews for the passages whose existence he remembered. "It's a long time, son, since I devoted myself to Bible study. Thank goodness it's the Authorized Version, in the language of Canaan, and not one of those new-fangled versions of the God-Is-Dead school."
While an occasional lady with a child or a gentleman with a dog passed them along the path, or a jogger trotted by, he read aloud to Quinten about Christ, who had not entered the "the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us."
" 'Christ,' " he recited with a solemn voice, " 'being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.' It says here that he consecrated man 'through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.' Come now, come now. And here it talks about 'the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched and not man.' If you ask me, all that contains a prohibition against ever building an earthly Holy of Holies with human hands again."
"But," said Quinten, "over there is a Christian building that is called Sancta Sanctorum and is the holiest place on earth."
"That's what I mean."
"So perhaps it's not so very Christian at all. That is, Christian but at the same time not Christian."
Onno nodded. "I take your point, but where do you want to go from here?"
Quinten pointed to the Bible. "Look at the ark of the covenant again. I want to know how big it was."
Onno looked up the book of Exodus and did not have to look for long. It was as though when he saw all those names and turns of phrase he again smelled the smell of his parents' house.
"Two and a half ells long, one and a half ells wide, and one and a half ells high."
"And how long is an ell?"
"Well, from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger, so about eighteen inches."
"So about forty-three inches long, twenty-seven inches wide, and twenty-seven inches high."
"That's about right."
Quinten looked through the hilly park, but all he saw was the heavy padlock. "If you ask me, that's also the size of the altar in the Sancta Sanctorum."
"Let's hope," said Onno with a little laugh, "that it's a bit bigger, otherwise the ark won't fit in it."
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because everything is always right — if you want it to be. Just think of that crazy Proctor, in the castle. Do you remember? Look, I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven buttons on my shirt; the top one is open. So that tallies with the six days of creation and the Sabbath."
"But something can really be right, can't it?"
"Of course."
"Why else would there be such thick bars in front of that altar? And on that canopy above there are two angels with outspread wings, aren't there? We're on the track of something, Dad! Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus— that could also have been in the temple of Jerusalem!"
Onno closed the Bible, looked at Quinten seriously and made a gesture. "Yes."
"Well, then! I have to know what's going on here."
"Why on earth do you have to, Quinten?"
"I don't know," said Quinten with something impatient in his voice, while he was thinking of the center of the world.
57. Discoveries
The origin of the urge that had seized Quinten was a mystery to Onno. Max and Sophia had brought the boy up to be agnostic — he scarcely knew the Bible, and religions had never interested him, as far as Onno knew. If this was a kind of religious mania, then he could understand. But it was obviously nothing of the kind. And besides, the question of the ark of the covenant being in the Sancta Sanctorum was of course total nonsense — but Quinten's reasoning had the enthusiasm of youth and the beauty of simplicity, though Onno himself knew the traps of this kind of simple conclusion all too well.
Things were almost never like that; something always turned up that suddenly changed the beautiful simplicity into a disheartening chaos, in which one could discover an order only with the greatest effort, which then turned out to be much more complicated. But the fact that he regarded Quinten's theory as nonsense did not stop him from immersing himself in the literature for a few days — or was it precisely the obvious absurdity of the project that attracted him?: in an absurd world only the absurd had meaning, as he had said in the letter that he had written to his father.
Because most books he had to consult would be in Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Quinten went his own way, while Onno himself started research the following morning in the Biblioteca Nazionale. He polished his shoes as well as he could with an old rag, tucked his shirt neatly into his trousers, and for the first time in years put on a tie.
The very first day, after a few hours, he realized what he had suspected: that through the centuries the writings about the temple of Jerusalem and the ark of the covenant had formed as vast a conglomerate as Rome itself, in which one thing was built on another and most things were under the ground. He couldn't restrain himself from browsing a little in the countless rabbinical commentaries, having a quick glance at what Philo had written about the ark; in the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas; in the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, Francesco Giorgi, Campanella; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Fludd and Kepler and even Newton; down to the watered-down views of modern freemasons, Rosicrucians, and anthroposophists.
The existence of all those speculations made him realize even more acutely what a commotion it would cause if the ark actually appeared — but apart from that, it was all much too interesting. He knew from experience that he would never finish if he went into that any further. Via entries in Jewish encyclopedias, not only Hebrew ones, through notes, references, bibliographies, he had to follow the trail closely, trot like a police dog with its nose close to the ground, not looking up or around, ignoring everything that did not immediately serve his purpose. And that purpose was not religious or metaphysical or symbolic but very concrete: did the ark still exist — and if so, where was it?
The following morning he checked all references to the ark, closer to two hundred than a hundred, with the help of a biblical concordance; and in the afternoon he looked with Quinten's eyes at the history of the Lateran palace, the basilica, and the Sancta Sanctorum. When the library closed that evening, he had made a couple of discoveries that would surprise Quinten; but he decided only to talk to him about it when he had more or less sewn things up. At the last moment he had found in a systematic catalog a promising Italian title about the treasure of the Sancta Sanctorum, and because he did not feel like going to the same library again, he first phoned the art historical institute on the Via Omero; it turned out to have a copy too, indeed in the German original. Only when he was on his way there did he realize that he had again put on a tie.
When the librarian saw him, a smile crossed her face. "Did you leave your pious companion at home today?"
"That's my son. He's wandering through the city somewhere, looking for the secrets of antiquity."
"Congratulations. I've never seen such a beautiful boy. The spitting image of John the Baptist in that painting by Leonardo da Vinci." She put out her hand and said, "Elsa Schulte."