Stefania Tchornenko—Adèle Skolyk

The relationship between Stefania Tchornenko and Adèle Skolyk is an intimate bond shaped by childhood friendship, household hierarchy, and an inheritance of responsibility neither woman knows how to escape. Adèle can regard Stefania as sister, servant, mother, and guardian at once; Stefania insists on the servant’s name even as her care and anger expose how much more the relationship contains. Their closeness does not dissolve the power difference between them: it makes that difference part of the intimacy itself.

Childhood Friendship and Household Dependence

Stefania and Adèle grew up together, and Stefania recalls that her own childhood friendship with Adèle’s world was bound up with visits to the Baumel family. The history of shared childhood gives the two women a language of sisterhood, but it does not make their adult positions equal. Stefania serves in the household, while Adèle is its mistress; the same person who remembers their common dreams must also acknowledge the distinction in status that structures their daily life.

The relationship is further complicated by the responsibility Stefania feels after Doctor Anger’s death. She believes Adèle will perish, wither, or dry up without her, and remembers having promised the dying doctor that the two women were like intertwined tree trunks. The image makes their dependence feel nearly inseparable, but the promise is also a burden: Stefania’s sense of duty binds her to Adèle even as it intensifies the question of whether she can live as anything other than her caretaker.

The Names Adèle Gives Their Bond

In a late conversation, Adèle says she is exhausted by the complications between them and cannot tell whether Stefania is a sister, a servant, a mother, or a supervisor. The list captures how their relationship crosses the boundaries of a household role without escaping it. Stefania answers humbly that she is Adèle’s servant. Her reply is not a denial that they share an intimate history; it is a declaration of the social position she occupies, made while she stands facing her mistress with a lamp in her hand.

Adèle challenges the simplicity of that answer. If Stefania is only a servant, she asks, why does Adèle weigh her words in advance to avoid hurting her, and why does she fear what Stefania will think or fear humiliating her? These questions show that concern and emotional accountability run in both directions. Adèle may command the household, but she does not experience Stefania as an interchangeable subordinate whose feelings can be ignored.

Yet Adèle also points to a recurring conflict: if they are sisters, why do they not do everything together, and why does Stefania mock her when she mentions housework? She observes that Stefania then emphasizes that Adèle is the mistress and she the faithful servant. Sisterhood, in Adèle’s account, cannot simply erase the very division Stefania insists on naming. Her words expose the contradiction at the heart of their intimacy: the women share memories and emotional claims, but not the same authority or obligations.

Marriage, Resentment, and Jealousy

Adèle describes their predicament through the history of her marriage to Petro. She recalls Petro’s view that neither woman was responsible for the arrangement that trapped them: their father, Doctor Anger, left them dependent on one another, and they did not know how to find a way out. Adèle connects that inherited predicament to Stefania’s resentment of her for falling in love and choosing to marry. The marriage is thus not merely a change in Adèle’s life; in Adèle’s interpretation, it becomes a point at which their unequal roles and mutual dependence are made painfully visible.

Her account gives a sharply concrete form to the grievance. For a whole month, Stefania fed Adèle turnip salad that she hated, while Adèle ate it obediently and did not dare object. Adèle presents this small domestic ritual as evidence of their entanglement: anger appears through the food Stefania prepares, while Adèle’s silence reflects the difficulty of protesting against someone who is at once her servant and the childhood companion with whom she shared dreams. Cooking here does not simply sustain the household; it carries resentment and attachment in the same act.

Adèle also admits that she has always been jealous of how much her father loved Stefania. Stefania answers that he wanted to get rid of her and had not loved her at all. The exchange reveals opposed memories of Doctor Anger’s attachment and of Stefania’s place in the family: Adèle perceived Stefania as a rival for paternal love, whereas Stefania remembers herself as unwanted. Their conflict therefore reaches back beyond marriage and household duties to a painful difference in how each understood the same family bond.

Care, Rupture, and the Limits of Reconciliation

The late conversation makes their closeness explicit but does not resolve it. Adèle weeps as she asks what Stefania is to her, and Stefania continues to answer in the language of service. Their shared childhood and Adèle’s frank admission of jealousy bring buried feelings into view, but neither woman finds a stable name that can encompass affection, resentment, dependence, and rank. Adèle’s recognition that their father left them to one another offers an explanation for their predicament, not an escape from it.

The conversation breaks into physical crisis. After Stefania insists that Doctor Anger never loved her, she experiences the familiar onset of overwhelming tension: her head grows heavy and hot, her vision fails, and her ears ring. She makes a sudden movement and realizes that the lamp she had been holding has shattered on the floor. Fire catches the tablecloth, spreads across the floor, and consumes upholstered furniture and a screen, cutting off the women’s route to the door. Adèle clings to Stefania and screams; Stefania tries to calm her, push her away so she can fight the flames, and beat them back with a window curtain, which catches fire and burns her hands.

The fire gives the unresolved relationship an immediate, material danger: in the moment when words about love and resentment fail, Stefania is still trying to protect Adèle, while Adèle clings to the person she has just challenged to define their bond. Care persists, but it cannot by itself undo the conditions that have made the two women both indispensable and injured by one another. Their relationship remains marked by that double truth: childhood intimacy binds them together, and the servant–mistress division keeps that bond from becoming simple or equal.