I will show those men; I will show everyone.
EASTER WEEKEND, PAUL MANAGES TO GET AWAY ON SATURDAY afternoon, and I take the train to meet him at our apartment. I get there, and I find the door ajar. It is unlike Paul to forget to shut it, and I push it open a bit, alarmed. “Paul,” I call out. “Paul?”
But the inside of the apartment is quiet, the drawer where we keep all our letters to each other in the living room wide open and shockingly empty. “Hello?” I call out into the apartment, my heart pounding wildly, but no one answers back. I walk through and the rooms are empty.
Paul opens the door a few moments later, walks in, takes one look at me and says, “What’s wrong, ma lumière rayonnante?”
“The letters,” I say. “Someone must’ve broken in and… stole all our letters.”
Paul’s face instantly becomes bloodless, and he hangs his head down between his knees as if he might vomit, or faint. I go to him, rub his back gently, until he stands up again. I put my hand to his face, trail my finger softly across the swirl of his mustache, his lips.
He leans down and kisses me gently. “I have to go,” he says softly.
“But, Paul, you just got here.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Marie, I’m so, so sorry.”
“SHE WANTS MONEY,” PAUL SAYS TO ME THE FOLLOWING WEEK. He has come to my lab during lunch hour, and my research assistants stare at him now, curious. They haven’t seen him in months, since Jeanne threatened me, and we agreed, through Jean Perrin, not to see each other. I take his hand and lead him outside to the street. The midday sun is hot, blinding, and I shield my eyes.
“How much?” I ask.
“Five thousand francs,” he says, lowering his voice, looking at his feet.
I remember once how I had offered to help Jeanne if she needed money, but not like this. “And if I pay her… then she will let you end the marriage?” I ask.
He looks up at me, his eyes wide, and he shakes his head. “Then she will not release our letters to the press,” he says softly.
The press. They’ve finally stopped printing lies about me now that the Academy vote has passed and I’ve lost the spot. I remember the poetry of Paul’s words about my body in his letters. I shiver, even in the heat of the sun.
“They already tried to crucify you, a woman, daring to go up for a spot in the Academy,” Paul is saying now. “Imagine what they would do with these?”
I do not want to imagine. I lean against the wall of my lab, put my head in my hands. “Okay,” I say. Five thousand francs is a lot of money, but it will not destroy me. “I’ll give her five thousand francs.”
“And we cannot meet anymore,” he says softly. “I cannot risk what she will do to you now that she has those letters. She could ruin you. And I love you, ma lumière rayonnante. I would never forgive myself.”
“No.” I refuse to accept that. “Not being with you will ruin me. We will keep our distance for now. But I know we will be together, soon. I know it.”
“Marie,” he says my name so softly and so sadly, like he is singing a funeral song. “Marie, Marie, Marie.”
I WAS WRONG. LOVE AND SCIENCE, THEY ARE NOT ONE AND the same. Love has come and gone in my life, permeating me with nothing but sadness in the end. Kazimierz. Pierre. And now Paul.
But science, it is always here. It never leaves me or abandons me or hurts me or stops needing me. My lab calls for me and waits for me. It is my life and my home, and the truest thing I have ever devoted myself to.
Jean Perrin reports that, in spite of my five thousand francs, Jeanne Langevin is still telling everyone on boulevard Kellerman she would like to kill me. “Perhaps you should leave for the summer?” he says gently. “Let her calm down.”
“I already paid her to calm down,” I say. “With the money I was going to use to rent a house in Brittany again this summer.”
But I don’t think Jean Perrin is wrong, and Bronia has been after me to bring the girls to Zakopane for the summer. She has room for us. We would only have to pay for the train, and Ève has never even been to Poland. I imagine both of my girls there, happy and carefree, picking berries and riding horses in the pastures and smelling the Polish country air of my youth. And I write Bronia to let her know that we are coming.
THE SUMMER AIR IN ZAKOPANE SMELLS SWEET AND FRAGRANT, the city feeling a lifetime away. When we arrive, Bronia and Lou are in the kitchen together eating fresh-picked blackberries. My niece is now nineteen, a full-grown woman, an apparition of the Bronia I knew in Warsaw once long ago. She is more muscular, her cheeks more ruddy, but with Bronia’s haunting eyes all the same.
Irène and Ève go to their room to unpack, and I sit down in the kitchen with Bronia and Lou, still unable to rid myself of the fog that hovered in the city—Jeanne’s threats, and the ache of missing Paul. On the train I thought of so many things I wanted to share with him about my latest findings on polonium’s decay, how excited he would be about my revelation, that the half-life must be much shorter than that of radium. And now I feel a residual emptiness, not being able to tell him.
“Here.” Bronia holds her hand out across the table. “Have a blackberry. They are so sweet. I promise, they will fix what ails you.”
I frown and shake my head, pushing the fruit away. I’m not hungry.
“You need to forget about him,” Bronia says quietly. I’ve written to Bronia about Paul, but I have not told her about the death threats, or the five thousand francs I gave away. “He is married,” she adds, her tone unforgiving, unyielding.
“Jeanne does not love him like I do,” I say petulantly. I realize I sound like a child, but I don’t care. “Their marriage is all but over.”
Bronia frowns and chews on a blackberry. “But she is still his wife.” Bronia emphasizes the word wife, like I do not understand its meaning. “No matter what happens between me and Mier, I would want to destroy any woman who believed she could have him. Who thought she could take him away from me.”
Lou pops a blackberry in her mouth and chuckles, perhaps at how serious Bronia sounds, or perhaps at the ridiculousness of Bronia’s statement. Bronia, the caretaker, the physician, could never destroy anyone.
“You would blackmail someone?” I say to her. “You would threaten to kill someone?”
“Her husband is being unfaithful to her,” Bronia says, frowning. “Who is the villain in this story, hmm?” she adds softly.
My cheeks turn hot at the implication that I am the villain. Or is she saying that Paul is the villain? I open my mouth to lash out at her. What does she know? Her husband is still alive and working with her. They have their simple and beautiful life here in the mountains. But then I don’t say anything at all because maybe she is also right. In another life, one where Pierre had not stepped in front of a horse on a rainy April afternoon, Jeanne might be the one I feel sympathy for now, not Paul. It is a hard thing to admit, even to myself, and I swallow, saying nothing else at all.
“I’m never getting married,” Lou announces, standing. Bronia’s frown creases deeper. But Lou ignores it, kisses Bronia on the head. “I’m going for a hike,” she says, bored with our conversation. I remember what Bronia told me once about Lou and Mier and their fascination with hiking after Jakub died. Now, at nineteen, Lou is nearly a professional, she knows the Carpathians so well. Bronia, however, wishes she’d earn a degree in science instead.
“Take me with you,” I implore her, in part because I want to go. I want to forget all about Jeanne and Paul and the fog that had hovered in Paris. But I also know my interest in Lou’s hobby will annoy Bronia and will get her mind off my love life.