Willem swallows, picturing the Peter who used to spit at him at Montessori. Peters always spit at people, Willem thinks to himself. It figures that the ones who treat you like dirt end up with the girl.

He steps toward a urinal, two down from the guard’s, and opens his pants, terrified. A shameful lump of tortured flesh emerges, used for lewd thoughts at Jopie’s expense, late at night after his father’s women have gone home. In Willem’s new school, they teach the Bible—sort of like in his old school at Montessori, actually, except this Bible is only about half the size. Most of the time Willem passes school time staring at the ceiling, or flipping through textbooks to find interesting pictures in chapters the class hasn’t reached yet. The Bible the class uses doesn’t have any illustrations—Willem has checked. But once as he was flipping through looking for one, a line in the Dutch translation caught his eye, in something called the Book of Job. The line was so strange that he copied it into his notebook, and he was sure he had mistranslated it as he converted it into German in his head. But that evening he checked in the dictionaries and found that the verse really did mean what he thought it meant: “After my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God.”

The line was strange enough to make him turn to the beginning of the Book of Job to see if something there might explain it. He found no explanation, but what he did find—even though he had to translate it word by word, until he was spending almost all of his waiting time in the hallway working on it—swallowed him whole. Job, it seemed, was the name of a man who was “simple and upright, and feared God and shunned evil,” a happy man, apparently, with happy children and prosperous flocks, who always thanked God for what he had. Then one day someone called “the adversary” (Willem wasn’t quite sure about that part, suspecting something funny in the Bible’s footnotes, yet he continued nonetheless) asked God, teasing him almost, whether all Job’s good faith wasn’t something of a sham, since, after all, Job didn’t have much to complain about. God decided to let the adversary play with Job a bit, and this was where things started to get interesting. First, all of Job’s flocks were stolen, and his children killed, through various disasters. Job, however, took this rather well, continuing his praise of God despite their deaths. Then Job was stricken with some sort of skin disease. The details here eluded Willem’s dictionary skills, but it seemed that Job ended up sitting in a pit and scraping himself with a broken plate (and here Willem winced, remembering his mother’s china smashed on the floor in Vienna). Three friends came to visit Job at that point, but as Willem read their names—So-and-so the Something-ite, Somebody-else the Somewhere-else-ite, Somebody-else the Nowhere-ite—he suspected that they weren’t really Job’s friends at all, but rather just some sort of emissaries, reporting their own boring points of view on why Job deserved all this hard luck. It was only then that Job rose up and cursed his God.