In my earthen cell in the secret catacombs beneath the great Paris Cemetery of Les Innocents where we made our lair, I dreamt night after night of one strange and meaningless thing: What had become of that fine little treasure my mortal Mother had given me? What had become of that strange artifact of Podil which she’d taken from the Ikon corner and put in my hands, that painted egg, that crimson painted egg with the star so beautifully painted on it? Now, where could it be? What had become of it? Had I not left it, wrapped thickly in fur in a golden coffin in which I’d once lodged, ah, had all that really ever taken place, that life I thought I recalled from a city of brilliant white-tiled palaces and glittering canals and a great sweet gray sea full of swift and graceful ships, plying their long oars in perfect unison as if they were living things, those ships, those beautifully painted ships, so often decked with flowers, and with the whitest sails, oh, that could not have been real, and to think, a golden chamber with a golden coffin in it, and this special treasure, this fragile and lovely thing, this painted egg, this brittle and perfect egg, whose painted covering locked inside to utter perfection a moist, mysterious concoction of living fluids—oh, what strange imaginings. But what had happened to it! Who had found it!
