Stefania and Adèle’s Enmeshed Dependency

Stefania and Adèle’s Enmeshed Dependency is the lifelong attachment that binds Stefania to Adèle as companion, caretaker, and self-appointed guardian. It precedes Adèle’s marriage and survives its disruptions, but it is not simply mutual affection: Stefania’s practical care, fear of abandonment, jealousy, and obedience to Doctor Anger’s deathbed charge make closeness both a source of belonging and a constraint on her independence.

A Bond That Precedes the Marriage

Stefania describes herself and Adèle as having grown up together and never been separated. The scale of that claim is deliberately enlarged beyond ordinary chronology: in Stefania’s account, their togetherness reaches back to the creation of the world, before the serpent dared emerge from the earth. The extravagant image expresses how she understands their bond—not as a friendship begun at a particular time, but as a permanent condition.

Their shared routines make that imagined permanence concrete. Since childhood, Stefania has been the first to rise and empty their common chamber pot. Petro’s mockery cannot change the custom. Stefania accepts separate chamber pots as a concession, and has taken a separate bed, yielding the warmer place to Petro; even these adjustments leave the older pattern of intimate service intact.

Adèle’s Marriage and Stefania’s Place

The bond follows Adèle into marriage. Stefania accompanies Adèle and Petro on their honeymoon to Krakow, Budapest, and Vienna. Petro agrees only after several nights of Adèle’s tears because Adèle is afraid to travel without Stefania. For the month-long journey, Stefania continues to manage Adèle’s needs: she arranges for them to receive soft-boiled eggs while Petro receives none, searches each morning for fresh cream for Adèle’s coffee, and takes charge of her hair, clothes, and dressing.

This practical intimacy sits uneasily beside the marriage. Adèle confides that Petro is intensely drawn to her, and Stefania tends to the painful marks left on Adèle’s skin with lavender cream. The account places Stefania close to the private realities of the marriage while also showing that Petro resents her presence. He behaves as though Stefania does not exist; she, meanwhile, remains indispensable to Adèle’s daily comfort. The relationship is therefore not merely a childhood attachment carried into adulthood: marriage makes Stefania’s service more contested without dislodging it.

Separation, Jealousy, and Return

During the honeymoon, an episode at the baths leaves Stefania convinced that she and Adèle will never again be together. At the end of the trip, she runs away from the others at the Prater and reaches the bank of the Danube Canal. Watching the water flow, she finds a way to understand her attachment without demanding that it be returned in an identical form: she can be like the canal, continuing to flow and to love Adèle.

Stefania returns to the hotel calmer. Petro lets her in and looks at her with a new interest and gentleness. She understands this change through the household’s power relations: Petro now decides who may approach Adèle, and Stefania feels grateful that he allows her near. The moment marks a shift from assuming that her place is guaranteed to recognizing that access to Adèle can be controlled by her husband.

The closeness does not prevent conflict. Stefania admits that she is jealous, then judges that feeling as ridiculous because she and Adèle are neither friends nor sisters; she can find no word for the bond that has sewn them together. She privately hopes that Petro will lose interest and withdraw if he learns that Adèle is infertile, leaving Stefania some of her former place. The hope exposes the possessive strain within her devotion: she wants Adèle’s companionship and also wants relief from the husband who has entered their shared life.

Care as Duty and Identity

Adèle’s infertility deepens Stefania’s role as caretaker. Doctor Anger had said that Adèle, like her mother Thérèse, could conceive only through a miracle, and specialists’ examinations confirmed that she could not have a child. Stefania responds by tending to Adèle’s distress and physical weakness: she holds her hand, changes the pillowcase wet with tears, prepares cold cucumber-juice compresses, and makes nourishing food, including pigeon and the broth known as Maria-Theresienbouillon. Her service is not an abstract declaration of loyalty; it is repeated work directed at the particular needs of Adèle’s body and household.

Stefania describes the result as quiet rather than happiness. Adèle’s inability to have a child is, in her view, an injustice, and she imagines Adèle’s delicate hands and gentle voice as suited to caring for and singing to children. Stefania, by contrast, says she does not want a child: she already has someone to care for, and her love cannot extend to anyone else. The contrast makes care both her chosen devotion and a limit she imposes on her own future.

The Deathbed Charge and Its Consequences

Doctor Anger gives Stefania’s attachment an explicit command. Near death, he compares Stefania and Adèle to two trees whose trunks have grown intertwined, asks her to think of Adèle and of her own life, and tells her that she must serve Adèle. Stefania does not hear every word clearly, but the instruction becomes more powerful than its uncertain delivery: after Doctor Anger dies, she says, the words continue to pulse through her and direct her through dozens of daily tasks, each like a prayer for Adèle.

The charge offers Stefania a reason to remain, but it also makes leaving feel like a betrayal of both Adèle and the dead doctor. When she considers disappearing into a convent or taking work as a companion to an older woman, she immediately imagines that Adèle could not manage without her. She fears that Adèle’s anemia, migraines, and difficulty with ordinary tasks would leave her vulnerable to illness or accident. This is Stefania’s conviction, not an independently established forecast; its importance lies in how completely it closes off separation in her mind.

Stefania’s later conduct shows the cost of that conviction. She recalls earlier quarrels in which she and Adèle wept, sought forgiveness, appeared to reconcile, and then began again, sometimes in the same bed. She remembers Adèle calling her a slave, accusing her of stealing Doctor Anger’s watch, and becoming angry when household duties took precedence over Adèle’s appearance before a concert. Stefania now swallows her bitterness and continues her work, saying that she is not there to establish justice but to make Adèle’s life easier. The deathbed command has become a daily practice of service: sustaining the bond also means accepting an unequal place within it.