The hooks stab at the thick blue air during the most oppressive moment of the day. It isn’t exactly sunset, especially not in the winter months, but the moment right after sunset—the moment when the day has just disappeared forever, leaving behind a few ragged leaves and scattered regrets. The sky seeps like watery blue ink behind the buildings, but it’s not the sky that smothers Willem. It’s the lights. Along the brick walls at that moment, windows begin to light up like little slide panels, glowing white-framed pictures with tiny people in them, or yellow squares blurred by casually drawn shades. Each window is its own separate could-have-been, a place he might have lived, a person he might have known, a scene he somehow missed. Instead he walks home through the blue ink, a lost merchant sailing across an uncharted open sea.

And then, at the door of the apartment itself, the test becomes a true challenge, just like a test on a rat who chooses one path for cheese and another for an electric shock. A choice of going in or not going in, of listening at the door to hear whether some anonymous moaning woman might be behind it, and if there is, of waiting in the suffocating hallway behind a corner, sometimes for hours, until you hear the clicking of shoes and laughter—and smell the perfume that smells nothing like how your mother used to smell, your mother who, you remember, used to smell only of coffee, or sometimes of fresh bread, but never of perfume—passing through the building’s front door. One time, when Willem first arrived in Amsterdam, he walked into the apartment to find his father and a young woman sitting on the mattress on the floor, still clothed, and he passed through the room to get to his tiny bedroom on the other side. For this his father refused to serve him meals for a week. From then on Willem made a habit of sitting on the grimy tilted floor in the corridor, listening and waiting, torn between an aching curiosity to overhear as much as possible and the wave of nausea when he actually did. Only once in the countless hours of sitting in the corridor did he ever hear mention of himself. The door to his bedroom must have been left open, Willem realized, and the woman asked his father, in Dutch, if his son was living with him. Willem’s father laughed and answered that Willem had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland. Willem wished he had. But by then the doors were almost all closed. The world was becoming a dark and grimy apartment vestibule, and Willem could do nothing but sit and wait in it.

WILLEM’S FATHER Nadav Landsmann had shell shock, from the war. He had even received a copy of an army-issued letter from a doctor stating that he had undergone psychological damage on the front, a letter he kept hidden in a drawer out of some sick refusal to throw it away, even though he went to great lengths to make sure no one ever heard about it, including his wife.