Mateusz Forcefully Kisses Jagna and Clashes with Dominikowa

Mateusz Forcefully Kisses Jagna and Clashes with Dominikowa turns a private encounter into an open family and reputational conflict. Mateusz returns after an absence of nearly half a year and approaches Jagna with intense affection, but the scene’s central reversal is that his pursuit overwhelms her attempts to withdraw: her distress and uncertainty are set against his physical insistence, while the prospect of discovery makes the encounter dangerous within her mother’s household.

Encounter and escalation

Mateusz greets Jagna, takes her hand, and looks at her ardently. She blushes and glances toward the door; when he tells her he has been away half a year and twenty-three days by his reckoning, she tries to break off the intimacy by offering to light a lamp in the growing darkness. The practical excuse reflects her fear that Dominikowa or someone else may find them alone together.

Before Jagna can reach the fireplace, Mateusz seizes her by the waist, pulls her against him, and kisses her passionately. She struggles like a bird caught in a grasp, asks him to let go, and invokes her mother, but he continues until approaching footsteps make him release her. The physical sequence leaves Jagna breathless and unsteady; Mateusz, by contrast, lights the stove lamp, rolls a cigarette, and watches her with evident satisfaction. When Jędrzych enters, the two say little, exchanging hungry looks instead. The interruption does not resolve the encounter: it makes their attraction visible as a tense, concealed exchange within a shared room.

The confrontation with Dominikowa

Dominikowa arrives soon after Jędrzych enters, already angry from having scolded Szymek in the hallway. Seeing Mateusz, she glares at him without returning his greeting and goes to the storeroom to change. Jagna quietly urges Mateusz to leave before her mother curses him. The warning makes plain that the danger is no longer only the possibility of someone discovering a secret encounter: Dominikowa is present, alert to his pursuit, and prepared to confront him in her own home.

Mateusz initially approaches Dominikowa meekly and makes to kiss her hand. She snatches it away, angrily rejects him, and insists that there is nothing for him in the household. He answers that he has come to see Jagna, not her. Dominikowa then orders him to keep away from her daughter, warning that his behavior will set village tongues wagging and drag Jagna’s name through the mud. Her objection is framed not as a discussion of Jagna’s wishes but as a defense of her reputation against public gossip.

The argument turns toward violence. Mateusz threatens that, if Dominikowa were not a woman, he would crush her ribs; she answers by snatching up an iron poker and daring him to try. He spits and leaves, unwilling to fight a woman and make himself a laughingstock in the village. The poker halts the threat without settling the conflict: Mateusz withdraws, but the dispute over his access to Jagna has become an unmistakable clash between his desire and Dominikowa’s authority in the household.

Jagna’s Account and the Mother’s Response

After Mateusz leaves, Dominikowa turns her anger on Jagna. Jagna sits nearly frozen, then hides her face in the quilt and bursts into tears, denying that she invited him or was to blame for what happened. She recalls an earlier encounter in spring, when Mateusz met her at a stile, and describes a recurring helplessness: when someone fixes her with a look or seizes her, she trembles, feels her will drain away, and can lose awareness of what is happening. Her account reframes the scene not as a willing secret meeting but as a pattern in which Mateusz’s force and her inability to resist leave her distressed and exposed to blame.

Jagna protests quietly through her tears until Dominikowa softens. The mother wipes her daughter’s face and eyes, strokes her head, and soothes her. The shift from scolding to tenderness closes the episode with care rather than a settled judgment: Dominikowa has condemned Mateusz’s pursuit as a threat to Jagna’s name, while Jagna insists that the encounter was not of her choosing.

Narrative Function

The scene moves through a series of failed attempts to contain what is happening: Jagna looks toward the door, turns to the fireplace, and invokes the possibility of her mother’s arrival; then Jędrzych’s entrance interrupts the pair, and Dominikowa’s arrival makes their private tension a direct household confrontation. Each threshold changes who can witness or control the encounter, but none gives Jagna a voice that the others accept without qualification. Mateusz’s physical insistence becomes a threat to her reputation in Dominikowa’s account, while Jagna’s tears and explanation expose the gap between being blamed for an encounter and having freely chosen it. The episode therefore links desire to unequal power: the dispute concerns not only who may approach Jagna, but whose interpretation of her experience will govern what follows.