Jillian Cantor - Half Life

“I don’t mean to sound rude,” Agata said, her tone sounding perfectly rude. I liked Agata for her bluntness. She spoke this way at work, too, even with Pani Kaminska, and sometimes I was in awe of her sheer ability to speak her mind and not get fired. “But why are you here?” she said to Leokadia now. It wasn’t Leokadia’s presence that had particularly thrown any of us, but more the deep red chiffon of her dress, the perfect smooth line it made around her ample waist. We were all struggling to survive in ways she clearly was not. If you had money, why wouldn’t you leave Poland for a real university?

Leokadia opened her eyes wide in response, but did not answer at first. Her irises were a bright blue, the color of the robin eggs in the nest outside our apartment window, and somehow their color alone softened her, made her seem younger and more delicate than the rest of us.

“Every woman is welcome,” I chided Agata with a stern look, though I wasn’t sure yet whether Leokadia deserved my defense or not. “As long as she can contribute knowledge and keep our secret.”

“I can,” Leokadia said quickly, shooting me what appeared to be a grateful smile. She had a heart-shaped face, and when she smiled, she revealed tiny, pearl teeth, with the smallest of gaps between the top two. “And I will,” she added. I stared at her, wanting her to go on, explain herself. “I can teach you all about music, piano lessons for anyone who wants to learn. And my father is a mathematician. He does not approve of women getting a higher education and has forbidden me from getting one, but he’s away teaching in Russia and I’ve been teaching myself maths, sneaking his books.” That explained why she hadn’t sought out an education outside of Poland. Her father . “I don’t know anything at all about science or literature.” Leokadia was still talking. “And I wish I did…” Her voice trailed off, and she stared at us all. No one said anything for a moment.

“She plays piano quite beautifully,” her cousin, Joanna, finally said, her voice teetering with reluctance. Perhaps she worried now she had made a mistake bringing Leokadia here to begin with. Joanna’s pale cheeks flushed scarlet, and I felt all the women turn their eyes to me. I was the one who’d started our Flying University, and they still saw it as mine.

But the truth of it was, it wasn’t mine. It was ours . Flying University was for every woman who wanted to learn and couldn’t. It didn’t matter now in Poland whether you were a rich woman or a poor woman, whether you dressed in rags or silk, whether you had enough to eat or you didn’t—none of us were allowed to attend university here, and why would we deny Leokadia the knowledge we so hungered for ourselves?

“I would very much like your piano lessons, Leokadia,” I finally said, though I had never before desired to play or learn anything about music. To me music was babka and science was kielbasa . You could live without sweets, but you could not live without sustenance.

Leokadia smiled wider this time. “I would love to teach you, Marya. And please, call me Kadi.”

“Welcome, Kadi,” I said, and five other voices followed suit, murmuring the same.

There were not enough seats for seven people in my small apartment, and barely even enough floor space, but I pushed our tiny table up all the way to the coal stove, and then there was just enough room for us all to sit on the bare wood floor in between the table and our bed.

The June air was heavy, stifling, and even with the window cracked, and it being nighttime, it was much too hot for so many people, sitting shoulder to shoulder. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck, from under my bun, and I fanned myself with the paper Emilia had made for us all, to teach us Latin, which she had learned as a child from her older brother.

But we all sat together, repeating Latin words after her into the simmering growing darkness, speaking softly, so as not to alert the neighbors, or the patrons below in the bakery. And there, just like that, sweaty and crowded among women, it was the happiest I’d felt all week.

JUST AS EMILIA WAS TEACHING US THE LAST PHRASE ON HER paper— omnium rerum principia parva sunt (the beginnings of all things are small) —the apartment door swung open. All seven of us reacted the same, a collective jump, shoulders bumping, knees banging together. Then I looked up, let out a sigh. It was only Kaz coming home, not the Russian police coming to arrest us. Of course it was Kaz. “This is my husband,” I told the other women. “Don’t worry. We’re fine.”

I knew he would be home by eight, and I had planned we would be finished by then, all the women already gone home. But our fascination with Kadi meant we’d started a bit later than we’d intended and I’d lost track of the time. Kaz knew what I’d been doing all along, but only in the abstract, in theory. Now, for the first time, he was face to face with my little university.

He quickly shut the door, stepped to the side, which was the only space for him left, save for our bed, which sat on the other side of the room and would require climbing through the whole seven of us to get to. His eyes caught mine, and for a second I thought he might laugh. The ridiculousness—an entire group of women, taking up all the floor space in his apartment, all of us sweating and whispering Latin to one another in the almost darkness. But then he frowned instead.

I stood up quickly, accidentally bumping Agata’s shoulder with my knee. “Thank you, Emilia. Let’s end for tonight.”

Kadi stood up next. “This was so wonderful,” she gushed. “Thank you for letting me join in, Marya. Next week you’ll come to my home. There’s more room, and there’s a piano. I’ll teach.”

Everyone else’s eyes turned to her now, including my husband’s. But mine were only on him. It was too dark in here for me to really understand the look on his face, or what he was thinking as he took in her red silk dress, her pretty blond hair, her invitation to teach piano, of all things. Kadi was everything he’d had once, in his other life: wealth and privilege and destiny. And for a few seconds, I felt something strange bubbling up inside of me, a flicker of doubt.

All the women whispered goodbyes and left, one at a time. Agata left last, and as soon as she shut the door behind her, Kaz came to me. Two strides, and then his arms were around me.

He put his finger to my face, traced the lines of my lips ever so gently, until my doubt and my worry turned into a half smile. Steady. “I love you so much, Marya,” he said. “What would I do if anything ever happened to you, kochanie ?”

My dear sweet devoted husband. “Nothing will happen,” I promised him.

“But there were too many women here tonight. It’s dangerous for you all to meet like this. What if you are caught? Arrested?”

“It was only seven,” I said. “Our apartment is just so small, it felt like more. And who’s to say we were not here… baking together?”

“But you weren’t,” he snapped, the crease of his frown growing deeper. He sighed, then pulled me tightly against him. He kissed the top of my head. “You are everything to me,” he said into my hair. “Everything.”

Everything. I felt a crushing weight in my chest, and for a moment, it was hard to breathe.

I still had my family: Papa and Hela were only a short train ride away in Warsaw and I visited with them every few months, and Bronia was still writing me letters from Paris, though more infrequently now, since my niece, Helena (who Bronia wrote they’d nicknamed “Lou”) had been born. As far as I knew, he hadn’t talked to his parents nor any of his siblings since we’d been married two years earlier. I had my friends in Flying University now, too. But what did Kazimierz have in Loksow? His work, the insufferable young boys he taught, and… the inability to further his own education, to light his mind the way he needed.