Zuzanna Ferenz

Zuzanna Ferenz, addressed as Mademoiselle Zuza, is a wealthy, unmarried hostess whose mountain villa becomes part of Stefania Tchornenko’s childhood holiday memories. She treats Stefania with a tenderness that reverses the girl’s usual role as a servant, but that intimacy is shadowed by possession: Zuza eventually offers to buy her. Her story links the comforts of travel and care to the unequal power governing who may move, serve, and belong.

Identity and Setting

During the Anger family’s recurring holidays in Dora, Adèle Anger and Stefania stay at Zuzanna’s wooden, two-storey villa. A narrow turret rises from its center, and a lace-like balcony wraps around the building. The house belongs to Zuzanna through inheritance: her brother, a prosperous craftsman who had no family of his own, spent seven thousand crowns building it. She explains that receiving guests helps her stave off boredom, and the villa gives her a life of leisure rather than hard labor.

Zuzanna is slight and dry in appearance, shrewd-eyed, and given to blowing smoke rings from a small pipe. Her conversation is full of complaints, yet she takes pride in her house and the means it affords her. She likes jewelry and trifles—necklaces, Venetian glass, copper chains, little crosses, dice, and coins—and lives like a grand lady, in fine fabrics and fine sheets. She washes her hair often and takes her time arranging it. These details give her a self-fashioned elegance that is both a pleasure and a display of the security her inheritance provides.

A Caregiver Who Reverses Stefania’s Role

Zuzanna’s bond with Stefania develops through a reversal of the household’s usual hierarchy. Stefania serves the Angers; Zuzanna, who has a young Hutsul couple to help her, makes the girl the object of her own attentive service. She plays with Stefania as if she were a doll, combs her hair, places necklaces around her neck, and feeds her raspberries and rich cheese. The girl’s holiday memories retain the physical particularity of that care: after returning from the mountain, Stefania first washes Adèle, then Zuzanna washes her.

Their days outdoors are recalled in details that make the relationship feel companionable rather than merely ceremonial. Stefania tells Zuzanna about a lizard whose tail she pulled off, prickly carline thistles dried in the sun, and a horse named Ioura that Ossyp let her ride bareback. Zuzanna holds her pipe between her teeth and rubs her with a damp sponge without speaking. Stefania cannot imagine that the washing could give Zuzanna pleasure, but the scene nevertheless makes her care tangible: it is work performed on the girl’s body, distinct from the labor Stefania herself performs for others.

The tenderness is not free of control. Zuzanna enjoys dressing and arranging Stefania, and she values the girl’s ability to remain still and obey. When Doctor Anger later tells Adèle that Zuzanna wanted to buy Stefania, Adèle explains that Zuzanna liked her hair and her compliance but did not know how difficult Stefania could be. The doll-like affection therefore carries an implicit demand: the child is cherished partly in the form of someone quiet, beautiful, and manageable.

Possession, Money, and the Refusal to Be Sold

Zuzanna’s fondness exists alongside pronounced thrift. She counts every coin more than once and checks before each departure that Stefania has not taken one of her silk handkerchiefs or a translucent white-stone comb. The vigilance over small possessions contrasts with her lavish-seeming generosity toward the girl, revealing how carefully she guards what she owns even while indulging her taste for adornment.

The conflict becomes explicit when Zuzanna proposes to Doctor Anger that he sell Stefania to her, offering as much as she would pay for a good carriage. Zuzanna’s affection thus crosses into a claim of ownership. Adèle recalls Doctor Anger’s furious refusal: he would not sell a living person, and Stefania was part of the family he had raised after saving her from a fire. In his comparison, she was as inseparable from the household as the gold watch inherited from his father. Stefania takes the watch comparison as proof of how precious she is to him, while the episode also exposes the social danger of a servant-child being treated as something that can be transferred for money.

Zuzanna’s own words sharpen that danger. She asks why Doctor Anger needs two children when he already has one, while she has none. The remark makes her desire for Stefania intelligible as more than a taste for the girl’s hair and obedience: she wants the place of a child in her household. But the story supplies no adoption or lasting change in Stefania’s status. Doctor Anger refuses the sale, and the family stops visiting Zuzanna after the scandal.

The Wedding Gift and the Rupture

Zuzanna reappears in Adèle and Petro’s marriage through a magnificent lace bedcover she sends as a wedding present. Adèle is delighted, while Stefania finds the gift surprising because she remembers Zuzanna as exceptionally stingy. The apparent generosity seems to offer a gracious reconciliation, but it soon proves to rest on a mistake.

A young Hutsul man unknown to the family arrives carrying a letter from Zuzanna. She writes that she had thought Stefania, not Adèle, was the bride; the bedcover was meant for Stefania, and she asks for it back now that the confusion has been cleared up. She adds that she will marry the young messenger in a month and will need the bedcover. Adèle returns the parcel, directing at him all the contempt she can muster. The incident turns an elaborate gift into a claim that can be withdrawn, and it makes Zuzanna’s marriage another practical context for the object she wants returned.

The contrast between the two episodes is pointed. As a child, Stefania is cherished through food, grooming, and bathing, and Zuzanna tries to secure her through a proposed purchase; as an adult bride, Stefania is again the intended recipient of an intimate household object, but only because Zuzanna mistakes whose wedding is taking place. Once the mistake is corrected, the gift goes back. Zuzanna’s attachment leaves a vivid impression on Stefania’s memories, yet it never overcomes the possessiveness and calculation that shape it.

Memory, Travel, and Narrative Significance

Zuzanna belongs to a recurring pattern in Stefania’s account of travel: Adèle goes to Carlsbad, Dora, or Yaremche for rest and health, while Stefania goes along as part of the household’s service. Adèle is taken to the mountains to regain color and strength; Stefania’s presence is justified with the practical joke that someone must empty the chamber pots. In Dora, however, the customary hierarchy temporarily shifts. Zuzanna’s villa offers Stefania a place where another person combs her hair, feeds her, and washes her, even though the affection remains entangled with obedience and possession.

That reversal gives the holiday memories their ambiguity. The villa’s beautiful furnishings, Zuzanna’s ornaments, and the attentions lavished on Stefania suggest a sheltered, almost doll-like world. Yet its protection is conditional: the girl is valued for qualities Zuzanna can admire and command, and the offer to buy her reveals how easily care can imitate ownership. The returned bedcover repeats the pattern in miniature—an intimate gift becomes recoverable property when its intended recipient is mistaken. Zuzanna is therefore neither simply a benevolent guardian nor only a miserly antagonist; she is a figure through whom Stefania remembers being cherished, handled, and claimed at once.