Stefania Tchornenko—Felix

Stefania Tchornenko’s relationship with Felix is built through sustained acts of care: she feeds him, worries over whether he can manage in the world beyond the household, and makes room for him in an imagined future that includes Adèle. Their bond turns domestic service into attachment, but it does not erase the social boundaries that leave Stefania identifying herself as a servant rather than an equal member of the family.

Care Through Food and Service

Stefania’s care for Felix belongs to a larger pattern in which cooking is her most direct means of expressing attachment. She describes preparing food for Adèle and Petro as giving herself to them, and their willingness to eat becomes a measure of whether they accept her. That emotional logic shapes her relationship with Felix: meals are not merely provision but a way of sustaining someone whose place in the household and future remain uncertain.

The care is practical as well as emotional. Petro brings brown plush fabric and white cotton and asks Stefania to take Felix to Helman Cohen and Sons to be measured for a suit and shirts. Felix has grown and gained weight, and can no longer curl himself into every small recess. Stefania sees the change as welcome evidence of his development, yet it also prompts her to wonder whether he could still earn a living in the street or with Ernest Thorn’s troupe, where his former abilities might once have been useful.

Growth and a First Word

Stefania understands Felix’s adaptation to ordinary life through a precarious image: he has become an acrobat learning to balance on the thread of real life, and she fears he may fall. His increasing familiarity with her cakes, soups, meat, desserts, and fruit mousses accompanies a visible transformation. He becomes healthier in appearance, with rounded, rosy cheeks, and seems less able to retreat into the confined spaces that once suited him.

A decisive change comes when Petro teaches Felix to speak. Stefania hears his voice for the first time as he brings Adèle new silk threads for embroidery and says “maman.” Adèle is listening too; when Stefania arrives, Adèle meets her at the bedroom door and silently signals that she has heard the word. The moment joins Felix’s emerging speech to the household’s intimate relationships, while leaving its meaning open: Stefania witnesses a new capacity in him, but Adèle shares the recognition.

Protection and Vulnerability

Felix’s unusual physical flexibility continues to shape Stefania’s concern for his safety even after he has grown heavier. When she goes to the roof to bring him down discreetly, she wonders how he managed to pass through a round opening too narrow for a cat. She has difficulty lifting the metal hatch and finds him curled around the Stone Woman in the attic. Her response is gentle and immediate: she tells him he is cold and offers to find something good for him. The scene makes care a repeated practice of locating Felix in hidden or precarious spaces and coaxing him toward warmth and food.

The danger becomes more severe in the final fire. Stefania hears Felix’s small footsteps and recognizes that he has climbed onto the roof and slipped through the gap into the attic. Although she has fed him richly, including chocolate mousse, his cutis hyperelastica and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome have not disappeared. Felix makes his way down the ladder after the fire has spread from the salon and destroyed a substantial part of the house; he reaches the entrance and works at the metal padlock. Stefania understands that help is coming as firefighters from the railway and Kniahinyn-Colonia are already on their way, and she holds Adèle close. Felix’s actions make him part of the family’s immediate struggle to survive, not merely the object of Stefania’s private worry.

Family, Service, and an Imagined Future

Stefania’s attachment to Felix exists within a household where she remains conscious of her subordinate position. She has learned to swallow her bitterness and continue her work because she believes her role is to make life easier for Adèle. Adèle, in turn, describes Stefania’s upbringing as a deliberate education in service, maintained through a claimed balance of affection and discipline. Their account reveals how intimacy and hierarchy coexist: Stefania’s care is genuine, but the household also treats that care as part of her assigned function.

Petro gives Stefania’s contribution a different name when he helps carry dishes into the kitchen and tells her that, without her, the household could not have become what it is; he calls her family. Stefania lowers her eyes and dismisses his praise as the result of drink, insisting that she has no time to talk. Felix’s relationship with her thus develops within competing descriptions of belonging: she performs the work that binds the household together, receives Petro’s acknowledgment, and nevertheless speaks of herself as only a servant.

During the fire, Stefania imagines a future with Velvele in which his capital and business sense combine with her cooking in a restaurant in Vienna. She pictures the restaurant bearing her name and serving people who will carry her food and affection across Europe and over the ocean. In that imagined future, they will meet Adèle and greet her child. Felix is not explicitly named in this vision, so it does not establish his place in the plan; instead, it shows how Stefania’s hopes for independence remain intertwined with her attachment to Adèle and the household’s children. Her bond with Felix is consequently marked by both concrete acts of protection and an unresolved question of what family can mean for someone whose labor is treated as both indispensable and expected.