Willem raises his head until the back of his skull touches his neck as he stands before the giant edifice. The walls are brick, carved and sculpted, ornamented at every turn with arched glass windows and circular rosettes. It looks like a Gothic cathedral, or a towering palace, or a great train station. Funny how train stations look like cathedrals or palaces sometimes, Willem muses, when people don’t even live in them—like shrines to the art of passing through. Willem is dazzled by the building’s beauty. His feet take him closer to the great entry gate, drawing him step by absentminded step toward its magnificence. And then he bangs his shins against a makeshift sign on a sandwich board just outside the museum’s gate. Stunned into alertness, he steps back and reads it, a hand-painted sign that probably wasn’t official at all, that might well have been put up by hooligans just that day:

WELCOME TO THE RIJKSMUSEUM
No dogs or Jews allowed

Our hero stands motionless, staring at the sign, a barbarian at the gates. But he doesn’t stand there long. Self-conscious twelve-year-olds—particularly underdeveloped twelve-year-old boys, the sort of twelve-year-olds that older people too often mistake for ten-year-olds, and justifiably so—always know not to stand around looking at something, because then someone nearby will notice you looking at it and use it to make fun of you. That’s what happens with girls, anyhow. Not that Willem has any ability to talk to girls. It would have been hard in German. When he tries to speak Dutch, even the Jewish girls at his new school avoid looking twice at him. They flounce their little skirts, crossing and uncrossing their knees in front of his very eyes, deliberately almost. Like a slow torture. One girl, Jopie, has tortured him especially of late. Shining blond hair, glowing green eyes, perfect hands, and a hint of a slope beneath her blouse. She isn’t Jewish, but her father is, and so she ended up at Willem’s school. Late at night, he dreams about her popping out from around a corner in the city, dragging him into an alleyway, and stripping off her clothes in front of him. Meanwhile the boys at the Jewish school still throw spitballs at him whenever he dares step near her. In the daytime, he opens his mouth in her presence and finds it filled with heavy parchment, the words he wants to say written on scrolls under his tongue, in a forgotten language.