Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  I remembered Hela as a girl, my sister-twin who smelled of lemon and corn poppies, always filled with light and hope, and now, here she was before me, a famous scientist, but was she made of stone?

  “I still think about how desperate Kazimierz was to get you back that morning he came to our apartment in Warsaw. You were already at the train station and you almost left for Paris without him.” Hela was still talking, and now her voice sounded far away. “I’ve always envied you, Marya, for having a love like that.”

  “Oh, Hela,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Kazimierz is no saint, believe me.”

  Still, all these years later, the thought of him and Leokadia together hurt, a physical pain deep in my gut. But it was so long ago, I barely thought of it. Kaz would not leave me, and I would not leave him. We had built a life together, a family. But I didn’t think we had the kind of life Hela should envy. Not when she had a Nobel Prize, a lab in Paris, and a vacation home in Brittany.

  “Do you ever wonder how different our lives might be now if I had gotten on that train to Paris?” I asked her.

  On the beach, Pierre grabbed onto Jeanne’s hand. She smiled at something he said to her, and they continued walking down the shore, hand in hand. Perhaps Hela was right, that they were good for each other, that Jeanne deserved happiness with Pierre, whether she was still legally married or not.

  Hela laughed a little. “But then you wouldn’t have Klara, and I might not have a Nobel Prize,” she said.

  “Or Marie,” I added.

  “Right. Or Marie,” she repeated softly. “And then . . . who knows where we’d both be standing right now, in the midst of this god-awful war.”

  How hard it was to imagine our lives without our beautiful daughters, and perhaps everything we had done, every choice we had made had led us to them, to our safety here together during this war. And then none of it felt like it could be wrong.

  Hela took my hand and pulled me away from the window. “Come, let’s leave these two lovebirds be, and I’ll show you the paper I’ve been writing up on electromagnetism. I think you’ll find it fascinating.”

  I WOKE UP EARLY IN L’ARCOUËST, BEFORE THE FIRST LIGHT, MY stomach aching with worries about the war and the world, and the safety of my house and husband back in Krakow. And while Klara remained snoring, I would tiptoe into the kitchen to make myself a coffee and read by lamplight the scientific papers Hela left out for me. I learned so much about Hela’s research and began to wonder if her theory on electromagnetic charges and atoms could possibly work hand in hand with Professor Mazur’s research on detonation. I wrote Professor Mazur a rambling letter, filled with ideas, and then I was quite disappointed when for weeks and weeks I received nothing from her in return.

  Kaz and I wrote letters to each other every few days. He told me about the courses he was teaching, the students he still had left. About the terrible state of the produce at the local market and how dreadful his soup tasted, how he remembered my clear potato broth back in Loskow when we lived together in our one-room apartment, and how he longed for something that delicious now. How he longed for me, for the way everything about our life had been close then. There was no place in that apartment I could stand without touching you, he wrote.

  Oh, you are in a sorry state if you remember that soup being delicious, I wrote him back. But I chuckled as I put the words to the page, marveling at the way, with this distance, this space between us, this war, Kaz somehow felt closer to me than he had in years.

  KAZ ARRIVED FOR AN UNEXPECTED VISIT AT THE END OF HIS fall term, showing up unannounced one night while we were all in the middle of dinner. He walked in, and Klara was so delighted to see him, she jumped up from the table, squealing, “Papa!” forgetting for a moment that she was a teenager, and in company no less. She jumped into his arms like she had as a toddler.

  “Kurczak! How you’ve grown!” He kissed the top of her head but looked over her, toward me. I could tell there was something wrong, in the way his cheeks were hollow and his eyes were dark.

  I stood and kissed his unshaven cheek, closed my eyes for a second and inhaled the familiar scent of him, pine trees and pipe smoke. “Kaz . . . what is it?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “We should talk in private,” he said, his eyes looking around the table, landing on Jeanne, the only one here he’d never met.

  I turned and caught Hela’s eye. She frowned. “Kazimierz—” She stood, taking charge. “Take a seat and have some stew, and tell us what is going on. We are all family here.”

