Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  No other man scientist has ever seen me this way. Except Pierre. “Am I?” I say. “Or am I foolish and crazy?”

  Paul smiles. “Don’t we all have to be a little bit foolish and crazy to work long, thankless hours in a lab in pursuit of something no one else can quite see but us?” I smile back. It’s true. “Will you tell me more, about polonium?” Paul asks. It’s a simple request, one scientist to another, but his voice is soft and clear, and his question carries so much weight. It’s as if Paul is truly asking about me, about my heart.

  “Of course,” I tell him. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” he breathes, and for a second, I think of Pierre, that first night I met him in the Kowalskis’ suite, when he was breathless in his fascination for my work. Paul sounds nearly the same way now. He wants to know and understand who I really am underneath everything else, and all at once, I feel lighter than I have in years.

  I open my journal and show him the notes I’ve been writing down all summer long. What fascinates me about polonium, I tell him, is the way it exists in the pitchblende with radium, but how its properties could not be more different. I suspect the alpha decay is drastically different as well. But I haven’t had the time or space or money to prove it yet, and polonium has become something I think about only in my time off from radium. “Polonium should be just as revered as radium,” I insist, my voice rising. “Or else I named them wrong in the first place. I wanted to honor my homeland, give it . . . something.”

  “You can take the scientist out of Poland,” Paul says lightly. “But you can’t take Poland out of the scientist, hmm?”

  I shake my head and laugh just a little, delighted by how much Paul understands me. The sun has begun to come up, and now I close my journal. The sky is pink and orange, but the light is still dim enough for the lamp. I hold it closer to Paul’s forehead, examine the wound again, and he’s right. The bleeding has stopped. It does appear to be superficial.

  I think about how Jeanne always tells me Paul is cruel, but I wonder if she has been the cruel one all along. It is strange the way you cannot really know what goes on in other people’s lives, their marriages, even when we were neighbors on boulevard Kellerman for so many years, and friends for even longer. That even now, living here with them this summer, I don’t really understand Jeanne or Paul or their marriage.

  Paul turns back to me, smiles a little in a way that makes his handlebar mustache appear suddenly lopsided. I have the strangest desire to reach up and touch it with my fingers, but I restrain myself.

  He moves first, puts his hand on my shoulder gently, pulling me toward him in a half hug, in a way we have never touched before. But I do not shift away. Instead I pull in closer to him and the two of sit there like that for a little while, staring out at the water glistening in the sunrise. Paul is right—this really is calming.

  “When we are back in Paris,” I finally say, “you should come to my lab and I’ll show you more about my studies of polonium.”

  “I would like that,” Paul agrees, his voice breaking a little. “I would very much like to visit your lab.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER, IN THE SPRING TERM OF 1909, WE GIVE UP on our collective school. All of us are stretched too thin with our own work to continue teaching one another’s children as well. And though I have a brief moment of sadness, I feel relief more—I am exhausted all the time, and I find a better school to enroll Irène in than the one she’d been in before. She will need official schooling to get into university later on, anyway. And without extra lessons to plan for the children, I can focus solely on teaching my classes at the Sorbonne and my work in the lab.

  Though we are no longer schooling our children together, Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin and I often still take our lunches together near the university. But now instead of schedules and the children, we discuss our lectures and our lab work. Then Jean’s lab becomes quite busy in the fall of 1909, as he is working hard to verify Albert Einstein’s predictions on atomic theory, and he begins working right through lunch. So only Paul and I take a quiet table together by the window, lingering some days over our coffees and our conversation, long past the end of the lunch hour.

  In the months since our summer in Arromanches, Paul has taken me up on my offer, come to visit my lab from time to time. And always, at our lunches, he asks me about my work, for updates on my progress, not just on polonium but radium too. Lately, I’ve been trying to achieve radium in a metallic state, and each day he asks about my results. All morning I look forward to talking things over with him during lunch, then pondering the questions he asks, after.

