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

find my way to L’Arcouëst to huddle in safety with my family. But in this life, where I am finally well again, my work is everything I have, everything I am. And I am deeply worried for my radium.

It is so expensive, I will never be able to replace it if something happens. And what will happen to my research if it is destroyed? I write letters, send urgent telegrams, until I finally convince the government of the importance of ensuring my radium’s safety. In the beginning of September they agree and let me accompany my radium, packed inside a heavy lead-lined box, on a train to Bordeaux.

Two soldiers accompany me to a bank, where I rent a safe deposit box to store it, and it is only once it is safely inside, locked away, and I clutch the key, that I allow myself to exhale.

“You must really have something valuable inside that box,” one of the soldiers says, frowning. His annoyance at being sent on this mission with me is clear. Perhaps he feels he could be doing more, fighting Germans on the front lines. I am dressed modestly in the same black dress I always wear to the lab, but perhaps he is mistaking me for a wealthy French woman, worrying about her silly diamonds.

“You want to know what is in the box?” I say to him, sharply. “One gram of radium. Only the entire scientific and medical future of France.”

The other soldier cocks his head and looks at me. “Radium. I know you . . . Madame Curie,” he says. “I remember reading all about you and your love affair in the papers.”

“You can’t believe everything you read,” I say, gritting my teeth.

“Yes . . .” The other soldier recognizes me now too. “You’re that fille who ruined that poor woman’s life.”

This story, this one choice, it will follow me around forever, no matter what else I do. It will continue to sicken and ruin and destroy me.

Only if you let it, mon amour, I hear Pierre say.

“I am nobody’s fille,” I say, firmly, petulantly. “I am a scientist.”

Marya

Krakow and L’Arcouëst, 1915

I did not believe that the war would touch us in Krakow at first. Fighting hovered around us—we read the news of the battles and invasions across Europe. But not in our city, our country. Life felt strangely normal, even as Hela sent a letter that they were evacuating Paris, leaving their lab for the safety of L’Arcouëst. After a scare with a German bomb falling too close, they grabbed Marie and Lou, who was still living with them, finishing her medical degree, and escaped to their home in the cliffs of Brittany.

Join us, Marya, Hela implored me. We have plenty of room.

She tried to convince Bronia too, but to no avail, as Bronia said she felt quite safe in Zakopane, and there might be a war raging but there were still sick people who needed to be treated. And she could not just abandon them. I resisted at first too, writing her that everything was perfectly safe in Krakow.

Our first sign in Krakow that the war would change us was when Chernikoff announced they were canceling the rest of the term and closing for the remainder of the war. It came just after a night of looting by Russian soldiers, outside the city, but still close enough to make people afraid. Jagiellonian also drastically cut down its staff for the spring term. Luckily Kaz had enough seniority in the math department that he was still kept on to teach, as was Professor Mazur. But there were no funds for her lab, or for me to assist. The irony was, in the last four years, I’d been helping her perfect a liquid-gas detonation device. Professor Mazur said she tried to explain that if we were allowed to finish, it could be helpful to the war effort, but the men in the university’s administration said there was no money for her women’s lab now.

“Our funding has been completely canceled,” she said, frustration wrinkling across her small forehead. “But we will be back at work, after the war. We will not give up, Marya. I promise you, we will not.”

I nodded, but I swallowed back my own uncertainty. It already felt impossible to imagine a time after this war when life would be normal again.

Klara was bereft without her intense schedule of piano. At home she moped and lay on the parlor couch like she was dying.

“Why don’t you go and practice, chicken?” I implored her. “You have to keep up your skills in spite of the war.”

“What’s the point?” she complained. “There’s nowhere for me to perform now anyway.”

At twelve years old, Klara was looking more and more like a woman and sounding more and more like a piano virtuoso, both when she performed and in her entitled attitude. Her teacher had spoken to me about a program in Berlin he’d wanted us to consider for the summer, and I’d liked the idea for nurturing her talent. I’d disliked it for what it might do to her already inflated ego. But that was all before the war. Klara was not wrong. There was no more music in the city now. Nowhere for her to perform. Even the Philharmonic had stopped giving concerts.

By the summer of 1915, Klara and I were trapped in the house. Looting outside the city grew worse and worse, and when two houses a few blocks from us were stormed by Russian soldiers one night in June, Kaz suddenly agreed with Hela, that Klara and I would both be much safer in L’Arcouëst.

L’ARCOUËST WAS A CITY TUCKED AMONG THE CLIFFS AND THE seashore in the northwest corner of France. A summer playground for the faculty of the Sorbonne, many of them owned summer homes here, including Hela and Jacques, who had built theirs after collecting their Nobel Prize money a few years earlier. Though Bronia had complained to me that she worried about them spending their prize on