Dedication
For Gregg, my love in any timeline
Epigraph
She dieda famous womandenying
her woundscamefrom the same source as her power
—ADRIENNE RICH
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Marie
Marya
Marya
Marie
Marya
Marie
Marya
Marie
Marya
Marie
Marya
Marie
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Marie
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Marie
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Marie
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Marie
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Marie
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Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Read On
Praise
Also by Jillian Cantor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Marie
France, 1934
In the end, my world is dark. My bones are tired, my marrow failing. I have given my whole life to my work, but now, science brings me no comfort.
My two Nobel medals aren’t here, keeping me warm, holding my hand. My Petites Curies cannot drive me into a heaven that I do not even believe exists, nor fix my bones the way I used them to help fix soldiers in the war. I can no longer really make out the glow of the radium tube on my nightstand. I know it is here, but that does not make me feel better. My eyesight has failed me enough that everything is almost blackness.
I am sixty-six years old, and I convalesce, my bones no longer able to carry the weight of me out of this bed. Nearly all day I sleep, but still I dream. Pierre comes back to me most of all, though it has been so long since I’ve seen him. And yet, when I close my eyes it could still be yesterday, and all the pain catches in my chest, and I stop breathing for a moment. Then I awaken, and I start again. I am not dead just yet.
Ève is here, though. She calls my name out in the darkness.
Maman, is there anything you need?
I can see the shape of her when I open my eyes again, more a shadow than my youngest daughter. The girl with the radium eyes. I wish I’d learned to understand her piano music more when I’d had the chance. There is more than science, I want to tell her now. Play all the concert halls you dream of, find a man who is your equal and love each other. But the words don’t quite come out.
Of course, I will play you a song, she says.
Maybe that is what I have asked of her instead. Because then there is the tinkling of piano keys, like raindrops on the metal roof of our laboratory that last morning with Pierre.
So much has happened since then; it is strange to be thinking about that rainy day again, that moment, now. I do not believe in the afterlife, or in God. I do not believe that Pierre will be waiting for me, somewhere, after all of this. My body, my bones, will be interred in the ground, and eventually turn to dust. And what will any of that matter anyway, once my heart stops, my brain deprived of oxygen, my mind completely gone? My mind. That is who I am, and who I was. Irène and Fred will carry on my work at the Institute, and everything I have done will not be lost. That should be enough now. I know that it should. But somehow it is not; my mind is still craving one last scientific problem, one more quandary before I go.
MAMAN. ÈVE’S VOICE AGAIN.
Hours have passed, or maybe just minutes? Or has it been days? My beautiful daughter, she is a shadow, hovering again. No, there are two shadows now. I wish for the second one to be Irène, my eldest daughter, my heart, my companion, my confidante. But the shadow is much too large, much taller than Ève.
Someone came to see you, Ève says. He says you were friends long ago, back in Poland.
He?
The shape becomes a memory, and my sense of smell has not left me yet. I inhale: peppermint and pipe smoke. And then the icy river in Szczuki; the pine cones and fir trees lining the road where we walked together.
Marya, he says my given name now, a shock after some forty years of being called Marie. Or maybe I am remembering it the way he said my name back then, when he asked me to marry him, once, by the river.
We were so young then, we had nothing but the way we felt about each other. Until we didn’t even have that and I left Szczuki heartbroken. Kazimierz Zorawski is from another life.
Marya, he says again now. He must’ve sat down in a chair by my bed, because when I open my eyes again, his shadow is smaller, closer to me. I feel the weight of a hand on mine, and I know. I just know. It is his hand, and it still feels the same after all these years, all this time. I am twenty-two again, skating on the river, dizzy and laughing. Which is ridiculous, scientifically impossible. My bones are nearly dust. I cannot move out of this bed.
Why are you here? I think I say. Or maybe I don’t say anything at all.
The biggest mistake of my life, Kazimierz says, was ever letting you go. I should’ve married you.
But is it the biggest mistake of mine? What would a life with Kazimierz have been like? How different would everything have been?
I close my eyes, and I imagine it.
Marya
Poland, 1891
I packed my things in such a haste, barely even seeing my clothing through my haze of tears and anger. My valise lay open on my bed, and I pulled what little I owned from the corner chest, stuffing it inside, wiping away at the tears on my cheeks with the backs of my hands. It didn’t matter that my dresses would wrinkle. They were threadbare, and anyway, who would see them now except for Papa and Hela when I returned to them in Warsaw? Penniless. Worthless. Abandoned.
That was the feeling that hurt most, sent a physical pain shooting into my stomach. Mama and Zofia had already abandoned me years earlier, but not by choice, by getting sick and dying. And though I was so very sad that I’d become listless then, I was not angry, too, the way I was now. Kazimierz was not dying. He was very much alive, and he claimed he loved me. I knew he loved me. And yet he had left me anyway.
