For both. And so I seat myself and doodle, dream of Mad Meg mumbling in the mob, Mad Meg shaping history with his hands. Martha wonders whether I plan to move my study to the basement. Dirty hands a problem, smutty trousers. Not yet, Marty, old girl. Not yet. So I seat myself and commit Culps. I imagine Mad Meg wiping his hands on her plump rump, and I smile for the benefit of her displeasure. The basement stairs are gray and worn, the wood so splintery it’s like stepping on brooms to descend, and the following walls are irregular as a dungeon’s, with huge stones sinking as slowly through them as time passes for a prisoner, while, above, the house twists like a hankie in nervous hands. Tabor too. The Meggy Magus. He had hands which grimaced, hands which sneered; he had hands which explained, expostulated, threatened, wept; which touched like buttocks in apparent prayer, which joked, which jeered; hands that danced and sang and held the dagger—creating, conducting, eliciting the word—hands which uttered every innuendo, misled, lied, which latched and locked, insulted and defied; hands which greeted one another like old boozing friends, which squeezed yours unexpectedly and left them wet; outstretched, open, pleading hands crisscrossed by lines for life and love and fate, runnels rushing toward the twiddle finger, fat and ringed, the Mounts of Moon and Mercury rising from a plain of soft pink skin, the Girdle of Venus, too, a Via Lasciva like some Gasse in Hamburg; head, health, heart lines, and all the pulpy cushions of the palm, etched as finely as a counterfeiter’s plate; hands wholly unlike mine, like Pilate’s, water and towel to one another, thumbs and fingers disappearing into the shadow of a duck, a fox, a bear, a skirt; hands which were the equal of another’s eye; which were, from time to time, I’m sure, both cunt and cock. We listened, watched. His hands circled his head like birds. We noted, nodded. He drew an Eve from every side—kneading, molding, smoothing, tenderly tracing the final lines, applauding the ultimate form. In his sleight of hands he made it seem so easy. The underhanded art, he said historians had. As if I could make my own life up as simply. Under the tyranny of work, the gentle tyranny of love, I’ve given way. In this house I am afraid of everything.

Yes, why hold back? The publisher is eager. Thousands of Jews will be offended. A few will not. Most must read it; some will even buy it; there’ll be talk. Surely it will have to dress itself in French and German, come out in England. It will interest the Japanese, though the Russians won’t touch it. It will harrow hearts, and even fascinate philosophers who have none. And the politicians . . . caught in the complicities of power . . . my fellow historians . . . staring down those fissures. I have opened at their feet . . . poets . . . parsons . . . fellow pundits . . . every sort of literary personage, yes . . . tap dancers, comics, exhibitionists . . . for them a drama on a scale before undreamed of . . . a style which murder made, and murderers recite. Why wait?