Le peigne chromé à la libellule

Le peigne chromé à la libellule is a hair ornament given to Stefania by Adèle. Its movement from a familiar gift kept beside Stefania’s bed to an object found among stolen religious treasures makes it a hinge between domestic attachment and the mystery of the thefts. In the final revelation, it belongs to the cache concealed in the stone woman, and its presence exposes how personal possessions, like sacred objects, have been drawn into Stefania’s confused world of dependence and illusion.

Gift and Possession

Stefania recalls the comb as one of the few belongings she can claim: the clothes she inherited from Adèle, the bed that belongs to Adèle, and the chrome comb with a dragonfly that Adèle gave her. It had always been in the drawer beside Stefania’s bed, but when she looks for it, it is gone. The absence unsettles the ordinary certainty of ownership: even the object closest to her daily life seems to have slipped away.

The comb’s gift history binds it to Adèle, while Stefania’s catalogue of possessions makes clear how little she considers wholly her own. She wonders whether she has the right to leave the house at all, and whether she herself belongs to Adèle. The comb is therefore not merely a decorative item; its status as a gift marks a relationship in which care and possession are difficult for Stefania to separate.

The Theft Mystery

The comb’s disappearance takes place against a wave of unexplained thefts from places of worship. A precious monstrance vanishes from a locked cathedral at Ozeriany without damage or witnesses; a silver etrog container disappears from the Old Synagogue in Tchortkiv, and sacred objects are stolen from the synagogue in Brody. Their losses provoke competing explanations, from suspicions of insiders to talk of supernatural removal.

When Father Josef and Petro discuss the thefts, Petro suggests that servants of the religious institutions may be responsible. Father Josef instead points to the coincidence between the disappearances and the performances of Ernest Thorn, a magician and swindler. The comb is not identified as one of the stolen religious objects in this conversation, but its later appearance in the same hidden cache brings Stefania’s missing possession into the broader pattern that the men are trying to explain.

The religious losses also carry meanings beyond their material value. Mr. Baumel laments stolen Torah ornaments and ritual objects, calling the thefts a baleful sign and stressing that the Torah is a living book whose sacred vestments cannot simply be taken. Against these accounts of collective violation, the comb registers a more private loss: a gift tied to one household and to Stefania’s uncertain place within it.

The Cache and Its Revelation

Near the end, the roof collapses amid the fire, and the stone woman falls through the floor beside Stefania and Adèle. Precious objects spill from the jar she carried on her head. Among them are the Ozeriany monstrance, the gold patens depicting the Bethlehem manger and Christ’s tomb, the silver etrog container, the blackened kiddush cup, the lion-adorned hanukkiah, and the emerald-inlaid yad. The comb lies among these items, no longer an isolated missing possession but part of a concealed assemblage that joins thefts from Christian and Jewish places of worship with objects from the Anger household.

Its setting among the stolen treasures changes the meaning of its earlier absence. Stefania had been sure it remained in the drawer; the final scene shows it elsewhere, gathered with objects whose disappearances had inspired fear, suspicion, and apocalyptic explanations. The comb’s small scale and domestic use contrast with the ritual importance of the surrounding objects, yet the shared cache makes both kinds of loss part of the same mystery.

Significance

The comb connects two forms of attachment that the narrative keeps in uneasy proximity: Stefania’s dependence on Adèle and the religious communities’ attachment to their sacred objects. It was given as a personal token, but Stefania’s fear that she belongs to Adèle makes even a gift feel entangled with obligation. Its disappearance thus echoes the larger thefts without being equivalent to them.

When the comb emerges from the stone woman’s jar, familiar distinctions between household property and stolen treasure, private loss and public desecration, are unsettled. The object is both unmistakably intimate and materially implicated in the wider mystery. Its recovery does not resolve the comb’s path or explain the thefts; instead, it makes Stefania’s earlier certainty about the drawer—and her own place in Adèle’s home—look as vulnerable as the religious order shaken by the missing relics.