by Lydia Davis
It was fifteen years ago, to the day, that, arriving from Warsaw, a little Polish student crossed for the first time the courtyard of the Sorbonne. The second life of Marie Curie has begun.
And the chronicler of the Journal: “A great victory for feminism…For if woman is admitted to give higher instruction to students of both sexes, where henceforth will be the so-called superiority of the male man? In truth, I tell you: the time is close when women will become human beings.”
Proving that Radium is an Element by Extracting the Metal Itself
Marie is the only one to be able to do it. All haloed with that melancholy fame that she bears so soberly, she has touched one heart in particular by the simplicity of her bearing and the precision of the objectives she has fixed for herself: that of Andrew Carnegie.
He decides to finance her research, which he knows how to do with elegance.
In the eyes of the international scientific community, she has become an implacable person, without rival in the domain in which she is an authority, a unique star, because she is a woman, in the constellation that then shines in the sky of science.
Yet “her nerves are ill,” as she has been told by some of the doctors participating in the congress. Nerves are never ill. They only say that in some part one is ill.
But in 1910, no one knows that a certain Doctor Freud has already analyzed Dora.
A trip to the Engadine will succeed in restoring her.
Sorrow and Her Children
Many years will pass before her daughters are old enough so that she can speak with them about what is occupying her days. If she never speaks to them of their father, whose name she has forbidden one to pronounce in her presence, it is that fresh wounds are so prompt to bleed, and since when does one bleed in front of one’s children?
To say nothing in order to be sure of controlling herself is her rule, she applies it. This does not facilitate communication.
But she has known the privilege of privileges: coherence.
A Second Nobel Prize
At the end of the same year, 1911, it is the jury of the Swedish Academy that gives itself the pleasure of bestowing on her the Nobel Prize. In chemistry this time, and not shared.
But the news reaches her in the heart of a tempest next to which the academic eddies are a spring shower. In a word, due to her association with a certain married man, Langevin, Mme Curie has for a time ceased to be an honorable woman.
Conflict with the Workers in the Laboratory
Nor at work are things always smooth. There is a day, for instance, when the laboratory’s head of works is raining blows on the woman’s door and yelling:
“Camel! Camel!”
No doubt she can be.
She is capable of everything.
The Entr’acte
Thanks to Marthe Klein who has taken her there, she discovers the South of France, its splendor, its August nights in which one sleeps on the terrace, the warmth of the Mediterranean where she begins to swim again. Tourists are rare. Only, on the beach, a few English…
The passion for stones is the only one she is known to have where ownership is concerned, but this passion is lively: she will also buy a house in Brittany.
She is still slight, slender, supple, walks with bare legs, in espadrilles, with the manner of a young girl. According to the days, she carries ten years more or ten years less than her age.
For some time she has needed glasses, but what could be more natural?
In Quest of a Gram of Radium
The courage, the determination, the assurance that made her the twice-crowned queen of radioactivity are powerless before the evidence: Paris is a festival, but French science is anemic. Toward whom, toward what, should she turn?
Those who are most dynamic among the scientists will try to sound the alarm, everywhere, with voice and with pen: whether it be prestige, industrial competition, or social progress, a nation that does not invest in research is a nation that declines.
This, everyone knows more or less—rather less than more—today.
Missy
And so, one May morning in 1920, Marie welcomes at her office at the Curie Pavillion Henri-Pierre Roché who accompanies a very little graying person with large black eyes, slightly limping: Mrs. Meloney Mattingley, whom her friends call Missy. The minuscule Missy is editor of a feminine magazine of good reputation.
And the unforeseeable is going to happen. One of those mysterious consonances, as frank as a C Major chord. A friendship, whose consequences will be infinite.
Marie is charming, though who knows why, with this bizarre little creature.
In Quest of a Gram of Radium
Mme Curie is, in a word, poor. In a poor country.
Stupefying! Something to surprise the cottages lining 5th Avenue, certainly.
