Across the street towers the monolith itself, the Rijksmuseum. Willem knows what to do. He marches right across the street without even bothering to look both ways for screeching bicycles. Let them cower before him! In an instant his lordship stands at the sign beside the golden door.

WELCOME TO THE RIJKSMUSEUM. Willem reads the words again and hears them as if they were spoken by his old teacher at the Montessori School, whom he imagines standing at the museum’s gate, grinning and shaking his hand. “Welcome to the Rijksmuseum, my dear Willem! Your national treasures await you!” Willem pulls open the museum’s heavy door like a bishop entering his own cathedral. A gust of heated air blows in his face, inflating his thin sweater and shirt on his skinny shoulders into flowing regal robes as he closes the door behind him.

Willem stands in line to enter the museum, posture perfect, head erect. He has urgent business to attend to; his national treasures await. The only problem, he suddenly realizes with embarrassment, is that his wallet and his yellow star travel together—one on the breast of his jacket, the other in its left-hand pocket. He has no money for admission. With shaking hands he searches the pockets of his pants. Not a single coin.

Bit by bit the line moves forward, and now the people directly in front of him have reached the ticket counter. In front of Willem is a large group, a family—a couple in their thirties, a father already balding and a mother with hair so blond it is almost white, both quite tall. They lean against the ticket counter, frowning and exhausted, while their—how many? Willem counts them—six children whine, play, and harass one another behind them. The youngest looks about three, a little blond girl with chubby legs bulging like rolls of dough between her red pinafore and her sagging white socks, and the oldest, a boy with dark hair and glasses swinging one of the younger boys around by the arm, about eleven. A girl of about five hides between her mother’s legs, peeking out from under her skirt. Suddenly Willem has an idea.

“Two adults and six children,” the exhausted father recites. Willem edges closer to the children in question, who are far too busy hitting each other to notice him. The little girl has concealed herself completely underneath her mother’s skirt.

Willem waits, his breath held, as the ticket cashier leans forward over the counter, lowering his glasses and pointing with his finger as if tapping buttons on an invisible typewriter as he identifies each child. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” he announces, handing the tickets to the father. The parents sigh with relief as the man behind the counter leans over to move the velvet rope, allowing them in. And Willem, whom the ticket cashier has counted as their mute fourth son, slinks in behind them.

WILLEM DOES not know what to expect of the Rijksmuseum. At first he is vastly disappointed. From the outset, as he wanders through the maze of endless galleries, it doesn’t seem that different from the museums he once toured with his school back in Vienna. Lots of paintings of Jesus, mostly. Jesus as a baby, looking like a wrinkled, hairless old man shrunk to baby size. Jesus as a young man, with shining rays coming out of his head as people gather around him. But of course, mostly Jesus dying on the cross, moaning and bloody, jeered at by an ugly crowd and crowned with the letters “INRI”—a Latin abbreviation, Willem remembers having read somewhere, for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Willem walks by these paintings quickly. Then he turns a corner and enters what seems like a labyrinth of thousands of rooms filled with paintings just of fruit. It is amazing, he muses, how many ways one can arrange fruit in a bowl.