« C’est ainsi. »

“C’est ainsi” is Stefania Tchornenko’s compact formula for accepting circumstances she cannot or will not change, but its recurrences carry more than resignation. Spoken inwardly or as a refrain, it accompanies a shift in who controls access to Adèle, the formation of a household of three, and Stefania’s account of service as a settled condition. The phrase’s steady surface gathers meanings that are neither simple nor fully reconciled: affection, dependency, loyalty, and the choice to make one person the limit of one’s life.

Form and Recurrences

The expression first appears as a conclusion to Stefania’s recognition that Petro will decide who may see Adèle. After returning to the hotel calmer, she finds Petro watching her closely; his face does not return her smile, yet his expression has acquired interest and gentleness. Stefania interprets his permission to approach Adèle with gratitude, then adds that he will now decide who can visit her. “C’est ainsi” closes the thought with the sound of settled fact. It registers a change in authority without protest, though the circumstances make clear that Stefania’s access depends on Petro’s decision.

The phrase returns after Stefania goes out to order strong, heavily sweetened tea for Adèle, with lemon slices, almond-milk jam, and ice. When she comes back, she understands that the three of them will now live together. Again, the formula follows a recognition rather than explaining how that arrangement came about. Its repetition links two different kinds of acceptance: one concerns the limits Petro can place on Stefania’s access, the other a new shared domestic life. The same words accommodate both, making them sound continuous even as the relationship’s practical terms change.

Service and Care

Later, the expression follows an extended account of Stefania caring for Adèle. She holds her hand, changes a pillowcase wet with tears, applies cold cucumber-juice compresses to reduce the swelling in her face, and prepares food intended to help during weakness and anemia. The service is physical and particular: attending to a distressed body through repeated tasks, including remedies Adèle resists. Stefania describes carrying out this care with diligence, docility, and fidelity, as if her whole being consisted of service. The quiet attached to that work is not joy, she says, because their shared misfortune cannot be a source of happiness; it is instead a sense of calm. “C’est ainsi” gives that calm a refrain, but does not erase the grief that precedes it.

The care also has a concrete domestic and culinary texture. Stefania makes a broth associated with imperial tradition, while recalling that François-Joseph I had sometimes set it aside during visits to Galicia in favor of a pork-breast borscht with mushrooms, beans, and garlic. The contrast situates her tending of Adèle inside an ordinary kitchen, where an inherited recipe and local food alike become part of the work of care. The recurring formula does not turn that work into an abstraction: it follows a sequence of hands-on acts and gives their repetition a declared purpose.

Attachment, Loss, and the Formula’s Limits

Stefania connects her devotion to the loss of their mothers in a fire that consumed half the city. She describes her love for Adèle as burning like that fire, then calls it indivisible and unalterable. She does not want children; she says she already has someone to care for and that her love cannot extend to anyone else. The phrase reaches its most emphatic form after this declaration: “C’est ainsi. C’est ainsi, tout simplement.” Its doubled cadence sounds like a final ruling, closing off alternatives as if repetition could make a difficult commitment self-evident.

Yet the surrounding account keeps the formula from meaning mere contentment. Stefania calls Adèle’s inability to have children unjust, imagining her delicate hands caressing little heads and her gentle voice singing lullabies. She then considers what that inability means for Petro: he may choose whether to leave, since Adèle cannot become the mother of his children or fulfill that promise, and no one would judge him. Stefania nevertheless feels tenderness toward him, considers him worthy of Adèle, and says that he has done them no harm. The refrain therefore accompanies not just Stefania’s commitment to Adèle but her recognition that Petro, too, has a choice. Its apparent finality sits beside a situation whose possible outcomes remain open.

Narrative Significance

Across its appearances, “C’est ainsi” is both connective refrain and verbal boundary. It joins the altered terms of Stefania’s access to Adèle, the arrangement of life together, and the daily labor through which she expresses attachment. At the same time, the phrase compresses unequal or unsettled circumstances into the language of inevitability: Petro decides who may approach Adèle, while Stefania describes herself as wholly given over to serving her. The text places that language beside the details of emotion and choice rather than treating it as a complete explanation.

The phrase’s repetition also makes Stefania’s self-description sound composed through practice. She repeatedly names circumstances as settled, and then continues to act within them: returning to Adèle, ordering what she needs, nursing her, and defining her own future in relation to her. The final doubled version—“C’est ainsi. C’est ainsi, tout simplement.”—does not resolve the tensions among service, grief, and exclusive love. Instead, it gives them a firm verbal shape, making resignation sound at once like acceptance and like a commitment Stefania has chosen to renew.