Missy has a good nature. She loves to admire, and Marie seems to her admirable. This excellent disposition being accompanied by a vigorous practical sense, Missy, who compares herself to a locomotive, moves a series of railway cars if not mountains.
How much does a gram of radium cost? One million francs, or one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand dollars for a noble cause attached to a grand name—this can be found. Missy believes she can collect it from several very rich compatriots.
She mobilizes the wife of the king of petrol, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, that of the Vice and future President, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, and several other ladies of the same caliber.
She takes each bull by the horns—that is, each editor of each New York newspaper by his sentiments.
A Trip to the United States
Evidently, when Missy will have succeeded, Marie will have to come in person to get her gram of radium. In a parallel way, a well-launched autobiography can bring her substantial authors’ rights. What benefit will Missy draw personally from the operation? Purely moral.
Correct? Unquestionably.
Friendship
What remains of their correspondence, which is, at times, almost daily, attests to the permanence of the affection that binds these two warriors, equally lame, equally intrepid.
If anyone esteems herself at her true price, it is Marie. If anyone is prepared to pay it, it is Missy. But take care: on both sides, one must be “regular.”
Marie has promised to come get her gram of radium herself. Does she confirm? She confirms. To write her autobiography. Does she confirm? She confirms. Good.
The king and queen of Belgium remained six weeks, says Missy. The queen of radium cannot make a less royal visit.
Health
She writes to Bronia: “My eyes are very weakened and probably not much can be done for them. As for my ears, an almost continual buzzing, often very intense, persecutes me. I worry about it very much: my work may be hampered—or even become impossible. Perhaps radium has something to do with my troubles, but one can’t declare it with certainty.” Radium guilty? It’s the first time that she mentions the idea. She will soon have confirmation that she is suffering from a double cataract.
The Trip to America
Mme Curie is to receive from the hands of the President of the United States the miraculous product of a national collection, one gram of radium.
She shakes hands with a great many people until someone breaks her wrist.
That evening, Missy knows definitively who Marie really is. And reciprocally.
Fabulous razzia: Marie has pocketed in addition fifty thousand dollars advance for her autobiography, though the book is to be insipid. Missy has at every point kept her promises, and well beyond.
Leavetaking
The crystalline lenses of the beautiful ash-gray eyes are becoming each day more opaque. She is convinced she will soon be blind. Marie and Missy embrace each other crying.
Let us say right away, however, that these two slender dying creatures will nevertheless meet again. It will be seven years later, again at the White House…
Missy and Marie certainly belong to the same race. That of
the irreducibles.
Time Passing
And now the red curls of Perrin, discoverer of Brownian motion, have become white.
Scientific Conferences
These conferences to which she travels often weigh on her. She finds only one pleasure in them: still a devotee of excursions, she vanishes and goes off to discover a few of the splendors of the Earth. For over fifty years a recluse, she saw almost nothing.
From everywhere, she writes and describes to her daughters. The Southern Cross is “a very beautiful constellation.” The Escurial is “very impressive”…The Arab palaces of Grenada are “very lovely”…The Danube is bordered with hills. But the Vistula…Ah! The Vistula! With its most adorable banks of sand, etc. etc.
The Illness of Marie
One afternoon in May 1934, at the laboratory where she has tried to come and work, Marie murmurs: “I have a fever, I’m going home…”
She walks around the garden, examines a rosebush which she herself has planted and which does not look well, asks that it be taken care of immediately…She will not return.
What is wrong with her? Apparently nothing. Yet she has no strength, she is feverish. She is transported to a clinic, then to a sanatorium in the mountains. The fever does not subside. Her lungs are intact. But her temperature rises. She has attained that moment of grace where even Marie Curie no longer wants to see the truth. And the truth is that she is dying.
The Death of Marie
She will have a last smile of joy when, consulting for the last time the thermometer she is holding in her little hand, she observes that her temperature has suddenly dropped. But she no longer has the strength to make a note of it, she from whom a number has never escaped being written down. This drop in temperature is the one that announces the end.
