Adèle Skolyk—Josef

Adèle Skolyk’s relationship with Father Josef is presented through two sharply different interpretations of intimacy: Stefania sees a secret, passionate embrace, while Adèle describes prayer, consolation, and a hoped-for miracle. Their bond matters especially because Adèle has been understood to be unable to bear children, and because the evidence that seems to implicate her in an affair is later recast as religious devotion and an awkward act of gift-giving.

Shared faith and Adèle’s infertility

Adèle’s dependence on Father Josef takes on particular weight against the anguish of her infertility. Stefania serves her through episodes of weakness with close, practical care: she changes the tear-wet pillowcase, applies cold cucumber juice to Adèle’s swollen face, and prepares foods intended to restore her strength. The service is not simply cheerful devotion. Stefania says that Adèle cannot have a child and that this is unjust; she imagines Adèle’s delicate hands caressing little heads and her gentle voice singing lullabies. The absence of a child becomes a grief around which care, longing, and religious hope gather.

Stefania’s own response is possessive as well as devoted. She says she does not want a child, because she already has someone to care for, and describes her love for Adèle as indivisible and unalterable. In that emotional arrangement, Father Josef’s role as a source of prayer and spiritual assistance touches a vulnerable point: his closeness to Adèle can be read either as support for her suffering or as a rival claim on the intimacy Stefania has made central to her life.

A public encounter, read through private longing

The relationship first appears in a setting that emphasizes the distance between social worlds. When Adèle and Stefania visit Father Josef’s wife, they find a modest, disorderly home furnished with substantial Hutsul-style pine furniture, carved and inlaid with folk patterns. Adèle responds calmly to the domestic disorder, telling Ivanka that it would be improper for her to do housework and that she should take a servant. The scene places Adèle’s household expectations beside Ivanka’s circumstances, while the visit also locates Father Josef’s marriage within the same world of faith and domestic obligation.

Stefania’s perceptions of the Jewish quarter elsewhere in the city likewise show how intensely she experiences encounters beyond her familiar surroundings. She sees young rabbis arguing and praying in the streets, with some raising their arms toward heaven or pressing their hands against synagogue walls. Later, at a fish market, Velvele’s gaze leaves her cold and anxious; her heart pounds, her hands grow damp and tremble, and she cannot look away. These scenes do not establish a connection between Velvele and Father Josef, but they illuminate the bodily intensity and interpretive uncertainty through which Stefania encounters people around her.

The embrace behind the stained glass

Stefania’s most consequential sighting occurs when she looks down through a blue, star-shaped piece of stained glass into the salon. She sees Adèle with her arms around Father Josef’s neck, pressed close against him, her face hidden against his chest. His hand strokes her hair; Adèle convulses and cries, then the two step apart. Her tear-streaked face is smiling, and she appears overcome with happiness. Stefania cannot hear what they say. From above, she sees gestures and expressions but not their explanation, so prayerful tenderness takes on the appearance of a passionate secret.

The scene turns again when Petro’s voice announces his return. Adèle moves toward the salon door, but Father Josef catches her hands and stops her. He takes a crumpled piece of cloth from the inner pocket of his jacket and gives it to her. Both seem shaken; Adèle lowers her eyes, takes the cloth, and hides it in the buffet drawer. The object’s concealment intensifies Stefania’s suspicion. Later that evening, after serving dinner to Adèle and Petro, she plans to open the drawer and examine what Adèle has put away.

Prayer, pregnancy, and the meaning of the stockings

When Stefania confronts Adèle, she describes having seen her in Father Josef’s arms and insists that Adèle can confess the truth. Adèle identifies the incident as the day Stefania saw them together, but rejects the interpretation of an affair. She says she had asked Father Josef for help, that he prayed while she prayed, and that they prayed together; she then reports that Doctor Vodnetsky believes she is pregnant. Stefania cannot absorb this explanation at once and calls it a miracle in her thoughts. The moment that looked to her like evidence of sexual intimacy becomes, in Adèle’s account, an answered prayer and the possibility of a child.

Stefania also demands an explanation for the stockings she believes Father Josef had. Adèle says she had wrapped them in a box, tied it with a ribbon, and asked Father Josef to pass them to his wife because she remembered how much Ivanka liked them. Father Josef would not allow Ivanka to accept gifts; this time, too, he opened the box and returned the stockings to Adèle. That sequence explains the cloth-like item passed in the salon without confirming Stefania’s suspicions: the gift was meant for Josef’s wife, and its return accounts for its presence between Adèle and the priest.

Intimacy and the limits of what Stefania knows

The relationship remains filtered through competing forms of knowledge. Stefania’s account is based on a view through colored glass, a tender gesture, tears, and a hurried exchange she cannot hear; Adèle’s later explanation supplies the missing purpose of the prayer and the gift. The contrast does not erase the emotional force of the embrace, but it shows how readily Stefania’s attachment to Adèle turns incomplete evidence into a story of betrayal. Her own declaration that her love cannot extend to anyone else makes the sighting feel not merely puzzling but threatening.

Father Josef and Adèle are therefore connected in the evidence as priest and supplicant, and as people whose shared prayer is linked to Adèle’s reported pregnancy. The scenes also place their relationship within a marriage: the returned stockings were intended for Ivanka, and Adèle describes Father Josef as refusing to let his wife receive gifts. The book leaves the reader with a consequential distinction between intimacy and its interpretation. Stefania sees a secret passion; Adèle names a religious appeal and a gift returned. The possibility of pregnancy gives their encounter a new meaning, while the gap between what Stefania witnesses and what she understands exposes the strain within her own devotion.