Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  “Yes,” Monsieur Kowalski finally clarifies as he takes a sip of his own tea and smiles at his bride. Madame Kowalska blushes at the obvious attention. “Pierre, Marie is conducting an experiment and needs more lab space. Marie, Pierre has the extra space. I thought if I introduced you both, you could work on an arrangement.” Are they truly trying to help me? Many of the men I have encountered since I’ve moved to Paris want nothing more than to bring me down. No man likes giving up anything to a woman.

  “Tell me about your study,” Pierre says. He stares at me, his eyes so attached to my face it is unnerving. Is this some kind of a test? Maybe he is like the men in my physics classes. And if that’s true, I would not want to share a lab with such an insufferable creature.

  “I have the funding, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I say, rather brusquely now. He continues to stare at me; it really is disconcerting.

  “No, no.” He laughs a little. “I don’t care about the money. I am fascinated by your work. What kinds of steels will you be using, and how do you plan to account for the different variables? And I wonder if you might allow me to observe your methodology, so I might learn from you. Your reputation and your brilliance in the lab precede you, Mademoiselle Sklodowska.” He speaks quickly, breathlessly, his eyes holding on to mine. Perhaps he isn’t feigning interest, or testing me at all. Does he already view me as his equal? Does he truly want to learn, from me?

  “Marie,” I correct him, softening my tone.

  “Marie,” he repeats, my name turning into a smile on his lips. “Please, go on, tell me about your study.”

  I feel myself relaxing, and I explain about the different kinds of steel I plan to test, the ways I will measure the magnetic properties using both vector and scalar magnetometers. He nods quickly; his eyes turn from pale blue to a blue green in the weakening light. When I’m done talking, he jumps in, talking about his piezoelectricity work with his brother, Jacques. Our words fly across the table, fast and electric, leaving me breathless. We’re two currents, zipping through water, side by side, charging each other to go faster and faster, hotter and brighter.

  When I look up again, the room is quite dim. Outside the window the night is black, and only a sliver of moonlight shines through. The Kowalskis had left the table and neither Pierre nor I had noticed nor even thanked our hosts.

  “Do you plan to always stay in Paris?” Pierre asks suddenly, out of nowhere.

  “Oh goodness no,” I answer quickly. “As soon as my study is done and I complete my examinations I’ll move back to Poland to be with my family and to teach.” Though even as I say the words, words I’ve repeated many times with the greatest of sincerity since I’ve moved to Paris, suddenly they feel like a lie.

  Marya

  Loksow, Poland, 1894

  I was a terrible piano student, but Leokadia was the most patient teacher. Or maybe she didn’t care that my fingers could never find the right notes and that my ears could not hear nor understand the melodies. She nodded and offered an encouraging smile, even when I played her back a D scale much too slow and filled with wrong notes. Of all the women in our university, I was the worst one at music lessons. But Leokadia looked at the chemistry equations I tried to teach much the same way I looked at a page of sheet music she handed out in class. And I offered her words of encouragement too. It isn’t so hard once you memorize all the elements, you see.

  And she said, Ah, just like scales.

  Still, I remained hopeless at playing a scale, and she could not remember the elements, as hard as she might try.

  And yet we kept on, week after week, all of us women trying to teach one another what we each knew and loved. By the beginning of the new year, there were ten of us, and we began to break off and meet in smaller groups, because it was hard to find a place where ten women could go, week after week, undetected. Sometimes, Leokadia and I just met alone a second night of the week, too, and though we always tried to teach each other new things, alternating music and science, we also just enjoyed each other’s company.

  There was an easiness to our friendship, a comfort that I found hard to come by with the other women, even the ones who loved the sciences, like me. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why. Our interests and our knowledge and our lives couldn’t be further apart. I spent my day working hard as a governess for the Kaminski twins, and nights with my husband, trying to stay warm and fed, just above water. And she spent her days practicing piano in her parents’ well-heated apartment, her nights dressed in glamorous and expensive gowns, giving concerts around the city, to greater and greater acclaim.

