Irène and I divide our time between driving to the front ourselves and training other women to drive the cars and use the radiological equipment back in Paris at the lab. (Irène all the while keeps up her studies at the Sorbonne and has achieved her certificates in maths and almost nearly in physics and chemistry.) All in all now, we have nearly 150 capable women, with the ability to drive, x-ray, and diagnose. I keep one car for myself, the Renault, and I drive into the field when I can and when I’m needed. I receive regular telegrams and telephone calls, letting me know where to go, and I dispatch the cars from Paris.
The laboratory has been, nearly my entire adult life, the place where I have felt most free, most at home. But now, driving my Renault from post to post out in the field, changing flat tires and cleaning carburetors, diagnosing wounded men, saving lives, I have never felt such excitement, such a thrill. Such a comfort and surety in my work.
BY SEPTEMBER 1916, IRÈNE IS AT HER OWN POST IN HOOGSTADE, Belgium, sleeping for weeks out in the medical tent with the nurses. She reports in her letters of the bullet fragments she finds in bones, of a man whose life she saves by diagnosing his wounded lung.
I get a dispatch that another unit is needed, and all my women are off elsewhere, so I take my Renault, drive to Hoogstade myself to assist.
“Maman,” Irène says, her tired face erupting in glee when I get out of the car. Her face no longer belongs to a girl, or even a teenager, but now it is the worn face of a woman. A woman who has seen things and done things and learned things. She embraces me tightly, and as she is a bit taller than me, she lowers her lips to kiss the top of my head. “How wonderful you came!”
“Of course I came,” I said. “I got a dispatch that there were too many injuries for just one car.”
“Oh.” Irène’s face fell. “It was silly of me… but I thought… it was my birthday that brought you.” She shrugs, sheepishly.
Her birthday. Is it really? It has been weeks, or maybe it has been months since we’ve last seen each other. It’s hard to keep track of time in the war, in the field. I measure my days in miles, in radiographs of broken bones and bullet-ridden chests. In number of men saved, and transported for treatment, and lost despite my greatest efforts.
“Happy birthday, darling,” I say to her, giving her another quick hug. If I were not standing in the middle of a war, perhaps I would take a moment to remember it, that precipitous joy that erupted from me on the morning of her birth. The way Pierre had cried out that she was so small, too small. Perhaps I would ruminate on the fact that Pierre has been gone so long, he would not even recognize our baby who stands before me now, a woman, a scientist.
But there is no time to be nostalgic. I kiss her cheek and pull out of the embrace. “Let’s be happy you and I are both alive. So many men are injured, dying. They need us. There will be other birthdays. Come, let’s drive to the field. You lead the way. I’ll follow behind you in my car.”
She nods, and I can tell she feels the same excitement about going back out into the field that I do. Her blue eyes light up the way her father’s did once in our laboratory shed, watching our radium glow and glow and glow upon the table.
Marya
Krakow, 1918–1919
Krakow became liberated from Austrian rule first, on October 31, 1918, a few weeks before the end of the war. And then after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Warsaw was liberated from Russian rule, and for the first time in my lifetime and more, over 100 years, Poland was Poland again. No more Austrian Poland, Russian Poland. Out of the horribleness and death and destruction of the war, my country had at long last regained her sovereignty. I wished my father were alive to see it.
Klara and I returned to Krakow once things stabilized, near the end of the war. And with Chernikoff still closed, Klara practiced piano on her own at the house for hours each day, but now without the sour attitude. She had been without a piano for so long at Hela’s that she was grateful just to be able to play again. And I was grateful to be able to taste the end of the war, to revel in the feeling of my Poland being Poland, and to hear the sounds of Klara’s beautiful music, filling our house with light and joy and wonder again.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I DID WHEN WE GOT BACK TO KRAKOW was go to Professor Mazur’s home to check on her daughters. She and I had been together only in the lab, teacher and student, researcher and assistant. We had not been friends—I did not know her daughters. I had met Nadia and Emilia only once before. And I didn’t even know the exact location of the Mazurs’ home because I had never been there. But Klara remembered where it was from that time I went to Sweden and she had spent time with the Mazur girls and their governess. When I asked her for help, she stepped away from her piano and said, “Mama, I’ll go with you to see them.”
The Mazurs’ house was only five blocks away from ours, in a location I’d walked by a few times before on Nadzieja Street. Klara and I walked there together, our arms linked. At fifteen, she was lithe and beautiful, and she wore her pale blond hair in curls. She was a few inches taller than me, and when we walked together now I got the distinct feeling she believed she was holding me up. When I looked at her though, I still saw my little girl.
Nadia, the Mazurs’ older daughter, nearly eighteen, answered the door when we rang the bell. She had blossomed in the years since I’d met her, and here she was before me now, a ghost of her mother, small and pale with shining black hair. She looked at me, uncertain. Then her eyes caught on Klara and recognition glimmered on her face. She smiled. “Oh, Klara! Marya?” She greeted us, opening the door wider.
I handed her the loaf of bread I’d baked last night with what I could scrape together at the market. Yeast and flour were scarce; my loaf had barely risen and more resembled a misshapen cracker.
Klara gave Nadia a hug. “Come in,” Nadia said to both of us. “I have been hoping you would return to Krakow.”
“I was so very sorry to hear what happened to your mother. How have you and your sister been?” I asked, as we walked inside. Boxes were stacked in the corner of the foyer, and the parlor room was mostly empty. “Are you moving?” I asked.
Nadia nodded. “Papa was offered a job at a university in Chicago, and Emilia and I can study there.”
“America,” Klara said, her eyes wide, with surprise, or was it jealousy? I had never met Professor Mazur’s husband, but I knew he was also a professor, literature, or… history?
“It’s been hard,” Nadia said. “Everything has been hard. The war… Mama’s passing.” She blinked back tears. I held on tightly to Klara’s hand. I wished there was something I could’ve done to save Professor Mazur, but I was also so grateful that Klara and I had found safety during the war, that my family had come through it intact. “It will be good to start over somewhere new. For all of us,” Nadia was saying now.
I nodded. “Your mother meant a lot to me,” I said. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. We were supposed to go back into her lab together, once the war was over. There was so much more work to be done.” I sighed.
“She had told us.” Nadia nodded vigorously. “Oh! Hold on, I have something for you.”
Nadia disappeared into the other room, then returned a few moments later with a stack of notebooks. I recognized them immediately: Professor Mazur’s research journals. She had never been without one in the lab, and she was always scribbling down notes. Nadia put the pile of them into my arms now, and I had no choice but to accept or let them drop to the floor.