She shook her head. Through the dark windows of her eyes I saw within her a flaming oven, sparks, tongues of flame and above them a heap of dry, tarry wood. It was clear to me that it was too late, my words could be of no avail.
She stood up. She would soon leave. Perhaps these were the last days, or the last minutes.... I grasped her hand.
“No, stay a little while longer ... for the sake ... for the sake....”
She slowly lifted my hand towards the light, my hairy paw which I detest. I wanted to withdraw it but she held it tightly.
“Your hand.... You undoubtedly don’t know and very few do know, that women from here occasionally used to fall in love with them. Probably there are in you a few drops of that blood of the sun and the woods. Perhaps that is why I....”
Silence. It was so strange that because of that silence, because of an emptiness, of nothing, my heart should beat so wildly. I cried.
“Ah, you shall not go yet! You shall not go until you tell me about them ... for you love ... them, and I do not know even who they are, nor where they come from.”
“Who are they? The half we have lost. H2 and O, two halves; but in order to get water, H2O, creeks, seas, waterfalls, storms, it is necessary that those two halves be united.”
I distinctly remember every movement of hers. I remember she picked up a glass triangle from
my table and while talking she pressed its sharp edge against her cheek; a white scar would appear; then it would fill again and become pink and disappear. And it is strange that I cannot remember her words, especially the beginning of the story. I remember only different images and colors. At first, I remember, she told me about the Two Hundred Years’ War. Red color.... On the green of the grass, on the dark clay, on the pale blue of the snow,—everywhere red ditches that would not become dry. Then yellow; yellow grass burned by the sun, yellow naked wild-men and wild dogs side by side near swollen cadavers of dogs or perhaps of men. All this, certainly beyond the Walls, for the City was already the victor and it possessed already our present-day petroleum food. And at night ... down from the sky ... heavy black folds. The folds would swing over the woods, the villages,—blackish-red slow columns of smoke. A dull moaning; endless strings of people driven into the City to be saved by force and to be whipped into happiness.