Sur l’aile de mes chants

“Sur l’aile de mes chants” is the song Ivanka sings while Stefania scrubs the floor, turning a scene of muddy water, grime, and frustrated labor into an imagined journey to the banks of the Ganges. Its movement from domestic confinement toward a distant, “delicious” place gives the song its force in the episode: it offers Ivanka a dream of transport even as Stefania must keep working in the room around her.

The Song in the Scene

Ivanka has stepped back because the muddy water’s foam is nearly touching her feet. In response, she looks upward and folds her arms across her chest, then begins to sing loudly. The narrator, meanwhile, notices dirty black cobwebs hanging above and feels anger rise, imagining either tipping the basin over Ivanka or pushing her into the muddy pool. Rather than act on that anger, Stefania hides it by redoubling her efforts to scrub the boards. The song therefore enters a scene shaped by opposing bodily gestures: Ivanka withdraws from the dirty water and sings with her arms crossed, while Stefania bends back to the work that keeps the floor clean.

The song’s words promise to carry its addressee on the wings of song to the banks of the Ganges, where the singer knows a “delicious” place. The destination is not the household’s immediate world of muddy water and soiled boards. It is imagined as a far-off refuge, and the promise of being carried there makes music itself a vehicle of escape. The passage does not show Ivanka going anywhere; the journey takes place in the song, while Stefania remains physically occupied with scrubbing.

Dream of Distance and Beauty

After the opening promise of travel, the song imagines the pair lying beneath palm trees. Their shade will pour down dreams of heavenly bliss. The sequence transforms travel into repose: first the singer carries someone away, then the two can lie together in a place whose shade seems to offer effortless comfort. The distant riverbank, palm trees, and promised dreams form a concentrated scene of ease against the labor and grime surrounding the performance.

The song’s imagery also gives Ivanka’s voice a striking contrast with the narrator’s suppressed response. Stefania is not simply watching a fantasy unfold: she is struggling to contain a dangerous exasperation while continuing to scrub. The lyrical movement toward bliss thus coexists with anger, dirty water, and work. Its sweetness does not resolve the conflict in the room; instead, the distance between the imagined refuge and Stefania’s actual task makes the song’s escapist character especially clear.

Ivanka’s Reverie and the Song’s Afterlife

As she sings, Ivanka’s thoughts range through the world of the celebrated opera singer Solomiya Krushelnytska and its ornaments of celebrity and luxury: pearls, powder, silk, diadems, champagne baths, admirers’ gifts, jewels, and special train carriages. The Ganges song belongs to this wider reverie of places and lives far removed from the floor Stefania is scrubbing. Its promise of a distant, blissful landscape resonates with Ivanka’s fascination with spectacle and refinement, even as the immediate scene remains materially uncomfortable.

The text identifies the song through a translator’s note as Heinrich Heine’s “Intermezzo lyrique,” in Gérard de Nerval’s translation. That attribution locates the song within a literary tradition, but the passage makes its significance concrete through the scene in which Ivanka sings it: a promise of transport and repose voiced beside the muddy water, while Stefania keeps her anger hidden in work. The song’s lyrical escape remains imagined rather than enacted, and that unresolved contrast is what gives its performance its particular charge.