When he got home, Onno was lying on his mattress reading the International Herald Tribune.
With his hand on the door handle Quinten stopped. "Since when have you read the newspapers?"
Onno dropped the paper, looked at him over his reading glasses, and said: "I've come down to earth, Quinten."
He told him what had happened to him in the institute and that it would now soon be the end of his anonymous existence, but that in exchange he had rediscovered the world.
"I would never have thought that it would happen again. I thought I would be in mourning till I died, and without your arrival in Rome that would have happened, but obviously this was meant to be."
"At least that's how it is," said Quinten, who had sat down on the chair at Onno's desk.
Onno folded his hands on the newspaper and looked for a while at a large black feather from Edgar's wing, which was in an empty inkwell on the windowsill.
"Do you know what may be the most terrible of all sayings? 'Time heals all wounds.' But it's true. There's always a scar that may hurt when the weather changes; but one day the wound heals. As a boy of eight I once stumbled with one of those curved pointed nail clippers in my hands. It went deep into my knee, and I can still remember exactly how I screamed with pain. So like everyone else I got a scar on my knee, but I couldn't tell you which one anymore. You must have scars, too, that you can't remember how you got. There's something dreadful about that. Because it means that looking back on it, those wounds might just as well have never existed. What happened to me is a trifle compared with what has happened to other people — in the war, for example, and that wound has obviously healed — but your mother's still in a coma and Auntie Helga is still dead. There's something wrong about that."
Quinten became confused by those words, and when Onno saw that he sat up a bit and laughed.
"Don't you listen to your old father. Humanity could not exist at all if it were any different, and for animals it's no problem at all. Very soon, when we've solved all mysteries, we'll still be left with the mystery of time. Because that's what we are ourselves. That's why I'm reading this newspaper here. I don't have the feeling that you're interested in world politics, but shall I tell you what I've discovered?"
"Yes," said Quinten. "But not what you've discovered in world politics."
Onno drew a deep breath, threw the paper on the floor, and got off the mattress. "Let me get over there." Quinten stood up and leaned against the windowsill, Onno sat at his notes. "I learned a lot, but I doubt whether you'll be happy about it." Like someone about to play a game of solitaire, he spread his notes over the table in four long rows, folded his arms, and looked at them for a few seconds. "Where shall I begin?"
"At the beginning."
"Could it also be the probable end?" He picked up a sheet. "According to II Kings, verse 9, the temple of Solomon was plundered and set alight by the Babylonians, together with all Jerusalem. The general view is that the ark was also lost when that happened. You knew that already, of course. This seven-branched candelabra and all those other things were later remade, but the ark was not. If you open your Bible at Jeremiah 3, verse 16, you'll read that Jahweh had told the prophet that no one must speak about the ark of the covenant anymore, that no one must think about it anymore, that no one must look for it anymore, and that no new ark must be made. That's the last mention of the ark in the Old Testament."
"But if no one was supposed to look for it," said Quinten, "that meant surely that it hadn't gone, although it was no longer in the second or third temples."
"You could come to that conclusion. And you find support for that in a couple of apocryphal texts. For example, the so-called Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch. It says that when the Babylonians approached, an angel descended from heaven into the Holy of Holies and ordered the earth to swallow up the ark. That would mean that it's still in Jerusalem on the site of the temple. The annoying thing is that the story was not written until a century after Christ — that is, even later than the destruction of the temple of Herod by the Romans. Perhaps a legend that I found in Rabbinical literature connects with that. After the destruction of Solomon's temple, a priest is supposed to have found two raised tiles in the floor of the ruin; the moment he told that to a colleague, he dropped down dead. So that was the proof that the ark had not been stolen or burned, but that it was buried in that spot. There was another nice story in the second book of the Maccabees. There you read that the same Jeremiah of just now took the ark on the orders of Jahweh and hid it."
"Really?" said Quinten expectantly. "Where?"
"In a cave on the Nebo. That's the mountain from where Moses saw the Promised Land on the other side of the Jordan, and which he himself was forbidden to enter for some reason by Jahweh."
"And have they never looked for it there?"
"Of course. From the very start. The people who were with him wanted to mark and signpost the way to the cave, but they could not find it again. When Jeremiah heard about it, he reproached them and said — let's have a look… where is it? There is only a Greek text of it left, but you can see that it's been translated from Hebrew. Here, I'll just translate off the top of my head: 'No man shall find this or know this spot until Jahweh again unites his people and has mercy on them. Then he will reveal it.' " He looked in amusement at Quinten, who was leafing through his Bible. "You might well say that the moment has now come with the state of Israel. It's just a shame that that story, too, was only written down about a hundred and fifty years before Christ."
"I can't find that book of the Maccabees anywhere."
"That's right, because it's not in there. It's also an apocryphal book, but that doesn't mean very much; it could just as well have been canonical. All that was decided fairly arbitrarily by those Church Councils. Conversely, that letter of Paul to the Hebrews, you remember, in which Christ is compared with the temple, could just as well have been apocryphal, because of course it wasn't written by Paul but by an Alexandrine follower of Philo."
"Who's that?" asked Quinten, without really paying attention. He was trying to understand what all those facts meant to him.
"A Jewish scholar, Philo Judaeus, a contemporary of Christ's, who wanted to combine Judaism with Greek philosophy. Interesting man. But let's not digress, because then we'll sink farther and farther into the historical quicksand. Right. If all that's true then, and if according to you the ark is hidden in the Sancta Sanctorum at this moment, how did the Romans get hold of it? Isn't it a little too improbable that they should have found it in that cave in the Nebo?"
"Yes," said Quinten. "That's true. But why is it called the Sancta Sanctorum? Why is it supposed to be the most sacred place in the world, then? You yourself said that that's very strange, didn't you?"
"Wait a bit, we're not there yet. The most probable answer is that the ark is not on the arch of Titus because the Romans simply didn't have it. Pompey had previously penetrated the Holy of Holies and hadn't seen anything there. And that was all confirmed by Flavius Josephus — he was a Jewish writer in Roman service, in fact a kind of collaborator. He reported the whole Jewish war at close hand, up to and including that procession across the Forum, with the table of the shewbread and the seven-branched candelabra and all those things; he mentions them in exactly the same order as they are on the triumphal arch. Anyway, in his young days he had served in the temple of Herod, and according to him, too, the debir was completely empty."