Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  “Madame Zorawska?” came a male voice from the other side of the door. It took a second for me to register that it was me he was calling for, as I was thrown by being called Madame and the very French-accented way he pronounced my last name.

  “Oui?” I responded carefully, testing out my poor and rusty French.

  “Breakfast is ready in the dining room, if you’re hungry.” He spoke in French, but slowly enough that I could follow along. At least, I thought I could. It had been years since I’d studied French, and the sound of it now brought back memories of Szczuki, and feelings I had not felt since that summer when I had believed my life would be here.

  I swallowed hard and called back that I’d be right there. I quickly dressed in a clean dress from my valise and wrapped my hair in a bun. I opened the door, and to my surprise he was still standing there, in the hallway at the top of the long winding staircase, waiting for me. I had not met Jacques in person yet, but Hela had shown me a photograph, and this man was most certainly the brother Hela had mentioned. He looked an awful lot like Jacques, only a bit younger and with a lighter expression, a broader smile. He stood before me, tall, raven-haired, with a dark thick beard. His deep blue eyes were trained on my face so steadily that I looked away from him, down at my feet.

  “Madame Zorawska.” He bent down and kissed my hand softly, in a way that was so very French, so very foreign to me. I had to stifle another laugh, but mostly because he made me feel . . . nervous, outside myself. “I’m Pierre Curie,” he said.

  His hand lingered on mine, and I gently extracted myself from him, folding my hands together in front of me. “Please,” I finally said, “we are practically related. Call me Marya.”

  “Marya,” he repeated. His tone was gentle, and he lingered a little too long on the y, so my name sounded more French in his voice than I’d ever heard it before, Maria.

  I was suddenly, finally, very hungry, and I felt my stomach rumble. “You said there was breakfast?” I asked him.

  “Yes, of course. My manners. You had a very long journey. You must be famished. Follow me.”

  He ran down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time like a child, while I followed behind, holding on to the railing, not wanting to miss a step and trip. All around me this house was an expanse of marble and glass and light. Hela was not only marrying someone French, someone who employed a gardener, but someone who came from a wealthy family.

  Downstairs in the dining room, there were enough pastries spread out on the long table to feed the Russian army, and the housekeeper again, who handed me a coffee. The distance between my sister-twin and me never felt greater than it did in this very moment.

  “I’ve heard very much about you,” Pierre said, sitting down to eat his own breakfast at the head of the table. I nodded as I took my own seat but did not admit that I’d heard very little about him. Only what Hela had mentioned last night. And what had she said about him—that he had been too emotional to handle his mother’s death? Jacques was the steady one. “Hela says you are building a university to educate the women of Poland.” Pierre was still talking. “What a wonderful undertaking.”

  Is that what Hela had told him? It seemed so much an exaggeration, as if I alone were educating the women of my entire country, not just a tiny little piece of the tiny little city of Loksow. But I took a sip of my steaming coffee and didn’t correct him. “It is very French of you to think that it is wonderful,” I said instead. “My husband hates it.” At the mere mention of Kaz, I remembered the unopened letter from him in my valise, and my chest tightened again.

  “Hates it?” Pierre laughed. “I’m sure that’s not the case. What could be better than giving people education? Education is freedom, is it not?”

  He sounded just like Papa, and I warmed to him. As he was a French man, born and raised in France, I didn’t think he would ever understand just how much the Russians didn’t want women to feel free or why Kaz worried for my safety. And now, here, in Paris, I did not desire to explain it to him, so instead I changed the subject. “And what do you do, Pierre?” I asked instead. “Are you a scientist, too?”

  He nodded, finishing off a croissant in one large bite. “I’m conducting research in paramagnetism.”

  I smiled, as if I understood exactly what he meant. And I did, a little, from my own reading about magnetic fields, but if he were to test me on the details or the differences between paramagnetisim and ferromagnetism, I would surely fail.

  “Do you like to ride bicycles?” he asked me suddenly, out of nowhere.

  “What?” I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in many years, not since Szczuki, with the children, around the lake in the summertime. Thinking of that now, I felt that Kaz-shaped chasm in my stomach again, and I put my own croissant down, losing my appetite once more.

