No, Willem decides. He knows where they have gone. To the Barbary Coast, attacked by barbarian pirates, never to return. Some of them don’t even make it that far. They leave Amsterdam and are apprehended by bandits, their throats slit before they reach Hamburg or even the Amsterdam city limits, their bleeding bodies left to freeze, staining the ice red on the side of the snowy road. Outside of this perfect little house, this glowing fed and heated sanctuary, barbarians were scratching at the gates, held off by nothing more than thin, wavy windowpanes of imported glass!

“Young man, you mustn’t touch the glass. You could get shocked, you know.”

The voice makes Willem jump. He has plunged so deep into his barbarian dreams that he didn’t even notice the museum guard creeping up on him, uniformed in black, nightstick in hand. The guard is a fat man, with thick hands and a stomach lurching over his wide leather belt. His bald head peeks out from under his cap, crowning a pink face with bright blue eyes. He is breathing through his mouth, panting almost. As he lowers his face to Willem’s height, Willem can detect a vague smell of fish on his breath. Instinctively Willem steps away from him, moving his nose just slightly away from the glass. The guard is joking about the glass being electrified, but Willem doesn’t know that. Still, he feels a need to disobey this smelly man’s orders at all costs. These are his national treasures!

Deliberately not looking at the guard and staying as close to the glass as possible, Willem focuses his stare on the dollhouse lavatory. In the split second after inhaling the sardine breath, Willem has decided that he will force himself to look at the dollhouse, even though he knows he can’t stand looking at something while being watched. It reminds him of his father’s constant lurking around the empty apartment, where Willem can’t even open his bedroom door without eliciting insults. But to his surprise, Willem finds that the lavatory, which he had barely noticed before, is actually one of the most intriguing rooms in the house. On second glance, he sees that it is more of a storeroom than a lavatory. There isn’t any plumbing, of course—this is, after all, the seventeenth or eighteenth century—but there are basins, basins upon basins, wide basins for washing, dented basins for shaving, round basins serving as noble urinals, all made of that blue and white china. Even the chamber pots are beautiful. All that water partitioned off, controlled, brought within the house’s hallowed halls on condition that it stay within those basins. The house could flood, of course, if the water seeped in from the man-made ground. It probably did flood, in fact, since flooding was one of those three X’s on the city seal. But within this room, one is safe from water’s ravages. Thinking about all that water gives Willem a sudden urge to urinate. He pushes the idea out of his mind.