Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  “You must never give up,” I told these young women, as their bright eyes trained steadily on my face. “You cannot let circumstances or misfortune or age stop you. You must make a choice to keep going. You always have a choice,” I told them.

  KAZ’S RETIREMENT DIDN’T LAST VERY LONG, AS HE MISSED the daily interaction with students and conversation about maths. After a few months in Warsaw, he returned to teaching two mornings a week at the University of Warsaw. And then at night, over supper, Kaz and I took pleasure in discussing our students, what we taught and also what we learned each day.

  Bronia lived nearby in the suburb of Anin, where she and her Kazimierz and Lou ran a medical clinic, helping patients recover from tuberculosis. Kaz and I saw all three of them at least once a week, for suppers on Sundays.

  Hela was still in Paris with Jacques and Marie, all three of them working at the Curie Institute, where they had made great advancements in using magnets for medical imaging. But mainly Marie stayed there to run the lab while Hela and Jacques traveled to give speeches about their work and raise money for their continued research. They went all around Europe, even to America twice, but Hela did not enjoy the travel and wrote to tell me how the older she got, the more she missed Poland, and me, and Bronia.

  There is very little science in fame, Hela wrote me, and very little joy for me and Jacques when we are not working in the lab together.

  I urged her to move back to Warsaw, to be near me and Bronia, to come and teach with me, and share her knowledge with other young women. Jacques would never leave France, she wrote. And I wondered if, in spite of her complaints, a part of her secretly loved the fame, or if she felt bound to it, some wayward duty? I felt sad that she might never be able to leave it behind, to have a quiet and beautiful life like Bronia and I were enjoying in Warsaw now.

  Pierre wrote to me that some days he made it into the lab to assist Marie, but most days he rode his bike through his gardens in Sceaux and was content to let Marie carry on his work. I imagined him riding, his completely white hair and beard fluttering in the wind while he reveled in the scent of flowers. Kaz and I had brought our own bicycles to Warsaw, and on the weekends, we still rode them together, too, sometimes bringing a picnic lunch to enjoy along the banks of the Vistula.

  In 1929, Marie sent me a scientific study she published so I could share her results with my students. She was studying the alpha decay of Pierre’s element, and she had determined its half-life to be just 138 days. Which was especially noteworthy compared with that of becquerelium, which was thought to be 1,600 years.

  Imagine two such radioactive elements, side by side in the pitchblende, so similar and yet with such a different half-life, she wrote.

  Half-life, I thought. What a funny word. So unscientific.

  To me it sounded more like the way I might describe how I had lived my entire adult life. One foot inside my reality with Kaz, one foot inside the fantasy of what might have been, what I might have become, had I gone to Paris as a young woman to study at the Sorbonne.

  AS PRINCIPAL PIANIST WITH THE LONDON SYMPHONY, KLARA gave concerts all around Europe, and Kaz and I traveled to see her whenever we could manage the cost and the distance, especially in the summers, when neither one of us were teaching. In the summer of 1932, we went to Belgium to hear her play at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, then on to Paris, where she played at the Salle Pleyel, and Hela, Jacques, Pierre, and Marie attended with us.

  How beautiful she was up on stage, dressed in taffeta as blue as her eyes! And sitting in the audience, I was mesmerized by the way her fingers moved across the keys, fast and furious and delicate all at once. Somehow we had made her, Kaz and I. But she had worked hard and practiced and practiced. She had gone after her dream; she had made herself, too.

  Kaz squeezed my hand, and when she finished performing and stood up to take her bow, he turned and kissed my cheek. “You’re crying, kochanie,” he whispered to me, reaching up to wipe away my tears. “Don’t be sad.”

  “I’m not sad,” I said back to him. “Watching her, now I know we have done everything right. Made all the right choices in our lives, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, kochanie,” he agreed with me. “We have.”

