...of a Russian farewell

After having tumbled silently into Finland, we lived for a time in Helsingfors. Then our ways parted. My mother acting on the suggestion of an old friend took me to Paris, where I continued my education. And Sebastian went to London and Cambridge. His mother had left him a comfortable income and whatever worries assailed him in later life, they were never monetary. Just before he left, we sat down, the three of us, for the minute of silence according to Russian tradition. I remember the way my mother sat, with her hands in her lap twirling my father's wedding ring (as she usually did when inactive) which she wore on the same finger as her own and which was so large that she had tied it to her own with black thread. I remember Sebastian's pose too; he was dressed in a dark-blue suit and he sat with his legs crossed, the upper foot gently swinging. I stood up first, then he, then my mother. He had made us promise not to see him to the boat, so it was there, in that whitewashed room, that we said good-bye. My mother made a quick sign of the cross over his inclined face and a moment later we saw him through the window, getting into the taxi with his bag, in the last hunch-backed attitude of his departing.

[The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov, V.]