Half Life

was now. Kazimierz was not dying. He was very much alive, and he claimed he loved me. I knew he loved me. And yet he had left me anyway.
It is not my choice, you see, Marya, he had said to me hours earlier. My parents will not allow us to marry. We had walked along the path toward the river, away from his parents’ manor house in Szczuki, my younger charges, his younger siblings, taking their afternoon rests. Kazimierz held on to my hand, the way he always did when we walked together in the afternoons, but now that he was delivering terrible news, terrible words I did not want to hear, he gripped me tightly. My wrist began to ache, and I pulled out of his grasp. I have no choice, he said again, when I pulled away. Marya, please.
“You have a choice,” I’d told him. “There is always a choice.” That very idea was what had gotten me through months and months of being a governess for the Zorawskis before Kazimierz had arrived. I did not want to care for children. I did not even enjoy them the way my sister Hela did. My mind ached to learn. I’d dedicated every evening to self-study since I’d been in Szczuki, and though I’d arrived here equally enamored with literature, sociology, and science, in the past few years I’d decided that science was what I wanted to study at university. But to do so I would need to earn enough money to move out of Russian Poland, where women were not allowed to be or do anything of import, and most definitely not allowed to attend university.
I had planned to move to Paris to be with my older sister, Bronia, before I’d fallen in love with Kazimierz. We’d even had a deal, Bronia and I—I would work and send her money while she earned her medical degree, and then I would move to Paris, and she would work as a doctor and help put me through university. I had made my own choice: act as a governess for just a few years until I could afford to do what I really wanted. Here Kazimierz was, a man, and an intelligent one at that, and he was claiming he had no choice.
“What would you have me do, Marya?” he’d asked me, grabbing my hand again, lowering to his knees as if he were begging me to understand him, to forgive him, which, of course, I wouldn’t. “If I disobey my parents they would disown me, and then . . .”
“And then, what?” I’d snapped, pulling away again. “We would be penniless together? Or, what is it you said your mother said about me, I am worthless? I’ll never amount to anything?”
“I do love you,” he’d said softly.
“Do you?” I’d asked him, and then when he didn’t say anything else, I’d turned and run back to the house alone.
I’d spent the rest of the afternoon crying in my bed, not even bothering to tend to the children when they woke from their naps. How could I continue to be their governess now, knowing what Pani Zorawska truly thought of me? Now knowing that Kazimierz agreed with her, that he and I could not be together.
I threw everything into my valise, and after the house grew dark, the night quiet, I snuck out without so much as even a goodbye to my employers. I put my bag on my shoulder and walked into town to hire a carriage to drive me through the beet sugar plantations that seemed to stretch for an eternity—it was a five-hour carriage ride to the closest train station. But I would use all the rubles I had left to pay the carriage man, then the train back to Warsaw, back to Papa and Hela. And I would arrive home, truly penniless.
BACK IN WARSAW, I STAYED IN BED, AND WHAT MUST PAPA and Hela have thought? Poor Marya, too thin, too fragile, and destined to be unloved forever. Hela was my closest sister in age—she was just one year older than me, and I had always been so advanced in school that we’d been placed in the same grade at the female gymnasium as girls. We had been something like twins, and she was the one I’d written to about Kazimierz the past few years. I’d even told her the secret I’d told no one else, that we’d been engaged. But all I would tell her when I first returned home was that it was over, and that I did not wish to talk about it.
“Marya,” Hela called for me through my bedroom door, her voice so high and sweet like a songbird. I wanted to go to her, to hold on to her, the way I had as a young girl when our oldest sister, Zofia, had died. But the absence of Kazimierz was a heaviness in my chest, and I could not move. I pretended to be asleep, turning on my side, and squeezing my eyes tightly shut.
Hela opened the door, called my name again into the darkness. I didn’t answer her, or move. “You’re not the only one,” she finally said, before giving up, shutting the door behind her.
And part of me wanted to ask her what she meant; the other part of me wanted to sleep forever.
ONE AFTERNOON, A FEW WEEKS AFTER RETURNING TO WARSAW, Papa knocked on my bedroom door, and unlike Hela, he walked right in, without waiting for my answer. “It’s time to get up, get ready,” he said.
My mind felt dull, my body listless. I was weak from hunger, or disappointment, but I had no desire to get up and eat or live my life. “I have nothing to get ready for,” I moaned. Eventually, I supposed I would have to get out of bed and try to secure another governess position, but I could not face that prospect yet. Bronia was just about finished with her degree, and she said I could move