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

and suddenly there we are, working on my idea together, side by side in the lab. A team.

WE HAVE OUR FIRST RADIOLOGICAL CAR UP AND RUNNING BY 1914, and Irène and I do our first test run. I drive us right up to the Battle of the Marne, much to the consternation of a general who shouts at me, no, demands that I stop my car and return to Paris, at once. “The front lines is no place for a woman!” he yells to be heard over the noise of the Renault’s engine.

I gun it a little in response.

“I’m serious, lady,” the general shouts at me.

“They told me that about the laboratory too,” I shout right back. “And two Nobel prizes later, I quite disagree. Now, step aside so we can help your soldiers.” He stands perfectly still, crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Step aside,” I shout again. “Or else I will be forced to drive right over you.”

I gun the engine of the Renault again, and finally he moves, perhaps thinking me crazy, thinking I might run him over if he were to stay there standing in front of me. “It’s not my problem if you’re both killed,” he shouts. I ignore him, steer the car past him, parking it by the medical tent. I kill the engine, and my hands are shaking. I ball them into fists so Irène won’t notice.

“Were you really going to run him over, Maman?” Irène asks. Her eyes are wide, and her face is a strange shade of green.

“No, of course not, ma chérie. The thing you must learn about men is that they might try and put up a fight, but then they will always, always move out of your way. There is nothing that frightens them more than an intelligent woman.” She nods slowly. “Now, come. We have made it here, let us put our X-ray machine to good use.”

BY 1916, WE HAVE TWENTY RADIOLOGICAL CARS IN THE FIELD, Petites Curies, as we have come to call them. All of them equipped with mobile X-ray units and their own dynamo, an electric generator, which I have designed myself and had built into all the cars so that we have electric power for the units.

Irène and I divide our time between driving to the front ourselves and training other women to drive the cars and use the radiological equipment back in Paris at the lab. (Irène all the while keeps up her studies at the Sorbonne and has achieved her certificates in maths and almost nearly in physics and chemistry.) All in all now, we have nearly 150 capable women, with the ability to drive, x-ray, and diagnose. I keep one car for myself, the Renault, and I drive into the field when I can and when I’m needed. I receive regular telegrams and telephone calls, letting me know where to go, and I dispatch the cars from Paris.

The laboratory has been, nearly my entire adult life, the place where I have felt most free, most at home. But now, driving my Renault from post to post out in the field, changing flat tires and cleaning carburetors, diagnosing wounded men, saving lives, I have never felt such excitement, such a thrill. Such a comfort and surety in my work.

BY SEPTEMBER 1916, IRèNE IS AT HER OWN POST IN HOOGSTADE, Belgium, sleeping for weeks out in the medical tent with the nurses. She reports in her letters of the bullet fragments she finds in bones, of a man whose life she saves by diagnosing his wounded lung.

I get a dispatch that another unit is needed, and all my women are off elsewhere, so I take my Renault, drive to Hoogstade myself to assist.

“Maman,” Irène says, her tired face erupting in glee when I get out of the car. Her face no longer belongs to a girl, or even a teenager, but now it is the worn face of a woman. A woman who has seen things and done things and learned things. She embraces me tightly, and as she is a bit taller than me, she lowers her lips to kiss the top of my head. “How wonderful you came!”

“Of course I came,” I said. “I got a dispatch that there were too many injuries for just one car.”

“Oh.” Irène’s face fell. “It was silly of me . . . but I thought . . . it was my birthday that brought you.” She shrugs, sheepishly.

Her birthday. Is it really? It has been weeks, or maybe it has been months since we’ve last seen each other. It’s hard to keep track of time in the war, in the field. I measure my days in miles, in radiographs of broken bones and bullet-ridden chests. In number of men saved, and transported for treatment, and lost despite my greatest efforts.

“Happy birthday, darling,” I say to her, giving her another quick hug. If I were not standing in the middle of a war, perhaps I would take a moment to remember it, that precipitous joy that erupted from me on the morning of her birth. The way Pierre had cried out that she was so small, too small. Perhaps I would ruminate on the fact that Pierre has been gone so long, he would not even recognize our baby who stands before me now, a woman, a scientist.

But there is no time to be nostalgic. I kiss her cheek and pull out of the embrace. “Let’s be happy you and I are both alive. So many men are injured, dying. They need us. There will be other birthdays. Come, let’s drive to the field. You lead the way. I’ll follow behind you in my car.”

She nods, and I can tell she feels the same excitement about going back out into the field that I do. Her blue eyes light up the way her father’s did once in our laboratory shed, watching our radium glow and glow and glow upon the table.

Marya

Krakow, 1918–1919

Krakow became liberated from Austrian rule