Delphine's infertility

Delphine’s infertility is presented as a condition she has long understood as part of her life, not as a newly disclosed diagnosis or a problem the plot resolves. She links her expectation of childlessness to what she witnessed in her father’s cellar, and the novel traces how that knowledge coexists with her extensive care for other people’s children. Her story distinguishes biological motherhood from the maternal bonds she forms through attention, work, and responsibility.

Understanding Her Childlessness

Delphine has always expected that her body would not give her children, an expectation she connects to the cellar deaths she witnessed as a girl. The evidence offers no medical account of the condition; instead, it presents the memory as the personal context through which she understands her childlessness. The cellar is therefore not simply a past tragedy in her history: its consequences shape what she imagines for her own future and how she responds to another child’s suffering.

When Delphine thinks about Ruthie Chavers, she imagines a girl enduring hunger and thirst, weakening into delirium, and dying in her mother’s arms. The identification is so intense that she pictures herself as having sat in the cellar and undergone the same ordeal. Her attention to the girl’s suffering thus draws on her own early knowledge of loss, while also placing motherhood—specifically, the comfort of a mother’s arms—at the center of what she remembers.

Motherhood Through Care

Delphine’s childlessness does not leave her without a maternal role. She has helped raise Eva Waldvogel’s boys, and Markus in particular receives the force of her attention. She watches him change after his near-burial: once absorbed in tunnels, boyish battles, and physical play, he becomes a reader and a studious, questioning pupil. The novel makes her bond visible not through a claim of biological kinship but through the years of practical care that accompany his growth.

That care is made of small, repeated acts. When Markus loses his mittens, Delphine scolds him and knits replacements. Because he is thin, she develops strategies to feed him, though they do not solve the problem. She later helps him study, celebrates his school awards, and consoles him when he has to wear eyeglasses. Her concern about the glasses also has a specific future in view: she hopes they will keep him from being accepted into the army. His eventual enlistment shows the limit of her ability to protect him, not the limit of her commitment.

Earlier, Delphine also takes an active role in teaching Markus the routines she thinks he needs to survive. When she decides he must learn self-control before she can send him back to his aunt, she arranges daily practice with Cyprian. They take lemonade behind the henhouse each morning; by the end of the week Markus is dry in the morning. Delphine intends to continue with further lessons, but the arrival of Fidelis interrupts her plan. The episode shows her care as deliberate and practical: she identifies a difficulty, recruits help, and turns instruction into a routine.

The Limits and Costs of Protection

Delphine’s attachment to Markus makes separation consequential. When he tells her he is joining the army, she is prepared for the news but has already tried to forestall it by hoping his glasses would prevent his acceptance. After Markus leaves by bus for Fort Snelling, she bakes into the night and reads library novels while eating cookies intended for his first care package. Her anxious grief returns alongside a dream of the dead from her cellar, including Ruthie rising amid white moths. The narrative brings the two losses into the same emotional space without suggesting they are identical: Markus is alive and away, while the cellar dead remain irretrievable.

She later receives relief when Markus writes that he failed the vision test and will probably have desk work at Officer Candidate School. His letters, far more numerous than Franz’s, give her a continuing connection to his life. When he returns, she sees a spare, thoughtful young man, neat in his pressed clothes, with a square package of cigarettes in his breast pocket. His quick laugh and talent for mimicry persist, as do the sadness and humor she recognizes in his eyes. The changes in him register the distance he has traveled, while his return allows their relationship to continue beyond her earlier role as his daily caretaker.

Work, Marriage, and Unresolved Grief

After Markus leaves, Delphine takes stock of her life. At thirty-five, she recognizes that the person she had called her son is grown and gone, while the fates of the two younger boys in Germany remain unknown to her. She describes her marriage to Fidelis as a love shaped by ordinary business rather than romance: selling and killing, hemming pants, sleeping heavily, and attending to each other’s habits and health. The relationship is precious to her, she understands, partly because it does not possess the overwhelming power she once feared love might have.

The work of the household and shop becomes a substantial part of Delphine’s own life. She likes grocering, butchering, and keeping the accounts; the detail of inventory suits her. In town she becomes respected for her judgment, her thrift, and her ability to know when money should be spent or saved. Her signature in library books also marks reading as a steady presence in her days. These details do not erase her childlessness; they show a life organized around responsibilities and attachments that are real in their own right.

Nourishment and What Cannot Be Replaced

Delphine’s response to Mazarine makes the unresolved ache especially clear. As she reads Mazarine’s letter, she notices the young woman’s pregnancy and later brings out a half-quart of milk. When Mazarine asks where Delphine’s own milk is, she quickly understands that she has touched a hurt. Delphine watches her drink, satisfied that she can provide nourishment and desolate that she has never had to take such pains for a child of her own.

The moment holds together what the novel refuses to simplify. Delphine can nourish, teach, protect, and love; those capacities give substance to her maternal life with Markus and the other boys. Yet practical care does not make her own childlessness disappear. Her satisfaction in feeding Mazarine and her grief at what she has never experienced remain side by side, making infertility neither her whole identity nor a loss that the story pretends has been repaired.