And when the doctor comes to give her a shot:
“I don’t want it. I want to be left in peace.”
It will require another sixteen hours for the heart to cease beating, of this woman who does not want, no, does not want to die. She is sixty-six years old.
Marie Curie-Sklodowska has ended her course.
On her coffin when it has descended into the grave, Bronia and their brother Jozef throw a handful of earth. Earth of Poland.
Thus ends the story of an honorable woman.
Marie, we salute you…
Conclusion
She was of those who work one single furrow.
Postscript
Nevertheless, the quasi-totality of physicists and mathematicians will refuse fiercely and for a long time to open what Lamprin will call “a new window on eternity.”
Mir the Hessian
Mir the Hessian regretted killing his dog, he wept even as he forced its head from its body, yet what had he to eat but the dog? Freezing in the hills, far away from everyone.
Mir the Hessian cursed as he knelt on the rocky ground, cursed his bad luck, cursed his company for being dead, cursed his country for being at war, cursed his countrymen for fighting, and cursed God for allowing it all to happen. Then he started to pray: it was the only thing left to do. Alone, in midwinter.
Mir the Hessian lay curled up among the rocks, his hands between his legs, his chin on his breast, beyond hunger, beyond fear. Abandoned by God.
The wolves had scattered the bones of Mir the Hessian, carried his skull to the edge of the water, left a tarsus on the hill, dragged a femur into the den. After the wolves came the crows, and after the crows the scarab beetles. And after the beetles, another soldier, alone in the hills, far away from everyone. For the war was not yet over.
My Neighbors in a Foreign Place
Directly across the courtyard from me lives a middle-aged woman, the ringleader of the building. Sometimes she and I open our windows simultaneously and look at each other for an instant in shocked surprise. When this happens, one of us looks up at the sky, as though to see what the weather is going to be, while the other looks down at the courtyard, as though watching for late visitors. Each is really trying to avoid the glance of the other. Then we move back from the windows to wait for a better moment.
Sometimes, however, neither of us is willing to retreat; we lower our eyes and for minutes on end remain standing there, almost close enough to hear each other breathing. I prune the plants in my windowbox as though I were alone in the world and she, with the same air of preoccupation, pinches the tomatoes that sit in a row on her window sill and untangles a sprig of parsley from the bunch that stands yellowing in a jar of water. We are both so quiet that the scratching and fluttering of the pigeons in the eaves above seems very loud. Our hands tremble, and that is the only sign that we are aware of each other.
I know that my neighbor leads an utterly blameless life. She is orderly, consistent, and regular in her habits. Nothing she does would set her apart from any other woman in the building. I have observed her and I know this is true.
She rises early, for example, and airs her bedroom; then, through the half-open shutters, I see what looks like a large white bird diving and soaring in the darkness of her room, and I know it is the quilt that she is throwing over her bed; late in the morning her strong, pale forearm flashes out of the living room window several times and gives a shake to a clean dustrag; in housedress and apron she takes vegetables from her window sill at noon, and soon after I smell a meal being cooked; at two o’clock she pins a dishcloth to the short line outside her kitchen window; and at dusk she closes all the shutters. Every second Sunday she has visitors during the afternoon. This much I know, and the rest is not hard to imagine.
I myself am not at all like her or like anyone else in the building, even though I make persistent efforts to follow their pattern and gain respect. My windows are not clean, and a lacy border of soot has gathered on my window sill; I finish my washing late in the morning and hang it out just before a midday rainstorm breaks, when my neighbor’s wash has long since been folded and put away; at nightfall, when I hear the clattering and banging of the shutters on all sides, I cannot bear to close my own, even though I think I should, and instead leave them open to catch the last of the daylight; I disturb the man and woman below me because I walk without pause over my creaking floorboards at midnight, when everyone else is asleep, and I do not carry my pail of garbage down to the courtyard until late at night, when the cans are full: then I look up and see the house-fronts shuttered and bolted as if against an invasion, and only a few lights burning in the houses next door.
I am very much afraid that by now the woman opposite has observed all these things about me, has formed a notion of me that is not at all favorable, and is about to take action with her many friends in the building. Already I have seen them gather in the hallway and have heard their vehement whispers echoing through the stairwell, where they stop every morning on their way in from shopping to lean on the banisters and rest. Already they glance at me with open dislike and suspicion in their eyes, and any day now they will circulate a petition against me, as my neighbors have done in every building I have ever lived in. Then, I will once again have to look for another place to live, and take something worse than what I now have and in a poorer neighborhood, just so as to leave as quickly as possible. I will have to inform the landlord, who will pretend to know nothing about the activity of my neighbors, but who must know what goes on in his buildings, must have received and read the petition. I will have to pack my belongings into boxes once again and hire a van for the day of departure. And as I carry box after box down to the waiting van, as I struggle to open each of the many doors between this apartment and the street, taking care not to scratch the woodwork or break the glass panes, my neighbors will appear one by one to see me off, as they always have. They smile and hold the doors for me. They offer to carry my boxes and show a genuinely kind interest in me, as though all along, given the slightest excuse, they would have liked to be my friends. But at this point, things have gone too far and I cannot turn back, though I would like to. My neighbors would not understand why I had done
it, and the wall of hatred would rise between us again.
But sometimes, when this building with its bitter atmosphere becomes too oppressive for me to bear it any longer, I go outside into the city and wander back to the houses I used to live in. I stand in the sun talking to my old neighbors, and I find comfort and relief in their warm welcome.
Oral History (With HICCUPS)
My sister died last year leaving two daughters. My husband and I have decided to adopt the girls. The older one is thirty-three and a buyer for a departmentstore, and the younger one, who just turned thirty, works in the state budget office. We have one child still living at home, and the house is not big, so it will be a tight fit, but we are willing to do this for their sake. We will move our son, who is eleven, out of his room and into the small room I have been using as a sewing room. I will set up my machine d ownstairs in the living room. We will put a bunk bed for the girls in my son’s old room. It is a fair-sized room with one closet and one window, and the bathroom is just down the hall. We will have to ask them not to bring all their things. I assume they will be willing to make that sacrifice in order to be part of this family. They will also have to watch what they say at the dinner table. With our younger son present we don’t want open conflict. What I’m worried about is a couple of political issues. My older niece is a feminist, while my husband and I feel the tables have been turned against males nowadays. Also, my younger niece is probably more pro-government than either my older niece or my husband and me. But she will be away a good deal, traveling for her job. And we have developed some negotiating skills with our own children, so we should be able to work things out with the two of them. We will try to be firm but fair, as we always were with our older boy before he left home. If we can’t work things out right away, they can always go to their room and cool off until they’re ready to come back out and be civil. Excuse me.
The Patient
The day after the patient was admitted to the hospital, the young doctor operated on her upper colon, where he felt sure the cause of her illness lay. But his medical training had not been good, the doctors who taught him were careless men, and he had been pushed through school quickly because he was clever and the country was desperate for doctors; the hospital was poorly staffed and the building itself was falling into ruin because of government mismanagement: piles of broken plaster choked the hallways. Because of all this, or for some other reason, the woman’s condition did not improve, but grew rapidly worse. The young doctor tried everything. At last he admitted that there was nothing more he could do and that she was on the point of dying. He was overwhelmed by the grief and guilt that come with the first death of a patient. He was at the same time filled with strange excitement, and felt he had joined the ranks of serious men of the world, men who hold the lives of others in their hands and are like gods. Inexplicably, then, the woman did not die. She lay peacefully in a twilight coma. As each day passed with no change, the young doctor grew more and more maddened by her immobility. He could not sleep and his eyes became bloodshot. He had trouble eating and his face became gaunt. At last he could not contain his frustration any longer. He went to her bedside and drove his fist again and again into her pinched, yellow face until she did not look human anymore. One last breath leaked from her mouth and then, battered and bruised, she died.