She put the needles in her lap, reached out both her hands for mine. “How good that he has you, that we are here,” she said. We sat like that for a few moments, and then I went back to the stationery, to compose a telegram for Bronia and Hela, to tell them to come on the train from Paris at once, before it was too late.
LATER, WHEN IT WAS VERY DARK, THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I could not sleep, and I got up and sat by Papa’s bed again, held on to him. His hand was cool and dry, the skin around his fingers loose and wrinkled. I stroked his fingers softly with my thumbs and hummed the melody of a long-forgotten lullaby, “Śpij Laleczko,” that came back to me only now. Mama had sung it to me and Hela and Bronia and Zosia once, when we were very young, and all ill, before Zosia succumbed to her sickness.
I sat there holding on to him until morning, until he opened his eyes, saw me there, smiled. “Papa,” I asked him. “What did you mean yesterday… you started to say you always thought I would… what did you mean?”
“Marya, my youngest, my brightest.” He spoke slowly, his voice trembling with the effort it took him to form the words. “I always thought you would be the one to change the world.”
“And I have disappointed you,” I said quietly.
“Disappointed me… no, not at all. Look at you, still learning, teaching young women in Poland. Education changes everything, does it not?”
“You taught me that,” I said. Papa had been a teacher himself, before the Russians took over Poland, and he’d always told us our entire lives how important education was. I squeezed his hands softly between my own.
“I wanted to teach you more,” he said, breathless.
“You taught me everything,” I told him.
TWO DAYS LATER HE TOOK HIS LAST BREATH, WITH ME SITTING by his bed, holding his hand. I was not ready to let him go, but he was ready to leave, and so I had no choice.
Bronia and Hela arrived on the train from Paris, three days too late.
Marie
Paris & Warsaw, 1902
“Mon amour,” Pierre says into the darkness of Irène’s bedroom, waking me with a gentle shake of my shoulder. Irène likes me to sit with her while she falls asleep each night, and perhaps she is insecure because she barely sees me during the day. Tonight I must’ve fallen asleep myself in here. “Come with me,” Pierre says softly in my ear.
I peer out Irène’s window toward our garden. It is the darkest of nights, not even a sliver of moon. “Pierre, what time is it?”
“Just about nine.” Only nine? I stretch and my body aches. I fell asleep in a strange position in the rocking chair, and I have been so tired as of late, the work we’ve undertaken so hard, so painstaking, that often I even dream about my own exhaustion. Pierre, too—sometimes he awakens me in the middle of the night, half-asleep, crying out in agony over the pains in his legs. But tonight his voice is soft, happy. Different.
“Come,” Pierre says. “Get your coat and come with me to the lab. I have a surprise for you.”
I rise, suddenly feeling dizzy, and Pierre puts his arm around me to steady me. We’ve been working so hard and so long with the pitchblende, and finally, finally, we’ve extracted enough radium and will be able to present it to the Academy. They asked for us to isolate the element to prove ourselves worthy, perhaps believing we never would. And at long last, we have. But these have been long, grueling, exhausting years, so many days when we are not feeling well in body or in spirit.
Yet in spite of the work and all the illness that has befallen us, Pierre always finds a way to look for the best in everything, and he brings me to see it too. Though it is late, I trust in his surprise, and I get my coat.
We tiptoe out to the front door, not wanting to wake Irène, or Dr. Curie, who is asleep in his own room down the hall. Pierre races out to boulevard Kellerman, forgetting for the moment all the pains in his legs, and I follow, suddenly giddy, or maybe I am just overtired, delirious.
We hold on to each other and proceed to walk, arm in arm. The night air is cool, and the darkness feels dangerous, but I cling to my husband, happy for a moment to feel free, of the science, of our household obligations, even of Irène’s little shouts for me each night as she tries to fall asleep.
When we reach the lab, Pierre unlocks the door and says, “Mon amour, don’t light the lamp.”
“But it’s very dark, we won’t be able to see what we’re doing.” We walk inside, and I reach for the lamp in spite of his words.
He gently tugs me away. “No, Marie, look.”
He points to our worktable, where, since I left, hours ago, he has lined up all our samples of extracted radium inside glass. They line the table now in rows, and in the absolute blackness of this night, they glow, making our dark, small shed of a lab alive with an ethereal light. I gasp, put my hand to my mouth.
How many days in the lab had I said to him that it felt we were working so hard for nothing tangible, that if only radium were beautiful, striking in its color, I might feel more encouraged.
And now here it is, right in front of my very eyes: our radium. Glowing so brightly it feels alive. Or otherworldly. As if Pierre has reached up into the sky, grabbed starlight, and put it in glass for me in our little lab. “Oh, Pierre,” I say. “Look what you have done!”
He climbs up onto the worktable to sit within the glow. His face illuminates green and gold. I go to him and he embraces me. “Look what we have done, mon amour. All this work, all these years.”
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I tell him. And it is.
THE GLOW OF OUR RADIUM BURNS BRIGHTER THAN THE DIFFICULTY of the work, the years of aches and pains in our bodies. It is everything. It is worth the higher-paying jobs we turned down in Geneva so that we could stay here in Paris and not interrupt our research by moving. It is worth the time and the distance away from my family, and from my country, and the long hours away from our daughter.
But then, only weeks later, an urgent telegram arrives from Warsaw from Hela, and suddenly the glow of the radium dims. Papa has been ill, has recently had surgery for gallstones. In her last letter Hela told me all was well, he was recovering nicely from the surgery, on the mend. But then her urgent telegram: all at once, he is dying. And I must get to Warsaw as soon as I can.
I am wrapped inside my own panic, my disbelief. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. Not when I am so far away.
I throw a few dresses into a valise, and Pierre hovers, saying he wants to go to Warsaw with me. But someone has to stay here, look after the lab and the household and Irène. “No,” I tell him, resolutely. “I will go to Poland alone.”
“At least let me get you to the train,” Pierre says. And I agree to that much.
A few hours later, I offer him and Irène a quick kiss goodbye before I board the train. “Send a telegram with any news,” Pierre calls after me, a worried look on his face. I can see him standing there, looking gloomy through my window, even after I take my seat on the train. I reach my hand up to the glass, partly to wave goodbye, partly to try and hang on to this moment, where my life is still whole.
THE LAST TIME I WENT BACK TO POLAND, IT WAS THREE YEARS ago, and our exhaustion from the work had only just begun to set in. Bronia and Mier and Lou and Jakub moved to Zakopane in 1899, opened their sanatorium, and a few months later my whole family reunited there for a holiday. Hela and Stanislaw, their daughter Hanna (just about the same age as Irène), and Papa all came together from Warsaw. Pierre and Irène and I came from France, and for a few glorious weeks we were all together. It was Pierre’s first time in Poland, and how he had enjoyed it so. I see why you love your country so much, he’d said to me as we’d taken a hike together on a mountain trail in the sunshine of the Tatras. And I had felt a glimmer of joy, of hope. One day my whole family could be together again in Poland. Pierre would love it enough, just like the rest of us.