Anger’s Deathbed Charge to Stefania to Serve Adèle

Doctor Anger’s deathbed charge that Stefania serve Adèle is both a final instruction and a binding promise: Stefania says she would have left long ago had she not given her word. Its image of two trees with entwined trunks exposes the cost of that devotion. Stefania holds to the command as an obligation, while Father Josef reads the same entanglement as something that keeps both women from growing freely.

The charge and its image

Stefania recounts the command to Father Josef while telling him about Doctor Anger’s final moments. She had sat beside his bed, listening to the terrible rattling in his chest, when he told her that she and Adèle were like two trees with their trunks intertwined. He urged her to think of Adèle and of her own life, acknowledged that what lay ahead would be hard, and then gave the instruction that governs Stefania’s account of their relationship: she must serve Adèle.

The image makes the instruction more complicated than a simple order to remain in service. Two trees joined together may appear inseparable, but Father Josef points out that they can obstruct one another’s growth. He suggests that this, rather than an endorsement of their dependence, may be what Doctor Anger meant. The exchange leaves the charge suspended between an obligation to care for Adèle and a warning about the harm that an entangled life may do to both women.

Stefania’s promise and Father Josef’s doubt

Father Josef is astonished by Stefania’s recollection and asks whether she is certain Doctor Anger said those words. Stefania insists that she heard him as clearly as she hears Father Josef and rejects the idea that she is deceiving herself. She also pushes back against any assumption that serving Adèle is easy: her continued presence is not presented as a comfortable choice or a reward.

When Father Josef returns to the entangled-tree metaphor, Stefania says she does not understand his interpretation. What she does understand is the literal force of the charge and her own pledge. She declares that she would have left long ago if she had not given her word to Doctor Anger. Her answer makes the promise an active constraint: the doctor’s dying instruction has become the reason she remains in a difficult relationship, even when another person offers a reading that might justify separation.

The charge within Stefania’s life

Stefania describes Felix and Father Josef as the two axes around which her life has unfolded. Felix hides from the outside world, and she recognizes a likeness between his refuges and her own tendency to slip away, avoid claiming anything, and flee from herself. Father Josef, by contrast, can draw her out of those refuges with a look or simply through his presence. She describes herself as opening before him and accepting that exposure, especially through the care she gives Felix.

That intimacy also makes her fear the social gaze. Stefania imagines other people misreading her care for Felix and her connection to the priest, reducing them to scandalous motives and treating her as a servant who has presumed to want more than her station allows. She expects people to invent the worst and says they will not believe that she has no need of a man. Against that imagined public judgment, the deathbed charge gives her service a declared basis: she has stayed because she gave her word, not because she is pursuing a conventional romance or trying to rise socially.

When service meets betrayal

The obligation becomes newly charged when Adèle calmly accepts Ernest Thorn’s proposal to buy Stefania’s child. Stefania’s response turns on the contradiction between her continuing service and Adèle’s willingness to treat the child as something that can be sold. She confronts Adèle over the earlier fear that Doctor Anger might love Stefania as a second child, and asks what Adèle fears now that makes her willing to sell the child.

Stefania’s accusation joins the deathbed charge to the immediate conflict: her life, she says, was given to Adèle at birth and attached to her like a spare button sewn inside a garment. The image makes dependence feel intimate and imposed at once. Her service has lasted under the authority of a promise, but that promise does not prevent anger when Adèle acts against the child. Stefania seizes Adèle by the wrists and shakes her; Petro restrains Stefania before she can attack further, and she collapses onto the floor among paper figurines. The confrontation does not resolve the meaning of the doctor’s instruction. Instead, it reveals its limit: a promise to serve Adèle cannot make Stefania indifferent to what Adèle does, or turn obedience into consent.