Budapest is a destination on Adèle and Petro’s honeymoon that becomes, for Stefania, a landscape of exclusion. At its thermal baths she is left alone while Adèle meets Petro elsewhere; wandering through the steam, Stefania experiences unwanted touching and recoils from a sculpture of Leda and the swan. The city’s role in the novel is therefore more than that of a travel stop: it concentrates the bodily distress of a relationship in which intimacy, care, and separation are unevenly shared.

A Stop on the Honeymoon

Stefania says that she and Adèle grew up together and had never been separated; she even accompanied Adèle and Petro on their honeymoon, which took them to Krakow, Budapest, and Vienna. Petro had resisted Stefania’s presence and agreed only after Adèle pleaded through several nights of tears. The trip thus began with a tension between the newly married couple’s claim to privacy and Adèle’s fear of travelling without Stefania.

Stefania’s account makes clear that she was not merely another tourist. She arranged for Adèle to receive soft-boiled eggs at the hotels, went to the market for fresh cream for her coffee, and dressed and prepared her each day. Budapest belongs to a journey whose comforts Stefania helped produce through practical, intimate labor, even as Petro’s resentment made her feel that he acted as though she did not exist.

The Thermal Baths and Separation

At the baths in Budapest, Adèle whispered that Petro had asked her to meet him in another room without Stefania. Stefania swallowed her response and concealed her distress. When Adèle’s figure disappeared between the columns, Stefania nearly fainted; she compares the feeling to pain in a missing limb, an image that makes separation seem not simply emotional but bodily.

The hours afterward were, in Stefania’s recollection, the emptiest and longest of her life. She could no longer bear the narrow, hot bath Adèle had left, put on her robe, and wandered from room to room before stepping into a freezing February day. She then swam through thick surface mist, avoiding groups speaking a language she did not understand. In her distressed perception, their conversations seemed to concern only separation and death.

The bath offered no refuge from other people’s bodies. Stefania recalls an unseen, persistent touch beneath the water; she tried to escape in splashes, but a hand caught her by the shoulder. More abject still was the sculpture she saw through the steam: a swan pressing its head and long neck against the ample chest of Leda, while something sputtered cold droplets. Stefania’s vision clouded; she dived underwater and swam, hoping not to surface again. She could not see the companions behind the sculpture in the fog, but knew their dark shadows were moving there.

Memory and the Meaning of the City

Stefania later says that much had changed and that things had calmed, yet remembers believing after the baths that she and Adèle would never again be together. Budapest is consequently preserved as a threshold in memory: the honeymoon’s shared itinerary gives way to an acute conviction of permanent separation. The contrast between the crowded baths and Stefania’s isolation sharpens the episode’s central reversal: she has travelled with Adèle, but cannot follow her into the private room where Petro has asked to meet.

The city recurs within a larger geography of travel. Adèle had gone to Carlsbad almost every year while her father was alive, and also visited Dora or Yaremche; Stefania accompanied these trips too, ostensibly so that she might gain color, while still performing domestic work such as emptying chamber pots. The repeated journeys reveal that mobility does not mean the same thing for both women: Adèle’s travel is leisure and cure, while Stefania’s presence is bound to service and care.

From Travel to Escape

Budapest also sits within the novel’s contrast between journeys undertaken for others and journeys imagined as a new life. Velvele proposes that he and Stefania leave from Hamburg aboard the Taormina, a third-class transatlantic ship designed for six hundred passengers, and open a restaurant in the New World under her name. At the novel’s close, Stefania anticipates making that crossing with him, again naming the ship and its women’s section. Against the remembered baths, where she is left outside Adèle and Petro’s private encounter, the proposed voyage points toward a different partnership and a future in which her cooking is not merely service within another household.