“Impossible,” Pierre says, shaking his head. “It would take years and… a ton of pitchblende.”
“Difficult, yes.” I agree. “But not impossible.” We will do it ourselves, I tell him. We will chemically wash away at the rock, little by little, piece by piece, grueling and disgusting work. But we will do it and we will isolate the new elements, if only to prove them all wrong. If only to prove that we can. If only to earn our own place in the Academy.
“YOU LOOK QUITE TIRED,” BRONIA SAYS TO ME, A MONTH later. She and Lou have come over on Sunday to teach me how to make jam. I’ve spent the entire last week in the lab, using chemicals on the pitchblende. My fingertips are raw, my nail beds ugly and scabbed. “Are you ill?” Bronia asks, putting her hand on my forehead. It doesn’t matter that I am a mother myself, an accomplished scientist. She will always be my sister-mother. “Pregnant again?” she asks.
I shake my head. The truth is, I feel more exhausted than I’ve felt in my entire life, worse even than in my terrible condition with Irène. It is grueling and tedious work we are doing in the lab now. And though today it is Sunday, my day of rest, I cannot shake the tiredness, the ache of the work. Pierre, similarly exhausted, has decided to spend the entire day in bed. My fingers ache, my eyes burn. But I’d extended this invitation to Bronia weeks ago, and she has brought little Lou over, and I cannot disappoint them.
“Where’s Irène?” Bronia asks now, looking around the kitchen.
“Dr. Curie took her to the park,” I say.
Bronia frowns, but Irène is too young to understand jam making yet, and I am too tired to keep her from making a mess. When Dr. Curie offered the park, I’d gratefully accepted.
Bronia is an expert at jam making, having learned from our mother before she died. It is her reward for being older than me, more time with Mama. And I envy her ease now. I wish I could be more wifely, more motherly, like my sister, but it does not come naturally to me the way it does to her. Bronia can somehow manage to be all things: mother, wife, sister, doctor, and still never look tired. I imagine if I can just master jam making, I will master everything else as well.
“All right then, eight pounds of gooseberries,” Bronia says now, recording her recipe in my household journal in her neat and perfect script as she speaks. “And an equal amount of crystalized sugar.”
There it is, like an equation. And making jam, being wifely, cannot be so hard if you treat it just like this, just like science, can it? My kitchen is my laboratory, the gooseberries my minerals. I squash them beneath my fingertips, the warm juices running down my aching fingers.
Lou mashes the berries with me, and the sound of her little girl giggle, the feeling of the fruit on my fingers is relaxing, and I close my eyes and let the process soothe me. Perhaps when Irène is a little older, we will do this together, too. And I understand now why Bronia enjoys this. For a moment I almost don’t realize Bronia is still talking to me. “… back to Poland,” she says.
“What?” I open my eyes, remove my hands from the berries. My fingers are stained red, as if I’m bleeding.
“Zakopane,” she says. “Mier and I are building a sanatorium there to live and work at, and when it’s finished next year, we will finally return back to Poland.” Her face has softened, her smile is wider than I’ve seen it in recent memory. Zakopane is a small country town at the base of the Tatras, in Austrian Poland, out of the Russian Empire, so Mier will be safe from prosecution. But Bronia will be back in Poland, only hours on the train from Warsaw, not days.
“Oh, Bron,” I say. “How wonderful for you.”
And something curls up in my chest: I’m not exactly sure what. It is jealousy mixed with a little bit of sadness, or, maybe it is pride, that my sister-mother has achieved her dream of becoming a doctor, and now she will go back to our homeland and help people there. Maybe one day, once we complete our research here, Pierre and Irène and I will be able to follow her.
Marya
Poland, 1901
Papa was sixty-eight years old, and his letters to me were getting noticeably shorter, the time between each one noticeably longer. The gap widened from one to two weeks, then three. When it had been an entire month without one, I got worried and told Kaz I was taking the train to Warsaw the following day to check on him. “Do you want to come?” I asked him, knowing full well that he couldn’t.
“I wish I could, kochanie,” he said. And I nodded. I understood. I did. He had his work with Hipolit—he was assisting him with new research on elasticity, and Hipolit, too, was getting older. Kaz told me he felt like a vital part of Hipolit’s research, recording notes when Hipolit forgot, making sure all the data was in order in the way the older man could not keep up with. And now instead of simply mentoring him, Hipolit was paying Kaz to be his research assistant. Kaz made twice as much money as he used to, which was a relief and a joy to him—to be paid to study mathematics!
The Kaminksi twins had gone away to boarding school in Krakow last fall, so I was no longer needed in my full-time position there. In the time since, I’d learned how to breathe again, and I began to focus on teaching, my university. In the past few months, free from my governess duties, I realized if I made my Flying University into something real, something a little larger, the women who’d first started in it with me could all teach new women just joining, younger than us. We could begin to charge a small tuition fee to pay those of us who taught. If I were able to pay myself a salary that way, I would not ever need to get another governess job. And besides, I would be growing education for women in Loksow, and that would be a wonderful thing. A thing that filled me with enormous pride.
“But I hate for you to travel alone… I wish…” Kaz was still talking about my trip now. I knew exactly what he wished. That I would wait, at least until Sunday when he would be able to accompany me on the train ride, but I knew he would not ask me that now either, not when I was so worried about Papa’s well-being, and today was only Monday. He began to speak, then hesitated.
“Kaz, I am a grown woman. I have made the trip many times before. I’ll be fine.”
“But that was… before.”
Three weeks ago, there had been a pounding on our door during a Wednesday night class—two military police claiming they had gotten word of illegal activity here. Luckily I’d only had a few women in attendance that night—two hid under the bed, one in the closet, and then Leokadia and I had hastily wrapped ourselves in aprons before answering the door. Leokadia had thought fast, had used her moneyed charm to regale the policemen with a story about the preserves we were trying to can, a disaster that had happened with the fruit, and how we were trying so hard to learn, to please our husbands. Luckily they had not asked to actually see our nonexistent preserves. Her explanation, and her charm, had satisfied the policemen enough for them to leave. I had not recounted the incident to Kaz, and if he knew about it now, it would only be because Leokadia had told him while he was at work. Had she?
He stared at me now, his eyes wide, concerned, and I wondered if he was envisioning the Russian police pulling me off the train. “Kaz, really, I’ll be just fine.”
“What if you take Leokadia with you?” he suggested. “Then you wouldn’t have to go alone.”
“I’m sure she has better things to do.”
Kaz shook his head. “No, she was just telling me how she would like to get out of the house more, have an adventure.” Leokadia still played piano all around the Russian Empire of Poland, but she had not been invited back to Krakow in years and had told me how she longed to move away, somewhere freer, somewhere she could be paid to play and free to study at a real conservatory. So why did it bother me that she had told Kaz much the same?