Eva's cancer diagnosis and treatment

Eva's cancer diagnosis and treatment mark the beginning of a final illness that medicine can temporarily address but cannot cure. The crisis first enters the household in ordinary language: Eva says she is not well, then repeats herself, and finally asks Delphine to take her to a doctor. The diagnosis turns that understated request into an emergency, and the ensuing treatments make Delphine's friendship with Eva a sustained practice of care and witness.

The Diagnosis and Immediate Response

The warning comes during a sweltering morning. Delphine is in the kitchen after waxing the floor, pleased that Eva has praised its renewed appearance. Eva, who has been awake much of the night baking, says she is not well. Delphine initially answers sympathetically without taking in the seriousness of the words. When Eva repeats the same statement, her quietness and fixed attention to her coffee make Delphine watch more carefully. Before Delphine can return to polishing the floor, Eva touches her hand and asks to be taken to a doctor.

Eva then lies down and does not move. Fidelis Waldvogel is away checking livestock with a farmer, and Delphine cannot find him after visiting Doctor Heech. She instead acts at once: Eva is in the back seat of the delivery car, sedated with morphine, while Delphine carries the doctor's written instructions. Doctor Heech contacts a surgeon and reports that Eva has a tumor pressing on her vital organs. Without removal, he says, it will cause her death within days. The doctor sends Eva toward treatment, but the diagnosis establishes how little time the family may have and how uncertain the prospect of a cure is.

Treatment and Its Limits

The initial treatment follows surgery. In the hospital, hollow metal tubes containing radium are inserted into Eva's uterus; over the weeks, they are removed, refilled, and inserted again. After Eva returns home, the treatment has left her physically unwell, and the cancer continues to spread. She asks Delphine to get lilac water because she feels she smells burned. Delphine buys a large bottle of flower water and washes her with it, but it does not relieve the effects of the treatment.

Doctor Heech next administers monthly radium treatments for the new tumor. He uses long gold needles tipped with iridium, inserting them with forceps. Eva is strapped to a table and given ether for the procedure; after she wakes, she receives morphine. The needles must remain in place for six hours, their black waxed threads arranged across her abdomen. Doctor Heech fears that the procedures are useless and leaves the room angry with himself, an acknowledgment that treatment continues without a credible expectation of recovery. The repeated interventions are therefore both efforts to fight the cancer and reminders of its advance.

Delphine as Caregiver and Witness

Delphine stays with Eva through the long treatments, reading, dozing, or knitting when she can. Her care extends beyond accompanying Eva to the doctor: she carries out the medical instructions, tends to her at home, and remains present while treatment and illness wear her down. Eva's suffering also produces bodily distress in Delphine. She experiences stomach pains as the needles are inserted and a sympathetic sweat, while Eva's illness weighs on her with an exhaustion that makes her want to give up. Delphine nevertheless continues the work and hides her own pain.

This is not her first experience of being unable to stop another person's suffering. Delphine recognizes a recurrence of the helplessness she knew among drunks and in her childhood neighborhood: she can remain beside the afflicted, but cannot make the suffering end. Her response is not a claim that she can save Eva. It is the more limited, repeated decision to stay. That distinction gives the care its force: Delphine's actions are practical, but they do not erase the limits of what practical action can accomplish.

Faith, Care, and the Aftermath

Delphine's way of confronting the illness also differs from the religious attention surrounding Eva. As Eva weakens, Tante gathers Lutheran women to pray at her bedside. Delphine, a Catholic and socially less powerful in Tante's household, struggles to keep them from crowding around Eva. She turns instead to deflection and hospitality, baking a sugar cake so that the visitors will leave to eat. Delphine's irreverent private curse, “Spit in your eye,” expresses her refusal to pretend that prayer answers what she is witnessing. The contrast is not between care and indifference: Delphine's skepticism accompanies close, persistent care, while the prayer circle threatens to overwhelm Eva when she is too weak to send it away herself.

The illness also alters Delphine's understanding of her own life. After Eva's death, she tells her that their friendship changed the direction of her ambitions: she feels that Eva took those ambitions and left her with Eva's life, which she continued to manage. At Eva's grave, Delphine imagines where Eva might lie in relation to Fidelis and herself, and recognizes that her childhood loss of her mother remains present even as she approaches middle age. Eva's illness thus joins present caregiving to Delphine's older experience of maternal absence. Its consequence is not a cure or a simple consolation, but an enduring bond shaped by care, grief, and the knowledge that love cannot prevent death.

Narrative Significance

The diagnosis is introduced not through dramatic symptoms but through Eva's repeated, understated admission and the everyday scene of coffee, floor-waxing, and baking. That quiet beginning makes the change in stakes especially stark: a household routine becomes a rush to medical care, followed by weeks of hospital treatment and recurring procedures. The episode also develops a central distinction between action and control. Delphine can transport Eva, follow instructions, wash and sit with her, and shield her from unwanted visitors; neither her devotion nor the available treatment can stop the cancer. The story makes care consequential without presenting it as a cure, and gives Delphine's continued presence meaning precisely because the outcome cannot be changed.