  “TAKE A WALK WITH ME,” PIERRE SAID THE MORNING AFTER the concert. He’d come to Hela and Jacques’s house, where we were all staying for a few days for a visit, all of us laughing around the breakfast table this morning: Kaz and Klara, Hela and Marie and Jacques. Pierre whispered the request close enough to my ear, and no one else seemed to hear or notice him.

  I stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Klara, who was sitting next to me. She smiled and dove back into conversation and laughter with her cousin, Marie.

  “Come,” Pierre said. He held out his hand for me to take it, and I did, finding a comfort in his familiarity. He moved slower than he used to. His shoulders were a bit stooped, his hair gone, his beard thinned and pure white. “The delphinium are all in bloom in the Parc Monceau,” he said. “And I swear it, they are all the color of your mercury flame. Every time I’ve walked by them, I’ve thought, How Marya will love these flowers.”

  I didn’t have a garden in Warsaw like I’d had in Krakow, and besides, I felt too old to tend to one now. It was harder to breathe than it once was, and as Pierre and I walked, I had to slow down. I began to cough.

  “Marya?” Pierre stopped and turned to me. “Are you ill?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Just a little cough, that’s all.” But inside my chest, my lungs constricted, pushing against my ribs, so that the words came out of me in a wheeze. Pierre’s face fell with concern. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I will have Lou examine me when I get back to Warsaw, hmm? But I’m sure it’s nothing. Come, show me your delphinium.”

  I DID NOT EXACTLY LIE TO PIERRE, BUT I DID NOT LET LOU examine me for six months after I returned to Warsaw. And maybe it was because deep down, I knew. I was a scientist and a teacher; I knew the body, my own body, well enough to understand it was failing me. But still, I could not push past my own denial, my own stupid hope that if I simply ignored it, it would go away. I would improve.

  A little bit of the grippe coming back to haunt me, that is all, I reassured a worried Kaz for months and months as I coughed.

  But by the winter my cough had become unbearable, my breathing more labored, and I could not ignore it any longer. I took the train out to Anin one Thursday when Kaz was teaching a class, wanting to go alone.

  “Oh, ciotka,” Lou said, examining my chest X-ray. Three months earlier, she had married a writer she’d cured of tuberculosis in their clinic, and up until this very moment, her face had been pink with joy.

  “Just tell me the truth,” I told her. “Don’t soften it.”

  She handed me the X-ray so I could examine it myself. The large black spots on my lungs confirmed what I already knew deep down. There was a cancer growing inside of me. And perhaps it was not at all surprising, after all the smoke that had filled my lungs day in and day out in the lab in Krakow.

  And still, I felt shocked by it. That it was happening to me. My hands shook with disbelief. “Are you sure this is my X-ray, Lou?” I asked, handing it back to her. Perhaps it had fallen from the machine, belonging to someone else, another patient.

  Lou put her arms around my shoulders, holding on to me. She stroked my hair with her hands. “It is too much to operate,” she said quietly after a few moments. “And we have no treatments for cancer other than surgery, you know.”

  I nodded, I did know. There was nothing to be done for cancer, no curative therapy to treat it. “How much time do you think I have?” I asked her.

  She didn’t say anything for another moment; she just held on to me. And then finally she said, “If you’re lucky and the cancer isn’t too aggressive . . . Maybe a year?”

  Marie

  Warsaw, 1932

  There is a great big Radium Institute opening in Warsaw, entirely devoted to Curietherapy, using my radium f
or the curative treatment of cancer. I travel to Poland by myself for its grand opening at the end of May; neither of my daughters can make it.

  Irène has recently given birth to a baby boy she named Pierre, a tribute to her father, and she and Fred are back in Paris looking after him, and my lab. I’ve had to admit I was wrong about Fred. Irène is right; he is kind and he is funny; he is a good scientist and now a good father, too. Everything my Pierre would’ve wanted for Irène. I have not lost Irène to Fred at all, but I have, instead, gained another scientist and a son-in-law. Irène is better than me; perhaps for her, love and science really can be one and the same.

