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Leiden, 20 March 2015, 1:00pm

Technically, Peter de Haan’s lecture was already over. He had given a brisk overview of Leiden’s most important churches in his ‘Introduction to the History of Leiden’ for Master’s students. It was part of an elective module, but it packed the small lecture theatre every year. He had stopped being surprised by it years ago, but it always did him good to see the theatre so full.

Some of the students had started to pack away their things, but they hadn’t yet dared to leave their seats. One young man watched him like a dog waiting for a command from its master.

An aerial photograph of the Hooglandse Kerk was projected onto the screen behind him. At the start of the fourteenth century, it had been no more than a small wooden chapel. By the end of the sixteenth century it had grown into a cathedral so enormous that it had become too big for its surroundings, like an oversized sofa in a tiny living room. The photograph also showed the Burcht van Leiden, the city’s iconic eleventh-century motte-and-bailey castle. This six-foot-tall crenelated circular stone wall was built on top of a man-made mound about twelve metres high.

Peter raised his hand, and the quiet chatter in the room immediately stopped. ‘I know you all want to go to lunch,’ he said, with a hint of hesitation in his voice, ‘but which of you are going to watch the first underground waste container being installed at the public library this afternoon?’

Most of the students looked at him politely, but none of them responded.

‘You know that there’s a major project starting in town at two o’clock today, installing these containers?’

‘I didn’t know about it, sir,’ said one young man politely, keeping his hand in the air as he spoke. ‘But why would we be interested in that?’

‘Well now, I’m so glad you asked,’ Peter said.

This response drew some chuckles from his audience. The students stopped what they were doing and accepted that they weren’t going to be allowed to leave just yet.

Peter grabbed his laser pointer and drew a circle around the church on the screen.

‘This might come as a surprise to you, but not much is known about Leiden’s origins or how it developed. There aren’t many opportunities to carry out archaeological research in the centre of town. The simple reason for that is that anywhere you might want to dig has been built on, as those of you who go into urban archaeology later will no doubt discover. We might, very occasionally, be given a brief opportunity to excavate when a building is demolished, but it’s extremely rare. This project means that we can go down as deep as three metres, at literally hundreds of sites across the city. Who knows what might be hidden beneath our feet?’

‘Or which skeletons will come out of the closet,’ said the young man.

‘Exactly!’ Peter replied enthusiastically. ‘Now it looks like we’d rehearsed that earlier, but it was actually going to be my next point. Look …’

He traced a route along the Nieuwstraat with a beam of red light. ‘This street used to be a canal, but like many of the other canals in Leiden, it was filled in. Some canals were covered over, overvaulted, meaning that instead of being filled with sand and debris, they were just roofed over and then the roads were built on top of them. You can still walk through some of them, like tunnels, but this one was infilled. The cemetery was here, on the other side of the church. But people were sometimes secretly buried in this area, near what used to be the canal, next to the church. Those were people who couldn’t afford to be buried in the churchyard but who wanted to be laid to rest as close to the church as they could get.’

His mobile phone started to vibrate in the inside pocket of his jacket.

He looked around the lecture theatre. If he kept on talking, he’d become that uncle who endlessly droned on about the past at parties.

‘You can go,’ he said instead. ‘I’ll see you all this afternoon!’

The room sprang to life again, as though he’d pressed play on a paused video. As they made their way to the door, the students filed past his desk to hand in their work. The course required a fortnightly submission of a short essay about one of the subjects they had covered.

The room was empty. Peter turned off the projector and gathered up his things. When he picked up the sheaf of papers, a blank envelope fell out from between them. He picked it up and looked at it. It was probably a note from a student apologising for the fact that various circumstances had prevented them from doing their assignment this week.

He was about to open it when Judith appeared in the doorway.

She smiled. ‘You’ve not forgotten, have you?’

‘How could I possibly forget an appointment with you?’ Peter said, stuffing the envelope in his bag with the rest of the papers.