  “Come work in my lab full-time,” I implore him, one chilly afternoon in late November. I have assistants in my lab now, students, but I do not have a true partner. I desperately miss having a partner.

  Paul smiles, shakes his head. “And who would complete my study on ultrasound waves then, Marie?”

  Paul has his own work, of course, and maybe it is selfish of me to want him to work on my studies alongside me. But my studies could become his studies too, our studies. “Well, perhaps next year,” I say. “When you are finished your current work.”

  He gets a strange look on his face, so I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Then he puts his hand on my mine, as he has been wont to do lately. It is familiar in a way, friendly enough that I don’t think that I should pull away, or that it is in any way improper. Usually it is to emphasize a point, or to interrupt what I am telling him about the lab to ask a question. Now, his fingers linger on my wrist just a few seconds longer than they normally would, and then he gently strokes my palm with his thumb. “I can’t work with you,” he says softly.

  “Why not?”

  “It would be impossible to be that close to you all the time and not fall in love with you.”

  “Love?” I laugh a little. “I’m talking about science, Paul.”

  “So am I,” he says, and his voice sounds completely serious.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, ONE EVENING IN MID-DECEMBER, I AM in my lab much too late. At lunch, Paul had given me an idea—why not use electrolysis to try and turn radium chloride metallic? And I spent the rest of the day planning out how this might work. But now my back aches from standing all day, and I can’t suppress a rising yawn. Outside it is snowing, and I know the walk to the train will be long and slippery, bitterly cold. Pierre’s watch tells me it is already after 8 p.m.

  There’s an unexpected knock on the door—perhaps one of my assistants has forgotten something or couldn’t make it to the train in the snow. But when I open the door, there on the other side is Paul, his hat and thick wool coat covered in snowflakes. “I saw the lamplight through the window,” he says apologetically.

  “You came to work with me?” I cannot keep the glee from my voice, and I tug on his coat sleeve to pull him inside my lab, out of the snow. He shuts the door behind him, and for a moment I just look at him, not letting go of his coat.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” he admits. “I just . . . didn’t want to go home,” he says quietly.

  I remember that morning in Arromanches, the tiny slivers of glass I plucked from his hair. None of us had ever spoken about that again, and the following morning Jeanne had been her usual self, chattering with me over coffee about the children. I’d wanted to ask her about what might drive her to smash a vase against her kind husband’s head. But what went on between them really wasn’t my business—I hadn’t said a word.

  The cut from Arromanches was superficial and has long healed, but I put my hand up to his face now, trace the lines of his forehead with my fingertips. His skin is cool and damp from the snow. He reaches his hand up to meet mine and holds it there. My fingers suddenly grow hot against his skin. I lean in closer, and it is chilly enough inside my lab tonight that his breath frosts the air.

  I have not been with a man since Pierre; I have not wanted to until right this very moment. I remember what Paul said, that if he came to work in my lab, he would fall in love
with me. And I wonder if love and science are, for me, one and the same.

  Our faces are so close; I can feel his breath against my lips. I suddenly think of Jeanne, waiting up for him in their kitchen on boulevard Kellerman. “We shouldn’t do this,” I say softly, but I am shaking, my heart pounding in my chest. I run my fingers down his cheeks, trace his lips with my forefinger.

  “One time,” Paul whispers. “Just this once.”

  And then his lips are on mine, and my body is hot with wanting, and I can’t pull away. I don’t want to.

  Marya

  Krakow, Austrian Poland, 1909

  Kaz’s treatise on elasticity posited the idea that materials were elastic if, and only if, they returned to their original form after all outside forces were pulled away. Our marriage, too, was elastic by this definition. The years and the things that had happened to us, the things we had done, had shaped and changed and molded us into something unrecognizable once in Loksow. But now, in a new city, a new life, away from everything and everyone, here we were again, simply a man and a woman who loved each other.

