Jillian Cantor - Half Life

Krakow, 1919–1920

Ifell ill with a terrible case of grippe on my return to Krakow after moving Klara to Paris, and Kaz was so worried he summoned our niece, Lou, a physician herself now. After I had introduced her to biology in Loksow, she had gone on to study medicine in Paris, then returned to Poland to work alongside her parents in their medical clinic. She moved into Klara’s empty bedroom for a few weeks to watch over my health day and night.

I was so very ill and so very lonely without Klara. It was hard to breathe, I was delirious with fever, and I truly wondered if the grippe might kill me. I desperately missed the comforts of Klara’s noise, her piano that I’d grown so used to after so many years listening to it.

Play all the concert halls you dream of, my beautiful girl , I’d told her when I’d left her in Paris, feeling it was my last real chance to be her mother, to give her advice. And if you fall in love, make sure it is with a man who sees you as his equal, and that you love each other and that he does not hold you back.

Like you and Papa , Klara had said with a smile.

But was it, really? I had wondered, the whole way back on the train. If I had taken my own advice to Klara, perhaps I would’ve said no to Kaz, gotten on my own train to Paris so many years earlier.

But Kaz was still here with me now, somewhere, all these years later. My sickness held on and dragged me into darkness. And Kaz’s voice came in and out of my fever dreams, distant and hazy, calling for me as he had once at the train station so long ago: You can’t go… Wherever it is you are going, you… you can’t. Stay here. Stay with me.

Then I didn’t step on a train to Paris, or, maybe I did? In my feverish haze, I came out of the Gare du Nord, sunlight so bright I couldn’t see, all of Paris before me and yellow and blinding, melting. And burning up into the blue-hot fire in Professor Mazur’s lab. Everything was too hot to touch.

ONE MORNING, QUITE SUDDENLY, MY FEVER BROKE, AND I SAT up in bed, sweating and breathless. The December sun shone in through my bedroom window, illuminating Professor Mazur’s stack of journals on my dresser. “Lou!” I called out. “Lou!”

She came running into my room, her face drawn. Lou was a woman now, and barely anyone still called her by her childhood nickname but me. She was Dr. Helena Dluska , tall and serious, stern and motherly, just like Bronia. It was hard to find even a glimmer of that girl who once traipsed through the Carpathians. My chest rattled with a cough, and I struggled to catch my breath as she walked over to my bed. “Can I get you something, ciotka ?” she asked, her voice thick with concern.

I nodded and pointed to the journals on my dresser. “Yes, bring me those.” Klara was in Paris; my head felt clear for the first time in months. I could not ignore science any longer. I could not ignore the legacy that Professor Mazur had left for me.

LOU RETURNED TO WARSAW A FEW DAYS AFTER MY FEVER broke, but I was still too weak to get out of bed and do much for weeks. I spent the time with Professor Mazur’s journals, carefully reading all of her notes, combing through her calculations, and then making notes of my own in the margins.

“She was so close,” I said to Kaz, one night after he’d come home from work, sat down on the farthest edge of the bed, the only spot free of scattered journals and papers. “It’s just… I would need to get back into her lab. These calculations aren’t quite right. I’d need more testing, and I have a theory that incorporates Hela’s electromagnetic research with my—”

“ Kochanie ,” Kaz cut me off. He loosened his tie and leaned across all the papers to kiss me softly on the forehead. “I think I can help, with the lab.”

“What?” His words didn’t make sense.

“I’ve spoken to the dean, and Ola’s old lab space has been empty since the war. They plan to hire a new chemistry professor next year, but until then, he said you can use her lab. On the condition that you also clean it out, get it ready for the next professor.”

“Kaz!” I moved the notes aside and jumped across the bed to hug him. “Thank you. This is wonderful news!” The idea of a lab, all my own, even if temporarily, bubbled up inside of me, filled me with new possibility and hope.

IT WAS A STRANGE THING AT FIRST TO BE BACK IN PROFESSOR Mazur’s lab, all alone. There was no one to instruct me, no one to decide what to do. No one at all, but me. Whatever happened here next would be of my doing and mine alone. That was both a glorious and terrifying thought.

The air in the lab smelled stale and somehow smoky even after being closed up all this time. It was windowless, dark, and hot inside, but still, standing here, I could breathe deeply again for the first time in months. My heart thudded wildly in my chest as I unpacked the equipment that had been stored away for years, cleaned off the canisters and combustion and cooling chambers.

I had only a few months to finish Professor Mazur’s lifetime of work, but I had already spent weeks in bed charting out what I would do. If I considered Hela’s theory about electromagnetic energy and applied this to the gas rather than trying to liquefy it, as we had been doing before the war, I theorized I could create an electrically charged detonator.

I wrote both Hela and Pierre for advice, and Hela encouraged me; she was excited by my idea. Pierre wondered if it would be too hard to do it alone. What if I came to Paris, worked on it at the Curie Institute with him and Jacques and Hela and our niece, Marie, a budding scientist? But I was Polish. I belonged here. Any discovery I might make belonged to Poland and to Ola Mazur.

And besides, I like working alone , I wrote back to Pierre. I like making my own choices, being entirely responsible for my own results.

I ROSE FROM BED EACH MORNING AT DAWN, AND THOUGH MY body was exhausted, my mind was utterly alive and buzzing with thoughts and ideas. I spent every waking hour inside my new lab. Sometimes, I did not even come home at night until after Kaz was in bed, already asleep.

One night in April when I made it home in time for dinner, Kaz greeted me at the door with a gentle kiss. Then he picked up my hands, stroked my fingers and frowned. “ Kochanie , your fingertips are black.”

I shrugged and wiped sweat from my brow with my free hand. My face was still warm, burning from the heat I’d created in my combustion chamber, and my entire body ached from standing all day. But my mind felt so wonderfully alive that I barely noticed the physical toll the lab was taking on me or the blackness of my fingers.

“You have been working so hard, kochanie ,” Kaz was saying now. “Maybe we should take a vacation?”

“I can’t leave,” I told him. “Not now. I don’t have much time left with the lab. I need to seize every moment I can there.”

He nodded. “Well… then, maybe I could buy you another bicycle?” he said kindly. “Oh! I could buy two and we could ride them together.”

I smiled at him, grateful for his concern. “That sounds nice,” I lied. In truth, bicycle riding sounded utterly exhausting. And he’d said it on such a whim, I figured he would forget all about it.

But he did not forget. A few weeks later when I got home from the lab, two shiny red bicycles were waiting outside on our front porch. Kaz sat in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe, reading by lamplight in the dusk. He had been waiting for me; he watched for my reaction.

“Oh, Kaz.” I laughed and ran my fingers across the handlebars, noticing the black streaks I left behind on the metal.