The line was strange enough to make him turn to the beginning of the Book of Job to see if something there might explain it. He found no explanation, but what he did find—even though he had to translate it word by word, until he was spending almost all of his waiting time in the hallway working on it—swallowed him whole. Job, it seemed, was the name of a man who was “simple and upright, and feared God and shunned evil,” a happy man, apparently, with happy children and prosperous flocks, who always thanked God for what he had. Then one day someone called “the adversary” (Willem wasn’t quite sure about that part, suspecting something funny in the Bible’s footnotes, yet he continued nonetheless) asked God, teasing him almost, whether all Job’s good faith wasn’t something of a sham, since, after all, Job didn’t have much to complain about. God decided to let the adversary play with Job a bit, and this was where things started to get interesting. First, all of Job’s flocks were stolen, and his children killed, through various disasters. Job, however, took this rather well, continuing his praise of God despite their deaths. Then Job was stricken with some sort of skin disease. The details here eluded Willem’s dictionary skills, but it seemed that Job ended up sitting in a pit and scraping himself with a broken plate (and here Willem winced, remembering his mother’s china smashed on the floor in Vienna). Three friends came to visit Job at that point, but as Willem read their names—So-and-so the Something-ite, Somebody-else the Somewhere-else-ite, Somebody-else the Nowhere-ite—he suspected that they weren’t really Job’s friends at all, but rather just some sort of emissaries, reporting their own boring points of view on why Job deserved all this hard luck. It was only then that Job rose up and cursed his God.

Willem found himself feeling proud of Job for this, and the so-called friends and their preachy arguments against the poor guy were making Willem angry. But then came the best part, when God answered Job “out of the whirlwind,” roaring at him: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Where indeed, Willem wondered as he crouched in the hallway, where the house’s sinking foundation made the floor slant down to the canal. But Willem never got to read the rest of God’s answer to Job, because that night his father, furious with the woman who had just left the apartment before Willem came in, took Willem’s book and threw it in the building’s furnace.