  Maybe the reason I was so drawn to her was that somewhere inside of me I knew, of any of us, she was going to find a way to follow her dream, to become someone. And already, I liked the idea of having touched just one iota of her greatness.

  ABOUT A YEAR AFTER I FIRST MET KADI, SHE GOT INVITED TO play in a special concert in Krakow. Normally she only gave concerts in Loksow and in Warsaw. She played for free, in private homes or at small parties, where it was acceptable for the background entertainment to be a woman, as long as she was well dressed, beautiful, and unpaid. When I asked if this bothered her, she told me playing her music for other people was her reward.

  “How I would love, though,” she would tell me sometimes, her voice sounding far away, the way mine sounded when I spoke of the Sorbonne, somewhere still in my future, “to train with Sibelius in Finland or maybe Debussy in France!”

  I lacked the means she had, but I always had the support of my family. I was still eagerly waiting for a response from Papa, hopeful he would send me money to help Kaz further his education—I’d written to him how I felt this was the only way for me to eventually get to Paris, get my own education, and I knew that was Papa’s greatest wish for me still. Kadi’s father would never approve nor allow her to do what she dreamed of. He wanted her to stay in Poland, marry well, and raise children. But as he was still away in St. Petersburg teaching, he did not know much of what she did these days. Her mother was quietly supportive, she told me. And when she got invited to go to Krakow, I felt it was the very first step ahead for her, the beginning of her way out.

  “Perhaps you will be seen in Krakow, then hired to perform there next time,” I told her. “If you are making your own money, you could save up, go anywhere in the world you want, with or without your father’s approval.”

  She cast her blue eyes to her shiny leather boots. “If only it were that simple, Marya. What would Mama do without me? And Papa would never speak to me again.”

  I wanted to tell her that she could make that choice, that there was always a choice. But sometimes, when the night was long and dark and freezing, and Kaz and I had not had enough to eat for dinner, and we lay in bed feeling the never-ending emptiness of our own bellies, I wondered if he missed his family, his parents, the manor house in Szczuki with their chef. I wondered how it would feel to give up your past, your history, everything that belonged to you, and whether I would’ve done the same.

  “I have an idea!” Kadi looked back up, her cheeks pink with excitement. “Come with me to Krakow and watch me play.” She knew that the Kaminskis were in the Baltic for a monthlong holiday, and that I currently had four glorious weeks off while they were away.

  I laughed a little. “I wish I could.” And truly I did. The idea of getting out of the gray soot-covered Russian-controlled streets of Loksow, and into the Austrian portion of Poland, Krakow, where art and music were supposedly thriving and luminous, sounded wonderful. But Kaz would never want to come—that vibrant world a reminder of his old life and everything he was missing now. Besides, even if he wanted to, we couldn’t afford for him to take the time away from his students unpaid.

  “Come on,” Kadi said. “Mama told Papa we are going to visit friends, and he got us a large hotel suite. You could stay with us. It would be so much fun.”

  I hesitated for a moment. The truth was, Kaz wouldn’t want me to go alone, without him. It would w
orry him. If I brought it up we would argue about it, and I would eventually end up giving in to what he wanted, making it easier not to bring it up at all.

  But what if I went and didn’t tell him? I had gone by myself to visit Papa and Hela in Warsaw a few times, and we had already discussed that I might go for a visit in the next few weeks while the Kaminskis were away. Could I do that, and take a night or two away in Krakow, too, and Kaz would never have to know? It felt strange, the idea of lying to my husband, but weirdly freeing too, that I might have something all my own to look forward to. I really did want to watch Kadi play in Krakow. And it would be fun to spend a night or two in a hotel suite, away from the worry and the cold desperate hunger of my everyday life.

  I wrote Hela and asked her thoughts, and also whether she would be willing to keep my secret from Kaz the next time she saw him.

  Yes! Under one condition, Hela wrote back. I want to go to Krakow with you.