  In Krakow, we rented a two-story brick house, walking distance to Jagiellonian University, where Kaz was teaching two mathematics courses each term and where he also had access to a lab to continue to further study elasticity. We had a small garden in the backyard where I began to cultivate lettuce and herbs. Enough money to enroll Klara in a private primary academy and weekly piano lessons. We could not yet afford our own piano for the house, but we were saving for it.

  I made breakfast for everyone in the mornings, kissed Kaz goodbye before he left for work. I walked Klara to school, and then, and only then, I understood my own elasticity. The worries about money, about the Russians’ opposition to women learning—that was absent here in Krakow. And I was still the same old Marya, my mind restless and itching, wanting to learn, wanting more.

  AT FIRST, I HOPED TO OPEN A BRANCH OF MY WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY here in Krakow. Teaching young women was what I’d come to think of as my life’s work in Loksow. But it was very hard to get started here. For one thing, it wasn’t easy to meet like-minded people in a new city. Mostly, I got introduced to the wives of the men Kaz taught in the mathematics department with, and they were only interested talking about their houses, their children, and their husbands. When I tried to bring up the subject of advancing our own educations, they would laugh. Or look at me funny, like I made them uncomfortable. Suffice to say, I did not make any friends our first few months in Krakow.

  But also the bigger problem was, there was not such a need for my school here, as there had been in Russian-controlled Poland. Women could enroll in Jagiellonian and had been allowed to since 1897. A few years ago, in 1906, the university had even hired their first woman professor. When I asked him, Kaz told me she was a part of the science faculty, but he had not met her yet. She felt to me like a mythical creature. And some mornings after I dropped Klara off at school, I would take a long path home, meandering by the science building on campus, hoping that, by chance, I might run into her. But it was silly, since I had no idea what she looked like. How would I even know if I walked right by her?

  I wrote to Hela weekly and begged her to send me as much current reading material as she could, so that I could at least continue my scientific education on my own. But Hela was so busy with writing up her findings on elemental magnetism with Jacques that her letters to me, her packages of scientific papers and journals, came less frequently than they had when I’d lived in Loksow.

  Our house in Krakow was on Golebia Street, and somehow it felt fitting that this street, too, was named for a bird. A pigeon, though, not a sparrow. And all the pigeons I saw in Krakow were never flying; they were prancing slowly on the street corners, pecking at wayward crumbs passersby had dropped in the street.

  IN THE SPRINGTIME, WE BOUGHT A PIANO FOR OUR HOUSE, and Klara could not keep her hands off of it. She ran to practice the moment she woke up in the morning, and then again the moment she got home from her daily school lessons. I had to pester her to do her schoolwork in the evenings and tried to hide that stabbing feeling in my stomach when she would say, Why, Mama? Why? Sciences and maths bore me. I want to play piano instead.

  “You can get back to the piano after your lessons are done. I’ll help you with the maths and sciences,” I would say. It pained me so that this was my favorite part of my day, and that she hated it.

  But I could not deny that Leokadia had been right about her talent either. After only two years of lessons, her small six-year-old fingers could fly across the keys in a way that mesmerized me when I sat down and watched her play. And her teacher, an older woman who had come recommended to Kaz by one of the other professors whose daughter also took lessons, told us that perhaps we should look into something more for Klara, something better, a professional institute of music?

  “Is there something like that here in Krakow?” I asked, genuinely curious. I had known of nothing of the sort in Loksow or Warsaw. And especially not something that would be open to young girls.

  She nodded. “There is one institute that accepts girls: Chernikoff. But it is very hard to get in.”

  “Oh.” I shrugged, and the truth was, as much as Klara loved piano, I still hoped for her to fall in love with science instead. And she was so young, only six years old. I was quite fine with her taking casual lessons with Pani Lebowska.

  “But Klara is special,” Pani Lebowska said matter-of-factly. “She’ll practice a little more, and then I will secure her an audition.”

