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

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