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 breakfast 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.