So she began to tell him her story, like so:
You say you’ve really forgotten everything, can’t remember it at all anymore, but I don’t believe you! Because I still remember it all, only vaguely, imprecisely, but it came from you yourself, because you once told it to me in great detail a long time ago, but not all the sentences from your story back then have remained in my mind, only the thoughts that seem most important to me for the two of us, like transparent shadowy twilight animals that have fallen away from you in the meantime, or that you’ve cast off — as before, they flit obscurely through my memory when I think of our common past; (which she described to him while he was longing for a common future, almost as if she wanted to impress upon him painfully that this common future, as far as she was concerned, had to belong to their common past, or as if a common time for the two of them was long since passed. .).
One of the things you told me was that you awoke one day in an unfamiliar, burning hot, swamp landscape without any idea of where you came from or why you should have been caused to end up there of all places, in the late afternoon air of what was presumably the first summer humidity you’d ever experienced, or maybe you named another time of year, but it must have been summer, the white heat of its air, or were those the walls of that sky over your head back then, which was turning into a spinning disc like a millstone atomizing the light for you before it tapped on your temples, yes, didn’t you refer to that day as a huge potter’s wheel that was turning overhead until it made you dizzy, and swarms of dragonflies inconsiderately passed across your eyes, crawling down from your brows they tore out your eyelashes, ripped your burning corneas’ glassy field of vision to shreds as they sailed above you, what a life in that edifice of an afternoon, exposed to a moss made of air, its evening sunbeam-hurricanes heaping inscrutable drumfire upon you; you thought it couldn’t get any worse, since it had already long since gotten much worse than anything you could have imagined, and having undergone much more than you should reasonably have been expected to put up with, and waiting patiently, almost curiously for any new nasty surprises, you felt that your main role was to be a spectator in a treacherous natural comedy, and then you felt yourself quite surprisingly, carefully extracted from the existing mess; no, this wasn’t a new sort of persecution — instead, as became apparent right away, it was a pleasant, liberating deliverance, and thus the actual beginning of your story at that time; you felt yourself being rolled away out of that unbearable area, almost tenderly, as if being wiped away from it, and indeed, as you could soon make out, lofted by huge but peaceful birds, yes, they soared through the air with the proud majesty of huge ocean yachts under full sail, their wingspan of course corresponding to the size of the sails of an ocean-going sailboat, and with their help you could finally glide out of that ominous swampy spot and get away from the stench of it, and had you remained hanging from one of the sail-wings that were brushing against you, or had one of those giant sailing birds taken hold of you, picked you up, or pulled you along with it, in any case, as you told me back then, you were hovering along with one of them through all the walls of air that were opposing your passage, at that time they were still so thick and covered with verdigris mildew, and you went along even the narrowest of the increasingly narrow streets, past the white huts that came closer and closer together, over all the untraversable undergrowth of light that was then still so unkempt, between ponds covered with bracken and moss that were an extension of a swampy bog the color of puréed peas, and farther ahead it became more expansive, and sometimes somewhat darker in color, like cooked spinach.
Unfortunately, those admirable birds are only very rarely seen nowadays, almost never at all, the whole family, the entire species of that feathered race may have become extinct, at least I can’t remember having seen even a single specimen of that species in recent years, can you? no? pity, those were good times when the giant sailor swifts inhabited our country’s bodies of water, a sublime sight, no, one mustn’t think those animals seemed ungainly, phlegmatic, or clumsy because of their size and build, no, no, quite the opposite, particularly with regard to their speed of movement, those animals used their wings as sails, tacking against the wind when they were gliding over the water, and hardly ever rose up into the air, or only when it was unavoidable, and as far as their agility on the surface of the water was concerned, the birds never had any difficulty competing with any class of sailboat, even the most maneuverable, at least back then, those giant sailor swifts sailed away from every steamer with the greatest of ease, no matter how dashingly elegant the boat. Yes, now I remember much more precisely how it was long ago, and didn’t the yacht clubs on the shore find it immensely entertaining at first when their members raised the ensign on the masthead and sailed out proudly toward the giant swimming and sailing birds, and the birds, blindly trusting, incapable of suspicion, weren’t afraid at all, always friendly, ready to play, fond of the groups of large sailing ships, even waiting for them, definitely, making certain gestures of greeting with their necks, which far exceeded those of giraffes in length (but not in width), their neck poles reached extraordinarily high into the sky, often in the clouds, or even poking through the clouds, so that their heads were above all the clouds, and you only saw the tremendously long, soft neck poles rising up toward the sky from the surface of the water, piercing the clouds and getting rather firmly stuck up there, you know, and you could only think that up there, above all the clouds, their extraordinarily agile neck poles were seeking out even the most hidden corners of the ether, the places clogged up with creepers, the innermost sources of daylight, those farthest