He had met Judith Cherev, a woman in her early forties, twenty years ago when he had supervised her final dissertation. They had become close friends in the years that followed. She had researched the history of Judaism in Leiden for her PhD. Now she was a lecturer in the history department, as well as freelancing as a researcher for the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Her dark curls, accented here and there with a charming streak of grey, were effortlessly tied back with a thick elastic band. She was still a beautiful woman, slim, and dressed, as always, in a blouse and long skirt. The Star of David necklace that hung around her neck glinted in the fluorescent lights.

‘Did you just send me a text?’

Judith shook her head.

Peter took his phone from inside his jacket and opened the message.

Hora est.

He smiled.

‘What is it?’

‘I think one of my students wanted to let me know that it was time to stop talking.’

He walked over to the door with the bag under his arm and turned off the lights. He showed the message to Judith on the way.

The hora est – the hour has come – was the phrase with which the university beadle entered the room exactly three-quarters of an hour into a doctoral candidate’s defence of their thesis before the Doctoral Examination Board. At this point, the candidate was no longer permitted to talk, even if the beadle had entered mid-sentence. To most candidates, the words came as a huge relief.

‘That’s quite witty,’ Judith said, handing back the phone. ‘Odd that it was sent anonymously though.’

‘Probably scared that their wit will get them marked down.’ He deleted the message. Just as he was about to lock up the lecture hall, he noticed that someone had left a telephone on one of the tables, an iPhone that looked brand new. He walked back into the hall, picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket. Its owner would appear at his office door soon enough. The students were practically grafted to their phones.

They walked outside and headed for the university restaurant in the Lipsius Building. It had been called the Lipsius for years, but Peter still called it the LAK, the name of the theatre and arts centre that used to be there.

‘Mark is probably there already,’ Judith said, tenderly. ‘You know him. One o’clock means one o’clock.’

Mark was a professor in the theology department, a brilliant man with a history of mental illness. He and Judith were in a ‘LAT’ relationship, living together in every way except that they had each kept their own little houses in the Sionshofje. Because of the hofje’s rules, actually moving in together would mean moving out of the Sionshofje, and neither of them wanted to leave the picturesque little courtyard.

Inside the restaurant, students and tutors sat at long tables. A monotone din of chatter and clatter filled the room. The warmth and smells from the kitchen made the air in the room stuffy and humid.

As Judith had predicted, Mark was already sitting at a table and saving two seats for them. He waved.

They visited the buffet counter on their way over to him. Peter chose an extra-large salad and a glass of fresh orange juice and Judith picked up a bowl of soup with a slice of bread and cheese.

‘Well done,’ Judith complimented Peter, giving his stomach a teasing little pat.

Mark was already half way through his meal by the time they sat down. Judith kissed him lightly on the cheek, something that still gave Peter a pang of envy, even after many years.

‘What are your plans for the afternoon?’ Peter asked.

‘I have an appointment with someone at two, sounds like an older gentleman,’ Judith said. ‘He’s inherited some bits and pieces from a Jewish aunt’s estate. He found me via the museum. I’m going to drop by and see if any of them are suitable for our collection.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Peter.

‘Oh, usually these things end up being a disappointment, to be honest. But every now and then something special turns up. A bit like The Antiques Roadshow. Diaries, letters from a concentration camp, or just interesting everyday bits and pieces like kitchen utensils, tools and so on. You never know. I usually enjoy it anyway. They often just want someone to talk to …’

‘Never a dull moment with you, is there?’

‘Never a dull moment, no,’ she agreed. ‘And I want to plan a lecture for Monday, nothing out of the ordinary, really. I’ve got the next few days to myself.’ She put her hand on Mark’s arm.

‘Yep,’ said Mark. ‘I’m off to Germany again. A week with no phone, no internet, totally cut off from the rest of the world. Heaven.’

Once or twice a year, Mark retreated to the depths of the German forests, beyond the reach of cell phone towers, to ‘reflect’, as he called it. Judith would tease him by suggesting that he had a secret mistress, but she knew that he needed time to recharge now and then. He always came back revitalised, full of energy. The only compromise he made was that he agreed to venture back into civilisation once a week to call Judith and let her know how he was.