  “I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU,” KAZ ANNOUNCED ONE EVENING, coming in from work, the beginning of our second fall in Krakow. Klara was already practicing for her audition, the sweet melodic sounds of her piano overtaking the entire house.

  Kaz had walked into the kitchen, where I was preparing dinner, put his hat on the table, and swooped in and kissed me. “Come, it’s out front.” He held out his hand, but I hesitated, not wanting our food to burn. “Come on, Marya. Come with me.”

  I wiped my hands on my apron before taking his hand, letting him lead me to the front steps of our house. And then when he opened the front door I saw it: a bright shiny red bicycle sitting out on our porch.

  “What’s this?” I asked him. I let go of his hand, stepped outside, and trailed my fingers along the handlebars. I hadn’t ridden in years, not since that glorious summer in Paris when my niece, Marie, was born and I’d ridden all around with Pierre.

  “I wrote your sisters, asked what I might be able to do to cheer you up.” He paused, swallowed hard. “I know it has been hard for you here in Krakow this past year. You miss your friends and your work . . . and I want to make you happy again. Both Bronia and Hela suggested that you would like a bicycle.”

  It was a thoughtful gift, or, he had meant for it to be that way. But I felt a disquieting sensation curl inside my stomach. My sisters both believed all I needed to be happy was a bicycle? And Kaz truly believed that this would satiate my mind’s desire to learn, my heart’s desire to help people and improve the world? A bicycle?

  Instead all I said was, “Kaz, this is much too expensive.”

  “But,” he said, leaning in to kiss me on the forehead, “you are worth it, kochanie.”

  MUCH TO KAZ’S DELIGHT I RODE MY BICYCLE ALL THROUGHOUT Krakow while Klara was at school and he was at work the following week. I explored the historic buildings and museums, the Royal Castle, and Cloth Hall.

  I rode and I rode, pushing my legs so hard that I could barely breathe, my entire body consumed with sweat. My life unfolded in front of me: Klara’s schedule and audition, this bicycle, my garden, and cooking suppers for my family. It all stretched out, long and tedious and dull, and then I couldn’t be sure whether it was sweat or tears on my cheeks. I pedaled and I pedaled, and I pushed myself, harder and harder, until it felt like my heart might explode in my chest.

  What was I doing here? I was only forty-one years old, and I hungered for knowledge. How could Kaz or my sisters believe t
hat a bicycle would solve any of that? Maybe it was that they couldn’t know something I hadn’t told them: it wasn’t the bicycle I’d loved so much in Paris, but those beautiful scientific conversations with Pierre while we were riding together.

  Pierre.

  His letters had sounded defeated as of late. He’d given up on his pitchblende last year, as he’d said it was too hard, too much work to do alone. And then recently Henri Becquerel had discovered a new element, the one that Pierre had long suspected existed. Now it would forever be known as becquerelium, highly radioactive, even more than uranium. And Pierre wondered in his letters to me whether he should even carry on in science. What have I done with my life? he asked me.

  I wrote him back, implored him not to give up on his scientific studies. Perhaps he could assist Hela and Jacques with their magnets until he figured out his next area of research. Next time will be different, I promised him.

  Pierre wrote me back: And what about you, Marya? What are you doing with your bright and beautiful mind in Krakow? There is more for you than gardening and bicycle riding, isn’t there? I know there is.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I RODE MY BICYCLE TO THE TRADING shop, and I sold it.

  My pockets full of crowns, I walked myself to the university and registered for my very first real university course. The registrar did not question my motives, nor ask why a woman my age would be interested in science. No, he simply took my money, asked me to fill out the registration card and to choose my classes.

  I wrote Marya Zorawska at the top of the card, my hands shaking with disbelief and excitement.

  “What course does the woman professor teach?” I asked the registrar. I did not have to walk through the university, hoping to seek her out. I could simply pay and enroll in her course. I could learn from her!