away from flowering aquatic plants, the germinating fire lilies of the clouds, and their heads must have reached comfortably into even the most inaccessible labyrinth-caves of the atmosphere, investigating everything, snapping at it, sniffing it, locating the rose gardens of the air that are always kept hidden from us, beyond our control, and they didn’t need to be told twice to strip them bare, to eat their way through them down to the last leaf — which was a really practical, effortless way, wasn’t it, to keep the sky free of creepers? — because the leaves of those sun creepers tasted good to them, the plants were all partly like sweet peas or regular peas or in any case somehow leguminous, as you already know, but some were also more dangerous, like philodendrons, and then many such creepers are often nothing more than the various aquatic liana-rope vines growing rampant in subtropical forests, growing up out of the treetops like Jacob’s ladders, with their aerial roots entwined around the atmosphere, high up into the cracks between the clouds, and continuing on by clinging to the chinks in the air along their walls until they can go no further, you know, because the ladders that such aquatic creeper-tendrils lean against the air, toward the sun, with their outermost tips pushing the skin of the heavens outward into the cosmos, might jab right into the universe, or else have already done so, you see, and there are even people who dare to assert that the tendrils of those creepers that are climbing up into the sky and poking into the cosmos may soon grow through the entire planetary system and along the edges of the Milky Way, their climbing nets of woven roots shrouded in the mist of Andromeda, and that they won’t come to a stop for a long time yet, but I consider this a frivolous, unverifiable rumor, the product of a typical excess of exaggeration and digression, you know, it’s enough for me that they’ve grown through our atmosphere, that increasingly large bundles of them are interlinked into knots, nodes, or impenetrable masses, and indeed, as you’ll have to admit, there are places where they’re already hopelessly tangled, completely tied up in themselves, you know, just look outside, out the window there, yes, take a look, do you see that, that completely rotted spot in the air over there, yes, you do see it, it’s gone all mil-dewy, and you’re astonished, yes, that entire room of air over there in the distance, together with its skyway corridors that lead from here to there, is hopelessly clogged, covered with algae, entangled, what do you say to that, and there, there, in that huge hall, the atrium of the so-called sunset, the walls and above all the extremely elaborately carved ornamental plasterwork of light have been attacked by red algae, there, those huge, ugly brown stains, — you see them, yes? — and that very definite section spreading toward us from far away with its rainbow-light avenue has already been attacked by amoebas in its branching calcified veins, you see, it’s simply rotten, the sunsets in this city are going rotten and getting covered with mildew before our very eyes, and no one’s putting up a fight, I can’t understand how people could have let it get this far, and why they don’t send a few people up there now and then, at least pro forma, although it would unfortunately be much too late for that now, but no one here seems at all inclined to even try to show some good will, but anyway, it’s all become quite pointless, even for the best-intentioned spirit, because one of these days, presumably soon now, this sort of thing goes much more quickly than one would like to think, the entire mantle of air will be entangled, interwoven, grown-over once and for all, and will have crushed us and everything else in it, under it, around it very tenderly with inescapable gentleness, you know? no? not yet? but it’ll become clear to you in good time: one day, unfortunately, you’ll have to admit I was right, but that won’t be of any more use to you then. . by way of contrast, when the giant swimming swifts still crossed our waters, which was unfortunately a long time ago, this alarming problem naturally didn’t exist, as you can imagine, because it was vitally necessary for those majestic, elegantly colossal giant birds, as they were romping about, to get into even the farthest corners of the ether with their heads and beaks, because only their anatomically rather extraordinary construction allowed them to keep up with their constant and exclusively vegetarian need to feed, which, as you can imagine, must have been immeasurable, given the sizeable volume of their bodies, which is why their main activity consisted almost exclusively of sticking their heads into the sky, anywhere would do, and subjecting everything up there to the most careful examination with their beaks, and in the process of doing so grazing the entire sky down to the roots with the greatest of ease, thus keeping the entire mantle of air continuously free of creepers, so the atmosphere was also free of mold, because they immediately and with particular delight broke up every network of mold they came across by taking it into their beaks and presumably insalivating it before conducting it into their immeasurably long gullets, which from the length of them might better be called gullet-conduits, down their neck poles into their deep stomachs, yes, this activity that was only barely able to quiet the giant birds’ hunger helped us all by carefully maintaining the sky and the air and by ensuring they were kept clean on an absolutely reliable and regular basis, yes — how long were their necks, you ask, and I can’t say exactly, but I had the impression that their length was variable and could be made greater or lesser, be extended or contracted as required, yes, I think I’m remembering it more precisely again now, they pulled their necks out and in, or was it an upward stretching and a tucking back in again, very much like a hose, and whenever they were approached, they immediately pulled their necks back out of the sky and beckoned with a friendly wave by swaying their necks, as if they wanted to convey their greetings.