‘And this afternoon,’ Mark continued, ‘I want to spend a couple of hours working on an article I’m writing with Fay Spežamor. You know her, right? The Czech classicist, curator of Roman and Etruscan Art at the Museum of Antiquities.’

‘I’ve met her a few times, yes,’ Peter said. ‘Funnily enough, hers is the only mobile phone number I know off the top of my head. If you remember the first two numbers …’

‘Then you just need to keep adding two,’ Mark finished his sentence.

None of them spoke for a while.

‘Were you planning to do anything this afternoon then?’ Mark asked.

‘I’m going to go into town to see them install the container in the Nieuwstraat. I’ve been following the project a bit. The Cultural Heritage Department invited me. Daniël Veerman, Janna Frederiks … They’ve promised to let me know if they come across anything interesting.’

‘Oh yes! I wanted to show you something!’ Mark said suddenly, as though he hadn’t heard what Peter said at all. He pushed his tray aside. Underneath it was a large envelope, addressed in neat, unmistakably old-fashioned handwriting.

‘To the most noble and learned professor doctor M. Labuschagne,’ he read with amusement. ‘I need to send the author of this letter a quick reply this afternoon.’ He took a large bundle of densely typed pages out of the envelope. They had apparently been written on an old-fashioned typewriter. ‘This is one of those things …’ he said, leafing through them as though he was looking for something specific. ‘Ever since I graduated, people have been sending me things. Amateurs writing to tell me that they think they’ve found the code that makes the Book of Revelation all make sense, or that they have definitive proof that Jesus didn’t die on the cross …’

‘Or that the Apostle Peter is buried in Leiden,’ Judith joked.

They laughed.

‘But this … Look, usually it’s nonsense and probably not worth holding onto, but I keep everything. I might do something with them one day. Sometimes an idea seems crazy, or the whole world thinks an author is mad, but sometimes these people are just way ahead of their time. I had another one today, a Mr …’ He looked at the title page. ‘… Mr Goekoop from Zierikzee, Zeeland. It’s about the Burcht. He says that it originally had an astrological function. Look, he’s even drawn some diagrams.’

Mark held up a sheet of paper with a surprisingly good pen-and-ink illustration of Leiden’s castle. The artist had left space between the battlements so that the whole thing strongly resembled a megalithic circle, like Stonehenge.

‘He has this whole theory about how the first rays of the sun shine through the Burcht’s main gate on the equinox on March twenty-first, taking the earth’s precession into account. The precession is the way the axis moves. The earth is like a spinning top, its axis is never exactly vertical. It’s a bit complicated … He uses all these calculations to try to show that the original castle must have been built more than two thousand years ago. According to him, the word megalith is derived from the Greek mega-leithos, or, Great Leiden.’

‘That should be easy to check. Tomorrow is March twenty-first.’

‘Yes. But actually, it’s not that easy. The earth’s axis has shifted since then. Anyway, that part about the megalith is bunk, and the rest too, probably. Look at this; he thinks he has further proof of his theory in the three trees in the middle of the castle. Because they’re arranged in exactly the same way as the three stars on Orion’s belt. You know, like the Pyramids in Egypt.’

‘And that would make the Rhine the River Nile, I suppose?’

‘He says that the Rhine is the Lethe, or the Leythe, one of the five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology, just like the Styx. According to him, the name Leythe is connected to Leiden of course.’

‘And this is what you spend your time on,’ said Peter.

‘It amuses me. You never know what someone is going to come up with. Sometimes the amateurs make surprising discoveries. But what fascinates me about this story is his theory that the Burcht was a centre for sun worship. He does have a point about the name Lugdunum …’

‘The Roman name for Katwijk.’

‘That’s right. But he reckons that it was originally the name given to the hill that the Burcht stands on. Lug is the name of the Celtic sun god, and dunum means “hill” or “mountain”. “Lug Hill”, or if you want to translate it more loosely, “the hill where Lug is worshipped”.’