  I’ve spent most of the last years traveling, raising money for my institutes, giving speeches, and accepting honors, and it has been good to have Irène and Fred back in Paris. I’d much rather be in the lab with them, but who else will do these things, raise the money to keep my work going, if not me?

  When she is not otherwise engaged with her piano performances, Ève accompanies me in my travels. She is nothing like me, or Irène—she is a dreamer, her head in the clouds, like her father. I am wont to remind her to pay attention every time she crosses the street. But it is silly, because she is the one looking out for me as I walk, as my eyes have failed me so. I wish she could’ve come to Warsaw with me, but she is busy, and she does not understand how important this particular journey is to me either. It is not just another speech, another honor—I have finally given something to my homeland.

  Still, the train ride to Warsaw is very, very long, and very lonely to undertake by myself. I’m exhausted by the time I arrive, and it is hard to remember why I’ve been looking forward to this trip so. My entire body aches.

  But then my sister-mother and my sister-twin are both waiting for me at the train station, and seeing them again, holding on to them again, I feel a glimmer of happiness.

  THE CITY IS QUITE EXCITED TO RECEIVE ME, BESTOWING UPON me honorary degrees and so many kind words. It is a strange thing to reconcile this with the city I knew as a poor young girl, with the country who refused to hire me, to want me, to love me and Pierre, once. Now, I stand here in front of my new institute, hearing a crowd cheering, for me? There is even a special brick in the building inscribed with an homage to me.

  Hela and Bronia both attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and how wonderful it is to be here with both of them. They each hold on to one of my hands, and the three of us stand here and stare up at my great big beautiful institute, long after the ribbon has been cut and the crowd has dissipated.

  “Look what you have done,” Hela says, softly, squeezing my hand. “Papa would be so proud.”

  I have lost so much, so many people. I am old and ailing and often quite lonely. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like now if Pierre were still here. I think about that last sun-drenched morning in Saint-Rémy, when love and light and our little family all glowed there around me—luck, as Pierre called it.

  But that was so long ago, so far away. In all the years since, amid all the loss, I have never lost sight of my work. My radiation therapy will help cure so many Polish people of cancer, right here, in this very institute. And staring up at this great big beautiful Polish building, for a second, I believe every choice I’ve made was the right one.

  Bronia nods and murmurs in agreement with Hela. “Very proud,” she says. “And I am very proud to be the medical director here.” Though today is the official opening, we have been admitting patients, curing them already for a few months, under Bronia’s direction.

  I get up close to examine my sister-mother, to be able to see her face through the clouds of my eyes. She is too pale and too thin. I worry for her, living alone in Warsaw, with no family left, but Hela. Mier passed away two years ago, and in the time since, Bronia has thrown herself into overseeing the building of this institute, raising the funds to get it finished, and now running it as the medical director.

  Still, she appears frail before me, her wrinkled skin sagging from her bones. But I ask her to tell me about the people she’s treating here, and her face lights up a little. Even after all this time, my sister-mother wants to be needed, needs to be needed. It is the people of Poland who need her now, to treat them with my cancer cure.

  “I’m tired,” Bronia says, finished speaking about her patients now. “It is time to go home.”

  But I am not ready to let her—or my time with my sisters—go yet. I grab her hand and beg of her to walk along the Vistula with me. To examine the bright blue water, to let it calm us and carry us as it did when we were girls. She protests that it is getting late, but Hela agrees with me, insists.

  “Life is so strange and too short,” Hela says. “What if we are never all together again?” And now it is true, that all three Sklodowska sisters have outlived their husbands, and that Bronia has also outlived her children. Bronia and Hela do hold each other close here in Warsaw, but my life is still in Paris, my lab in Paris. The very long trip here has exhausted me more than I have ever felt before, and I do not know if I will ever make it home again.

  But I will not admit that out loud to my sisters. Instead I say, “Who knows when we sisters will be together again, hmm?”

  Finally Bronia relents, and the three of us walk toward the river.

