There’s an unexpected knock on the door—perhaps one of my assistants has forgotten something or couldn’t make it to the train in the snow. But when I open the door, there on the other side is Paul, his hat and thick wool coat covered in snowflakes. “I saw the lamplight through the window,” he says apologetically.
“You came to work with me?” I cannot keep the glee from my voice, and I tug on his coat sleeve to pull him inside my lab, out of the snow. He shuts the door behind him, and for a moment I just look at him, not letting go of his coat.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he admits. “I just… didn’t want to go home,” he says quietly.
I remember that morning in Arromanches, the tiny slivers of glass I plucked from his hair. None of us had ever spoken about that again, and the following morning Jeanne had been her usual self, chattering with me over coffee about the children. I’d wanted to ask her about what might drive her to smash a vase against her kind husband’s head. But what went on between them really wasn’t my business—I hadn’t said a word.
The cut from Arromanches was superficial and has long healed, but I put my hand up to his face now, trace the lines of his forehead with my fingertips. His skin is cool and damp from the snow. He reaches his hand up to meet mine and holds it there. My fingers suddenly grow hot against his skin. I lean in closer, and it is chilly enough inside my lab tonight that his breath frosts the air.
I have not been with a man since Pierre; I have not wanted to until right this very moment. I remember what Paul said, that if he came to work in my lab, he would fall in love with me. And I wonder if love and science are, for me, one and the same.
Our faces are so close; I can feel his breath against my lips. I suddenly think of Jeanne, waiting up for him in their kitchen on boulevard Kellerman. “We shouldn’t do this,” I say softly, but I am shaking, my heart pounding in my chest. I run my fingers down his cheeks, trace his lips with my forefinger.
“One time,” Paul whispers. “Just this once.”
And then his lips are on mine, and my body is hot with wanting, and I can’t pull away. I don’t want to.
Marya
Krakow, Austrian Poland, 1909
Kaz’s treatise on elasticity posited the idea that materials were elastic if, and only if, they returned to their original form after all outside forces were pulled away. Our marriage, too, was elastic by this definition. The years and the things that had happened to us, the things we had done, had shaped and changed and molded us into something unrecognizable once in Loksow. But now, in a new city, a new life, away from everything and everyone, here we were again, simply a man and a woman who loved each other.
In Krakow, we rented a two-story brick house, walking distance to Jagiellonian University, where Kaz was teaching two mathematics courses each term and where he also had access to a lab to continue to further study elasticity. We had a small garden in the backyard where I began to cultivate lettuce and herbs. Enough money to enroll Klara in a private primary academy and weekly piano lessons. We could not yet afford our own piano for the house, but we were saving for it.
I made breakfast for everyone in the mornings, kissed Kaz goodbye before he left for work. I walked Klara to school, and then, and only then, I understood my own elasticity. The worries about money, about the Russians’ opposition to women learning—that was absent here in Krakow. And I was still the same old Marya, my mind restless and itching, wanting to learn, wanting more.
AT FIRST, I HOPED TO OPEN A BRANCH OF MY WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY here in Krakow. Teaching young women was what I’d come to think of as my life’s work in Loksow. But it was very hard to get started here. For one thing, it wasn’t easy to meet like-minded people in a new city. Mostly, I got introduced to the wives of the men Kaz taught in the mathematics department with, and they were only interested talking about their houses, their children, and their husbands. When I tried to bring up the subject of advancing our own educations, they would laugh. Or look at me funny, like I made them uncomfortable. Suffice to say, I did not make any friends our first few months in Krakow.
But also the bigger problem was, there was not such a need for my school here, as there had been in Russian-controlled Poland. Women could enroll in Jagiellonian and had been allowed to since 1897. A few years ago, in 1906, the university had even hired their first woman professor. When I asked him, Kaz told me she was a part of the science faculty, but he had not met her yet. She felt to me like a mythical creature. And some mornings after I dropped Klara off at school, I would take a long path home, meandering by the science building on campus, hoping that, by chance, I might run into her. But it was silly, since I had no idea what she looked like. How would I even know if I walked right by her?
I wrote to Hela weekly and begged her to send me as much current reading material as she could, so that I could at least continue my scientific education on my own. But Hela was so busy with writing up her findings on elemental magnetism with Jacques that her letters to me, her packages of scientific papers and journals, came less frequently than they had when I’d lived in Loksow.
Our house in Krakow was on Golebia Street, and somehow it felt fitting that this street, too, was named for a bird. A pigeon, though, not a sparrow. And all the pigeons I saw in Krakow were never flying; they were prancing slowly on the street corners, pecking at wayward crumbs passersby had dropped in the street.
IN THE SPRINGTIME, WE BOUGHT A PIANO FOR OUR HOUSE, and Klara could not keep her hands off of it. She ran to practice the moment she woke up in the morning, and then again the moment she got home from her daily school lessons. I had to pester her to do her schoolwork in the evenings and tried to hide that stabbing feeling in my stomach when she would say, Why, Mama? Why? Sciences and maths bore me. I want to play piano instead.
“You can get back to the piano after your lessons are done. I’ll help you with the maths and sciences,” I would say. It pained me so that this was my favorite part of my day, and that she hated it.
But I could not deny that Leokadia had been right about her talent either. After only two years of lessons, her small six-year-old fingers could fly across the keys in a way that mesmerized me when I sat down and watched her play. And her teacher, an older woman who had come recommended to Kaz by one of the other professors whose daughter also took lessons, told us that perhaps we should look into something more for Klara, something better, a professional institute of music?
“Is there something like that here in Krakow?” I asked, genuinely curious. I had known of nothing of the sort in Loksow or Warsaw. And especially not something that would be open to young girls.
She nodded. “There is one institute that accepts girls: Chernikoff. But it is very hard to get in.”
“Oh.” I shrugged, and the truth was, as much as Klara loved piano, I still hoped for her to fall in love with science instead. And she was so young, only six years old. I was quite fine with her taking casual lessons with Pani Lebowska.
“But Klara is special,” Pani Lebowska said matter-of-factly. “She’ll practice a little more, and then I will secure her an audition.”