Willem found himself feeling proud of Job for this, and the so-called friends and their preachy arguments against the poor guy were making Willem angry. But then came the best part, when God answered Job “out of the whirlwind,” roaring at him: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Where indeed, Willem wondered as he crouched in the hallway, where the house’s sinking foundation made the floor slant down to the canal. But Willem never got to read the rest of God’s answer to Job, because that night his father, furious with the woman who had just left the apartment before Willem came in, took Willem’s book and threw it in the building’s furnace.

At the urinal, Willem looks down at himself, at the purplish scar where his skin had been destroyed at his circumcision when he was eight days old. He thinks of Jopie and his face burns. He wraps his fingers around it further down than usual, trying to seem casual as he does his best to conceal himself, just in case the guard should glance to the side and notice something missing. No dogs or Jews allowed. Probably the sign wasn’t even official at all, he thinks to himself, trying to steady his trembling fingers. The guard, however, is standing at his urinal whistling something, and doesn’t take much interest in Willem. When Willem has arranged his fingers as best he can, he relaxes and begins to urinate. But then, as he glances down at his strangely intertwined fingers, one thumb on top of the other, he suddenly remembers something that happened at his grandmother’s house long ago. And as he empties his bladder he feels himself about to cry.

Willem doesn’t know where his grandmother’s house was, but he knows it was far away, very far away—so far away that he and his father and his mother had to take a train at night to get there, in a special sleeping car in which he and his mother shared a bed. (Where was his father during the night train ride? Willem thinks hard but cannot remember.) It was scary riding a train at night, but also thrilling, like being in a boat on an open ocean. The porters would knock on their cabin door to ask if they needed anything, and his mother would smile and say no, nothing, thank you, in her public voice that sounded clear and whole, like a single tap of a spoon on a wineglass. And then the door would close and they would be alone together in their clean and glowing room, a box of light whizzing through an endless sea of darkness. His mother would hold him and play games with him, drawing pictures with him in a notebook until it was time to go to sleep. Then they would climb into bed, a funny bed with stiff white sheets and too many blankets, and his mother would turn out the lights, falling asleep almost instantly, as if she existed only for him during the day and then, secretly at night, returned to another world. But Wilhelm had no past, no other world to return to. His only world was the one inside the glowing sleeping car. And so he would press his nose to the windowpane and stare out into the darkness, where he immediately saw that the train wasn’t actually going anywhere—he could feel it moving, sure, but outside the window was nothing but a blanket of blackness, a deep and heavy curtain drawn over the entire world. He would stare at that dark curtain until it terrified him, and then he would wake up his mother and tell her that he had had a bad dream. Each time she believed him.