The school is cramped, like everywhere in Amsterdam, so much so that Willem sometimes wonders if putting children in it is actually a waste of space—the floor level is always jammed, but since children are small, Willem thinks, they might have split each of the building’s stories in two instead of having six feet of empty air above the children’s heads, thus doubling the building’s floor space without altering its height. Perhaps that would inconvenience a few teachers, but what of it? These are the things that Willem thinks about all day at school as he stares up at the ceiling, trying his best not to learn any more Dutch even by accident. Anyway, the extra air in the classroom doesn’t help the fact that Willem sits in class each day jammed between his desk and the back wall and tormented on both sides by boys—Peter and Jan, they are called—who take advantage of the open education model to spit at him whenever the teacher turns around.

But then the whole city is like some ridiculous maze designed by a cruel psychologist who waits, watching you, testing you to see if you might take a wrong turn and receive an electric shock. You leave the school each day and walk home along the canals, where the big flatboats—reveling in their flatness in this upright, vertical city—seem to be grinning idiotic grins at you just like the boys in school. The boats, after all, are in the right place, while Amsterdam itself, a city built on seventeenth-century pilings of stone, is ever sinking into the sea where it belongs, and the boats themselves seem to know it as they chug their joyous way out to the North Sea. Meanwhile you are stuck on dry land, confined to the narrow streets, some of them walled in by crooked buildings, others open on one side to the freezing canals with cruel grinning boats, and all of them jammed with black bicycles ridden by old ladies in long frumpy skirts madly ringing their bicycle bells. Amsterdam belongs to these frumpy women, and you are forever jumping out of their way.

After you dodge the bicycles, though, you still have to negotiate your way through the tiny little streets, their corners, lampposts, and buildings occasionally marked with the city’s seal—a badge shape with three simple letters in a vertical column: “XXX.” At the Montessori School, before he was expelled, Willem learned that these three X’s stood for the three trials of Amsterdam: flood, fire, and plague. Those X’s glare at him at every interval as he wanders in circles around the city looking for a way out, as if to say, Not here, not now, not ever—and if you try to stand still, I’ll knee you in the groin.

And if the streets aren’t enough to make you feel like a suffocating rat, there is always home. Willem’s building in Amsterdam is a canal house, one of the strangled town houses gasping for air along the city’s river-streets. The canal houses each stand about four stories high, but are rarely more than thirty feet wide, with their side walls rubbing each other as they sink deeper and deeper into the city’s soft false ground, leaning forward and backward like poorly trained soldiers falling out of line. Inside, the apartments are so cramped that each building has a giant hook protruding from its elaborate gables. These hooks are for pulleys, used for roping up furniture that won’t fit through the narrow staircases and hauling it in through the windows.