— Ah but airports have frontiers. And travel-talk ensues with Herr Helmut von Irgendetwas who travels in textiles as others travel in simultaneous interpretation. To inflate jacket pull red toggle (1). To top up, blow into mouthpiece (2) in order to prevent any true exchange between the close breath and the leaning forward beyond keine Grenzen, obeying the innumerable instructions that translate time speed height desire into locality and channel and the slow descent into matter. You will find your life-jacket under your seat. This life-jacket can serve on an unconscious person. Uw zwemvest bevindt zich onder uw stoel. Dit zwemvest kan dienen voor een bewusteloos persoon. Questo salvagente one day will have no frontiers and no passports per assistere anche una persona priva de conoscenza. Aber natürlich, selbstverständlich, hoffentlich und so weiter.
Prague has a dingy airport still. A mess of huts, a transit-lounge like a wartime canteen. Just like our first meeting says Siegfried remember? The tannoy voice in the large wooden hut calls out ranks with names attached and even faces over uniforms grey-blue dark olive-green and khaki that wear a listening look for the Dakota aircraft about to take off from Frankfurt to a scattering of mimeographed news-sheets from the square metal table in the transit lounge look, the new Lord Mayor of Prague has promised to build a better one.
The Slovak National Council met in Bratislava yesterday for its first session since the General Election on June 14. The Council unanimously re-elected Minister Jan Trudny, member of the Praesidium of the Central Committee, as Chairman of the Council. Gut-gut. The Minister then took the floor.
— Mesdames messieurs. Aujourd’hui nous allons discuter le problème de la communication, du point de vue which reveals een bewusteloos persoon blowing hot air into the mouthpiece all enclosed in a glass booth going down, after having pulled red toggle (1) pushed the red button 
. But R turns out to mean Restaurant in studded black plastic cushioned walls not Rez-de-chaussée at all.
Kein Eintritt. Privat. Que cherchez-vous madame? Ah, au fond à gauche, in fondo a sinistra geradeaus dann links according to the theme the time the place with a flared-skirted figurine on the door. Or a high-heeled shoe perhaps as opposed to a flat foot, MESSIEURS, they have their exits and their entrances he makes his greying English jokes under his greying hair or stands against the gothic pillar telling the one about the elephant perhaps unless ideas that actually mean something to a svelte red-haired lady in a low décolletage that speaks ideas? My dear good girl and so forth.
Služi za brisanje. Za skidanje šminke. Für Rasierklingen. Zum Abschminken. Pour le rasoir. Pour le démaquillage. For the razor. To remove your make-up.
Molimo Vas ne upotrebljavajte ručnik. Bitte kein Handtuch benützen. Ever at all? Prière de ne pas se servir de l’essuie-main. Please weave no circle round him thrice and kindly do not leave your seats until the aircraft comes to a standstill.
It comes to a standstill. The body strapped under the tightly swaddling sheet and heavy blanket having slept immobile at a speed of nine hundred kilometres height ten thousand metres outside temperature minus something or other and the distant brain way up translating time speed height into locality and channel and descent where the light unrounds the corners of the cupboard dressing-table stool under which bevindt zich uw zwemvest for a bewusteloos persoon who nevertheless fondles the medal of St. Christopher between the breasts below the tightly swaddling sheet. No body occupies the empty space in the large bed nor will use l’essuie-main not für Rasierklingen. No one comes in offering anything not ordered. Soon some bright chambermaid will buzz allo? er, hello, seven-thirty, oh, thank you.
The headboard of the double bed forms a recess in the wall of pale turquoise silk, patterned in horizontal flat diamond-shapes with a tiny white embroidered circle at the corner of each diamond, forming studs, the lines that join all the studs to form the diamonds made up of minute stitches trapeze-shaped in white. A spot of light rests on the left lower line of each silk diamond turning it to silver. The light comes from the striped brown white and blue cotton curtain like a Dutch skirt clashing in style with the silk headboard but the night before in the electric light looking pale blue and gold and Louis Seize, muffling the footsteps made by Dutch people walking in Dutch along the Dutch canal with a Dutch dog barking in Dutch. The number on the key has dropped again to twee. But from the standpoint of the window each bright spot of light has moved to the stud-like dot at the points where the acute angles of the flat diamonds meet, forming a larger less bright patch on every diamond shape in the pale turquoise headboard recessed into the wall behind the empty unmade bed which the night before looked large and empty and made.
The dikes shine in the sun as silver threads between the large fields of pale green absolutely flat except for one surprising hill beyond the wing. The hill moves with the wing, rising quite disconnected from the land of unblossomed tulips below. The hill has a hinted halo of propellers almost invisible in their speed and the sun remains ahead from four o’clock to midnight never setting as the plane chases it across the clay Atlantic you could cut with a knife through Chicken Maryland, pancake and maple-syrup, cranberry and apple pie and Pouilly-Fuissé made in California. Do you have mineral water please?
— Mineral warrer? Do you mean nachral warrer?
— Nein, er, no thank you. Soda?
— Ow, sora-warrer. Sure. You can have sora-warrer. On the rahks.
— Thank you. Without the rocks please.
The bottle of Vidago stands on the bedside-table, poderosamente radio-activas, bicarbonatadas, liticas, arsenicais, fluerotadas, gaso-carbonicas. The cock crows loud and long at crack of dawn or so, triumphant in some shed or other somewhere beyond the slatted wooden shutters that rise easily to reveal the flat roofs of Lisbon and the pale blue temperature of no doubt twenty-two already as announced by the cock triumphant in some shed among the hanging sheets and the potted geraniums. Soon the bent wizened old woman dressed in black shuffles her booted feet noisily through the loose plaster on the terrace roof, drags a large iron-grey basin across from the shed-door to a low packing-case stood vertically against the white chimney, lifts the basin on to it, shuffles back noisily through the plaster to the shed-door, turns on a tap, fills a metal jug at a resonant distance below the tap, turns off the tap, shuffles across the terrace noisily through the plaster, pours the water into the iron basin at a resonant distance above it, shuffles back, repeats eight times until the basin contains a gallon or so of water for the washing of her wizened face eight times at a resonant distance above it like eight cataracts. A slatted shutter shrieks invisibly from above, another visibly and rising in a window along the right wing of the hotel where a blear-faced blear-aged man in striped pyjamas looks out and down, then up, gazes across, looks startled, sheepish, then licentious, smoothes his hair, makes dog-eyes, protrudes his lips, juts out his tongue slowly, very slowly out, and in, and out again, and round, repeats, cups the air breast-shape in his hand, protrudes his tongue slowly, very slowly out, and in, and out again, and round, looks back into the room then across the terrace, shows the palms of his hands in a naõ posso gesture and pulls down his shutter fast. The shutter from above slams down in anger shock regret, who knows to whom the blear-aged man has directed his dumb-show unanswered at one level 230 or thereabouts and at another higher unseen 312 perhaps responded to with yearning for romance or lust atingle in the loins unless despair in knowledge of the man exasperation cold indifference with her long blonde hair hanging over the sill sans merci despite desire at sight or lewd suggestion swelling her nipples through the diaphanous nightdress low cut on shapely breasts revealed as she leans forward or merely huge and heavy under flabby chins and a middle-aged face indignant under curlers. The wizened woman in black has gone and the cock crows in Portuguese triumphant somewhere on the flat roofs of Lisbon among the hanging sheets and the potted geraniums.