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

worries about the war and the world, and the safety of my house and husband back in Krakow. And while Klara remained snoring, I would tiptoe into the kitchen to make myself a coffee and read by lamplight the scientific papers Hela left out for me. I learned so much about Hela’s research and began to wonder if her theory on electromagnetic charges and atoms could possibly work hand in hand with Professor Mazur’s research on detonation. I wrote Professor Mazur a rambling letter, filled with ideas, and then I was quite disappointed when for weeks and weeks I received nothing from her in return.

Kaz and I wrote letters to each other every few days. He told me about the courses he was teaching, the students he still had left. About the terrible state of the produce at the local market and how dreadful his soup tasted, how he remembered my clear potato broth back in Loskow when we lived together in our one-room apartment, and how he longed for something that delicious now. How he longed for me, for the way everything about our life had been close then. There was no place in that apartment I could stand without touching you, he wrote.

Oh, you are in a sorry state if you remember that soup being delicious, I wrote him back. But I chuckled as I put the words to the page, marveling at the way, with this distance, this space between us, this war, Kaz somehow felt closer to me than he had in years.

KAZ ARRIVED FOR AN UNEXPECTED VISIT AT THE END OF HIS fall term, showing up unannounced one night while we were all in the middle of dinner. He walked in, and Klara was so delighted to see him, she jumped up from the table, squealing, “Papa!” forgetting for a moment that she was a teenager, and in company no less. She jumped into his arms like she had as a toddler.

“Kurczak! How you’ve grown!” He kissed the top of her head but looked over her, toward me. I could tell there was something wrong, in the way his cheeks were hollow and his eyes were dark.

I stood and kissed his unshaven cheek, closed my eyes for a second and inhaled the familiar scent of him, pine trees and pipe smoke. “Kaz . . . what is it?” I asked. “What happened?”

“We should talk in private,” he said, his eyes looking around the table, landing on Jeanne, the only one here he’d never met.

I turned and caught Hela’s eye. She frowned. “Kazimierz—” She stood, taking charge. “Take a seat and have some stew, and tell us what is going on. We are all family here.”

Kaz looked at me, and I nodded. Hela was right. Whatever was wrong, he could say it in front of my family. He took the seat Hela offered him next to her, and I sat back down in my seat next to Jeanne. “I’m so sorry, kochanie.” The words tumbled out of him as Hela placed a bowl of stew in front of him. “But Ola Mazur was killed.”

“Killed?” The word felt foreign on my tongue, unfamiliar and unexpected and unlike a word that belonged to me. I could not understand it nor absorb it. That such a word could be used in a sentence with Ola Mazur. My mentor and my savior. There was so much to be done with her in the lab still after the war. She had promised me that! She could not be killed.

“It was a terrible accident.” Kaz was still talking. “There was looting on her block, and she tried to intervene, help the old woman who lived next door to her. The old woman didn’t want to lose her things, you see, and Ola stepped in, and the looters pushed her into the street. She fell and she was run over by an automobile.”

I imagined Professor Mazur’s tiny body flying through the air into the street, crushed by an automobile, her beautiful mind bleeding out into the road. I covered my mouth, swallowing back the taste of bile in my throat. She was just a few years older than me. Her girls, just a few years older than Klara. Oh, her girls.

“Your research,” Pierre said, and at the same time I said, “Her children!”

Jeanne looked at him, then at me, and she put her hand on mine. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Marya,” she said patting my hand. “This war,” she said, “This great big terrible war.”

“I wish there was something I could’ve done,” I whispered.

Kaz met my eyes across the table. “But what can we do? What can any of us do? I just thank God that you and Klara came here when you did, that you are safe, kochanie.”

Later that night, in bed, Kaz’s arms were wrapped around me for the first time in months, but I couldn’t sleep. All I could see behind my lidded eyes was Professor Mazur, bleeding and dying in the street.

I watched her fall, again and again, powerless to stop her, powerless to save her. And the feeling of helplessness curled up inside of me, making it hard to breathe.

Marie

Western Front, 1914–1916

After I secure my radium in Bordeaux, I ignore the Perrins’ continued pleas to come to L’Arcouëst. So many men are dying in this terrible war, and I insist that if I stay in Paris, I can use my lab, use science to help. I cannot simply while away the war in the safety of the rocky cliffs of Brittany, not when there is something I can do here in Paris.

I get the idea that if I can make X-ray units mobile, fit them into cars, I can drive them out into the field to diagnose soldiers and save their lives. It seems like a daunting task at first, since I don’t even know how to drive, and I must lobby to secure the funding. But then I bring Irène back to Paris to help me,