I had spent most of the winter of 1935 in Marseilles, attending to some of my firm's business. In the middle of\ January 1936, I got a letter from Sebastian. Strangely enough, it was written in Russian.
'I am, as you see, in Paris, and presumably shall be stuck [zasstrianoo] here for some time. If you can come, come; if you can't, I shall not be offended; but it might be perhaps better if you came. I am fed up [osskomina] with a number of tortuous things and especially with the patterns of my shed snake-skins [vypolziny] so that now I find a poetic solace in the obvious and the ordinary which for some reason or other I had overlooked in the course of my life. I should like for example to ask you what you have been doing during all these years, and to tell you about myself: I hope you have done better than I. Lately I have been seeing a good deal of old Dr Starov, who treated maman [so Sebastian called my mother]. I met him by chance one night in the street, when I was taking a forced rest on the running-board of somebody's parked car. He seemed to think that I had been vegetating in Paris since maman's death, and I have agreed to his version of my йmigrй existence, because [eeboh] any explanation seemed to me far too complicated. Some day you may come upon certain papers; you will burn them at once; true, they have heard voices in [one or two indecipherable words: Dot chetu?], but now they must suffer the stake. I kept them, and gave them night-lodgings [notchleg], because it is safer to let such things sleep, lest, when killed, they haunt us as ghosts. One night, when I felt particularly mortal, I signed their death warrant, and by it you will know them. I had been staying at the same hotel as usual, but now I have moved to a kind of sanatorium out of town, note the address. This letter was begun almost a week ago, and up to the word "life" it had been destined [prednaznachalos] to quite a different person. Then somehow or other it turned towards you, as a shy guest in a strange house will talk at unusual length to the near relative with whom he came to the party. So forgive me if I bore you [dokoochayou], but somehow I don't much like those bare branches and twigs which I see from my window.'
This letter upset me, of course, but it did not make me as anxious as I should have been, had I known that since 1926 Sebastian had been suffering from an incurable disease, growing steadily worse during the last five years. I must shamefully confess that my natural alarm was somewhat subdued by the thought that Sebastian was very high-strung and nervous and had always been inclined to undue pessimism when his health was impaired. I had, I repeat, not the smallest inkling of his heart trouble, and so I managed to convince myself that he was suffering from overwork. Still, he was ill and begging me to come in a tone that was novel to me. He had never seemed to need my presence, but now he was positively pleading for it. It moved me, and it puzzled me, and I would certainly have jumped into the very first train had I known the whole truth. I got the letter on Thursday and at once resolved to go to Paris on Saturday, so as to journey back on Sunday night, for I felt that my firm would not expect me to take a holiday at the critical stage of the business I was supposed to be looking after in Marseilles. I decided that instead of writing and explaining I would send him a telegram Saturday morning, when I should know whether, perhaps, I could take the earlier train.
And that night I dreamt a singularly unpleasant dream. I dreamt I was sitting in a large dim room which my dream had hastily furnished with odds and ends collected in different houses I vaguely knew, but with gaps or strange substitutions, as for instance mat shelf which was at the same time a dusty road. I had a hazy feeling that the room was in a farmhouse or a country inn – a general impression of wooden walls and planking. We were expecting Sebastian – he was due to come back from some long journey. I was sitting on a crate or something, and my mother was also in the room, and there were two more persons drinking tea at the table round which we were seated – a man from my office and his wife, both of whom Sebastian had never known, and who had been placed there by the dream manager – just because anybody would do to fill the stage.
Our wait was uneasy, laden with obscure forebodings, and f felt that they knew more than I, but I dreaded to inquire why my mother worried so much about a muddy bicycle which refused to be crammed into the wardrobe: its doors kept opening. There was the picture of a steamer on the wall, and the waves on the picture moved like a procession of caterpillars, and the steamer rocked and this annoyed me – until I remembered that the hanging of such a picture was an old and commonplace custom, when awaiting a traveller's return. He might arrive at any moment, and the wooden floor near the door had been sprinkled with sand, so that he might not slip. My mother wandered away with the muddy spurs and stirrups she could not hide, and the vague couple was quietly abolished, for I was alone in the room, when a door opened in a gallery upstairs, and Sebastian appeared, slowly descending a rickety flight of stairs which came straight down into the room. His hair was tousled and he was coatless: he had, I understood, just been taking a nap after his journey. As he came down, pausing a little on every step, with always the same foot ready to continue and with his arm resting on the wooden handrail, my mother came back again and helped him to get up when he stumbled and slithered down on his back. He laughed as he came up to me, but I felt that he was ashamed of something. His face was pale and unshaven, but it looked fairly cheerful. My mother, with a silver cup in her hand, sat down on what proved to be a stretcher, for she was presently carried away by two men who slept on Saturdays in the house, as Sebastian told me with a smile. Suddenly I noticed that he wore a black glove on his left hand, and that the fingers of that hand did not move, and that he never used it – I was afraid horribly, squeamishly, to the point of nausea, that he might inadvertently touch me with it, for I understood now that it was a sham thing attached to the wrist – that he had been operated upon, or had had some dreadful accident. I understood too why his appearance and the whole atmosphere of his arrival seemed so uncanny, but though he perhaps noticed my shudder, he went on with his tea. My mother came back for a moment to fetch the thimble she had forgotten and quickly went away, for the men were in a hurry. Sebastian asked me whether the manicurist had already come, as he was anxious to get ready for the banquet. I tried to dismiss the subject, because the idea of his maimed hand was insufferable, but presently I saw the whole room in terms of jagged fingernails, and a girl I had known (but she had strangely faded now) arrived with her manicure case and sat down on a stool in front of Sebastian. He asked me not to look, but I could not help looking. I saw him undoing his black glove and slowly pulling it off; and as it came off, it spilled its only contents – a number of tiny hands, like the front paws of a mouse, mauve-pink and soft – lots of them – and they dropped to the floor, and the girl in black went on her knees. I bent down to see what she was doing under the table and I saw that she was picking up the little hands and putting them into a dish – I looked up and Sebastian had vanished, and when I bent down again, the girl had vanished too. I felt I could not stay in that room for a moment longer. But as I turned and groped for the latch I heard Sebastian's voice behind me; it seemed to come from the darkest and remotest corner of what was now an enormous barn with grain trickling out of a punctured bag at my feet. I could not see him and was so eager to escape that the throbbing of my impatience seemed to drown the words he said. I knew he was calling me and saying something very important – and promising to tell me something more important still, if only I came to the corner where he sat or lay, trapped by the heavy sacks that had fallen across his legs. I moved, and then his voice came in one last loud insistent appeal, and a phrase which made no sense when I brought it out of my dream, then, in the dream itself, rang out laden with such absolute moment, with such an unfailing intent to solve for me a monstrous riddle, that I would have run to Sebastian after all, had I not been half out of my dream already.