“I don’t mind the children being sick,” I protested. There had been many days I’d gone to the Kaminskis and nursed the twins through one cold or another. I’d caught many of them myself and still returned to the work the following day. “I can—”
“Nonsense,” Bronia said, cutting me off before I could finish saying I’d be happy to help her out with them at night. “I’m not going to have you get sick from my children. You are here to help Hela plan her wedding, not to be in bed, coughing for weeks. Come, have some soup before Hela takes you out to Sceaux to settle in.” The idea of being taken anywhere else, riding on another horse-drawn carriage or another train or another anything, turned my stomach again, but Bronia left me no room to argue. And anyway, I was too tired to argue now, too tired to think or do anything but accept her delicious soup and then let Hela take me away.
THE CURIES LIVED IN A LARGE ESTATE IN SCEAUX, ON THE outskirts of Paris, but when Hela and I finally arrived it was dark, and I could not really see the grounds. I awoke at dawn the next morning, stretching out in the unfamiliar comfort of the Curies’ guest room, the bed softer than any I’d ever felt in my entire life. I stood and went to the window, and I saw what Hela meant about the flowers: golds and reds and pinks, as far as the eye could see. It was so startlingly beautiful, I gasped.
I hadn’t actually met the Curies last night when I arrived, as they’d already gone to sleep and the housekeeper had shown me to my room. But Hela had told me a bit of their story on the interminably long omnibus rides from Bronia’s.
Jacques’s mother died a few years earlier of cancer, and before she got sick, Jacques had been living and working in Montpellier as a professor, where he’d planned to settle. But when she fell ill, neither his father nor his younger brother, Pierre—both highly emotional, Hela clarified—could handle things at the estate. And besides, Jacques wanted to spend time with his mother in her final days, and so he’d taken a leave of his job in Montpellier and picked up a course to teach at the Sorbonne while he was in Paris. Hela was a student in his class, and she said she knew she was in love with him immediately, and he felt the same about her, but they waited until the end of the session before acting upon their feelings. Of course, Hela said, blushing a little. And then, he forgot all about Montpellier. Now, five years later, Jacques was in Paris for good, and she was about to become his wife.
Jacques no longer lived at the house in Sceaux with his father and brother, but had his own house in the city on boulevard Kellerman, closer to the Sorbonne, which Hela planned to move into after the wedding. His father and his younger brother now inhabited this great big estate in Sceaux all on their own, with plenty of staff, Hela assured me.
I thought about her story again as I got out of bed, stretched, and stared at all those glorious flowers. Who planted them, took care of them? Did they employ a gardener as part of the many staff Hela mentioned? The idea that my Hela was marrying someone French with enough money to employ a gardener made me laugh out loud. And then, as if someone had been standing out in the hallway, testing to see if I was awake, there came a quick knock on my door, and I put my hand to my mouth to stop my laughter.
“Madame Zorawska?” came a male voice from the other side of the door. It took a second for me to register that it was me he was calling for, as I was thrown by being called Madame and the very French-accented way he pronounced my last name.
“Oui?” I responded carefully, testing out my poor and rusty French.
“Breakfast is ready in the dining room, if you’re hungry.” He spoke in French, but slowly enough that I could follow along. At least, I thought I could. It had been years since I’d studied French, and the sound of it now brought back memories of Szczuki, and feelings I had not felt since that summer when I had believed my life would be here.
I swallowed hard and called back that I’d be right there. I quickly dressed in a clean dress from my valise and wrapped my hair in a bun. I opened the door, and to my surprise he was still standing there, in the hallway at the top of the long winding staircase, waiting for me. I had not met Jacques in person yet, but Hela had shown me a photograph, and this man was most certainly the brother Hela had mentioned. He looked an awful lot like Jacques, only a bit younger and with a lighter expression, a broader smile. He stood before me, tall, raven-haired, with a dark thick beard. His deep blue eyes were trained on my face so steadily that I looked away from him, down at my feet.
“Madame Zorawska.” He bent down and kissed my hand softly, in a way that was so very French, so very foreign to me. I had to stifle another laugh, but mostly because he made me feel… nervous, outside myself. “I’m Pierre Curie,” he said.
His hand lingered on mine, and I gently extracted myself from him, folding my hands together in front of me. “Please,” I finally said, “we are practically related. Call me Marya.”
“Marya,” he repeated. His tone was gentle, and he lingered a little too long on the y, so my name sounded more French in his voice than I’d ever heard it before, Maria.
I was suddenly, finally, very hungry, and I felt my stomach rumble. “You said there was breakfast?” I asked him.
“Yes, of course. My manners. You had a very long journey. You must be famished. Follow me.”
He ran down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time like a child, while I followed behind, holding on to the railing, not wanting to miss a step and trip. All around me this house was an expanse of marble and glass and light. Hela was not only marrying someone French, someone who employed a gardener, but someone who came from a wealthy family.
Downstairs in the dining room, there were enough pastries spread out on the long table to feed the Russian army, and the housekeeper again, who handed me a coffee. The distance between my sister-twin and me never felt greater than it did in this very moment.
“I’ve heard very much about you,” Pierre said, sitting down to eat his own breakfast at the head of the table. I nodded as I took my own seat but did not admit that I’d heard very little about him. Only what Hela had mentioned last night. And what had she said about him—that he had been too emotional to handle his mother’s death? Jacques was the steady one. “Hela says you are building a university to educate the women of Poland.” Pierre was still talking. “What a wonderful undertaking.”
Is that what Hela had told him? It seemed so much an exaggeration, as if I alone were educating the women of my entire country, not just a tiny little piece of the tiny little city of Loksow. But I took a sip of my steaming coffee and didn’t correct him. “It is very French of you to think that it is wonderful,” I said instead. “My husband hates it.” At the mere mention of Kaz, I remembered the unopened letter from him in my valise, and my chest tightened again.
“Hates it?” Pierre laughed. “I’m sure that’s not the case. What could be better than giving people education? Education is freedom, is it not?”
He sounded just like Papa, and I warmed to him. As he was a French man, born and raised in France, I didn’t think he would ever understand just how much the Russians didn’t want women to feel free or why Kaz worried for my safety. And now, here, in Paris, I did not desire to explain it to him, so instead I changed the subject. “And what do you do, Pierre?” I asked instead. “Are you a scientist, too?”
He nodded, finishing off a croissant in one large bite. “I’m conducting research in paramagnetism.”