“Ah, the devil . . . What ails him!” Lambert grumbles from his bed. “Wait, I’ll show you! Won’t let me sleep . . .” He finally jumps out of bed, runs over to me, and starts tearing the blanket off me, but I hold very, very tightly to the blanket, covering my head with it.
“Whimpering, what are you whimpering for, cretin, cghretin! Take that!” and he beats me, he hits me painfully with his fist on the back, on the side, more and more painfully, and . . . and I suddenly open my eyes . . .
It’s already bright dawn, needles of frost sparkle on the snow, on the wall . . . I’m sitting, crouched, barely alive, frozen in my fur coat, and someone is standing over me, rousing me, abusing me loudly, and kicking me painfully in the side with the toe of his right boot. I raise myself, look: a man in a rich bearskin coat, a sable hat, with black eyes, pitch-black foppish side-whiskers, a hooked nose, his white teeth bared at me, a white and ruddy face like a mask . . . He has bent down very close to me, and cold steam comes from his mouth with each breath:
“Frozen, the drunken mug, the cghretin! You’ll freeze like a dog! Get up! Get up!”
“Lambert!” I shout.
“Who are you?”
“Dolgoruky!”
“What the hell kind of Dolgoruky?”
“
“Ha-a-a!” he cries out, smiling some sort of long, recollecting smile (but he can’t have forgotten me!). “Ha! So it’s you, you!”
He pulls me up, sets me on my feet; I can barely stand, barely move, he leads me, supporting me on his arm. He peers into my eyes, as if pondering and recalling and listening to me with all his might, and I babble on, also with all my might, ceaselessly, without pause, and I’m so glad, so glad I’m talking, and glad that it’s Lambert. Whether he appeared to me somehow as my “salvation,” or I rushed to him at that moment because I took him for a man from an entirely different world—I don’t know, I didn’t reason then, but rushed to him without reasoning. What I said then I don’t remember at all, and I hardly spoke coherently, hardly even articulated the words clearly; but he listened intently. He grabbed the first cab that came along, and a few moments later I was sitting in the warmth, in his room.
III
EVERY PERSON, WHOEVER he may be, certainly preserves some recollection of something that has happened to him which he regards or is inclined to regard as fantastic, remarkable, out of the ordinary, almost miraculous, whether it’s a dream, a meeting, a divination, a presentiment, or something of the sort. To this day I am inclined to regard this meeting of mine with Lambert as something even prophetic . . . judging at least by the circumstances and consequences of the meeting. It all happened, however, on the one hand at least, in the most natural way: he was simply coming back from one of his nighttime occupations (which one will become clear later) half drunk, and, stopping for a moment by the gate in the lane, saw me. He had been in Petersburg for only a few days then.
The room I found myself in was a small, quite unassumingly furnished example of ordinary Petersburg
“Alphonsine!” cried Lambert.
“Présente! ” 52 a cracked female voice replied in a Parisian accent from behind the screen, and in no more than two minutes out popped Mlle. Alphonsine, hastily dressed in a bed jacket, only just risen—a strange sort of being, tall and lean as a splinter, a young girl, a brunette, with a long waist, a long face, darting eyes, and sunken cheeks—an awfully worn-out creature!
“Quick!” (I’m translating, but he spoke to her in French.) “They must have a samovar going, fetch some boiling water, red wine and sugar, and a glass here, quick, he’s frozen, this is a friend of mine . . . he slept all night in the snow.”
“
“Uh-uh!” Lambert shouted at her as at a little dog, and shook his finger; she stopped gesturing at once and ran to fulfill his order.
He examined and palpated me; he felt my pulse, touched my forehead, my temples.
“Strange,” he muttered, “how you didn’t freeze . . . though you were all covered up in your fur coat, including your head, like sitting in a fur hole . . .”
