“Oho, where did you get that?” He called to him.

The man, without bothering to take his pipe out of his mouth, growled: “The devil knows where. I wish I had become a shoemaker. Here I sit, working away . . .” And no matter what the dear Lord asked him, the man hung onto his bad humor and gave no further reply. Until, one day, he got a big letter from the mayor of that city. After that, he told God everything, without having to be asked. He had gone so long without getting a commission. Now, all of a sudden, he was supposed to make a statue for the main city park, and it was supposed to be called The Truth. The artist worked night and day in a distant studio, and various old memories came back to the dear Lord as He watched this. If He had not still been angry at His hands, He might also have started on some work. But the very day the statue called The Truth was to be carried out to its place in the park garden, where God too would have been able to see it in all its completeness, a huge scandal broke out, for a committee made up of city fathers, teachers, and other influential personalities had demanded that the statue be partially clothed before being exhibited to the public. The artist was cursing so loudly God could not make out what the trouble was. The city fathers, teachers, and the others had brought him to this sin, and God was surely going to avenge. . . .

“But you’re coughing terribly!”

“It will pass,” said the teacher in a perfectly clear voice.

“Well, I have only a little more to report.”

The dear Lord loosed His hold on that apartment building and that city park and was intending to pull His gaze back altogether, as a man pulls his fishing lure out of the water with one jerk to see if anything has bitten or not. In this case, there was actually something hanging there: a very small house with several human beings inside who all had very little on because they were very poor. “So that’s it,” God thought; “the people have to be poor. I think these here are already quite poor, but I am going to make them so poor that they won’t even have a shirt on their backs.” That was the dear Lord’s plan.

Here I put a sound of finality in my voice in order to indicate that I had come to the end. The worthy schoolteacher was not satisfied with this. He found this story just as inconclusive and insufficiently rounded off as the previous one. “Yes,” I excused myself, “a writer will have to come along who can invent some sort of a fantastic ending for the story, because in very truth, it doesn’t have an ending yet.”