  Kaz looked at me, and I nodded. Hela was right. Whatever was wrong, he could say it in front of my family. He took the seat Hela offered him next to her, and I sat back down in my seat next to Jeanne. “I’m so sorry, kochanie.” The words tumbled out of him as Hela placed a bowl of stew in front of him. “But Ola Mazur was killed.”

  “Killed?” The word felt foreign on my tongue, unfamiliar and unexpected and unlike a word that belonged to me. I could not understand it nor absorb it. That such a word could be used in a sentence with Ola Mazur. My mentor and my savior. There was so much to be done with her in the lab still after the war. She had promised me that! She could not be killed.

  “It was a terrible accident.” Kaz was still talking. “There was looting on her block, and she tried to intervene, help the old woman who lived next door to her. The old woman didn’t want to lose her things, you see, and Ola stepped in, and the looters pushed her into the street. She fell and she was run over by an automobile.”

  I imagined Professor Mazur’s tiny body flying through the air into the street, crushed by an automobile, her beautiful mind bleeding out into the road. I covered my mouth, swallowing back the taste of bile in my throat. She was just a few years older than me. Her girls, just a few years older than Klara. Oh, her girls.

  “Your research,” Pierre said, and at the same time I said, “Her children!”

  Jeanne looked at him, then at me, and she put her hand on mine. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Marya,” she said patting my hand. “This war,” she said, “This great big terrible war.”

  “I wish there was something I could’ve done,” I whispered.

  Kaz met my eyes across the table. “But what can we do? What can any of us do? I just thank God that you and Klara came here when you did, that you are safe, kochanie.”

  Later that night, in bed, Kaz’s arms were wrapped around me for the first time in months, but I couldn’t sleep. All I could see behind my lidded eyes was Professor Mazur, bleeding and dying in the street.

  I watched her fall, again and again, powerless to stop her, powerless to save her. And the feeling of helplessness curled up inside of me, making it hard to breathe.

  Marie

  Western Front, 1914–1916

  After I secure my radium in Bordeaux, I ignore the Perrins’ continued pleas to come to L’Arcouëst. So many men are dying in this terrible war, and I insist that if I stay in Paris, I can use my lab, use science to help. I cannot simply while away the war in the safety of the rocky cliffs of Brittany, not when there is something I can do here in Paris.

  I get the idea that if I can make X-ray units mobile, fit them into cars, I can drive them out into the field to diagnose soldiers and save their lives. It seems like a daunting task at first, since I don’t even know how to drive, and I must lobby to secure the funding. But then I bring Irène back to Paris to help me, and suddenly there we are, working on my idea together, side by side in the lab. A team.

  WE HAVE OUR FIRST RADIOLOGICAL CAR UP AND RUNNING BY 1914, and Irène and I do our first test run. I drive us right up to the Battle of the Marne, much to the consternation of a general who shouts at me, no, demands that I stop my car and return to Paris, at once. “The front lines is no place for a woman!” he yells to be heard over the noise of the Renault’s engine.

  I gun it a little in response.

  “I’m serious, lady,” the general shouts at me.

  “They told me that about the
laboratory too,” I shout right back. “And two Nobel prizes later, I quite disagree. Now, step aside so we can help your soldiers.” He stands perfectly still, crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Step aside,” I shout again. “Or else I will be forced to drive right over you.”

  I gun the engine of the Renault again, and finally he moves, perhaps thinking me crazy, thinking I might run him over if he were to stay there standing in front of me. “It’s not my problem if you’re both killed,” he shouts. I ignore him, steer the car past him, parking it by the medical tent. I kill the engine, and my hands are shaking. I ball them into fists so Irène won’t notice.

  “Were you really going to run him over, Maman?” Irène asks. Her eyes are wide, and her face is a strange shade of green.

  “No, of course not, ma chérie. The thing you must learn about men is that they might try and put up a fight, but then they will always, always move out of your way. There is nothing that frightens them more than an intelligent woman.” She nods slowly. “Now, come. We have made it here, let us put our X-ray machine to good use.”