  HOW WONDERFUL IT WAS TO BE WITH MY SISTER-TWIN AGAIN, just the two of us! We’d bought very inexpensive fourth-class tickets for the train, but it was only a six-hour ride, and we did not mind the floor of the railcar so much, especially as we sat shoulder to shoulder, our arms around each other. I leaned my head against her shoulder and inhaled the scent of her—still the same as when we were girls, lemons and corn poppies.

  “You are going to love hearing Kadi,” I told her. “Her piano is so very beautiful.”

  “Marya?” Hela said my name softly, a question.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “I need to tell you something, and I want you to know . . . I never want to upset you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I was alarmed. “Is it Papa? Is he sick?”

  She shook her head, inhaled, and then exhaled her confession in one fast breath: “Bronia invited me to come live with them in Paris, to help her out with little Lou and to enroll in some courses at the Sorbonne.”

  “Oh,” I said. I’d never considered that Hela might want to go to Paris. We were almost the same age, but I’d always been the smarter one, ahead in all our studies. Hela had seemed content teaching at the girls’ gymnasium in Warsaw. I hadn’t expected her to ever desire more than that, and I felt ashamed that I had underestimated her ambitions.

  But it all made sense, why Papa had ignored my request to use the Sorbonne money for Kaz, writing only about other things in his letters. Now, I understood. Papa was going to help Hela go to France, use the money to pay her tuition at the Sorbonne instead.

  “Why would I be upset?” I finally said, swallowing hard. “I am surprised, yes. But . . . this sounds like a wonderful opportunity for you.”

  Hela smiled and exhaled. “Yes, I will be very excited to live in France for a little while. To expand my mind.”

  I didn’t ask her what she planned to study, the bitter taste so thick on my tongue that it was hard to speak, much less to breathe. The air on the train suddenly felt stale, suffocating as I tried to imagine both my sisters so far away.

  I felt like I was slipping again, my footing uncertain. Bronia and I were the ones who were supposed to get the university education. Hela was the one content with Poland. Bronia and I married Kazimierzs; Hela was still alone, wanting. And what was I even doing here now, on a train to Krakow, wrapped up in a lie to the one person who was still completely mine in Poland?

  “And perhaps you and Kaz will join us soon, too, and all three of us sisters can be together again?” Hela said, her songbird voice light and hopeful.

  “Perhaps,” I said softly, my response swallowed by the noise of the train. Suddenly Paris felt further out of my reach than ever before.

  Marie

  Paris, France, 1895

  Marry me,” Pierre says, out of nowhere, one afternoon in the lab in early March.

  We’d been in the middle of a conversation about alloy steel, as I hunch over a piece of it, heating it with a fire iron. I’m wearing my dirty linen smock and a pair of lab glasses much too big for my small face. They’re made with a man in mind, and it’s dreadfully annoying, how I must continually push them up the bridge of my nose as they slip down, again and again.

  This is the third time Pierre has repeated such nonsense since I’ve returned to Paris after a summer back in Warsaw visiting with Papa and Hela. Papa is doing quite well, and Hela has found a lovely position teaching at a girls’ school. She’s even recently met a man, a photographer named Stanislaw, whom I suspect she might have feelings for, as she could not stop talking about how beautiful his work is throughout my entire visit. It was hard for me to leave them again, return to Paris, and I even considered staying in Poland for good. But there is much more to be done in the lab—before I left, Pierre and I had stumbled into a fascinating experimentation on paramagnetic properties and temperature variance. Pierre had written me daily while I was away, reminding me of all the work I must return for.

  I’d moved my equipment into Pierre’s lab a few weeks after we met last spring, and from there Pierre and I quickly became good working partners. He was happy to assist with my study, performing any tasks I asked of him, but also offering his intelligent and unassuming suggestions. I’ve been doing the same in return with his work on temperatures. Working in the lab with him, I am not a woman and he is not a man—we are just two scientists who respect each other’s minds. Which is why his marriage proposals have caught me so much by surprise. And I already told Pierre the last two times he’s asked: I cannot marry you.

