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

into this life consumed by piano, I reasoned. It was only fair to ask for her help now. Besides, maybe she still owed me. Maybe she would always owe me.

I had not seen Kadi in years, not since her concert in Krakow, but we did still exchange letters occasionally. She had relocated to America during the war, and was, by her own account, becoming the darling of the New York orchestra scene. She was seeing an older man, an heir to an American shipping company, but she’d repeated the sentiment she had told me once, when we were so young and living in Loksow, that she would never marry. Her piano career was her entire life, her world. Still, I was happy for her that perhaps she was not quite as lonely as she once had been.

Leokadia’s reply came a few weeks later, and just like that, a spot opened up for Klara at the top piano conservatory in Paris. I know you will feel good to have her near your sister, Leokadia wrote, and her education will be top-notch in Paris. Better than anything she could ever get in Poland.

I stared at the word, Paris, in Leokadia’s neat script. All of a sudden, I saw everything I’d lost within Klara’s reach. If I could send her to Paris, I could give my Klara what I once denied myself: opportunity.

IN AUGUST OF 1919, I BOUGHT TWO TRAIN TICKETS SO THAT I could accompany Klara for her move to Paris. She insisted that, at almost sixteen, she was old enough to take the train there alone, and besides, Hela would meet her at the Gare du Nord. She would live at Hela’s house while she was studying, so she would not be alone. And all that was true, but I could not bear the thought of the worry I’d hold at her going all that distance without me, and so I insisted that I would take her, and that it would give me a nice visit with Hela and Jacques and Marie anyway.

The night before we were to leave, Kaz reached for me in bed, pulling me close toward him. He kissed the back of my neck, and I felt a familiar warmth travel down my spine, toward my legs. “Kochanie, our baby is a grown woman, isn’t she?” he whispered into my hair, his voice thick with pride, or regret, or was it longing?

It felt as though her entire childhood had vanished while we weren’t paying attention, and now Klara was no longer our child. It felt impossible that tonight would be the last night she would sleep in our house, in the room right next to mine, and I felt a sudden wetness on my cheeks.

“What will I do without her?” I choked out into the darkness, in between tears.

He pulled me closer to him and whispered for me to breathe. I could suddenly remember him holding on to me in just this way in our very tiny apartment in Loksow so many years ago, after my baby Zosia had died and I did not know how I would ever get out of that bed again. He had held me close and held me up. Steady.

“Who am I, if I am not her mother?” I whispered into the darkness. My life for so many years had been about Klara: putting Klara first, getting Klara fed and educated and keeping her safe. And now what?

“I think the answer is right over there, on your dresser,” Kaz said. He reached out his arm and pointed to Professor Mazur’s large stack of journals. I’d put them down there months ago after Nadia gave them to me and hadn’t touched them since.

I shook my head. I had no idea what to do with them. I had only been Professor Mazur’s assistant. I did not have the education she had, nor the clout she had at the university.

“Remember what you said to me after Hipolit died?” In the dark Kaz’s voice was brimming with quiet excitement. “You have all the research,” he said. “You’re going to finish it . . . publish it. And you are going to be fine. We are both going to be just fine.”

But Kaz’s words were hard to believe or understand, and I lay there for a long time in the dark feeling deeply unsettled, wondering if it would even be possible for me to live the life of a scientist, after all this time.

Marie

Paris, 1920

The smell of cherry blossoms permeates the air, as I walk to my lab one May morning. And though the war is now behind us and the day is pleasant, I feel quite unsettled on my walk to work.

I have agreed to an interview today with an American reporter, and I am already dreading it. As a general rule, I do not ever meet with reporters or talk to the press. My entire career the press has chased me and vilified me, and once, it nearly killed me. Usually requests for interviews, numerous which they may be since the end of the war, are thrown away by me or by my assistants in the lab.

But perhaps it is that Missy Meloney is American, not French. That she has written so many times claiming she wants to help me, it felt a cruelty to continue to ignore her. And she wrote something in her last letter that I feel a sort of connection to: It is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of people, she wrote. But you have been important to me for twenty years.

Yes, exactly! I had thought when I read that. It is not I who am important, it is my work. And in those words, it seemed that Missy had understood that too.

Still, when I walk inside my lab now and see a strange woman sitting there, pale and small and timid, I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve agreed to this particular meeting, in spite of the fact that she actually looks quite