  “I enjoy a morning ride after breakfast,” Pierre said. “And Jacques’s old bicycle is still here, if you’d like to come with me today?”

  “Oh, I probably shouldn’t.” I’d promised Hela I’d figure out the omnibus into the city this morning and that I would accompany her to meet the seamstress to discuss her wedding gown. But now the very idea of watching my sister-twin so caught up in love, so doe-eyed and bright, felt exhausting. Really what I desired to do was to get back into that comfortable bed upstairs and sleep for a long while until my head felt clearer.

  “Just a short ride,” Pierre prodded. I hesitated for another moment, and seeming to notice my hesitation, he took it as an opening and broke into a smile. “I’ll have to get into the city to the lab afterward. I’ll escort you there to your sister. I promise. Take a short ride with me. Experience Sceaux by bicycle. There is truly nothing like it.”

  IT WAS SO STRANGE THE WAY MY LEGS REMEMBERED HOW TO ride a bicycle, how my body remembered the pedals and my mind remembered the lightness of the wind in my hair, the sunshine upon my face. I didn’t mean to go fast, but once I started pedaling I couldn’t stop, and then I was riding out ahead of Pierre, not at all sure where we were going but following the path through the flowers: yellows and golds and pinks spinning and swirling by me in a blur.

  “Slow down,” Pierre called from behind me. But he was laughing.

  I was breathless and sweating. Away from Poland, and Kaz, my mind was a sieve, and time and knowledge slipped away, my head gloriously empty. I pedaled and I pedaled like fire ripping through accelerant.

  “Marya, wait for me!” Pierre called out from somewhere behind me.

  But I did not stop; I did not even attempt to slow down. I kept pedaling, faster and faster. Completely and utterly free.

  Marie

  Paris, 1903

  Marie,” Pierre calls out for me as he runs into our lab, his voice quivering. He’s clutching a telegram in his hands, and he stands in that awkward way he does when his legs are bothering him, almost bowlegged, but not quite. Fear clenches in my chest at the sight of the telegram. Not again.

  It has been three months since Val and Jakub died all at once, and though I have come back to work, to teaching my students in Sèvres, and to our lab, I have to force myself out of bed each morning. Force myself to dress and, only sometimes, eat, and make it through the day. Summer is long over, and now it is fall, nearly winter, but I barely notice the change in seasons, in weather and vegetation. I am numb, and I am empty. No matter what I do, what I achieve, Jakub and Val will still be dead. Papa is gone.

  Bronia and I have been writing letters back and forth each week, consumed by our own private pain, but we write mostly of our daily work because even writing the other things down, admitting our sorrow to each other on paper, seems too much to bear.

  Pierre waves the telegram in the air now and breaks into a smile, so it cannot be bad news, can it? He seems . . . happy? “Marie,” he says my name again. “You will not believe this.”

  “What’s happened?” I ask him, sighing with relief as I observe his face. Surprise, not sadness.

  “The most marvelous news in the world has just come for
us from Sweden,” he says. “They are giving us half of the Nobel Prize in physics, along with Henri Becquerel, for our work on radium. You and I. Both of us, mon amour. The Nobel Prize.” He’s breathless with excitement, and he stares at me, waiting for my reaction.

  His words ring in my ears. Nobel Prize. “I can’t believe it,” I say. And I really can’t.

  There had been some whispers about a nomination last year, a letter to Pierre from a Swedish mathematician who had learned the committee was considering the nomination, but only Pierre, not me. Pierre had argued in his own letters to the committee that I was as important in the discovery as he. In fact, more so. And I had thought that would be the end of it, that the committee would simply ignore both of us for the award. A woman has never been nominated before, even for part of the prize. Now, the fact that we have both won it, together, science’s biggest prize, should elicit something more in me than disbelief. I should be thrilled. The Nobel Prize. Pierre and I?

  “There will be prize money, seventy thousand francs.” Pierre is still talking. His voice quivers with excitement as he reads the telegram aloud to me. Then he rereads it again, a second time, as if he didn’t quite believe it in his own voice the first time through. His words wash through me and over me. “Seventy thousand,” he repeats.

