And so we find our hero, Wilhelm alias Willem, jacketless and freezing and flung out of his house, swung to the sidewalk against a lamppost that has just missed his groin. After a few minutes, he crawls back up the steps and bangs weakly on the door. No response.

WILLEM HATES Amsterdam on principle, but there is something sort of gentle about it. The city is a maze, but at least it is a maze lined with small and interesting things. Bakeries, mostly. And chocolate stores. And candy shops. At the moment, though, the thought of food makes him feel sick and disgusting. He needs to throw things, to smash windows—not that he has the guts to actually do it, of course. Instead he gets up, slowly, and begins walking. He passes one block, then another. And another. And twelve or thirteen more. He turns a corner, then another one, then a few more, wanders even further, for what feels like days, then hurries along a canal. And suddenly, as if rising from the depths of the sea, a giant edifice appears before him. Like all good citizens of Amsterdam, Willem recognizes it immediately. The Rijksmuseum.

The Rijksmuseum, his teacher at Montessori once told their class, is the oldest museum in Europe. The Louvre and other museums may occupy older buildings, but those buildings were originally built as palaces, or train stations. The Rijksmuseum was the first building actually built for the sole purpose of housing a public museum. “In other countries, art was something reserved for the wealthy, for nobles and royalty, and it remained that way for a very long time,” his teacher had said, facing the class and thereby giving Willem a short respite from the spitballs. “Here in Holland, though, we realized earlier than anywhere else that the fine and decorative arts should not be partitioned off for the upper classes. They are our national treasures. And that means that everyone in the nation shares these treasures of our kingdom, including all of you.”

Willem raises his head until the back of his skull touches his neck as he stands before the giant edifice. The walls are brick, carved and sculpted, ornamented at every turn with arched glass windows and circular rosettes. It looks like a Gothic cathedral, or a towering palace, or a great train station. Funny how train stations look like cathedrals or palaces sometimes, Willem muses, when people don’t even live in them—like shrines to the art of passing through. Willem is dazzled by the building’s beauty. His feet take him closer to the great entry gate, drawing him step by absentminded step toward its magnificence. And then he bangs his shins against a makeshift sign on a sandwich board just outside the museum’s gate. Stunned into alertness, he steps back and reads it, a hand-painted sign that probably wasn’t official at all, that might well have been put up by hooligans just that day: