Half Life

far away. I let myself believe she had moved somewhere else, out in the countryside, with a family perhaps. “I will start something small,” I promised Kazimierz. “For a few women. We will only meet once a week. I need this,” I said again.
Kazimierz sighed. He knew me well enough to know that nothing he might say now, no worry he might have was going to change my mind. He squeezed my hand. “Just promise me you’ll be careful,” he finally said.
“Of course, darling.” I leaned across the table and kissed him once softly on the lips to mollify him. I sat back down and began to chart it in my head, how I could begin this university, where I would even start.
Kazimierz was still staring at me, and he put the exam down again, reached his hands up to hold on to my shoulders and pull me closer to him. He kissed me, more forcefully than before, as if to remind me that he was here, that he was the most important thing. And he was.
But we were going to get to Paris, I was going to go to a real university eventually. And in the meantime, I had to prepare as much as I could, so I would be ready.

Marie
Paris, France, 1891
You have a choice. There is always a choice.
I get on the train to Paris, leaving Kazimierz still standing at the station, looking as though I had trampled upon his heart. But my own heart feels free, bursting with so much possibility for my future. The heavy sinking cloud that had crushed my thoughts and my hopes, working so many dull years as a governess, begins to lift as the train pulls away from Warsaw. My university education is finally within my grasp, after all these years. Maybe my love for Kazimierz had not been love at all, as now the prospect of giving up university, for him, does not feel even remotely right to me the way it had only months earlier, skating in Szczuki.
Forty long and uncomfortable hours later, Bronia is waiting for me at the station in Paris. She completed her course of study in obstetrics and is a married woman now—having fallen in love with another doctor, a Polish man, a political dissident exiled from Russian Poland.
It is wonderful to see her again, and my heart swells further. She looks so beautiful, so happy and so grown up and . . . it can’t be! I rest my hand gently on the round bulge of her belly, before I even give her a hug. “You are having a baby?” I ask, stunned that my sister is about to be a real mother to her own child, not just a sister-mother to me and Hela. And, that she has kept this last bit of news from me until now.
“Yes.” She laughs a little and holds me tightly to her, kissing the top of my head. She smoothes back the wisps of my blond hair that have come loose from my bun on the very long journey. “You are going to be a tante.” She quickly corrects herself in Polish: “Ciotka, I mean.”
“Tante,” I repeat back, the French word both foreign and delightful on my tongue.
BRONIA AND HER HUSBAND LIVE IN A SMALL APARTMENT IN La Villete, on rue d’Allemagne, an hour and two horse-drawn omnibus rides away from the Sorbonne.
I take a few days to unpack my things and settle in, and then Bronia draws me out a map. I manage to navigate the omnibuses into the city for the first time alone, without getting lost. And as I walk the rue Saint-Jacques to go and register for my classes, I’ve never felt such a lightness, such a happiness before. In Poland, a woman cannot simply walk into a university, pay the fees, and register. But in Paris—anything is possible!
I do not feel at all like that same girl, that same woman, who had been skating through life as a lovesick penniless governess, not too long ago, in Szczuki. And when I sign my registration card, instead of Marya, I write Marie. The French version of my name seems more suitable for my new life here, as a student, as a scientist. In Paris Marie can be anything or anyone. And I vow to leave that sad and listless Marya behind.
“ARE YOU AWAKE?” BRONIA’S VOICE CUTS THROUGH THE DARKNESS of my bedroom.
“Yes,” I say. “Sorry, did I wake you, Bron?” It is November third, the morning I am officially to become a student of the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne, and I’ve been awake since the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep, my mind and body restless, eager and excited.
“No,” Bronia says, lifting the curtain a bit now, only to reveal darkness. “I heard you rustling around in here. But it was the baby who woke me.” Bronia sighs. “Should I make some coffee?” she asks. “I’m not falling back to sleep.”
“Neither am I,” I admit. “Will we wake up Mier?”
“He’ll be fine,” Bronia says dismissively. I feel a little bad for my brother-in-law, who is kind, but also quiet—no match for the two independently minded sisters who now inhabit his apartment. Mier is short for Kazimierz, and every time Bron has said his name these past few weeks I couldn’t help but think about my own Kazimierz standing on the train platform in Warsaw. But I do not regret my choice. And besides, my brother-in-law is nothing like him. Mier’s love and adoration for Bronia are so clear on his face each time he glances at her, and he agrees to everything Bronia asks of him, anything to make her happy and fulfilled. He would never ask her to choose him over medicine, and that alone makes me quite fond of him.
Bronia leaves to start our coffee, and I rise and dress in the darkness. I don’t have many dresses to choose from, and I pull one blindly out