Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

a girl. Perhaps most of all I enjoyed watching my young students’ faces and eyes light up when I told them stories about Hela and Jacques accepting their Nobel, and me completing Ola Mazur’s research using Hela’s theory, and even Pierre discovering his new element after so many years of wanting.

“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.