Eva

Eva’s remembered presence in Delphine’s life is carried by a sound: a rapid, insistent knocking that Delphine recognizes as a message from her dying friend. Years later, the same sound returns in a dream in Germany, where it signals not only Eva’s continuing place in Delphine’s memory but also the illness Fidelis is hiding. The repeated knock binds past bereavement to present foreboding.

The Knocking in Argus

Delphine recognizes Eva’s knock because she has heard it before. Long ago, in Argus, the same tapping entered a dream; when Delphine woke, she knew that Eva was dying. The passage offers no account here of Eva’s diagnosis or death itself. Instead, it gives the loss its defining sign: an ordinary sound that becomes, for Delphine, an unmistakable warning.

This remembered recognition makes Eva’s death an experience Delphine associates with a sudden certainty on waking. The dream does not explain or soften the loss; it makes Delphine’s knowledge arrive through an intimate signal she already knows. Eva remains present in the memory not through description, but through the knock and the grief it announces.

The Dream in Germany

Later, Delphine wakes in Germany beside her husband on a narrow mattress of soft sheep’s wool. The knocking begins within a dream, first loud and whispery, then faster and more urgent, as though it comes from just beyond a wall. Delphine understands it as Eva asking for Fidelis, and recognizes that she will have to return him very soon. The dream’s appeal reaches across distance and time: Eva, dead in Delphine’s earlier life, appears again as the one calling for Fidelis.

The sound also changes what Delphine understands about the present. Waking to the knock, she realizes that Fidelis is hiding his illness. The passage thus turns an old sign of impending death into a warning about another beloved person. Delphine moves close to Fidelis and holds him while he sleeps, feeling his even breath, humming blood, and troubled heartbeat; her recognition leads directly to a gesture of care, even as the dream makes time seem inexorable.

Memory and Foreshadowing

The two moments are joined by repetition, but their stakes shift. In Argus, the knock tells Delphine that Eva is dying. In Germany, its return recalls that knowledge while pointing toward Fidelis’s hidden illness and the prospect that Delphine must soon return him. Eva’s memory therefore acts as a bridge between a past bereavement and a present threat, not as a separate recollection detached from the plot.

The passage gives this foreboding a further image: time is imagined as an army marching like the butchers onto the stage, and as a singing club whose music is smoke and ash. Against that ominous movement, Delphine attends closely to Fidelis’s sleeping body. Eva’s remembered knock makes the danger legible; the scene ends not with certainty about what will happen, but with Delphine holding Fidelis and listening to the life still moving in him.