Delphine Watzka and Clarisse Strub

Delphine Watzka and Clarisse Strub are childhood friends whose shared passion for disguise and performance becomes both the origin and the durable language of their relationship. They imagine leaving Argus together, but adult obligations keep Clarisse in the town and draw Delphine elsewhere before she returns. Their friendship endures that divergence through private theatrical jokes, mutual loyalty, and the ordinary intimacy of working and talking together.

Childhood and theatrical bond

As girls, Delphine and Clarisse made shows in Clarisse’s backyard, hanging a sheet over a clothesline for a curtain and playing every part through elaborate costume changes and stage directions. An old captain’s lamp supplied a makeshift spotlight, its glow directed onto the grass after dark. Their ingenuity and eccentric dress attracted a mixture of derision and awe from the other children, but the girls’ loyalty helped them withstand the teasing. Over time, the town’s response shifted: unable to harm the pair, it began to accept and even cherish their entertainment. They became known as “those two girls,” a local oddity whose performances had earned respect.

Their friendship also grew through shared work onstage. They performed as the first and second witches in Macbeth and knew practically the entire play, having understudied Lady Macbeth and the other roles as well. The lines could become a private exchange: when Clarisse, dressed for work, greeted Delphine with a line from the witches’ scene, Delphine answered with the next. Their performance was not merely a childhood pastime; it furnished a familiar, playful mode of communication that survived into adulthood.

Different futures in Argus

In their shared daydreams, the girls leave Argus for cities, other people, and real theaters. Delphine briefly pursues a version of that imagined life, but her role becomes that of a human table supporting Cyprian Lazarre’s flamboyant balancing act. Clarisse, by contrast, never leaves town. After high school, her father and uncle need her in the family funeral business, Strub’s Funerary, and she inherits the expectation that she will carry it on. Her parents’ loss ends her opportunity to continue school or make drama her life; her aunt Benta believes Clarisse has a natural aptitude for embalming.

Clarisse’s work makes her an unusually capable presence among the dead. She assists in an advanced, well-regarded funeral practice trusted by people in towns beyond Argus, while her friends and classmates know that those who remain in town may one day come into her care. She is pretty and flirtatious, accomplished in the dissection of a flatworm, and still marked by a bright, mocking expression, but her vocation demands composure and practical attention. Delphine recognizes the Strubs’ matter-of-fact sympathy: their control and reverence around the dead offer relief to a community made helpless by death.

Confidence, discretion, and mutual care

Clarisse trusts Delphine with a painful episode she shares with almost no one. After an unexplained infection—possibly connected to a body she had assisted in embalming—Clarisse undergoes lengthy treatment supervised by Doctor Heech. The treatment includes intravenous salvarsan and deep-tissue mercury injections, both distressing procedures. Delphine is frightened by seeing her friend suffer, but stays and holds her hand throughout. She is the only person outside Doctor Heech who knows what happened and, apart from Clarisse’s family, the only person admitted to the private basement of Strub’s Funerary. The confidence is an especially intimate measure of the trust between them.

Their ease does not depend on being alone together in a private room. At the site where bodies are being prepared, Clarisse breaks professional formality when she sees Delphine: she removes her mask and gloves, looks to make sure no one is watching, and then plays out a grotesque face in the style of their old theatrical mischief. The joke is brief, bounded by the solemn demands of her work. When Aurelius Strub returns, Clarisse signals that they will talk later, and the two communicate their sympathy through facial expressions. Friendship here means knowing when to play, when to wait, and how to understand one another without a full explanation.

Adult friendship and renewed closeness

After Delphine begins working at Waldvogel’s Meats, Clarisse moves her grocery trade there from Kozka’s market. She has inherited her parents’ house and unwinds by cooking elaborate meals in her mother’s kitchen; Delphine saves the leanest cuts of meat for her. Their conversation continues amid the shop’s generators and meat grinders. When Clarisse begins to raise a piece of news, Delphine feels guilty about talking on the job but makes room for her because business is slow. The small scene shows the friendship not as a relic of childhood but as a living routine woven into work, food, and confidences.

The distinction between their imagined future and their actual lives remains important. Clarisse accepts that she is needed in the family business and that her aptitude suits the work, even as the theatrical life they once pictured recedes. Delphine, meanwhile, has had her own ambitions narrowed: she would rather design costumes, sew, build sets, or perform than butcher meat. Her bond with Clarisse connects her present life to the imaginative freedom they made together as children, without pretending that either woman has escaped the constraints that shaped her adult path.

Narrative significance

The friendship joins performance to care. As girls, Delphine and Clarisse use costume, role-playing, and elaborate staging to make themselves resilient against ridicule; as adults, their theatrical language remains available inside a world of labor and death. Clarisse’s work requires seriousness, but the old Macbeth exchange lets her welcome Delphine without denying the gravity around them. Their relationship also provides a counterpoint to the different futures they imagined: one friend stays to serve the dead of Argus, while the other leaves, performs, and eventually returns to practical work in town. What persists is not a shared destination but loyalty, familiarity, and the ability to recognize each other across changed circumstances.