The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (40 page)

The body is removed to a police station. An officer picks up his telephone. But Pierre Curie no longer has ears to be annoyed that he belongs, in death as in life, to the number of those for whom one disturbs the minister of the interior.

Marie remains frozen; then she says: “Pierre is dead? Completely dead?”

Yes, Pierre was completely dead.

Telegrams flow in, from all corners of the world, letters pile up, the condolences are royal, republican, scientific, formal, or simply emotional and sincere. Fame and love have been brutally mown down by death …

A new title, a sinister one, is added to those with which Marie has up to then been dubbed. Henceforth she will be called only “the illustrious widow.”

Eleven years—that is long. Long enough so that the roots of love, if the tree is robust, plunge so deep that they will subsist always, even dried up.

She begins to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

“My Pierre, I arise after having slept fairly well, relatively calm. There is scarcely a quarter of an hour of that and here I again want to howl like a wild beast.”

Summer is here and the sun, so wounding when in oneself everything is black …

“I spend all my days in the laboratory. I can no longer conceive of anything that can give me personal joy, except perhaps scientific work—but no, because if I were successful, I could not tolerate that you should not know it.”

She will be successful. And she will tolerate. Because that is the law of life.

As she gives her first lecture, continuing where Pierre left off, something is happening that clouds the eyes, tightens the throats, holds the audience from top to bottom of the tiers of seats frozen with emotion before that little black silhouette.

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.”

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 say only 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

And so, one May morning in 1920, Marie welcomes at her office at the Curie Pavilion 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.

Mme Curie is, in a word, poor. In a poor country.

Stupefying! Something to surprise the cottages lining Fifth 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.

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 author’s rights. What benefit will Missy draw personally from the operation? Purely moral.

Correct? Unquestionably.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And now the red curls of Perrin, discoverer of Brownian motion, have become white.

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.

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 that she herself has planted and that 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.

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 Joźef throw a handful of earth. Earth of Poland.

Thus ends the story of an honorable woman.

Marie, we salute you …

She was of those who work one single furrow.

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 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.