To India, of course, cruising off on voyages for the Dutch East India Company, or to Indonesia or the South Pacific—the “Dutch East Indies,” they had learned at school—or to Dutch Guiana in South America, or to Curaçao or St. Maarten in the Caribbean, all within the world of the great Dutch mercantile empire. (In the past, everyone conquered the world for fifteen minutes.) Willem imagines a giant ship with white billowing sails pulling alongside the shore of some distant tropical island, greeted by naked natives in hollowed-out log canoes. He pictures the topless women for a moment, garlanded with flowers above their completely revealed breasts, reveling in the thought. It is as if he is there, touching them. And India—here Willem even conjures up the smell, and his eyelids droop as he takes a deep drag of incense, blown out of some sort of exotic pipe as dark women—also topless, he muses—make offerings to their gods. Willem pictures a shipwreck on an Indian coast, the poor Western merchants lost in a land they never intended to explore, thousands of miles from home. It is easy to picture the scene during daylight hours, Willem thinks. But what if such a shipwreck had happened at night? What if they had washed up on this mysterious shore under a black velvet window shade drawn over the sky, feeling for each other’s hands and faces in the thick wet night, crawling onto dry sand without knowing who might be waiting for them on land at daybreak? Was that humid blind man’s beach the farthest anyone could possibly be from a warm little glowing Dutch house?

Perhaps more likely, Willem thinks to himself, the dollhouse people would have gone to New Amsterdam, the Netherlands’ greatest loss. And here Willem’s fantasies run wild. He knows English from school in Vienna, reads his English-German dictionary with passion, lust almost—he knows English better than Dutch, even though he doesn’t often hear it spoken. But somehow when he’d stare at the map on the wall back at the Montessori School, he always found his eye wandering across the Atlantic, right to left as if reading a sentence out of the Hebrew Bible. Vienna was indiscernible on the world map from his exile at the back of the room; Amsterdam sank into a muddy delta of borderlines and riverlines, practically lost beneath the sea. But New York! Somehow Willem feels drawn to New York, his mind’s eye climbing up the metal skyscrapers he has seen in photographs, crawling through the cavernous canyons of streets. The slightest thought of it enchants him—the buildings so tall, the sidewalks so wide, the streets laid out in perfect rectangles so that no one could ever get lost or disappear into them, the blocks of buildings divided into neat columns and rows like a case of eggs. What fools the Dutch were to lose that little island, that case of gleaming eggs, brimming with people’s eager lives always just about to hatch! The dot on the map with its loud black letters in Dutch, NIEUW-YORK, stood out like a stout peg on a coatrack, waiting for something—someone?—to hang on it. Would the dollhouse people go there, building themselves new glowing box houses for a new world?