Felix

Felix is the silent boy found beside Petro in the sculptor’s workshop, an apparently living counterpart to the stone angel. Taken into Adèle and Petro’s household, he becomes at once a figure of wonder, an object of public dispute, and the focus of increasingly forceful attempts to care for and keep him. His body seems to promise miraculous escape from ordinary limits, yet his later return to the roof during a fire makes his survival depend not on wonder alone but on his own strength and resourcefulness.

Identity and First Appearance

Felix first appears asleep beside Petro, dressed in a long robe embroidered with shining beads. His fair skin, rosy cheeks, softly waved hair, and delicate face make him look less like a statue than like an angel made of flesh and blood. The scene overturns the distinction between the stone figure and the living child: where Petro lies motionless beneath marble dust, Felix’s presence seems to embody the impossible transformation the onlookers will proclaim.

The people in the workshop respond to the sight as a miracle. Petro wakes, sees the child, and drops his chisel before sinking to his knees. But the apparition does not remain where the crowd expects it to be. When Petro pulls away the cloth, the angel has vanished from the floor; Stefania finds Felix in her arms at the threshold, beside the black top hat. The opening establishes a pattern that follows him: others see a supernatural marvel, but the evidence of his presence shifts between places and interpretations, resisting any settled explanation.

Silence, Writing, and the Gaze of Others

Felix does not smile, cry, grimace, or make a sound. He does not answer when spoken to, though Stefania believes he understands the languages around him. His unchanging expression and silence frustrate and unsettle her; she describes the shame he awakens in her as especially intense. The narrative thus makes his quiet more than an absence of speech. It becomes a surface onto which the household and the surrounding community project fear, embarrassment, wonder, and expectation.

Writing is the exception to his silence. He fills pages by repeating the same advertisement: “Deux magnifiques oléandres, à vendre, bon marché. Deux magnifiques oléandres, à vendre, bon marché.” The repeated sentence gives him a means of expression, but it does not explain him to the people who want to classify or interpret him. His silence and his writing remain parallel facts: one withholds a response, while the other returns the same words without opening a conversation.

The crowd’s first dispute over where Felix should go reveals how quickly appearance becomes a claim of identity. Père Josef initially thinks the child is a girl and proposes taking him to a Basilian sisters’ institution. He then suggests asking the Protestant pastor Zekler to receive him at the Bethlehem orphanage. Bystanders argue that his face shows what “blood” he belongs to, while others counter that a closer look would place him among the Armenians. Stefania cannot see what is supposedly improper or legible in his face. Adèle refuses to give him up and holds him firmly, her eyes bright with an intense attachment; Père Josef blesses his light curls. Before Felix can speak for himself, adults and spectators have made him the center of competing religious, ethnic, and familial claims.

Care, Confinement, and the Body

The household’s protection of Felix becomes inseparable from controlling his body. When officials arrive two weeks later with green-uniformed gendarmes, led by the general of the Lviv gendarmerie, and order the boy to be handed over, Stefania and Petro answer by presenting him as too fat to fit inside a barrel or an illusionist’s top hat. Their performance depends on a dramatic change: they have fed him so heavily that he is now a round, conspicuously plump child. Petro’s joking challenge to the visitors turns the objects associated with the angel’s disappearance into a public test of the authorities’ claim, while Stefania demonstrates that Felix’s swollen calf will not slide into the hat and that it sticks on his chubby cheeks.

The transformation is the result of determined, repeated feeding. Petro seats Felix at the table and gives him an immense range of dishes, from knysh, potato-and-walnut fillings, and dumplings to varenyky, soups, pork cutlets, sausages, and rich milk and broths. When Felix protests, they suppress his protests, wipe his tears, and quiet his cries. If he vomits after overeating, they let him rest and then put him back at the table. Stefania also brings food to his bed in the middle of the night, and feeds him in the garden or workshop; she ensures that he is never left without something to chew. The scene holds care and coercion together: the adults act to preserve him, but their method is to override his refusals and remake his body.

Petro later brings brown plush fabric and white cotton and sends Stefania with Felix to Helman Cohen and Son to be measured for a suit and shirts. By then Felix has grown and gained enough weight to become almost unrecognizable. He can no longer curl himself into a ball as easily or squeeze into every narrow hiding place. Stefania reflects that, if he were back in the street or with Ernest Thorn’s touring troupe, he could no longer earn a living in the same way unless he stopped eating again. The new clothes mark his passage into a more settled domestic identity, while the thought of his former means of survival exposes the cost of that settlement.

The Roof, the Stone Woman, and the Fire

Despite his changed size, Felix retains an extraordinary capacity to get into hidden spaces. Stefania has to coax him down from the roof without Adèle or Père Josef seeing him: another glimpse of his shadow could provoke a scandal, and Adèle might accuse Petro of trying to make the boy his son and master of the house. The roof opening is so small that Stefania doubts even a cat could pass through it, yet Felix has managed to enter. Now heavier from the meatballs and dumplings she has given him, he is still able to get into a place that seems physically inaccessible to him.

Stefania finds him curled around the stone woman. She calls to him gently, says he is cold and should warm himself, and offers to find him something good to eat. The contrast is pointed: the boy whom the household has worked to make substantial folds himself beside stone, as if the living child and the carved figure have resumed the intimacy of the workshop’s first apparition. The scene does not explain his attachment to the statue. It gives the image room to hold its force without reducing it to a spoken motive.

During the fire, Felix’s access to the roof and attic becomes decisive. Stefania hears small feet running through the roar of the flames and recognizes them as his. She recalls his congenital joint hypermobility, identified as cutis hyperelastica and Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, and observes that feeding him chocolate mousse and stuffing him with food have not made that condition disappear. He has climbed onto the roof and slipped through the gap into the attic; after descending by the ladder, he reaches the entrance even though the fire has already spread beyond the salon and a substantial part of the house is destroyed. Stefania hears the metal lock grind. Her narration turns from the boy’s peculiar body to the immediate possibility of rescue: firefighters from the railways and from Kniahynyn-Colonia are already on their way, and she holds Adèle close.

Narrative Significance

Felix’s story repeatedly sets the body against the explanations imposed on it. At the workshop he is read as an angel; among the bystanders, as a question of ancestry and religious belonging; in the household, as a child whose safety can be secured by feeding him. His silence prevents those readings from being confirmed or corrected in ordinary dialogue. Even his writing, with its repeated advertisement for oleanders, offers recurrence rather than disclosure.

The top hat and the stone figure bind wonder to practical consequence. The hat first marks the apparent disappearance of an angel and then becomes part of Petro’s attempt to defeat the gendarmes’ demand with a physical demonstration. The stone woman, meanwhile, appears again as Felix’s chosen refuge on the roof. In the final fire, the quality that had made him difficult to contain becomes useful: despite his weight and vulnerability, he can pass through the narrow opening, cross the burning house, and reach the locked entrance. Felix remains difficult to explain, but the story gives his actions a consequence no onlooker’s interpretation can replace: he makes rescue possible.