“I’ve been well,” he says. “I’ve recently been named the dean of faculty at Jagiellonian in Krakow. We’re back in Warsaw for the summer visiting my mother, who has been ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I murmur. All these many years later, I cannot bring myself to muster ill will for Pani Zorawska, who was perhaps only acting out of a simplistic protective instinct. Besides, she was very wrong about me, and that in itself is satisfying enough.
“Leokadia and I have three children.” Kazimierz is still talking.
Leokadia, yes, that was her name. I remember again the clipping Hela had sent, that I had placed away in a textbook, so long ago. “And your wife… she is a pianist?”
He laughs. “Once, she played, yes. But now the children keep her very busy. She doesn’t have time for piano any longer.”
I feel a sudden sadness for her, this woman, Leokadia, this wife of Kazimierz’s who I’ve never met. It is hard for me to understand a life where having children would force a woman to give up on her own work. “She can’t do both?” I say, frowning. “Be a mother and a pianist?”
“She loves being a mother, looking after the children.” He shrugs. “And I make a good living.”
I nod and think about that morning so long ago at the train station, the last time I saw Kazimierz. What if I had not gotten on that train, but stayed here, married him instead? Would Leokadia’s life be my life? I love my children, but I cannot imagine a life without my work. I cannot imagine who I would’ve become without it.
“You have children,” Kazimierz says, more a statement than a question.
“Two daughters,” I say. “Irène is almost nine and Ève is almost two. And I’ll be starting as a full professor at the Sorbonne in the fall, and of course I have my work in the lab, too.”
Kazimierz nods. Somehow he already knows this also. But my life has been detailed in the press for the past few years. Maybe it would not be so hard to keep up with me. “I was very sorry to hear about Pierre’s accident,” he says softly. At the mention of Pierre’s name, I quickly look away from him.
“Please don’t say his name,” I say. It is warm inside the café; I’m sweating. I stand up quickly, too quickly, and my coffee begins to tip. Kazimierz and I both reach for it. He catches it just in time, and then catches onto my elbows.
“I’m so very sorry,” he says softly. He holds onto my elbows for a moment, his eyes wide with sympathy, or maybe it is regret. I remember that he is a good man, a kind man. I am happy for him that his life has turned out well, that he has love and a family. But none of that belongs to me.
I gently pull out of his grasp. “I should get going,” I say. “My sister will worry.”
He nods, but keeps his eyes on my face for another moment. “It was so good to see you again, Marya.”
“You too,” I say. The air in here is stifling; being this close to him is stifling. I gather up my notebook and quickly walk out of the café, not turning back to see if he’s still watching me.
Though somehow, I know he is. I can feel his eyes on my back.
ON THE LONG WALK BACK TO HELA’S, I THINK ABOUT KAZIMIERZ and his three children, his wife who gave up her work to look after them. His mother, who lies in bed somewhere in Warsaw, dying. His prestigious job as the dean of Jagiellonian in Krakow. None of that belongs to me, but it could have.
What if I had not stepped on that train, but instead, stayed behind in Poland with him so many years ago? If I had married him, become a mother to his children, and given up on my own education altogether, I would not have my work now.
But then Pierre and I never would have met at the Kowalskis that night so long ago. We never would’ve shared a lab, fallen in love, gotten married. We never would’ve won a Nobel Prize. And Pierre never would have been walking in the rain on his way back from a science academy luncheon on April 19th.
What if I hadn’t stepped on that train, but had turned around, chosen Kazimierz instead?
Then, right now, Pierre would still be in Paris somewhere, very much alive.
Marya
Poland, 1907
I quickly forgot about my wayward fantasy of staying in Paris, as Pierre had suggested that lazy afternoon in the park. Because two momentous things happened to us in Poland in the beginning of 1907.
The first was that mine and Agata’s school grew large enough so that we suddenly needed not just one room to hold classes, but three. And we had enough tuition money, enough regular students now, that we rented what had once been a girls’ gymnasium on Aleja Wróbli. We liked it both for its size and the symbolic nature of the street name. Our Flying University was now housed out in the open, on an avenue named for sparrows.
We hung a large sign out front, designed by our art students, that proclaimed us to be the Women’s University of Loksow. No longer hiding, no longer flying. In addition to my administrative duties that I carried out during the day with Agata, I also taught three courses, three nights a week: beginning chemistry and physics, and a new course this term, advanced physics, as we now had girls who’d been with us long enough to want more advanced knowledge.
The second thing that happened was Kaz finally finished writing up his and Hipolit’s research. His paper was accepted for publication by the Polish Academy of Mathematics in March: The Theory of Elasticity. It was a very momentous and exciting moment in the mathematics field. As Hipolit was no longer alive, all the acclaim and accolades for the work fell squarely on Kazimierz. He received encouraging letters from as far away as America! And in May he was offered a guest lecture position at the University of Vienna to begin in the fall. It was a well-paying appointment, five times what Kaz would be paid in a year to teach at the boys’ school here. As it would only be a one-year appointment, we decided it made the most sense for Klara and me to stay behind in Loksow, without him.
“For now,” Kaz said, with a hopeful note to his voice, like he thought his appointment could be extended, and that I would be more than happy to join him. But what would I want from Austria? Poland was my home. Poland had always been my home. Now that my school was out in the open and thriving, I would not want to leave it.
“Maybe if this goes well,” I told him. “You will get a good job back here?”
“Maybe, kochanie.” He kissed the top of my head. “Finally the entire world might be opened to us. Just the way we always dreamed.”
I thought about the sign we had recently erected on Aleja Wróbli, and it was not the world I wanted any longer. It was Poland, it was my own country. My own burgeoning part of it.
WE PLANNED TO GO TO ZAKOPANE FOR THE WHOLE MONTH OF July to stay with Bronia and Kazimierz, Lou and Jakub, and to spend some family time all together before Kaz left for Austria. Agata and I put our school on summer break, just like the male universities, and I was so excited for this trip. My hands shook with glee as I packed for the three of us. It was the first vacation we had ever taken together, the first vacation Kaz and I had taken since that disastrous one with his family nearly ten years earlier.
Pani Zorawska was reportedly back in Warsaw these days and had taken ill. Kaz received monthly letters from his brother Stan, but he had not gone to seen his mother, not since that time many years earlier when she had offered to pay me to leave him. I still sometimes thought about that, even now. If I had taken her up on her offer, my life might have been completely different. But by the summer of 1907, I no longer desired a different life. The years had softened the blow of Kaz’s betrayal, and since I had Klara, I could not imagine any sort of life that would be good for me, without her.