Doctor Anger’s Trauma from the 1868 Fire

Doctor Anger’s Trauma from the 1868 Fire is a wound that returns nightly rather than receding into the past. For more than twenty years, Doctor Anger cries out in his sleep, reliving an inferno that killed his wife and Stefania’s parents; Stefania, who grew up beside Adèle in the bereaved household, becomes its witness and caretaker. The fire’s private aftermath—nightmares, smoke-haunted images, and a table on which jam is never served—stands in sharp contrast to the public language of a stable, “happy” empire.

The Fire and Its Losses

The catastrophe occurred on September 28, 1868, while jam was being prepared in the Lothringer garden. Half the city went up in smoke. Doctor Anger’s wife, Adèle’s mother, died in the fire, and he never recovered from her loss. The absence of jam from the household table gives that bereavement an everyday form: a domestic food associated with the circumstances of the disaster is excluded from family life.

The fire also destroyed the neighboring home of Stefania’s parents, who were serving Doctor Anger and his wife. No trace of their cottage remains. Stefania instead remembers the lilacs growing where it stood, and wonders what her mother might have cooked for the doctor and Madame while in their service. The same disaster thus joins the two girls’ histories before either can remember it: neighbors rescue Stefania and Adèle and return them together to Doctor Anger, wrapped in soot-stained, smoke-smelling rags.

Nightmares and Repetition

For more than twenty years, until his death, Doctor Anger dreams of fire and cries out without interruption. The sound changes shape—at times a siren, an owl, a locomotive, or a current of air—but the terror persists. His dreams may shift in their details, yet they retain the same deceptively calm morning, the quiet hospital setting, and the sense of catastrophe about to break, tightening his breath before it arrives.

In one recurring dream, Doctor Anger operates in a hospital. He makes a precise incision in a patient without drawing blood, only for the supposed patient to prove to be a doll stuffed with straw and rubbish. Outside the window, tiny black fragments multiply until the view becomes like a photograph’s negative on a snowy day. The flakes enter the operating room, settle on the tiles and instruments, and invade the mouths, nostrils, and eyes of those inside. A bitter smell of burning fills the space; the air seems poisonous, while an oppressive silence holds everything beneath it.

The nightmare does not offer the doctor a completed or changeable past. He recognizes that it has happened again, that he has passed through the whole ordeal once more, and that its ending still has not truly come. He feels unable to influence any part of it. The accumulated anguish breaks out as a scream, as if the fire’s ash and smoke have entered his lungs. The dream’s return makes the old catastrophe present again without allowing him to master it.

Stefania as Witness and Caretaker

Stefania’s first memories become entangled with images produced by Doctor Anger’s dreams. She describes seeing through his eyes: the operating room’s white tiles, disinfectant that makes the throat and lungs painfully sensitive, and sterile instruments being placed in a shining case. The boundary between her memory and his is therefore unsettled; the fire reaches her not only as family history but through the dreams she absorbs and the nights she witnesses.

Whenever Doctor Anger begins to cry, Stefania wakes, slips free of Adèle’s embrace, and runs downstairs. He sleeps on a narrow sofa in his consulting room, beneath his father’s portrait. She finds him agitated and sweating, staring into nothing; in his eyes she sees despair, horror, pain, and guilt rather than an explanation of what happened. As a child, she tries to calm him, strokes his wet head, gives him water and a soothing mixture from a blue bottle, wipes his head and chest, and changes the damp sheets. Her care is practical and repeated, responding to a distress that neither of them can undo.

Stefania can question him about the fire only in the interval when he is no longer asleep but not yet fully awake. That narrow opening suggests how little ordinary conversation can reach the event: the disaster comes into view through fragments, dreams, and the doctor’s exhausted condition. The household’s care for him does not bring the past to a close, but it gives Stefania a role in carrying its traces.

Private Grief and Imperial Permanence

The novel places Doctor Anger’s irreparable loss within a society that publicly presents itself as prosperous, diverse, and secure. The imperial motto “Indivisibiliter Ac Inseparabiliter” and the words “Felix Austria” appear even in the city’s filthy, impoverished lanes, where portraits of the emperor hang above scenes of deprivation. At the emperor’s seventieth-birthday celebrations in 1900, the city is decorated with flowers and banners and takes on an unusually solemn appearance. These signs of continuity and collective celebration coexist with private grief that has lasted for decades.

The contrast returns in Stefania’s conviction that her love is eternal and unchanging, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That equation gives personal devotion the scale of an imperial promise, but the novel has already shown how little permanence can protect a home or restore the dead. Doctor Anger’s recurring nightmare is the intimate counter-image to public assurances of stability: the past keeps breaking into the present, while the fire’s losses remain beyond repair.