Half Life Jillian Cantor (trending books to read .txt) 📖

city, rather than a short walk like on boulevard Kellerman, but I care less about that than about my distance from Pierre.

The first few days after we move, in the mornings, before the children wake, I take a walk and go and talk to Pierre’s tombstone. I tell him how Ève is so small, I think about all the years and years it will take for her to grow, and how I don’t know if I can continue to live for that many years on my own without him. How some people have been writing me to congratulate me on my new position at the Sorbonne. And how the very idea that someone might rejoice over me taking his position makes me impossibly angry.

Some mornings I linger too long, return to the house after breakfast, and Dr. Curie frowns at me. “It is not him. He is not there,” Dr. Curie chides me gently.

As a scientist, I know he is right. But Pierre had always believed in séances, hiring a woman to conduct them to speak to his mother after her death. And though I did not enjoy them, or even believe in them the way he had, now I can understand his need for the otherworldly, for something. I cannot keep away from his grave. And I continue to go each morning just to talk to him there. And sometimes, I go in the evenings before bed, too.

PIERRE AND I HAD PLANNED ON SPENDING MOST OF THE summer in Saint-Rémy—classes will not begin again until November. But I cannot bear the thought of going back there again now. The last time we went, Easter, Pierre and I had ridden bikes and lain in the grass together holding hands, touching sunlight, reveling in our luck. It feels like a cruel joke now. Dr. Curie offers to go with the girls, and I decide to go to Warsaw and spend time with Hela instead.

“It’ll be good for you to have a rest back in Poland,” Dr. Curie says. But what he really means is that we both know I cannot take care of the children right now, that it is not good for them to see me like this, tired and listless and ill and drowning in grief. And it is not that I don’t love them, or don’t provide for them, but it is that I do not have the strength within my being to both grieve and be their mother.

“I’ll write them letters,” I tell Dr. Curie.

“I know,” he says, offering me an acceptance, a condolence, in the form of a fatherly hug.

HELA’S HOUSE IN WARSAW IS SMALLER THAN I REMEMBER IN the years since I’ve seen it last. I estimate it at only a third of the size of our new unremarkable home in Sceaux. But she welcomes me to into it with the warmest hug and kisses on my cheeks, and an apology for not being able to make it to Paris in time for Pierre’s funeral.

“Please,” I beg of her. “Don’t say his name.” I close my eyes, bite back tears. I cannot bear to hear his name out loud, or even to speak it myself.

“Of course, I’m so sorry,” she says, pulling me tighter in her hug.

“It’s not your fault,” I say, holding on to my sister-twin so fiercely, reveling in the way she still smells of lemons and corn poppies, as she always has. My entire world has grown and then imploded, and here is Hela, in Warsaw, exactly the same.

She offers me her daughter Hanna’s bedroom for my stay, and Hanna stays in her parents’ room. I unpack my valise, happy for the quiet here, for this space of my own. Happy that my children are half a continent away enjoying the summer in Saint-Rémy with their grand-père, and that I am not dragging them under with my grief.

Hela and Stan do not have much money, nor great acclaim in their work. Hela runs a small girls’ school in Warsaw, and her husband, Stan, is a photographer. Their life is simple compared to mine in Paris. But in the evenings, at the dinner table, Stan reaches for Hela’s hand, or catches her eye in a smile, and watching the way they love each other, so quietly, it almost tears me apart with wanting, jealousy.

I BEGIN TAKING VERY LONG WALKS EACH MORNING TO CLEAR my head, to try and satiate my sadness with fresh air and with exercise. I walk all around Warsaw, to the corners of my youth: the girls’ gymnasium we all attended, and Papa’s old home, and the homes where I attended Flying University classes with Bronia, which ignited in me that hunger for more, for a real university. I walk along the banks of the Vistula, as Bronia and Hela and I did as girls. And then I find myself each day for lunch inside the little café where Bronia and I used to go and study for our Flying University classes.

I order myself a czarna kawa. It is the color of night and nearly the consistency of mud, and it awakens my mind much more so than a Parisian coffee. I begin bringing my notebook along with me, and I start to think about work again. I jot down ideas for what I might say in my first lecture in November. What I might study when I return to my lab again. Coffee, and the thick summer air, and the ghosts of my youth remind me again how far I have come. How much I have left to do before I go. Even without Pierre. He would not want me to stop; he would never want me to stop.

One afternoon, I am concentrating very hard on my notes, my coffee, and then out of nowhere, a man’s voice calls out: “Marya Sklodowska?”

I don’t register at first that it is me he is speaking to. I have kept Sklodowska as part of my name, even since being married, so I