The Secrets of a Fire King (7 page)

A Gleaming in

the Darkness

Sometimes we returned in the evening after dinner for another survey of our domain. Our precious products, for which we had no
shelter, were arranged on tables and boards; from all sides we could
see their slightly luminous silhouettes, and these gleamings, which
seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever new emotion
and enchantment.

—Marie Curie

Iam an old woman now, and dying, so surely the things of this world should no longer have the power to compel me.

Yet in my final hours I am indeed distracted, and it is nothing from my own hard life that haunts me, but rather a woman I barely knew, a person on the edge of all my living. It seems im-proper, it is not right. If I am to be in this world a little longer, then I should wish to dwell on my husband, Thierry, or the son who looked just like him and fell beneath the German rifl es, or my only daughter, who disappeared so many years ago into the countryside of France. I should wish to think of them, yet I do not. Even my granddaughter cannot hold my attention, though she comes to see me daily. For half an hour every morning she visits, speaking brightly and fl uffing up my pillows, rubbing the cool balm into my hands, which are the color of a pig’s liver, the texture of bark, swollen now as thick as sausages.
Merci grandmère,
she whispers when she leaves.
Merci.

She is good to me. She is grateful. I raised her after her mother
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The Secrets of a Fire King

fled with the Resistance, and she has not forgotten. In her grati-tude she has brought me to this hospital, the best in Europe, to die in a room that is not my own. I watch her depart, delicate in a dark blue dress that rustles lightly against her calves. She, of course, does not remember Madame, who died when she was still a little girl. She does not remember the years of hard work or the blue jars glowing. It is only I who remember, but I do this with such clarity that I sometimes imagine myself back in the small glass building on the rue Lhomond, Madame in her black cotton, Monsieur scribbling on the board, the scent of cooking earth thick around us. As if my life had not yet happened. As if time, after all, were of no lasting consequence.

It is strange, it is most disturbing, yet it is so. I run their images through my mind like beads through my fingers, working something out. Madame was a small woman whose hands were often cracked and bleeding from her work. She had a habit of running her thumb across the tips of her fingers, again and again, lightly.

They were numb, she said once, absently, when I asked her. That was all, a small thing. She would not remember it, and out of so many things that have happened in my own life, why I dwell on this is a great mystery. Still, I would like to call her here, to this room with its walls of green tile, its single window masked by a thin yellow curtain, a pale sea light washing through the air. I would like to ask her what happened to her hands before she died.

Long before she was famous in the world for her mind, Madame was famous in the market for her shopping. That is how I fi rst knew of her, as the woman who stood baffled before the butcher, uncertain how many people she could feed with a joint, as the woman who bought fruit blindly, without pausing to test if it was too young yet, or too ripe. The things any ordinary house-wife knew she did not understand. In the market they said she was unnatural, working side by side with men, leaving her small daughter in the hands of others. At first, I must admit, I was no different in my opinions. When the fruit sellers gossiped, I nodded in agreement. When she walked by on the street, in such deep conversation with her husband that the world around them
A Gleaming in the Darkness

41

might not have existed, I stared boldly, along with all the others.

She did not go to church at all, a scandalous thing, and in the evenings, when I knelt on the hard pine boards of my little room and prayed, I wondered how she lived without that ritual, that comfort.

It was not until the day she came for the key that I began to see her differently. Up close she was more human, and more frail. We were similar in size and looks, she and I, two slight women with gray eyes and ash blond hair, and I felt an immediate affinity with her, despite the vast differences in our ages and our lives. I took her to the room full of windows, a rude and dusty space, abandoned for decades, which would become her first laboratory. Because it was a room the university did not require me to clean, I used to go there often, slipping unseen through the cloudy glass door, locking it behind me. Inside the air was still, moist and warm when the sun shone. I had cleared a little table of its dust and rubble so I could have a place to drink my morning coffee and to eat my lunch in peace. People said it had been a greenhouse once, and in that room of windows I could close my eyes and imagine the air around me growing thick with shiny leaves, spilling over with blooming fl owers. I could pretend I was a rich girl, dressed in deep blue satin, wandering through the foliage like a bright pampered bird. When I told this to Thierry, who was then my most serious suitor, he laughed out loud, but two days later he brought me a little tur-quoise bird in a brass cage. For this I married him, for the extravagance of that little bird, for his deep laugh. I let him kiss me sometimes, in that deserted room, and I remember even now his lips, pressing mine like two pliant leaves, cool and alive. A shaft of sunlight fell across his arm, and all around us the air was full of dust, thick with the memory of growing things.

