Willem doesn’t know where his grandmother’s house was, but he knows it was far away, very far away—so far away that he and his father and his mother had to take a train at night to get there, in a special sleeping car in which he and his mother shared a bed. (Where was his father during the night train ride? Willem thinks hard but cannot remember.) It was scary riding a train at night, but also thrilling, like being in a boat on an open ocean. The porters would knock on their cabin door to ask if they needed anything, and his mother would smile and say no, nothing, thank you, in her public voice that sounded clear and whole, like a single tap of a spoon on a wineglass. And then the door would close and they would be alone together in their clean and glowing room, a box of light whizzing through an endless sea of darkness. His mother would hold him and play games with him, drawing pictures with him in a notebook until it was time to go to sleep. Then they would climb into bed, a funny bed with stiff white sheets and too many blankets, and his mother would turn out the lights, falling asleep almost instantly, as if she existed only for him during the day and then, secretly at night, returned to another world. But Wilhelm had no past, no other world to return to. His only world was the one inside the glowing sleeping car. And so he would press his nose to the windowpane and stare out into the darkness, where he immediately saw that the train wasn’t actually going anywhere—he could feel it moving, sure, but outside the window was nothing but a blanket of blackness, a deep and heavy curtain drawn over the entire world. He would stare at that dark curtain until it terrified him, and then he would wake up his mother and tell her that he had had a bad dream. Each time she believed him.