‘With that sort of reasoning,’ Peter countered, ‘you could prove that Mr Goekoop’s hometown of Zierikzee can be traced back to the Greek goddess Circe. And that would put the city of Troy somewhere in Zeeland.’

Mark put the papers back in the envelope. ‘All the same, I always send these people a polite reply. That’s usually enough to satisfy them.’

Judith picked up her tray. She had already eaten her soup and bread.

‘Are you leaving already?’ Peter asked, a little disappointed.

‘I’ve got that appointment at two o’clock. I’m going back to my office to get my things. We could get together for a nightcap later this evening if you like?’

Peter nodded.

Judith rested her hand briefly on Mark’s shoulder. He tilted his head a little to meet it, like a cat reaching to be petted. She winked at Peter and went to tidy her tray away.

‘So, Lug then,’ said Peter, bringing the conversation back to where they had left it.

‘Yes, Lug, but there have been lots of other sun gods over the centuries of course. Fascinating subject, actually. That’s what the paper I’m working on is about. A bit of pop history about how they’re always born on the third day after the winter solstice, on the evening of the twenty-fourth of December, a symbolic celebration of the arrival of light in a dark world. Born to a virgin, usually in a cave, a star appears, they’re adored by shepherds, kings come bearing gifts, a wise man predicts that this is the saviour the world has been waiting for, and so on …’

‘Yes, I know those stories. By the way, did you manage to see some of the eclipse this morning?’

‘No, barely gave it a thought to be honest.’

‘It was cloudy anyway. I don’t suppose there would have been much to see.’

‘Probably, but … where was I? Oh yes, the sun gods … They always die round about the time of the spring solstice and they’re resurrected three days later. Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, take your pick. The god dies or his son dies, there’s a day of mourning, and then on day three, there’s unbelievable joy when the god rises from the dead. Just like the natural world around them that appeared to have died in the winter, but then comes back to life.’

Of course, Peter had also read about the early Fathers of the Church and how they had become confused when they saw the similarities between the Gospels and these other stories that were evidently much older. The only explanation they could give was that the older stories were the work of the devil. Satan would have known about the circumstances under which Jesus would be born and so he established the sun gods’ rites centuries earlier in order to confuse people.

‘My article will lay out the parallels between all sorts of basic Christian concepts and the religion’s sacred mysteries. It’s terribly interesting. Take Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone … all variations of the same theme. The cult of Dionysus slaughtered a bull every year. The followers ate the meat and drank the blood so that they could become one with Dionysus, a communion, and share the power of his resurrection.’

‘It’s … Listen,’ Peter interrupted him. Mark was usually fairly introverted, but once he felt at ease with someone, it could be very difficult to get him off his soapbox. ‘I still need to take my bag back to my office, and the mayor’s coming for the opening at two o’clock …’

Mark smiled and held his hands up apologetically. ‘No problem.’

Peter finished his last few forkfuls of salad and emptied his glass. He opened his mouth wide and bared his teeth like a laughing chimpanzee.

‘Not got anything stuck between my teeth, have I?’ he asked. Mark reassured him that he hadn’t.

They said goodbye and Peter walked to his office in the archaeology faculty next to the LAK.

Peter’s office hadn’t changed in more than twenty years. It was almost like a living room to him. The same three pictures had always hung on the walls: The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, a poster of a famous painting of Burgemeester Van der Werff by Gustave Wappers, and a large photograph of Pope John Paul II in his popemobile.

There were weeks when he spent more time in his office than in his flat on the Boerhavenlaan. He even kept a change of clothes in the cupboard for the odd occasion when he spent the night on the three-seater sofa.

When he pulled the stack of papers from his bag, the envelope fell out onto the floor. Intrigued, he picked it up and opened it. The note inside didn’t contain excuses for an unfinished assignment. Instead, written neatly in the middle of the sheet of the paper, was:

Rom. 13:11

But it was the text below it that suddenly made his mouth feel dry. He dropped the note, repulsed, as though he was throwing a used tissue in the bin.

Hora est.