  BY 1916, WE HAVE TWENTY RADIOLOGICAL CARS IN THE FIELD, Petites Curies, as we have come to call them. All of them equipped with mobile X-ray units and their own dynamo, an electric generator, which I have designed myself and had built into all the cars so that we have electric power for the units.

  Irène and I divide our time between driving to the front ourselves and training other women to drive the cars and use the radiological equipment back in Paris at the lab. (Irène all the while keeps up her studies at the Sorbonne and has achieved her certificates in maths and almost nearly in physics and chemistry.) All in all now, we have nearly 150 capable women, with the ability to drive, x-ray, and diagnose. I keep one car for myself, the Renault, and I drive into the field when I can and when I’m needed. I receive regular telegrams and telephone calls, letting me know where to go, and I dispatch the cars from Paris.

  The laboratory has been, nearly my entire adult life, the place where I have felt most free, most at home. But now, driving my Renault from post to post out in the field, changing flat tires and cleaning carburetors, diagnosing wounded men, saving lives, I have never felt such excitement, such a thrill. Such a comfort and surety in my work.

  BY SEPTEMBER 1916, IRèNE IS AT HER OWN POST IN HOOGSTADE, Belgium, sleeping for weeks out in the medical tent with the nurses. She reports in her letters of the bullet fragments she finds in bones, of a man whose life she saves by diagnosing his wounded lung.

  I get a dispatch that another unit is needed, and all my women are off elsewhere, so I take my Renault, drive to Hoogstade myself to assist.

  “Maman,” Irène says, her tired face erupting in glee when I get out of the car. Her face no longer belongs to a girl, or even a teenager, but now it is the worn face of a woman. A woman who has seen things and done things and learned things. She embraces me tightly, and as she is a bit taller than me, she lowers her lips to kiss the top of my head. “How wonderful you came!”

  “Of course I came,” I said. “I got a dispatch that there were too many injuries for just one car.”

  “Oh.” Irène’s face fell. “It was silly of me . . . but I thought . . . it was my birthday that brought you.” She shrugs, sheepishly.

  Her birthday. Is it really? It has been weeks, or maybe it has been months since we’ve last seen each other. It’s hard to keep track of time in the war, in the field. I measure my days in miles, in radiographs of broken bones and bullet-ridden chests. In number of men saved, and transported for treatment, and lost despite my greatest efforts.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” I say to her, giving her another quick hug. If I were not standing in the middle of a war, perhaps I would take a moment to remember it, that precipitous joy that erupted from me on the morning of her birth. The way Pierre had cried out that she was so small, too small. Perhaps I would ruminate on the fact that Pierre has been gone so long, he would not even recognize our baby who stands before me now, a woman, a scientist.

  But there is no time to be nostalgic. I kiss her cheek and pull out of the embrace. “Let’s be happy you and I are both alive. So many men are injured, dying. They need us. There will be other birthdays. Come, let’s drive to the field. You lead the way. I’ll follow behind you in my car.”

  She nods, and I can tell she feels the same excitement about going back out into the field that I do. Her blue eyes light up the way her father’s did once in our laboratory shed, watching our radium glow and glow and glow upon the table.

  Marya

  Krakow, 1918–1919

  Krakow became liberated from Austrian rule first, on October 31, 1918, a few weeks before the end of the war. And then after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Warsaw was liberated from Russian rule, and for the first time in my lifetime and more, over 100 years, Poland was Poland again. No more Austrian Poland, Russian Poland. Out of the horribleness and death and destruction of the war, my country had at long last regained her sovereignty. I wished my father were alive to see it.

  Klara and I returned to Krakow once things stabilized, near the end of the war. And with Chernikoff still closed, Klara practiced piano on her own at the house for hours each day, but now without the sour attitude. She had been without a piano for so long at Hela’s that she was grateful just to be able to play again. And I was grateful to be able to taste the end of the war, to revel in the feeling of my Poland being Poland, and to hear the sounds of Klara’s beautiful music, filling our house with light and joy and wonder again.

