When we returned to Paris, I got caught up in our work. Everything else felt so far away, that now, on the train, it is hard to believe it has been years since I’ve last seen Papa and my sisters, not weeks or months. And I spend the long hours on the train from Paris to Berlin praying to a God that I don’t believe in that Papa will hang on longer, that he will make a miraculous recovery. Perhaps now that Pierre and I have extracted our radium we will have more time, and we can make more frequent visits to Poland.
But when I change trains in Germany there is an emergency telegram from Hela, waiting for me at the station. It is too late. I am too late. Papa died in the middle of the night.
THE TRAIN ROLLS ON FROM BERLIN TO WARSAW. SO MANY hours and hours and hours. They are excruciating. Guilt curls into my chest like a lion, roaring and hurting, but I am too stunned for tears. My body is cold and numb, from grief, or the shock. Papa was doing fine just last week. How has this all happened so fast?
When the train arrives in Warsaw at last, I have not eaten nor slept for days, and yet I do not feel tired or hungry. I am only angry now. Why didn’t Hela write sooner? Why did she wait until the very end? I storm from the train, rehearsing my tirade, and practically run the entire way to Papa’s apartment.
“How could you?” I say to Hela, when she opens the door and tries to wrap me in a teary-eyed hug.
Bronia stands behind her. Of course, she made it first, the journey from Zakopane so much shorter than the one from France. Her face is white as snow, her eyes bloodshot from her own tears. “Marya, you are so thin,” Bronia says, reaching for me, too, but I pull away from them both. “Are you feeling well?” Bronia asks. Always my sister-mother. Her worry enrages me even more, perhaps unjustly so. But it’s not fair; they got to say goodbye.
“I need to see him,” I demand, ignoring her questions about my health.
“He’s gone,” Hela says softly.
And though I am a scientist and I understand what happens in death, I cannot let it go. “I demand to see him,” I say again. Tears roll down Hela’s face, and maybe they are tears of my doing and I should feel her pain as my own, my sister-twin. But I can only feel my own rage.
Bronia sighs and takes my arm. “The casket has already been prepared,” she says. “But I will take you to it.”
THEN, PAPA IS A WOODEN BOX. BRONIA WAITS OUTSIDE THE mortuary, giving me, she says, a chance to say my goodbyes.
In the last letter Papa wrote to me, he told me how proud he was, how happy he was to know that his daughter, his little Maryishna Sklodowksa, born of Warsaw, Poland, had discovered an entirely new element, opened up the world of science in a way no man had yet done. And then, as was his way, he had told me about the weather. Papa was always as interested in the otherworldly as he was the mundane. The day, he wrote, was cool, but still pleasant. Or had he said it was warm? I can’t remember exactly now, nor even where I set the letter down. In the lab, somewhere? Or had I been reading it in Irène’s room as I’d tucked her into bed?
It is stupid, and it does not matter now, what he wrote about the weather. But I want to remember the last piece of him, and it infuriates me that I can’t. But it does not matter. What matters is that he is gone. That I’d been so caught up in the glow of our radium, I hadn’t taken the time to write him back yet. And now it is too late.
I stare at the large wooden box in front of me. I have so many things to say to him, so many apologies to make, but I cannot believe it, this box, is really him.
“Open it,” I command the mortuary worker.
He stares at me with large brown eyes and shakes his head. He does not know who I am, what I have done, that I have spent the last four years away from my family, tearing apart rock bit by bit, just to extract the smallest bit of radium, and that I will tear him apart with my hands, too, if he does not do what I say.
“Open it,” I shout at him. “I need to see him.” He shakes his head again, and then I go to open it myself. But the box is heavier than it looks. The lid too much for me to lift on my own. “I am not leaving until you help me open this box and I see him.” My chest heaves from the effort, and my words are part scream, part like a cry from a feral animal. And maybe I have frightened him because he finally relents, opens the lid to the box.
And there he is. Papa. I don’t think I’ve quite believed he is gone until I see him lying there, gray and listless. A bit of blood trickles from his nose, and nausea erupts from my stomach to my chest. I heave, but I’ve eaten nothing for days. There is nothing left in me.
“Papa,” I say. “I am sorry. I am so, so sorry. I abandoned Poland. I abandoned you.”
I do not stop apologizing until Bronia comes in from outside, until she pulls me away. “He is gone,” she says matter-of-factly. “There is nothing you can say or do. He’s gone.”
Marya
Poland, 1902–1903
I stayed two months in Warsaw after Papa died, living in his house, getting his affairs in order. Kaz came for Papa’s funeral, then quickly returned to Loksow with Leokadia, who had to get back to play a concert. And Hela, too, rushed back to Paris just a few days after we buried Papa, as she was preparing to begin work on her doctoral thesis and urgently had to secure space for a lab, which was apparently in high demand. Not to mention she’d received daily letters from Jacques while she was in Warsaw, the content of each making her blush.
But I wanted to know more about this lab she desired, about the experiments she hoped to conduct there, wanted to hold Hela close and absorb all she had learned and experienced in France without me. When I asked, she shrugged, told me it wasn’t very interesting at all. “Mineralogy,” she’d clarified. Which, in truth, didn’t sound all that interesting. But still, I imagined my sister-twin inside her laboratory in France, examining rocks with Jacques, and it made me feel hot with wanting, or jealousy.
After she left, Bronia told me Hela was lovesick. Hela looked well-fed to me, her color was rosy: she appeared the healthiest and most vibrant I’d ever seen her. Bronia, though, looked very tired, and I didn’t think it would be good for her to rush back to Paris the way Hela had. “I could really use your help sorting through Papa’s things,” I told her. And always my sister-mother, she couldn’t resist being needed.
“I miss Poland,” she said, running her finger wistfully across Papa’s credenza, which I’d dusted and polished in hopes of selling it before we left. “Paris is… becoming too much. It’s not home. I’m ready to come back for good, Marya.”
I nodded, but I thought of the school my niece, Lou, attended in Paris, a real school, where she was getting a real well-rounded education, not a girls’ gymnasium like in Poland. “What about Lou’s education?” I asked. My younger nephew, Jakub, would be fine, but he would grow up to be a man, and it wouldn’t matter as much for him where: Poland or Paris. A man could be a man anywhere.