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

uneasy, thinking about how stupid I’d been when she had betrayed me once, and I had just let it happen, right before my very eyes. How Kaz was drawn to her because of her passion, because of her drive for her career, and how I had given up on that in my own life, once, all to be with him. “Well,” I finally said. “Look at you. World-famous pianist.”

“Hmmm.” She frowned, took another sip of her wine, and stared out across the night sky, the river, and then, the heart of Krakow sparkling in front of us.

“Are you not happy?” I asked her. “You have everything you ever wanted.”

“What is happiness, really?” she said. “You can love your work or you can love your family, but it is impossible as a woman to have both, to have it all, isn’t it?” I thought about how Professor Mazur promised me you could have both work and family, but I wasn’t so sure. As her assistant, I left the lab when it was time to pick Klara up each afternoon, but she would often work through dinner; sometimes, she would tell me, until almost midnight. How did her daughters feel, without their mother at home at night? “I have had great success in my work,” Leokadia was saying now. “But it is lonely sometimes. This great big room, it can be very, very lonely.”

“Still . . . you have sold more records than any Polish woman in history,” I said, repeating what I’d read in the liner notes on the program.

“Any European woman,” she corrected me gently. “Not just Poland.” Then she grimaced a little. “But record sales cannot hold your hand or kiss you goodnight, can they?”

“No,” I said, finishing off the last drop of my wine. “I suppose they can’t.”

TWO MONTHS LATER, IN THE SUMMER QUIET OF ZAKOPANE, I felt restless. I had the whole summer ahead with Klara and my sisters and my nieces and nephew. But I thought about what Leokadia had said: that you could have your work, or you could have your family, but you could not have both. I missed the burnt smell of Professor Mazur’s lab, missed having my hands and my mind busy with combustion all day long. Kaz had stayed behind in Krakow this summer to work, and so had Professor Mazur—she had sent her own daughters off to Berlin to stay with their grandparents, and she planned to continue in the lab. She’d asked if I’d wanted to stay this summer too, but I had chosen Zakopane, Klara, my family.

I was grateful for the sun-kissed air, and the feel of Klara’s warm red skin lying close to me in bed each evening. In the dark we would whisper our favorite parts of our summer days. Mine was always the time I spent with Klara each morning after breakfast, trying to catch her up on her maths and science studies. Hers were the hours she got to swim in the lake with her cousin Jakub. At fifteen now, Jakub was tall, looking startlingly like Papa, and I knew it was good for Klara to play with her cousin in the fresh air, so after the first weeks, when she begged me to skip her maths and science lessons in favor of time outdoors, I acquiesced.

Then I read all the latest research on flame theory that Professor Mazur had given me before I left, the paper Henri Becquerel had published on his findings about becquerelium that Pierre had sent to me, somewhat in despair that he himself had not been able to publish it first.

It felt silly but I wished I had a bicycle again; I needed exertion and exhaustion to clear my mind and my heart. When Lou arrived from Paris with Hela, Jacques, Marie, and Pierre, I asked her to take me hiking, thinking perhaps I could climb my way out of this strange empty feeling that had settled in my stomach.

“Aunt Marya.” She laughed. “I don’t hike anymore. I need to study to get ahead for my courses next term.” After falling in love with biology at my school in Loksow, Lou was now studying to become a doctor in Paris. “And I promised Klara and Jakub I would teach them how to dissect the dead frogs they found yesterday,” she said.

Bronia smiled, nodded her head approvingly, and I could not argue with the fact that she was about to inject some love of science into Klara’s summer, even if it would be taking the shape of dead frogs.

“I will hike with you,” Pierre offered. He walked in from the kitchen, where he had been eating breakfast, and I hadn’t realized he’d even been listening to our conversation.

“Do you know the Carpathians well?” I asked, skeptical. Yes, my body longed to climb and ache and soar. But I did not want to die in the mountains either.

He pulled out his pocket watch to show me that it also had a compass. “I enjoy exploring, and we won’t go too far,” he said. “Anyone else want to come?” he offered to Bronia, Hela, Jacques, but no one else took him up on it.

“TELL ME,” PIERRE SAID, BREATHING HARD AS WE BEGAN TO climb. We had not gotten too far, but already Bronia’s home and sanatorium looked like toys in the distance below us. “Where is your husband this summer?”

“He has too much work to do, back in Krakow,” I said. I felt a strange sort of jealousy that, as a man, Kaz could simply stay behind, allow his work the utmost importance in his life and be revered for it. But also, I felt sorry for him. He was missing these beautiful light-filled days with our family, missing watching our daughter swim and play with her cousins, and dissect frogs. And this—Pierre and I reached the top of the peak, and we were both breathing so hard that we had to stop talking, catch our breath, inhale this view. I stood at the edge,