Josef Ridny’s Thwarted Marriage Proposal

Adèle Anger’s false announcement that Josef Ridny has come to propose marriage to Stefania Tchornenko turns a domestic room into a stage for a cruelly ambiguous performance. Stefania hides in a wardrobe to avoid the supposed proposal, only to witness Adèle kiss Josef and call the kiss a joke. The episode leaves Stefania unable to distinguish play from betrayal, and its consequences reach beyond the room: she withdraws from Adèle for nearly a month and begins preparing to leave for work in Solotvyn.

The Announcement and the Hiding Place

Stefania is putting Doctor Anger’s collars and cuffs into a dresser when Adèle rushes in, takes her by the shoulders, and shakes her. Adèle seems caught between laughter and tears as she announces that Josef Ridny has arrived in formal dress with a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, supposedly to propose to Stefania. The news is not presented as a confirmed intention on Josef’s part; it is Adèle who frames his visit as a marriage proposal.

Stefania’s response is immediate and physical. She turns pale, her mouth dries as if she had chewed a paper dumpling, and her eyes search the room for escape. Adèle offers to say that Stefania is out, even suggesting that she could invent an appointment with Chaim Scharf. Stefania asks her simply to say she is not there. Adèle kisses her tenderly on the temple and shuts her inside the walnut wardrobe.

The refuge instead revives the terror of the earlier pond accident. Confined in the wardrobe, Stefania feels she cannot breathe and imagines her lungs filling again with water and mud, with fish brushing her neck. The wardrobe is a hiding place in the house, but in Stefania’s body it becomes the submerged boat that cuts her off from the world. Her attempt to avoid the supposed proposal thus places her inside an older fear before she has even seen what is happening outside.

The Kiss and Its Reversal

From inside the wardrobe, Stefania hears Adèle’s carefree laughter and Josef’s muffled stammering. She thinks Adèle may have mentioned Scharf and imagines Josef falling silent in surprise. Through a gap, she sees him in Doctor Anger’s room, standing solemnly with his head held high. His long, thin neck and prominent Adam’s apple make him seem to her like a heron; the unexpected tenderness of that thought briefly interrupts her panic, and she wonders what she is doing in the wardrobe.

Then Adèle raises both arms, takes Josef’s face, and kisses him. Josef bends toward her awkwardly and puts his hands timidly on her forearms. The sight seems to Stefania to have no reason or warning behind it: she cannot reconcile the kiss with the announcement that Josef had come to ask for her hand. She opens the wardrobe and steps into the room, hoping the scene might be an optical illusion or a contrivance rather than what it appears to be.

Adèle gently moves Josef away and tells Stefania that it was a joke. She repeats the explanation while Josef stands unsteadily in the middle of the room, as if drunk. The episode does not establish what Josef intended when he arrived, and Stefania leaves without learning what happened afterward. The gap between Adèle’s claim, the kiss Stefania witnesses, and the explanation offered after it is central to the event: Adèle’s joke makes a marriage proposal appear real, then makes the visible intimacy seem dismissible.

Fallout and the Threat of Departure

Stefania does not speak to Adèle for almost a month. She even begins packing to enter the service of a Swabian priest’s family in Solotvyn, converting the hurt into a practical plan to leave the Anger household. Doctor Anger, Stefania believes, has understood what happened and is on her side: he treats Adèle coldly and appears deeply saddened. His reaction reinforces the seriousness of the rupture within the household, even though Stefania does not describe a direct conversation with him about the scene.

Adèle tries to explain herself by appealing to her light moods and joking nature. She says she did not want to offend anyone and had not imagined that something so harmless could hurt Stefania so deeply. Stefania will not listen. She turns away, leaves the room, hides her head beneath the quilt, whistles, mutters, and curses under her breath; at times she simply shuts Adèle’s voice out. Her refusal to hear is matched by a refusal to see: she says that when one does not want to hear, one does not hear, and when one does not want to see, one does not see. She rejects the need for hypnosis or a sacred image to accomplish that withdrawal.

The event therefore ends not with reconciliation or a clarified account of Josef’s intentions, but with Stefania’s deliberate ignorance and departure preparations. Adèle’s explanation cannot undo what Stefania saw, while Stefania’s decision not to listen prevents the explanation from restoring trust. The wardrobe’s promise of concealment has given way to a wider withdrawal from Adèle: for weeks, Stefania treats not knowing as a way to endure what she cannot accept.