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

would like to kill me. “Perhaps you should leave for the summer?” he says gently. “Let her calm down.”

“I already paid her to calm down,” I say. “With the money I was going to use to rent a house in Brittany again this summer.”

But I don’t think Jean Perrin is wrong, and Bronia has been after me to bring the girls to Zakopane for the summer. She has room for us. We would only have to pay for the train, and Ève has never even been to Poland. I imagine both of my girls there, happy and carefree, picking berries and riding horses in the pastures and smelling the Polish country air of my youth. And I write Bronia to let her know that we are coming.

THE SUMMER AIR IN ZAKOPANE SMELLS SWEET AND FRAGRANT, the city feeling a lifetime away. When we arrive, Bronia and Lou are in the kitchen together eating fresh-picked blackberries. My niece is now nineteen, a full-grown woman, an apparition of the Bronia I knew in Warsaw once long ago. She is more muscular, her cheeks more ruddy, but with Bronia’s haunting eyes all the same.

Irène and Ève go to their room to unpack, and I sit down in the kitchen with Bronia and Lou, still unable to rid myself of the fog that hovered in the city—Jeanne’s threats, and the ache of missing Paul. On the train I thought of so many things I wanted to share with him about my latest findings on polonium’s decay, how excited he would be about my revelation, that the half-life must be much shorter than that of radium. And now I feel a residual emptiness, not being able to tell him.

“Here.” Bronia holds her hand out across the table. “Have a blackberry. They are so sweet. I promise, they will fix what ails you.”

I frown and shake my head, pushing the fruit away. I’m not hungry.

“You need to forget about him,” Bronia says quietly. I’ve written to Bronia about Paul, but I have not told her about the death threats, or the five thousand francs I gave away. “He is married,” she adds, her tone unforgiving, unyielding.

“Jeanne does not love him like I do,” I say petulantly. I realize I sound like a child, but I don’t care. “Their marriage is all but over.”

Bronia frowns and chews on a blackberry. “But she is still his wife.” Bronia emphasizes the word wife, like I do not understand its meaning. “No matter what happens between me and Mier, I would want to destroy any woman who believed she could have him. Who thought she could take him away from me.”

Lou pops a blackberry in her mouth and chuckles, perhaps at how serious Bronia sounds, or perhaps at the ridiculousness of Bronia’s statement. Bronia, the caretaker, the physician, could never destroy anyone.

“You would blackmail someone?” I say to her. “You would threaten to kill someone?”

“Her husband is being unfaithful to her,” Bronia says, frowning. “Who is the villain in this story, hmm?” she adds softly.

My cheeks turn hot at the implication that I am the villain. Or is she saying that Paul is the villain? I open my mouth to lash out at her. What does she know? Her husband is still alive and working with her. They have their simple and beautiful life here in the mountains. But then I don’t say anything at all because maybe she is also right. In another life, one where Pierre had not stepped in front of a horse on a rainy April afternoon, Jeanne might be the one I feel sympathy for now, not Paul. It is a hard thing to admit, even to myself, and I swallow, saying nothing else at all.

“I’m never getting married,” Lou announces, standing. Bronia’s frown creases deeper. But Lou ignores it, kisses Bronia on the head. “I’m going for a hike,” she says, bored with our conversation. I remember what Bronia told me once about Lou and Mier and their fascination with hiking after Jakub died. Now, at nineteen, Lou is nearly a professional, she knows the Carpathians so well. Bronia, however, wishes she’d earn a degree in science instead.

“Take me with you,” I implore her, in part because I want to go. I want to forget all about Jeanne and Paul and the fog that had hovered in Paris. But I also know my interest in Lou’s hobby will annoy Bronia and will get her mind off my love life.

“You want to know the mountains, ciotka?” Lou asks, seeming surprised. “Mama says you are only comfortable inside a laboratory.”

“Does she now?” I say, looking back at Bronia. She’s still frowning. “Your mother might not remember that I used to ride my bicycle all throughout the French countryside. I am a big believer in the power of fresh air to help the brain and heal the body.” And saying it out loud, I remind myself that it is also true.

I lace up my boots and follow Lou to the path. We climb and climb. For a long while there is only the conversation with my sweet niece about the beautiful nature that surrounds us, the fresh Polish summer air in my lungs, the big blue sky above us, my breath heavy in my chest, and the feeling of my heart bursting from exertion.

Marya

Krakow & Zakopane, 1911

Leokadia came to Krakow to give a concert just before Easter, invited to perform as the special guest of the Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra. Her popularity had risen in Germany and Austria in the past few years, and as a native Pole, she was now highly sought after in Krakow, a city with both Polish and Austrian identities.

Kaz was away in Brussels at a conference, but I bought tickets for me and Klara to attend, and we made plans to have dinner with Leokadia afterward. Klara was so excited she could barely stand it, and she spent the day trying to teach herself to play the music from the Beethoven