Yet there aren’t quite enough dolls around. Each house seems occupied only by a few dolls each, perhaps four or five at most. But the bedrooms can accommodate more than that, and the banquet tables are set for many more. There must be more people living in these houses, Willem thinks, who are simply off on a journey somewhere. After all, these are the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which means that Dutch people have places to go. Willem thinks of the merchants of the house going off on their ships to—where?

To India, of course, cruising off on voyages for the Dutch East India Company, or to Indonesia or the South Pacific—the “Dutch East Indies,” they had learned at school—or to Dutch Guiana in South America, or to Curaçao or St. Maarten in the Caribbean, all within the world of the great Dutch mercantile empire. (In the past, everyone conquered the world for fifteen minutes.) Willem imagines a giant ship with white billowing sails pulling alongside the shore of some distant tropical island, greeted by naked natives in hollowed-out log canoes. He pictures the topless women for a moment, garlanded with flowers above their completely revealed breasts, reveling in the thought. It is as if he is there, touching them. And India—here Willem even conjures up the smell, and his eyelids droop as he takes a deep drag of incense, blown out of some sort of exotic pipe as dark women—also topless, he muses—make offerings to their gods. Willem pictures a shipwreck on an Indian coast, the poor Western merchants lost in a land they never intended to explore, thousands of miles from home. It is easy to picture the scene during daylight hours, Willem thinks. But what if such a shipwreck had happened at night? What if they had washed up on this mysterious shore under a black velvet window shade drawn over the sky, feeling for each other’s hands and faces in the thick wet night, crawling onto dry sand without knowing who might be waiting for them on land at daybreak? Was that humid blind man’s beach the farthest anyone could possibly be from a warm little glowing Dutch house?