Tante

Tante, Fidelis’s sister and guardian to the boys, is a forceful, anxious presence in the family’s household and travels. Her authority rests on vigilance: she counts what is owed to her, guards her belongings, and treats ordinary exposure to cold or infection as a danger requiring elaborate defenses. Yet the attempted journey to Germany ends not through her planning but when Markus becomes gravely ill on the morning they are to leave, bringing her guardianship and the family’s plans into sharp relief.

Identity and Family Role

Tante is Fidelis’s sister and the aunt responsible for the boys. The evidence presents her chiefly through her dealings with Delphine, Fidelis, and Markus: she complains openly, keeps close account of her possessions, and speaks with confidence about the boys’ prospects. Her domestic authority is real, but it is not absolute. Fidelis can guide her through the city, while Delphine takes charge of the boys and makes decisions about their immediate care.

The family’s arrangements place Tante in a difficult position between dependence and command. During the journey, Fidelis leads her into a delicatessen and seats her at a table while Delphine settles the boys separately and helps them choose the least expensive items on the menu. Tante’s grievances continue even as the others manage the practical demands around her. The scene shows that her complaints do not prevent the family from acting, but they help define the work of accommodating her.

Travel and Domestic Vigilance

On the eve of the planned departure, Tante shares a hotel room with Delphine. The lodging is modest but clean, with a single bathroom down the hall; the boys sleep with Fidelis. Delphine has dreaded sharing the room, and the first night passes largely through exhaustion. Tante’s hand flicks out in sleep close to Delphine’s face, an unsettling detail in their cramped arrangement.

That evening, Tante says someone has been in the room and immediately checks her bags. She kneels before her brown cowhide valise, takes out each garment, and examines it suspiciously before carefully repacking her shabby slips, tissue-thin bloomers, and newer clothes sewn on her own machine. The inspection gives her anxiety a physical routine: possessions are removed, scrutinized, and restored, while Delphine watches. The sewing machine is the notable exception, left under lock and key with the hotel manager; Delphine has already checked that it remains there.

Tante’s fear of illness is just as concrete. After Delphine opens the window, Tante panics at the prospect of cold air touching her skin. She sleeps bundled in a muffler, with a towel at her throat, felt slippers laced around her feet, and flannel laid over her chest. Before bed she rubs her skin with a salve made of lard and petroleum jelly, scented with camphor and orange water but still carrying a rancid undertone. She prays quietly in German and falls asleep in this cumbersome defense against sickness. Her precautions are not casual eccentricities: the scene makes them an organized attempt to control a world she experiences as physically threatening.

Her speech in sleep briefly turns the scene toward the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. Tante asks for a finger in German, echoing the witch’s demand in the story and striking Delphine as an alarming omen. The moment does not establish Tante as a threat; rather, it layers the familiar anxieties of the cramped hotel room with a folkloric unease that Delphine cannot simply dismiss.

Authority, Money, and the Boys

Tante presents herself as influential in the boys’ lives and, in a letter from Germany, says that they have started school and joined a government youth group whose selection process was difficult. She implies that she used some of the money Fidelis sent to bribe officials so they would be admitted, although she also says that the boys passed rigorous tests. The account leaves the use of the money ambiguous: it conveys Tante’s claim to have managed the boys’ advancement, but does not independently confirm her implication about bribery.

Her practical life is also tied to sewing. In America she initially gives demonstrations using her sewing machine, then concludes that the American model is inferior to the German one. The machine links her daily work to the same national comparison that surfaces in her report from Germany. Her confidence in the German model is presented as her own judgment, not as a general conclusion about the machines.

Tante’s authority over Markus is tested by Delphine’s efforts to teach the boy self-control and the routines needed to stay dry in the mornings. Delphine is unwilling to send him back to his aunt without first giving him these skills. Cyprian agrees with her plan, and she takes Markus outside behind the henhouse with a pitcher of lemonade each morning. By the end of the week he is dry in the morning. Delphine hopes to continue by teaching him to feign an epileptic fit to deter Tante, but Fidelis arrives before those lessons begin. The contrast is telling: Delphine’s care is built from patient instruction, while Tante’s power over the boys is something Delphine anticipates having to counter.

Markus’s Illness and the Interrupted Journey

On the morning the family is due to leave, Markus becomes extraordinarily ill during the night. His fever is high enough that Fidelis comes to Delphine’s room before sunrise and asks her to stay with the boy while he searches for a pharmacy. The twins are dressing sleepily, excited by the departure, but Markus is feverish, dry, and visibly unwell. Delphine feels his racing, unsteady pulse and sees his face contort.

Delphine responds with practical care. She takes a wash basin from the boys, helps Markus over it when he feels sick, cleans the basin scrupulously, and returns with cold water to wipe his forehead, cheeks, throat, ears, wrists, and forearms. She fears that the illness might pass as suddenly as it came, but it does not. The departure is therefore halted by a real and continuing medical crisis, not by a change of mind or a quarrel with Tante.

The account suggests that Markus himself later wondered whether some hidden part of him had foreseen what would happen had he boarded the train to New York and then the ship to Germany. That is presented as his later speculation, not as a confirmed cause of the fever. For Tante, the outcome means that the journey she was to undertake with the boys is stopped at its threshold. Her authority as their guardian remains part of the family’s arrangement, but the immediate crisis shifts care to Delphine and makes Markus’s condition decisive.

Characterization and Narrative Significance

Tante is drawn through small, precise acts rather than through an account of her inner life: the valise unpacked garment by garment, the sewing machine placed in safekeeping, the layers of cloth and salve, the muffled prayer. These details make her vigilance visible and give it both comic and uneasy force. Delphine’s attention to Tante is often wary; sharing a room with her feels oppressive, and the sleeping fairy-tale phrase briefly makes that unease uncanny. Yet the novel does not reduce Tante to a single frightening image. Her role is also practical and familial: she has cared for the boys, reports their schooling, and presents herself as someone who has secured their place in a demanding youth group.

Tante’s scenes also expose the limits of guardianship. She can inspect luggage and insist on precautions, but she cannot determine the course of the family’s journey when Markus falls ill. Around the boy, Delphine supplies the intimate care that his fever requires, while Fidelis goes out for medicine. The difference is not simply between a good and bad caretaker; it is a change in who can meet the immediate need. Tante’s presence helps make family authority feel contested and contingent, while the interrupted trip shows how bodily vulnerability can overrule plans, claims, and household hierarchies.