Wilhelm’s father growled in German. “Mother, can’t you stop filling the child’s head with this barbarian trash?”

His grandmother snapped her head up and looked at Wilhelm’s father. “Listen, young man, when you go back to your precious city, you can fill his head with whatever nonsense you want. But when I’m in this house I say what I mean.” Wilhelm’s grandmother was the only person who could talk back to his father and win his silence. And silent he remained until they returned to Vienna.

But now Willem stands at the urinal, holding himself with one thumb on top of the other, wondering whether or not he is made in the image of God. Is he even a man yet? No, that much is clear. And what God would stand at a urinal, an intruder in a house of treasures not his own, hiding his sex in his hands because he was afraid a stupid guard would see that he had the Covenant sealed into his flesh? Will any girl ever want him, with his skin destroyed? From his flesh, will he ever see God? Right now all he sees is his mother’s face, and as the guard finishes and turns away, Willem squints to keep his tears from sliding down into the urinal’s drain. If I ever get up the courage to talk to Jopie, he realizes, or to kiss her, or to kiss any girl at all, or to ask a girl to marry me, my mother will never know it. In that moment, he suddenly understands that he will never see his mother again.

THE WALK home from the museum is much too short. The city has grown dark. All around him, lights begin to flicker on in the houses lining the canals, illuminating the rooms inside them like little slide panels of distant lands. When Willem arrives at his own house, he sees that the light inside his apartment is also glowing. Inside, his father sits at his desk, writing on a piece of paper. His father raises his head for a moment, as if hearing something outside, but then returns to his writing. From his side of the window, he cannot see out. Willem rings the bell and pounds on the door, but there is no answer. His father knows he is there, Willem is sure, but that hardly matters. Willem is forced to watch and wait.

And so Willem watches. It is almost like a silent film. His father writes intently, squinting his eyes and furrowing his brows, pausing frequently, as if after every word. Willem is puzzled. On most days when he notices his father working at his desk—before ducking into his room again, before his father notices him noticing—he is amazed at how quickly his father writes. But now his father is sitting like a schoolboy, struggling to move his pen, his teeth clenching his lower lip, frightened. Like Willem.

The silent film continues as Willem’s father puts down the pen to read through the page he has just written, slowly, moving his lips. After what feels like years, he lifts the page off the table, folds it carefully, and slides it into an envelope. And then the silent movie ends: Willem’s father stands up and walks away. A moment later, he lets Willem in.