Adèle Skolyk—Petro Skolyk

Adèle Skolyk and Petro Skolyk’s marriage is presented as a loving partnership whose comfortable household rests on work performed largely by Stefania Tchornenko. Their public tenderness—most vividly expressed in Petro’s birthday toast and his gaze fixed on Adèle—coexists with a private order in which cooking, cleaning, and care are expected of Stefania. The marriage thus links affection to an unequal domestic arrangement, one the women eventually name as a source of hurt.

Marriage and Household

Adèle marries Petro after her father’s death, and Petro begins building a house for their life together. Their connection also reaches beyond their home: before the marriage, Petro visits the Baumel family to study the retractable-tray ceiling of their veranda, which serves as a sukkah during Sukkot. The episode situates the household he is making within the community’s domestic practices, as well as within his practical interest in construction.

The house’s upkeep, however, becomes Stefania’s burden. As rain pours through the roof, she changes the buckets collecting water while also preparing meals, cleaning, carrying Petro’s lunch to the cathedral or prison chapel where he works, shopping for provisions, massaging Adèle, and preparing iron-spiked apples to ease her anemia. Petro’s attention is elsewhere: he is more intent on carving cherubim for the Resurrection of Christ chapel than on preventing his own home from becoming a sieve. The contrast makes the marriage’s domestic economy plain: Petro builds and sculpts, while Stefania absorbs the work of keeping the household functioning.

Affection and the Public Image of the Couple

At Adèle’s birthday gathering in the park’s glass-and-wood restaurant pavilion, Petro and Felix present her with a charcoal portrait. Petro credits Felix with making it, though he says he contributed a few corrections. Adèle’s solemn expression in the portrait resembles prayer, and Stefania observes that she has often seen her wearing that expression lately. The gift makes the couple’s shared domestic circle visible, while also giving Felix a place in their family life.

Petro’s toast is brief, but his attention speaks for him: he cannot take his eyes off his wife. When the restaurateur Klaar offers him a symbolic little woman’s slipper, Petro places his glass in it, kneels before Adèle, bows his head, and drinks to her health. The guests raise their crystal glasses of Pommery Sec, laugh, and kiss the birthday celebrant. The scene offers a clear public image of devotion, grounded in gestures rather than extended declarations.

That celebration is also sustained by Stefania’s service. She has no place among the guests because she must keep the tables in order, ensure everyone can taste each dish, and serve the food. After the meal, she thinks of the labor that remains—preparing, cooking, baking, washing, cleaning, mending—and of the silence expected of her. Petro takes a heavy tray of dishes from her and carries it toward the kitchen, thanking her for making the gathering possible and calling her family. His assistance and gratitude are real, but they do not erase the unequal division of work that has kept the celebration running.

Service, Training, and Class

Adèle openly describes the household’s relationship with its servants as the outcome of deliberate training. At dinner with Ernest Thorn, she says servants must be educated, raised, and instructed, comparing the process to dressage. She insists that this discipline requires humane behavior, friendly understanding, and closeness, and presents her father as having begun Stefania’s education from infancy, with Adèle continuing it. Her account casts intimacy as part of the method by which a mistress forms a servant who is both affectionate and compliant.

That description sits uneasily beside the labor it makes sound like a personal bond. Adèle’s anemia and migraines, and her inability to cook even a soft-boiled egg, make Stefania’s care essential; Stefania consequently imagines that leaving would put Adèle at risk. She fears Adèle might injure herself, start a fire, or simply waste away from sadness. The fear is not merely a claim about Adèle’s dependence: it also shows how the obligation of service has become bound to Stefania’s sense that she cannot abandon her.

The burden extends beyond the married household. Stefania later works in two homes, maintaining order and cleanliness and cooking in both, despite having thought she could not manage it. When Father Josef objects that she already labors hard for her employers and says she must be paid for her work in his home, she collapses onto a chair, exhausted. The episode distinguishes paid work from the family service expected of her, and shows how much effort her apparently dependable presence conceals.

Marriage and the Sisters’ Conflict

Adèle and Stefania’s closeness predates the marriage, but marriage sharpens the difference in their positions. Adèle is the mistress; Stefania is her servant, even though they grew up together and have witnessed one another’s dreams. Adèle admits that she has been jealous because her father loved Stefania as much as he loved her. Her confession complicates the household hierarchy: affection between the women is genuine, but it carries the history of a father’s attachment and an unequal distribution of power.

Adèle also repeats Petro’s explanation that neither woman is responsible for what their relationship became. In his view, her father left them dependent on one another without teaching them how to manage that bond. Adèle connects Stefania’s resentment to her own falling in love and choosing to marry, and recognizes the painful absurdity of their arrangement: Stefania fed her turnip salad for a month, although Adèle hated it, and Adèle obediently ate it rather than protest. Even their conflict takes place inside a closeness so habitual that neither readily asserts herself.

The marriage is therefore neither a simple idyll nor merely a device for separating the women. Petro’s visible tenderness toward Adèle and his gratitude to Stefania coexist with a domestic order that leaves Stefania responsible for sustaining the home. In Adèle’s account, the father’s deathbed charge that Stefania must serve her helped perpetuate their entanglement; in the sisters’ later reckoning, that inheritance explains part of their injury without dissolving their love. Their marriage remains the household’s emotional center, but the story measures its warmth against the labor and dependency on which it rests.