As the rooms full of fruit continue, however, Willem notices the galleries slowly being infiltrated by non-fruit, non-Jesus paintings. Portraits, mostly. Not much nudity, to Willem’s disappointment. Instead the portraits show people sitting in dark rooms, their faces looking almost incandescent, as if light were not shining on them but coming from within them. Willem stares for a moment in fascination at a small painting of an old man, seated in an empty shadowed landscape, pressing his delicate white-bearded head against his palm. The title of the painting is given in Dutch: “blah blah Jeremiah blah blah blah,” a wordy title that Willem doesn’t feel like deciphering. The old man looks as if something tragic has happened to him, but what? Maybe his parents died, Willem thinks to himself, but then dismisses the idea. The man is old, after all, too old to mourn his own parents. But clearly he is upset about something. What?

The painting unsettles Willem. He tears himself away from it and moves on to another gallery, one filled again with those self-illuminating portraits of people in darkened rooms, most of them holding books or quill pens. There is almost always writing of some kind involved. In one painting a young woman who appears pregnant is holding a letter, looking anxious. Or more than anxious. Devastated, more like. Willem finds himself feeling sorry for her. But it’s a comforting kind of sadness, like hugging someone who has fallen down or visiting a stranger in the hospital. Her problem, not his.

Countless fruit-lined rooms later, Willem comes upon a gallery with a sign beside its entrance. Suspicious of all signs now, he only glances at it, but the glance is enough to make him pause in his tracks.

POPPENHUIZEN

“Poppenhuizen”? A delicious word. Willem tastes it on his tongue, lets it dissolve in his throat like cotton candy. Poppenhuizen. Dollhouses?

At first Willem hesitates. Dollhouses are for girls, he thinks. Why would they be in a museum? Toys of old nobles, probably. There is a long explanatory plaque in Dutch, but Willem doesn’t have the energy to try to read it—he catches only a vague date in numerals, “17th to 18th century.” At any rate, he considers, the Poppenhuizen have clearly been classified as national treasures. Willem does a quick mental calculation. If one of his classmates should by chance walk by and spot him in the dollhouse gallery, he will never hear the end of it. But then he realizes something else. In this vault of national treasures, he has found a perfect sanctuary from the children at his new school, if that sign is really true. No dogs or Jews allowed. It probably wasn’t official anyway, that sign, though. Nonetheless, Willem steps inside.

The dollhouses aren’t really dollhouses, to Willem’s vague disappointment. He was expecting miniature homes, shrunken bricks, tiny windows he could peek into. Instead, inside the gallery’s glass cases stand elegant cabinets, each about three or four feet high, with polished speckled wooden doors flung open behind the display windows. The cabinets are divided into square compartments, a perfect grid.