In order at least to reserve a small pleasure for Himself after all His trouble, He had commanded His hands to show Him the human being just before the time came for them to deliver it over into life. Again and again He asked, as children do when they are playing hide-and-seek, “Ready?” But all the answer He got was the sound of His hands kneading, and He waited. It seemed to Him quite a long time. Then, all at once, He saw something tumbling through space, something dark falling at such an angle that it seemed it had come from quite near Him. Filled with a dark premonition, He called for His hands. They appeared, besmirched with clay and hot and quivering.

“Where is the human being?” He shouted at them. The right hand let fly at the left:

“You let him go!”

“Please!” said the left hand, incensed. “It was you who wanted to do everything by yourself—you wouldn’t let me in on the business at all.”

“You were the one who was supposed to hold him!” And the right hand wound up as if to strike. But then it thought better of it, and the hands, in their hurry to get in the next word, both said:

“He was so impatient, the human being. He kept wanting to be alive already. Neither one of us could do anything about it. Definitely, we are both innocent.”

But the dear Lord was seriously angry. He pushed both hands away, for they were botching up His view of the earth, saying, “I know you no longer; do what you will.” From that time on, the hands tried that, but no matter what they did, they could only begin things. Without God, there is no completion. And so they finally got tired of it. Now they spend the whole day kneeling, doing penance, or at least that’s the story one hears. But the way it seems to us is that God rested because He was angry at His hands. So to this very moment we’re still on the seventh day.

I remained silent for a moment. The neighbor lady took advantage of this to be very reasonable:

“And you think they’ll never make up the quarrel?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “At least I hope so.”

“And when will that be?”

“Well, not until God finds out what the human being His hands let go of against His will looks like.”

My neighbor thought about this and then laughed: “But to do that, all He would have to do is look down.”

“Excuse me,” I said in a nice way, “your remark shows understanding, but my story isn’t over yet. Well, so, by the time the hands had stepped aside and God was again surveying the earth, just about a minute had passed by, or let’s say a millennium—which, as we know, amounts to the same thing. Instead of one human being there were now a million of them. But they were all already wearing clothes. And since the fashions of that particular time were especially ugly and also badly distorted people’s faces, God got a completely false and (I won’t gloss over it) a very bad impression of human beings.”