  Seventy thousand francs is a lot of money. It will go a long way in improving our lab from the small shed we’ve been using for years. And that alone should make me quiver with the same excitement in Pierre’s voice, and I want to. I really do. But I cannot make myself actually feel it. Instead I am very tired and my legs ache, and inside I am hollow.

  “They want us to go to Sweden to accept, mon amour,” Pierre says. I look up again, and his blue eyes glimmer in the morning light.

  “Sweden? Sweden is much too far,” I say quickly.

  Pierre opens his mouth as if to protest, then closes it, says nothing for a moment. “The Nobel Prize, mon amour,” he finally says again, more gently.

  But I am still stuck on Sweden.

  I envision it in my mind: the trip would take at least forty-eight hours, more if we stop along the way. And what about Irène? We would have to leave her here with Dr. Curie, and I cannot bear the idea of letting her out of my sight for so long. Or, risk traveling with her, and to think of all the diseases she might be exposed to on the trains. Besides all that, I can barely get out of bed and make it to the lab these days. How will I ever make it all the way to Sweden?

  “We can’t go to Sweden,” I say again. Pierre folds the telegram, puts it in his jacket pocket, and reaches out to hug me. He clings to me, kisses the top of my head. “I can’t. Go without me if you must.”

  “This prize is for both of us,” he says gently. “I will not go without you.” He stands back, puts his hand on my cheek, stares into my eyes. “I will write them and tell them you have been ill over the summer and are still not yourself. The journey is too much right now. Perhaps next year we will make it to Sweden, and we can give our acceptance speech then?”

  “Perhaps,” I murmur back, but I do not fully believe that we might ever make it there. I say it now to placate him more than anything. If only I could take my seventy thousand francs and use it to buy back time, to take us all back before the summer, and somehow, somehow keep mine and Bronia’s children safe.

  “Next year, mon amour,” Pierre murmurs. “In 1904 everything will be better for us.” Pierre places his hand over his heart. “I can feel it.”

  What a ridiculous notion. His heart pumps blood, beats to keep his body alive. It does not hold a feeling, a silly premonition.

  And still, Pierre is my glimmer of hope. I want so very much to believe he has a magical heart, not a scientific one.

  Marya

  Paris, 1903

  The summer in Paris was hot, the heat rising off the streets, visible in cloudy waves that trailed behind the horse-drawn omnibuses. But after only a few weeks, my French improved, and with Pierre’s help, I learned how to take the omnibuses in and out of Sceaux, and I became comfortable getting places in the city on my own.

  Pierre conducted his paramagnetism work in a small back space inside Hela and Jacques’s lab. Hela and Jacques had tables and tables lined with rocks, as they were investigating mineral compositions. My sister’s cheeks glowed pink as she showed me the rocks she and Jacques were sampling. As she spoke, my eyes wandered toward the back of the lab, toward Pierre, who had lined up sheets of metals so close together that he barely had any room to work among them. But he was quite thin, and he squeezed in and out of the metals, remarking on measurements to himself.

  “Marya, are you listening?” Hela asked, following my eyes toward Pierre. She looked at me and frowned, then leaned in and lowered her voice. “Jacques feels sorry for him,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t have the right schooling,” she whispered. “He never did well in traditional schools the way Jacques did, and even with many scientific studies, he’s had very little in the way of findings. The university won’t hire him to teach. If we don’t make the space for him in our lab, who will?”

  “But he’s very kind,” I said to her, narrowing my eyes. Perhaps it was all the food he’d continually offered me in Sceaux or the peaceful moments our morning bicycle rides had brought to me, or the way he had delighted in the idea of my women’s university in Poland. But I felt defensive of him now.

  “Yes, so very kind.” Hela smiled at me and shrugged. “But he is lucky to have Jacques, that is all. His head is in the clouds. Who knows where he would be if left on his own.”

