“Tell the children myself? No, dear lady, that will not work, that simply will not work at all. You see, I immediately get embarrassed whenever I have to talk to children. That’s not a bad thing in itself. But the children might take my confusion to mean I was lying to them. And since the truth of my story means a lot to me . . . You could retell it to them; you would do a much better job of it anyway. You could make it fit their understanding and embellish it a little. I’ll just give you the simple facts in the shortest form. All right?”

“All right, all right,” replied my neighbor, confused.

I thought for a moment: “In the beginning—” but then I broke off at once. “I can presume, my dear lady, that you already know much of what I’d have to tell the children first. For example, the Creation . . .” There was a rather long pause.

“Yes. And on the seventh day—” The good woman’s voice was high and shrill.

“Stop!” I said. “We’re going to want to keep the earlier days in mind too, aren’t we? Because it mainly has to do with them. Well, anyway, God, as we know, began His work by making the earth, dividing it from the water, and ordaining light. Then, with remarkable speed, He formed things, I mean the big, substantial things that exist—rocks, mountains, a tree, and in the pattern of that one, many trees.” At this point, I had already been hearing footsteps behind us for a while that were neither overtaking us nor falling behind either. That bothered me, and I got tangled up in my Creation story, continuing as follows: “You can only make this high-speed and productive activity understandable by assuming that, after long and deep reflection, everything was already completely ready in His head before He . . .”

Here the footsteps finally caught up with us, and a not particularly pleasant voice broke over us.

“Oh, you must be talking about Mr. Schmidt, excuse me. . . .”

I looked at the intruder with irritation, but my neighbor became very embarrassed.

“Ahem,” she coughed. “No . . . that is . . . yes, we were just talking about, somehow about—”

“What a fall!” said the other woman suddenly, as if we’d had no exchange, and her small red face glowed.

“Yes,” I heard my neighbor say. “You’re right there, Mrs. Hüpfer, an extraordinarily beautiful fall!”

Then the ladies parted. “And say hello to the children for me,” Mrs. Hüpfer added with a giggle.

My good neighbor paid no further attention to her. After all, she was eager to hear my story. But, with incomprehensible harshness, I declared, “Yes, well! I’ve lost track of where we were.”

“You were saying something about His head. That is . . .” The neighbor lady blushed very red.

I felt really sorry for her, so I quickly resumed my tale:

Yes, so you see, as long as only things were made, the dear Lord didn’t have to keep His eye on the earth all the time. After all, nothing could happen there. The wind, it is true, was already blowing over the mountains, which were very much like the clouds that it was already familiar with, but it was still avoiding the treetops with a certain distrust. And that was fine with God. The things He had made in His sleep, so to speak. It was only when He began on the animals that the work started to interest Him. He bent over this work and only rarely raised His broad brows to cast a glance at the earth. He forgot it completely when He was forming human beings. I don’t know what complicated part of the body He had come to when He heard a whirring of wings around Him. An angel hurried past, singing, “Thou who seest everything. . . .”