He told all this in his deadpan way, saying nothing of his emotions, criticizing no one. A faint flush mounted into his face but that may have been caused by the exertion of talking so much—an unheard-of amount for him.

“My paternal grandparents sent me to boarding school. It was okay. My cousin Renée told me about my parents when I was about fourteen, the story of the tightrope fall among others. Nobody had heard from my mother since I was three weeks old. Then she turned up. I was a student, I was at the University of Utrecht. She waited for me in the street one Friday evening as I was going home to Marie’s. She was in a nice car and was wearing a fine fur coat. No one minded about wearing fur then. She said she wanted to talk to me with a view to my coming to live with her in Amsterdam. Her husband knew about me, would welcome me, and so would the three children she’d had by him.”

“What did you do?” Silver asked.

“Nothing. I just walked on. She called after me but I took no notice. The funny thing was it was on the edge of the red-light district and passersby must have thought she was a whore, a rich whore or one with a rich pimp. She called after me, she got out of the car and ran after me. People laughed. Someone said, ‘What’s wrong with you, boy? I should be so lucky.’ She was very pretty, you see, and only about thirty-seven.

“She came to Marie’s. She begged me to go to Amsterdam with her. At any rate, for the long vacation. I couldn’t speak to her. I suppose it was wrong of me. But I kept remembering how she’d abandoned me when I was three weeks old.”

Wim said he had a law degree but he had never been able to hold down a job. He had had several but he couldn’t stand the constraints, the routine, the regular hours. Being an artisan, doing laboring work, he thought might be the answer. He had to work. Once he had graduated Marie and her daughters no longer wanted to know him.

“They would have if I’d stuck to the law and got to be a judge. My grandparents were all dead. I worked on a building site, then doing odd building jobs. One of them was with a roofer. It was in Liège. There were these houses, a terrace, and the person who owned them wanted the leads taken off and tiles laid. I was happy up there. I suppose I was happy for the first time in my life.”

“Why did you come here?”