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I DID WHEN WE GOT BACK TO KRAKOW was go to Professor Mazur’s home to check on her daughters. She and I had been together only in the lab, teacher and student, researcher and assistant. We had not been friends—I did not know her daughters. I had met Nadia and Emilia only once before. And I didn’t even know the exact location of the Mazurs’ home because I had never been there. But Klara remembered where it was from that time I went to Sweden and she had spent time with the Mazur girls and their governess. When I asked her for help, she stepped away from her piano and said, “Mama, I’ll go with you to see them.”

  The Mazurs’ house was only five blocks away from ours, in a location I’d walked by a few times before on Nadzieja Street. Klara and I walked there together, our arms linked. At fifteen, she was lithe and beautiful, and she wore her pale blond hair in curls. She was a few inches taller than me, and when we walked together now I got the distinct feeling she believed she was holding me up. When I looked at her though, I still saw my little girl.

  Nadia, the Mazurs’ older daughter, nearly eighteen, answered the door when we rang the bell. She had blossomed in the years since I’d met her, and here she was before me now, a ghost of her mother, small and pale with shining black hair. She looked at me, uncertain. Then her eyes caught on Klara and recognition glimmered on her face. She smiled. “Oh, Klara! Marya?” She greeted us, opening the door wider.

  I handed her the loaf of bread I’d baked last night with what I could scrape together at the market. Yeast and flour were scarce; my loaf had barely risen and more resembled a misshapen cracker.

  Klara gave Nadia a hug. “Come in,” Nadia said to both of us. “I have been hoping you would return to Krakow.”

  “I was so very sorry to hear what happened to your mother. How have you and your sister been?” I asked, as we walked inside. Boxes were stacked in the corner of the foyer, and the parlor room was mostly empty. “Are you moving?” I asked.

  Nadia nodded. “Papa was offered a job at a university in Chicago, and Emilia and I can study there.”

  “America,” Klara said, her eyes wide, with surprise, or was it jealousy? I had never met Professor Mazur’s husband, but I knew he was also a professor, literature, or . . . history?

  “It’s been hard,” Nadia said. “Everything has been hard. The war . . . Mama’s passing.” She blinked back tears. I held on tightly to Klara’s hand. I wished there was something I could’ve done to save Professo
r Mazur, but I was also so grateful that Klara and I had found safety during the war, that my family had come through it intact. “It will be good to start over somewhere new. For all of us,” Nadia was saying now.

  I nodded. “Your mother meant a lot to me,” I said. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. We were supposed to go back into her lab together, once the war was over. There was so much more work to be done.” I sighed.

  “She had told us.” Nadia nodded vigorously. “Oh! Hold on, I have something for you.”

  Nadia disappeared into the other room, then returned a few moments later with a stack of notebooks. I recognized them immediately: Professor Mazur’s research journals. She had never been without one in the lab, and she was always scribbling down notes. Nadia put the pile of them into my arms now, and I had no choice but to accept or let them drop to the floor.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?” I asked, stunned.

  Nadia shrugged and smiled at me. “We didn’t want to get rid of them, but we don’t want to move them either.”

  “But I don’t . . .” I stammered.

  “I’m sure you will take good care of them,” Nadia said. Then she turned to Klara to ask about her piano schooling. I heard Klara telling her about Chernikoff still being closed, and Nadia saying that in America she hoped to study biology, maybe become a doctor.

  In my arms, Professor Mazur’s life’s work felt so heavy that I suddenly wondered if I might collapse under its weight.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1919, WE HOPED THAT CHERNIKOFF WOULD reopen, and that Klara could continue her musical education. But Max Chernikoff’s son had also been killed in the war, and Max, consumed by grief, announced his permanent retirement. His school would never reopen. Klara had been without a professional piano education for nearly four years, and now there was nothing in Krakow for her. I wasn’t sure what to do for her, and I wrote Leokadia a letter to ask for her advice. She had gotten Klara, and me, into this life consumed by piano, I reasoned. It was only fair to ask for her help now. Besides, maybe she still owed me. Maybe she would always owe me.