  BRONIA’S CHILDREN WERE FEELING MUCH BETTER BY THE END of June, and so it was time for me to leave Sceaux and go stay with her for the remainder of my time in France. I felt a little sad to leave the expanse of the Curies’ house and my morning bicycle rides with Pierre. So much so that when Pierre offered to give me Jacques’s bicycle to take to La Villete with me, to have to ride for the rest of my stay, I accepted his offer.

  “What in heaven’s name is that?” Bronia demanded, when I stepped off the omnibus, holding Jacques’s rickety old bicycle. I didn’t answer her—of course she knew what it was—and I kept walking toward her house with it. The bicycle was light and freedom, and it gave me the time and space each morning to clear my head, to think. Though it would not be the same as riding through the flowers in Sceaux with Pierre, I hoped to ride it through the cobblestone streets of La Villette while I was here.

  Lou and Jakub, however, were delighted to see me with it, and they both begged me to teach them to ride it. “Absolutely not,” Bronia said. “You’re both still recovering from your coughs.”

  Truth be told, they looked healthy to me, and aside from an occasional cough I saw no trace of illness in them. “I’ll teach you when she’s at work,” I whispered to Jakub, and his little green eyes lit up, and he squeezed my hand.

  “Marya,” Bronia said my name sharply, and I turned away from my nephew. Lou’s eyes were wide, worried her mother had heard my whispered exchange with her brother and that now we would both be in trouble. But instead she said, “You’ve gotten fatter living in Sceaux. What were the Curies feeding you?”

  She rested her hand across my belly, which perhaps had expanded a little. “Let me examine you,” Bronia said, moving her hands to feel my stomach.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her, pulling away. “I am perfectly healthy.” I’d been offered, and eaten, more food than I’d ever seen in my life in Sceaux. And somehow all the worry that had followed me around in Poland for so long had lifted, and I was hungry again. My body was blossoming here, free, in Paris.

  A NEW LETTER FROM KAZ HAD COME TO BRONIA’S HOUSE THIS past week, as it had every week since I’d arrived. I had yet to open a single one, but had them in a pile at the bottom of my valise. Bronia brought it to me as I unpacked my things in her small guest room. I’d left the bicycle outside, of course, and I didn’t have much in my valise, only a few well-worn dresses and underg
arments, and I got them put away in the chest in only a few minutes. I shut the last drawer, and Bronia stood there, holding Kaz’s new letter out to me. I put it inside my valise with the others, without opening it, and then she frowned.

  “What is really going on?” she demanded, a hand on her hip.

  “Nothing is going on,” I lied. The truth bubbled up in my throat, but I couldn’t tell my sister-mother what had really happened, that Kaz had betrayed me. That Leokadia had betrayed me. That Sceaux and a rickety old bicycle and Pierre Curie had made me feel alive again these past few weeks and that now I didn’t want to read any of Kaz’s letters and face my real life at all, extinguish the glimmer of happiness I’d been feeling in Paris. “I’ll open it later, when I’m alone. That’s all, Bron.”

  “I really wish you’d let me examine you. If you’d just lie down, I could do it right here.” Her hand went back to my stomach, and I abruptly pulled away from her.

  “I promise you, I am fine,” I snapped at her.

  Her frown creased deeper, but she sighed and let it go, and she went down to the kitchen to prepare supper.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE HELA’S WEDDING IN JULY, THERE WAS A large bicycle race running all through France, ending in Paris. Pierre asked if I would go to Ville d’Avray to watch the finish with him, and I offered to take the children along with us so Bronia could help Hela with last-minute arrangements.

  The day was quite warm, the air humid, and my dress felt much too tight, constricting even my slightest movements. Bronia was right—I’d been eating too well since I’d come to France, and I had put on weight. I hoped the dress Hela had insisted on paying the seamstress to make for me to wear to her wedding this coming weekend would still fit.

  At eleven years old Lou already comported herself like a woman, a miniature Bronia, and as we stepped off the omnibus and into the very crowded street of onlookers, she commanded Jakub to hold her hand and stay close by. Jakub, darling seven-year-old gentleman that he was, complied, attached himself to his older sister. I held on to his other hand and with Pierre just a step ahead of us, we made our way through the crowd to wait for the racers.