Perhaps more likely, Willem thinks to himself, the dollhouse people would have gone to New Amsterdam, the Netherlands’ greatest loss. And here Willem’s fantasies run wild. He knows English from school in Vienna, reads his English-German dictionary with passion, lust almost—he knows English better than Dutch, even though he doesn’t often hear it spoken. But somehow when he’d stare at the map on the wall back at the Montessori School, he always found his eye wandering across the Atlantic, right to left as if reading a sentence out of the Hebrew Bible. Vienna was indiscernible on the world map from his exile at the back of the room; Amsterdam sank into a muddy delta of borderlines and riverlines, practically lost beneath the sea. But New York! Somehow Willem feels drawn to New York, his mind’s eye climbing up the metal skyscrapers he has seen in photographs, crawling through the cavernous canyons of streets. The slightest thought of it enchants him—the buildings so tall, the sidewalks so wide, the streets laid out in perfect rectangles so that no one could ever get lost or disappear into them, the blocks of buildings divided into neat columns and rows like a case of eggs. What fools the Dutch were to lose that little island, that case of gleaming eggs, brimming with people’s eager lives always just about to hatch! The dot on the map with its loud black letters in Dutch, NIEUW-YORK, stood out like a stout peg on a coatrack, waiting for something—someone?—to hang on it. Would the dollhouse people go there, building themselves new glowing box houses for a new world?

No, Willem decides. He knows where they have gone. To the Barbary Coast, attacked by barbarian pirates, never to return. Some of them don’t even make it that far. They leave Amsterdam and are apprehended by bandits, their throats slit before they reach Hamburg or even the Amsterdam city limits, their bleeding bodies left to freeze, staining the ice red on the side of the snowy road. Outside of this perfect little house, this glowing fed and heated sanctuary, barbarians were scratching at the gates, held off by nothing more than thin, wavy windowpanes of imported glass!

“Young man, you mustn’t touch the glass. You could get shocked, you know.”