It is not my choice, you see, Marya, he had said to me hours earlier. My parents will not allow us to marry. We had walked along the path toward the river, away from his parents’ manor house in Szczuki, my younger charges, his younger siblings, taking their afternoon rests. Kazimierz held on to my hand, the way he always did when we walked together in the afternoons, but now that he was delivering terrible news, terrible words I did not want to hear, he gripped me tightly. My wrist began to ache, and I pulled out of his grasp. I have no choice, he said again, when I pulled away. Marya, please.
“You have a choice,” I’d told him. “There is always a choice.” That very idea was what had gotten me through months and months of being a governess for the Zorawskis before Kazimierz had arrived. I did not want to care for children. I did no
t even enjoy them the way my sister Hela did. My mind ached to learn. I’d dedicated every evening to self-study since I’d been in Szczuki, and though I’d arrived here equally enamored with literature, sociology, and science, in the past few years I’d decided that science was what I wanted to study at university. But to do so I would need to earn enough money to move out of Russian Poland, where women were not allowed to be or do anything of import, and most definitely not allowed to attend university.
I had planned to move to Paris to be with my older sister, Bronia, before I’d fallen in love with Kazimierz. We’d even had a deal, Bronia and I—I would work and send her money while she earned her medical degree, and then I would move to Paris, and she would work as a doctor and help put me through university. I had made my own choice: act as a governess for just a few years until I could afford to do what I really wanted. Here Kazimierz was, a man, and an intelligent one at that, and he was claiming he had no choice.
“What would you have me do, Marya?” he’d asked me, grabbing my hand again, lowering to his knees as if he were begging me to understand him, to forgive him, which, of course, I wouldn’t. “If I disobey my parents they would disown me, and then . . .”
“And then, what?” I’d snapped, pulling away again. “We would be penniless together? Or, what is it you said your mother said about me, I am worthless? I’ll never amount to anything?”
“I do love you,” he’d said softly.
“Do you?” I’d asked him, and then when he didn’t say anything else, I’d turned and run back to the house alone.
I’d spent the rest of the afternoon crying in my bed, not even bothering to tend to the children when they woke from their naps. How could I continue to be their governess now, knowing what Pani Zorawska truly thought of me? Now knowing that Kazimierz agreed with her, that he and I could not be together.
I threw everything into my valise, and after the house grew dark, the night quiet, I snuck out without so much as even a goodbye to my employers. I put my bag on my shoulder and walked into town to hire a carriage to drive me through the beet sugar plantations that seemed to stretch for an eternity—it was a five-hour carriage ride to the closest train station. But I would use all the rubles I had left to pay the carriage man, then the train back to Warsaw, back to Papa and Hela. And I would arrive home, truly penniless.
BACK IN WARSAW, I STAYED IN BED, AND WHAT MUST PAPA and Hela have thought? Poor Marya, too thin, too fragile, and destined to be unloved forever. Hela was my closest sister in age—she was just one year older than me, and I had always been so advanced in school that we’d been placed in the same grade at the female gymnasium as girls. We had been something like twins, and she was the one I’d written to about Kazimierz the past few years. I’d even told her the secret I’d told no one else, that we’d been engaged. But all I would tell her when I first returned home was that it was over, and that I did not wish to talk about it.
“Marya,” Hela called for me through my bedroom door, her voice so high and sweet like a songbird. I wanted to go to her, to hold on to her, the way I had as a young girl when our oldest sister, Zofia, had died. But the absence of Kazimierz was a heaviness in my chest, and I could not move. I pretended to be asleep, turning on my side, and squeezing my eyes tightly shut.
Hela opened the door, called my name again into the darkness. I didn’t answer her, or move. “You’re not the only one,” she finally said, before giving up, shutting the door behind her.
And part of me wanted to ask her what she meant; the other part of me wanted to sleep forever.
ONE AFTERNOON, A FEW WEEKS AFTER RETURNING TO WARSAW, Papa knocked on my bedroom door, and unlike Hela, he walked right in, without waiting for my answer. “It’s time to get up, get ready,” he said.
My mind felt dull, my body listless. I was weak from hunger, or disappointment, but I had no desire to get up and eat or live my life. “I have nothing to get ready for,” I moaned. Eventually, I supposed I would have to get out of bed and try to secure another governess position, but I could not face that prospect yet. Bronia was just about finished with her degree, and she said I could move in with her and her new husband in Paris, but I would need enough money to register for classes and pay my fees, and I had nothing to my name. Penniless.
“You are leaving for Paris soon,” Papa said, brightly. He walked to my window and threw open the curtains. “There is much to be done.”
“Paris?” I sat up in my bed, squinting my eyes to adjust to the sunlight streaming in. “I cannot afford Paris yet. I quit the Zorawskis, remember?”
“I have some money saved that will help cover your first year of tuition at the Sorbonne. You can begin classes in November.”
“But Papa . . . I can’t let you do that. You can’t possibly have enough money for that.”
The Sorbonne. Even the very idea of it felt like a confection for my mind, and my body hummed, alive again, in a way it hadn’t since I’d left Kazimierz in the woods, weeks earlier.
