Delphine and Eva’s friendship

Delphine and Eva’s friendship becomes one of the central bonds of chosen family in their lives. Delphine first recognizes Eva’s character in the way she treats animals and the people others dismiss; over time, that regard deepens into mutual trust, intimate care through illness, and a lasting relationship that shapes how Delphine understands motherhood, loss, and her own future. After Eva dies, Delphine does not simply remember her: she continues the work of the household and helps raise the boys, carrying Eva’s influence into the family’s daily life.

Recognition and growing trust

Delphine’s admiration begins with close observation. When the Kozkas give the Waldvogels a white German shepherd, Eva treats the dog not as a pet to be indulged but as a companion and fellow guardian. She scratches where the dog cannot reach and brushes its matted fur. Delphine sees the care Eva extends both to the animal and to people treated as outsiders, including Step-and-a-Half. This sensitivity persuades Delphine that Eva has rare qualities, and makes her love her all the more.

Their friendship develops through the ordinary labor of the meat shop and home. Delphine works beside Eva through the oppressive heat, cleaning and waxing the shop floor while the family struggles to keep food from spoiling. When Eva first says she is unwell, Delphine is so absorbed in the heat and her own work that she scarcely registers it; Eva repeats the words, and Delphine then attends to her symptoms. The scene reveals both the familiarity between them and the limits of what either can yet know: care begins amid routine, before the illness’s full gravity has become clear.

Eva also gives Delphine a place in the Waldvogel family’s emotional life. After Eva dies, Delphine thinks that Franz’s attachment to Mazarine may be profound because she has seen how deeply he loved his mother. Delphine’s concern for the boys grows out of her recognition of their bereavement, and she becomes protective of them partly because she knows their lives remain threaded through their love for Eva.

Care through illness and death

As Eva’s cancer advances, Delphine stays with her through painful treatments and prolonged waiting. She reads, dozes, or knits while the treatments take effect, and experiences her friend’s suffering as a burden that seems to reach her own body. She keeps going even when she cannot stop the illness. Her response is practical rather than pious: she uses the blunt curse “Spit in your eye” as a prayer suited to her anger and helplessness, while also keeping unwanted visitors from crowding Eva’s bedside.

At the end, Eva tells Delphine that Franz’s father was Johannes Grunberg, not Fidelis, and explains that Fidelis already knows. The disclosure is one of the intimate truths Eva has repeatedly tried to tell her, but this time she turns instead to what she needs from Delphine. She asks Delphine alone to handle her body and to write to her mother, saying that Delphine cared for her and that she loved her. The request confirms the trust between them in the most concrete terms: Eva chooses Delphine to carry out the final acts of care and to speak for her to the family she leaves behind.

Delphine holds Eva’s hand and stays focused on her face as Eva dies. She later thinks she should have called Fidelis or the boys, but in the moment she understands that Eva is afraid and wants her hand held. Delphine does not let go. Their friendship’s culmination is not a speech or a cure, but this sustained presence at the threshold of death, answering Eva’s last request with the care she had asked for.

A friendship carried into family life

After Eva’s death, Delphine’s work with the boys extends the friendship into a form of maternal care. Markus confides in her most readily when she is occupied with kitchen chores: she deliberately draws out cooking and conversation, and he tells her about school, his dreams, the hill, and his mother. Their conversations connect grief to ordinary domestic life. When Delphine says she will never make Eva’s dumpling-soup recipe as well as Eva did, Markus tells her that hers is good too; Delphine strokes his hair, moved by the acceptance implicit in his answer.

Delphine also responds to Markus’s impending departure for Germany by trying to contain what she cannot easily say. She talks about Eva’s preference for marmalade made from Spanish oranges, then admits that she is broken up inside and does not want Markus to see it. When he leans his head against her arm, she recognizes the gesture as his choice of her and resolves not to let him go. Her bond with Markus is not a replacement for Eva; it is one of the ways the friendship’s care continues through the family Eva entrusted to her.

That continuity shapes Delphine’s sense of herself as a mother. She has long believed that her body would not give her children, a belief sharpened by what she witnessed in the cellar of her father’s house. She feels the absence less keenly than she might have because she helped raise Eva’s boys, especially Markus. She scolds him for losing mittens and knits replacements, tries to feed him when he is thin, helps him study, celebrates his school awards, and hopes glasses might keep him out of the army. Her maternal role is made through repeated acts of attention rather than biological descent.

Memory, inheritance, and continuing life

Delphine preserves Eva’s presence through objects and routines. In her room, she keeps the quilt Eva made and traces its small stitches, feeling that the work connects her to the friend who made it. She imagines that the stitches might as well have been made into her own skin, and takes comfort in believing that Eva’s personality remains imprinted on her. Her room’s warmth and carefully tended belongings become a private setting in which memory can be lived with, even as the Chavers family’s deaths continue to trouble her.

Years later, Delphine visits Eva’s grave and speaks to her beneath the pine tree she planted behind the gravestone. She tells Eva that their meeting changed what she wanted: Eva took Delphine’s ambitions and left her with Eva’s life, and Delphine kept running things. The statement gathers friendship, loss, and responsibility into a single inheritance. Delphine’s continuing work is not only a duty to the living; it is also how she understands herself as carrying Eva forward.

Her imagined place in the cemetery keeps that bond within a wider network of attachment. Fidelis will lie beside Eva, while Delphine has claimed the other side; now she wishes Eva could lie between them, with Roy beyond her. Beneath the pine, Delphine feels the loneliness left by her own childhood loss and longs for the comfort of a mother’s presence. The grief does not erase her friendship with Eva. Instead, the novel links the two forms of attachment: Delphine’s care for Eva and Eva’s family gives her a life to continue, while the older wound of maternal absence remains part of what makes that care so consequential.