  For one thing, he is French; he belongs in France. I am a Pole, I belong in Poland and will eventually move back to work there and be closer to my family. But for another thing, after Kazimierz, I promised myself I would never get engaged again. I am bound to live the life of a scientist now, not of a wife. It doesn’t matter how much I respect Pierre, or even enjoy his company, our marriage is an impossibility, any way I look at it.

  “Consider it, Marie,” he prods again now. “We would be so wondrous together, you and I.”

  Wondrous. It is so very Pierre to make us sound whimsical, instead of logical, scientific. We are lab partners, not lovers.

  “You are like lodestone, and I am your magnet.” He’s still talking.

  Lodestone, the most magnetic of all the materials we have tested. The magnet cannot stay away, even from an almost unexplainable distance. I have to bite my lip to keep from smiling. “Pierre.” I shake my head, without looking up from the fire iron. The silly glasses slide down the bridge of my nose and I push them back up, again. “We’ve been through this already.”

  “And nothing you’ve told me has changed my mind. I still want to marry you.”

  I glance up from my steel. Pierre has crossed his arms in front of his chest, resting them across the vest of his well-tailored suit. He is such a stubborn, beautiful, brilliant man. For a second, I cannot look away.

  “You can be a scientist and my wife,” he says. “I fully support you and your work, you know I do. I want us to work together, to continue to be partners in the lab, yes, but everywhere else too.”

  I enjoy working with him in a way I’ve never enjoyed working with anyone before. Science burns brighter; my mind feels even more alive. But that doesn’t mean we must get married. “We already are lab partners,” I say.

  “Yes,” Pierre says. “But I mean permanently. Forever.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Nothing is forever.”

  “I beg to differ,” Pierre says. “What about atoms?”

  It’s hard to tell whether he’s teasing now, or whether he’s hurt that I’ve refused him yet again. But when I glance at him, the corners of his lips upturn ever so slightly above his beard. This conversation, this proposal of his, is far from over in his mind.

  “Oh, Pierre,” I say, shaking my head. But I am still biting back a smile as I turn my attention to the steel and the fire iron.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, PIERRE AND I TAKE A BIKE RIDE TO the Bois de Vincennes, as we have been doing each weekend the weather is warm enough,
riding on old bicycles that belong to him and his brother, Jacques. I pedal ahead of him, my hair coming loose from my bun, blowing back behind my shoulders as the wind whips around my face. I enjoy knowing that he is here, riding with me, but also that I am faster.

  “Slow down,” Pierre calls from behind me. But he’s laughing.

  I’m breathless and sweating even though the almost-spring air is cool and crisp. Away from the lab, and science, my mind is a sieve, and time and knowledge slip away, my head gloriously empty for the afternoon. I pedal and pedal like fire ripping through accelerant. Past the gates of the park and the still bare-branched cherry trees.

  As we near the water, I finally do slow down, and Pierre catches up. I hop off, lay my bicycle on its side, and sit down by the edge of the lake, resting my sweaty face against the cool edge of my sleeve. Pierre is a moment behind me, and when he stops, he pulls a bouquet of white daisies from his bicycle basket, then holds them out to me, like a prize for reaching the lake first. I take the flowers and our fingertips touch, sending a current of warmth up my hand, my entire arm.

  He sits down next to me, close enough so our shoulders touch. “Together,” he leans in and says softly, next to my ear. “Inside of the lab and out.”

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I TAKE THE OMNIBUS TO BRONIA’S apartment in La Villette for dinner. I haven’t seen her much in the few months since I’ve been back from Poland, as I’ve been busy in the lab. And yet I am not thinking about her or my little niece, Lou, as I should be on the way to her home. Instead, the entire carriage ride, my mind is back at the lake, with Pierre, the feel of his whisper on my ear. Together. I have to forget about Pierre, and I promise myself I won’t even bring him up at dinner.

  But the first thing Bronia says when I walk inside her apartment is, “That man loves you. Don’t be a glupi.”

  I am no fool, but I’m caught off guard by my sister’s words. “Whatever do you mean?” How does Bron know about Pierre? I have made a point not to mention him, other than as a scientist I share a lab with.