“Helena and I will get by. You need to go and get your university education,” Papa said. “You are brilliant, Marya. And you have worked so hard, for so many years. You deserve this.”
Who was right—Papa or Pani Zorawska? Was I brilliant or worthless? But Papa was going to help me get to Paris. That was enough to get me out of bed.
I stood up and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” I said to him.
He embraced me, kissed the top of my head. “You will thank me by earning your degree at the Sorbonne.”
That night I did not dream about Kazimierz or the way his kisses had left the feel of sunshine upon my skin as we’d traversed the woods, hand in hand. Instead I dreamed about the beautiful laboratories that surely awaited me now. The fantasy lingered in my mind in the moments after waking the next morning, leaving a sweetness in my mouth like I’d just eaten a kolachke, the jam still on my tongue. Paris was waiting for me, only two train rides away now: everything I’d ever wanted.
Well, almost everything.
THE MORNING I WAS TO LEAVE, PAPA OFFERED TO WALK WITH me to the train station to help me with my things. Hela hugged me goodbye at our apartment door, saying it would be too hard, too emotional to say goodbye at the train. She was right. I already felt teary-eyed as Papa and I walked the short distance, mostly in silence.
I was not bringing much, and did not truly need Papa’s help, but I was glad for his quiet company all the same. I had only a folding chair to sit on—my fourth-class ticket did not come with a seat—and one suitcase of belongings. My suitcase was heavy, as it contained more books for the long ride than clothing. I only owned a few dresses, and I had sent the rest of my things ahead by freight.
“You take care of yourself,” Papa was saying now. “And remember to eat.” Papa was always saying I was too thin, and truth be told I did have a habit of forgetting food when my mind was otherwise engaged. Whether it was Kazimierz or my studies.
“Don’t worry, Papa. Bronia will keep me fed.” If Hela was my sister-twin, Bronia was my sister-mother. She was the oldest, and most responsible, and when we were younger, after our mother died, she was the one who’d stepped into the mothering role in our household. Even all these years later, even living so far away, her worry for me and Hela came through in her letters.
“And you have all your papers in order?” Papa asked, though he had already asked before we’d left the apartment. He was nervous about the Russian officers examining me too closely on the checkpoints out of Poland, a woman traveling alone and with the Sklodowska last name. Years ago, before I was born, Papa had been involved in the January uprising against the Russian army—it was how we’d lost our family’s money and property and become poor in the first place. But in the years since, the Russians had many others to worry about. The Sklodowskis kept out of their way. And Bronia had traveled this route herself several times with no trouble.
“You know I do, Papa,” I reassured him. “You worry too much.”
“I can’t help
it. I worry because I love you, my dear sweet Marya,” he said as we arrived at the station.
We both stopped walking, and I grabbed Papa in a tight embrace. I couldn’t hold back tears any longer, and for just a moment, I buried my wet cheek into the stale wool of his jacket. I’d already been away from him and Hela for years in Szczuki, but this felt different. Paris was so far—forty hours by train. And Papa was placing all his money, all his trust, in me to succeed at the Sorbonne, something we’d long thought out of reach for me, growing up both poor and female in Warsaw.
In the distance, we could hear the whistle of the train approaching. I let go of the embrace, picked up my things, and stepped closer to the tracks. The city of Warsaw, majestic and gray and stifling, would be behind me now. And suddenly, I felt lighter, dizzy with excitement at what lay ahead of me.
AS THE TRAIN PULLED INTO THE STATION, I THOUGHT I HEARD my name in the distance, from somewhere across the street. I ignored it, sure I was imagining it, because it sounded just like Kazimierz’s voice.
But then I heard it again: “Marya, wait!”
I turned around, and there he was, running across the street, waving his arms. Kazimierz was tall and lovely, with a long face and deep-brown brooding eyes. Now he was red-faced, and sweating, out of breath from running. The fall air was crisp, and it suddenly chilled me. All of my skin turned to ice. My own voice froze inside my throat, and I could not respond.
Papa turned toward Kazimierz and frowned. “What is happening?” he asked, turning back to me. He knew about Kazimierz, but only in a general way. Kaz was the man who’d broken his daughter’s heart, who did not believe she would ever be good enough to marry him.
“What are you doing here?” I put my suitcase down, put my hands on my hips, and demanded an explanation of my own.
He stood in front of me, his breath jagged. “You can’t go,” he said, glancing behind me at the train, which had begun to board. “Wherever it is you are going, you . . . you can’t. Stay here. Stay with me.” His voice broke, making him sound desperate in a way I hadn’t heard before. My love for him ran through my body, a shiver.
“How did you even find me?” I asked. The question slipped out, but what I truly meant to ask was why? Why was he here? His parents disapproved of us; he would never disappoint his parents or risk them disowning him, making him penniless, just like me. That’s what he’d told me, wasn’t it?
Half Life Page 1
