The Carpathians are a landscape of remembered refuge and physical testing in Stefania’s account of her life with Adèle. Their holidays there offer a world of forests, mountain streams, and unhurried wandering, but the freedom is not equal: Stefania seeks the cold water and steep climbs, while Adèle recoils from the torrent and the idea of entering it. The mountains hold both the intimacy of their shared past and an early, telling contrast between their bodies and their appetites for risk.

A holiday landscape

Adèle had long travelled to Carlsbad, and also to Dora or Yaremche, with Stefania accompanying her. The stated reason for bringing Stefania along was to give her some colour, since her complexion had grown waxen; the practical arrangement also meant someone could take care of the chamber pots. Travel thus offered leisure to Adèle while carrying domestic work with it for Stefania. Their mountain memories preserve both facts at once: the women’s closeness and the unequal service that travelled with them.

At Dora they stayed in the wooden villa of Zuzanna Ferenz, an eccentric, sharp-eyed older woman who smoked a small pipe and complained about nearly everything. The two-storey house had a large sitting room and eight bedrooms. Around it lay an untended cherry orchard, with apple, plum, and quince trees; beyond the garden, yews, hornbeams, maples, and beeches stood amid the distant sound of a waterfall. This particular retreat was not an abstract wilderness but a lived-in place, with a household, a host, and a dog, Joke, whose peculiar show of affection was to hold a visitor’s hand gently between his teeth.

Forest paths and shared play

Stefania and Adèle made their own routes through the forest, often avoiding paths laid out by people. On steep hills the damp humus slid beneath fallen leaves; they clung to trunks, bushes, and grass, sometimes crawling on all fours, to Joke’s delight. At the top they collapsed into moss among bilberries, blackberries, and ferns, and drank dew and rainwater from fallen maple leaves. They imagined living inside the ear of a kindly giant, sheltered by trees growing on his stony head, and addressed him as an uncle while listening to his breathing and rumbling laughter.

These episodes make the mountains a setting for a private imaginative life shared by the two girls. The forest changes in their telling from bright corridors of golden sunlight to cold, damp darkness, thick moss, mushrooms, and layers of needles. Their freely chosen route and their make-believe giant are set against the human paths they avoid: for a while, their companionship seems to establish its own geography, outside the routines of the house. Yet the memories also hold danger and loss. Joke once carried home a young hare with great care; the women tried to raise it on warm milk, feeding it through a piece of cloth, but a cat suffocated it.

High pastures and unequal daring

Sometimes Ossyp, the man who helped Zuzanna, took the women high into the mountains to pastures where his brother watched sheep and horses. The grass was short and sharp, and patches of snow remained. Ossyp’s brother named the sheep while cutting crumbly slices from a strongly scented cheese with a large knife. Nearby, a cold stream rushed and foamed against pointed stones. Stefania and Adèle liked sitting on the rocks, watching the water with their minds emptied of other concerns.

In the hottest weather Stefania plunged into the torrent, gripping a large stone so the current would not carry her away. The cold made her bones ache unbearably, yet she felt strong enough to break the rock in two. Adèle, by contrast, hid her face in her hands and cried out at the very thought of that icy water. The episode makes the mountains more than a picturesque holiday backdrop: the same landscape that gives the women a shared place to roam also reveals their different thresholds of physical fear and pleasure.

They sometimes stayed on the alpine pasture until nightfall, although Ossyp disliked the difficult descent in the dark with two young women. Stefania pleaded to remain longer, and the kind-hearted Ossyp eventually agreed. As the clouds darkened and gathered around black and violet peaks, someone began playing a trembita on a neighbouring mountain. Its sounds carried over the heights like desperate groans; then Ossyp urged them to return. Their bare feet were black and pricked, and their hair smelled of smoke. The outing’s freedom had its limits: the approaching dark and the hazardous descent determined when the party had to leave.

Memory, care, and the limits of escape

Back at the villa, Stefania washed Adèle, after which Zuzanna washed Stefania. Stefania recounted the day’s adventures, including a lizard whose tail she had pulled off, thorny sun-dried plants, and the horse Ioura, which Ossyp had let her ride without a saddle. Zuzanna listened in silence, pipe between her teeth, scrubbing Stefania with a wet sponge. Even in these remembered mountain holidays, care has a practical, bodily form, and Stefania moves between being the one who tends Adèle and the one being washed herself.

The mountain journeys also sit within a broader pattern of movement that Stefania can imagine more readily than command. She accompanies Adèle on holidays and on her honeymoon trips, while the labour of preparing, fetching, and tending continues to fall to her. Much later, Velvele proposes a different kind of departure: leaving the ageing empire for the New World, where their proposed restaurant would bear Stefania’s name. The promised voyage would begin at Hamburg aboard the Taormina, with a women-only section for Stefania. The Carpathian memories do not themselves provide an escape from her assigned life, but they preserve a time and place in which her physical boldness, choices of route, and shared play with Adèle come briefly into view.