“Two adults and six children,” the exhausted father recites. Willem edges closer to the children in question, who are far too busy hitting each other to notice him. The little girl has concealed herself completely underneath her mother’s skirt.

Willem waits, his breath held, as the ticket cashier leans forward over the counter, lowering his glasses and pointing with his finger as if tapping buttons on an invisible typewriter as he identifies each child. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” he announces, handing the tickets to the father. The parents sigh with relief as the man behind the counter leans over to move the velvet rope, allowing them in. And Willem, whom the ticket cashier has counted as their mute fourth son, slinks in behind them.

WILLEM DOES not know what to expect of the Rijksmuseum. At first he is vastly disappointed. From the outset, as he wanders through the maze of endless galleries, it doesn’t seem that different from the museums he once toured with his school back in Vienna. Lots of paintings of Jesus, mostly. Jesus as a baby, looking like a wrinkled, hairless old man shrunk to baby size. Jesus as a young man, with shining rays coming out of his head as people gather around him. But of course, mostly Jesus dying on the cross, moaning and bloody, jeered at by an ugly crowd and crowned with the letters “INRI”—a Latin abbreviation, Willem remembers having read somewhere, for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Willem walks by these paintings quickly. Then he turns a corner and enters what seems like a labyrinth of thousands of rooms filled with paintings just of fruit. It is amazing, he muses, how many ways one can arrange fruit in a bowl.

As the rooms full of fruit continue, however, Willem notices the galleries slowly being infiltrated by non-fruit, non-Jesus paintings. Portraits, mostly. Not much nudity, to Willem’s disappointment. Instead the portraits show people sitting in dark rooms, their faces looking almost incandescent, as if light were not shining on them but coming from within them. Willem stares for a moment in fascination at a small painting of an old man, seated in an empty shadowed landscape, pressing his delicate white-bearded head against his palm. The title of the painting is given in Dutch: “blah blah Jeremiah blah blah blah,” a wordy title that Willem doesn’t feel like deciphering. The old man looks as if something tragic has happened to him, but what? Maybe his parents died, Willem thinks to himself, but then dismisses the idea. The man is old, after all, too old to mourn his own parents. But clearly he is upset about something. What?