  We are older now, and we all move slowly. My eyes give me so much trouble that I am holding on tightly to my sisters, counting on them to lead the way, to guide me.

  “Do you remember when we walked here after Mama died?” Hela says. “What you told us about the river, Bron?”

  “It was so long ago,” Bronia says. “I don’t know.”

  But I remember. We were so young then, so sad. So lost. We knew nothing of the world outside of Warsaw or all the things the future would hold for us. We knew nothing of men or love, of science or of war. We had lost our mother; we thought we had lost everything. We did not know that we could lose so much more, that we could survive so much more, too. We did not know what we were capable of, what we would become, how we would change the course of science.

  Bronia had insisted then that the fresh air, the water, it would do us some good. She had grabbed on to mine and Hela’s hands and practically dragged us here, and then we had stood by the banks of the big blue river and Bronia had said, Look, my sisters! Look at the way the water moves, on and on and on. It never stops. It can’t stop.

  Once we reach the river again now, it is just as blue, just as beautiful and striking as I remember it being when we were girls.

  “Look,” I say to Bronia. “It is still moving. Always moving. It never stops. It can’t stop.”

  Marya

  Warsaw, 1934

  I am sixty-six years old and I convalesce, my lungs no longer able to carry the weight of my breath. Nearly all day I sleep, but still I dream, comforted by the sounds of Klara’s concertos in my mind. In waking moments, Bronia and Lou and Kaz tend to me, bringing me soup and flowers and sitting by my bedside, talking to me softly. Outside my window I can catch a glimpse of the palest summer Polish sky, or, on days when I am well enough to sit up, the sparkling blue waters of the Vistula in the distance.

  Klara comes from London, and that is when I know, it is truly the end, that the cancer has grown larger than my will to breathe. Kaz must’ve called her and told her to come as fast as she could.

  Mama, is there anything you need?

  I can see the shape of her when I open my eyes again, more a shadow than my beautiful daughter. Play for me, I tell her. Play me a song.

  Her sweet music floods my ears, a balm, a memory. A dreamscape.

  Promise me something, I say to her. You never stop playing that music. And if you fall in love, you make sure he is your equal. That he will not hold you back in your career. You never stop, Klara. You reach for everything you want, and, you never stop.

  From the other room, the sound of her piano goes and goes and goes, and I close my eyes listening to it, smiling.

  MAMA. KLARA’S VOICE AGAIN.

  Hours h
ave passed, or maybe just minutes? Or has it been days? My beautiful daughter, mój mały kurczak, she is a shadow, hovering again. No, there are two shadows now.

  Someone came to see you, Klara says. He came all the way from Paris!

  His shape becomes a memory, and my sense of smell has not left me yet. I inhale: the flower gardens in Sceaux. The cherry blossoms as we rode bicycles through the streets of Paris, pedaling too hard, the sun on our faces.

  Slow down, mon amie. You are much too fast.

  Marya, he says my name. Oh, Marya. I remember the way his face fell in Sweden, standing by the river, wanting to kiss me. The way he looked when he swirled his vodka glass by the sea, finally understanding that his work mattered. That his life meant something. Means something. He is here now, and he is alive and breathing, and he will continue on, even after I am gone.

  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 am young again, riding a bicycle through the cobblestone streets of La Vilette, climbing through the Carpathians on the bluest-sky day of July. We are standing on top of the world together, staring out at the valley below us.

  You came all this way? I think I say. Or maybe I don’t say anything at all.

  Imagine, Pierre says. If we had met when we were younger. If we had married. Imagine what our life could’ve been, Marya.

  I close my eyes again, and somewhere between sleep and waking, somewhere between life and death, between breathing still and taking my very last breath, I imagine it.

  Marie

  France, 1934

  The end seems to come upon me fast, even though it has been coming upon me for so very long. I have been ill and tired, having trouble with my eyes and with my ears and with my legs for so long, that it seems I will exist and exist and exist this way forever.