On the day they came to see this room, Madame and her thin, absentminded husband, I was newly in love, and thus sensitive to love in others, and so I noticed how he paused and took her arm, and the look she gave him in return—warm, full of an unspoken affection that softened the severity of her features. They said in all the shops that she was cold, like a machine, but that morning
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The Secrets of a Fire King

I saw she had a tender heart. As they toured the room I watched with curiosity. They were not romantic, yet they suited one another exactly, just as a shell would fit perfectly within its fossil. In part it was the way they spoke, for they did not talk of ordinary things, the closeness of the air or the dampness of the fl oor beneath their feet, but rather of formulas and research. Each spoke, each listened, and as I stood quietly in the corner, watching their inspection, I thought that they spoke as two men might, as equals.

She was intent, beautiful I thought, but wearing no adornment.

She did not flirt or hesitate to contradict her husband. This was odd to me, for Thierry viewed his word as law, and I had learned not to oppose him even when I knew that I was right.

They took that room and soon moved in, though it was not possible to believe anyone could work there for an hour, much less for the decade they finally stayed, freezing when the winter came, plugging loose panes against whistling drafts, worrying about leaks or the roof caving in beneath the heavy snows. And in the summer it was worse, hot as an inferno with the sun fl owing in and the great fires kept going for their experiments. Yet they would not vent the roof. Dust enough, they complained, came in already. No matter how carefully I cleaned, dust drifted into test tubes, coated instruments, tampered with their experiments like an evil force. Still, despite the bad conditions, they worked with such concentration that they forgot about meals and cold and heat, and everything in the world except the experiments before their eyes. I knew it was a rare thing, what they did, the way they did it. I have never seen the like of it, the twin heads bent over the glass and fl ames and measuring tools, the long silences broken by the bursts of talk, the shared excitement running like another flame, invisible, between them.

Now I myself have become an experiment, and people study my hands with the same intentness that Madame once turned, day after day, upon her jars. They examine me closely, but no one has any answers. Not the doctors, coming once each morning to make their tests; not the nurses, stepping through the doorway with their trays of bandages. I watch their smiles change, grow fixed, as they attend to me.
Your fingers look better,
they tell me, ly-A Gleaming in the Darkness

43

ing gently, and then, because they cannot say that soon I will recover, they talk about the war.
Soon the fighting will end for good.

France is free again, Marie Bonvin, soon the whole world will be free
and the soldiers will come home.
I murmur small words, smile my happiness. Of course I do. Who could disappoint the young nurses with their clear skin and hope-shining eyes? They save the news up, dwelling on the past, which for me, in their eyes, is a much greater place than my future. Pity glimmers on their faces, and compassion, yet their words are insulated with the smug knowledge of their youth. They do not believe that their unlined skin, their smooth and agile limbs, will ever fall into such a state of dis-repair as mine have done. They are sorry for my disabilities, my old age, my dying, and they pity me. They do not see I have no pity for myself. These young girls do not know it, and I cannot tell them, but I have discovered that past and present blur together, become one and the same, so that time means very little at the end.

I believe Madame understood this even in the heart of life.

Absorbed in her experiments, she showed no awareness of the way the sun moved across the panes of glass and fi nally disappeared.

She would look up suddenly, when it had become so dark she couldn’t see, and she would blink then, surprised that the day, already, had gone past. After many years, when I grew brave enough, I used to urge her to go home. It was always a great effort for me to speak to her, a foreigner and such a brilliant woman, famous already for her mind. Still, we had the same name, Marie, a saint’s name, and I had watched her long enough to know that with other people she was very gentle, though she pushed herself far beyond any human limit. Long after everyone else had gone home, when I myself had put away the brooms and rags and was setting off into the evening, she would still be bent over the single weak light.

I worried for her, then. She was so pale, she rarely ate.

One time, long past the supper hour, she checked some bottles, wrote some numbers, then threw herself into a stiff wooden chair and rubbed her hands against her face. I was sweeping and for a long time I did not speak. But she was so still that at last I grew courageous.

“Madame,” I said. “Madame, are you all right? Would you like
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The Secrets of a Fire King

me to fetch you a glass of tea?” She looked at me, startled, then shook her head. The dark circles ringed her eyes like clouds, and her eyes themselves were dull and weary, without the sparked focus of concentration that I had always seen in them before.

“No,” she said slowly, sitting up straight and rubbing her hands. On the wooden table there was a beaker full of some dark liquid, and she picked this up, turning it before her, studying it. “I have made an error,” she said. “Somewhere. That is all.” She paused, and put the beaker down. “I will simply have to start again.” She shook her head, then, and gave a small dry laugh. “A year’s work,” she said, “and it is gone, and there is nothing to do but to begin all over again.”

I did not know what to say to her, of course. I knew her dedi-cation, and it seemed that any words would sound petty against that pure intensity. Yet I felt a deep sympathy as well, for my second child had died as he was born, and so I thought I knew what it meant to lose in a moment what you had spent a year creating.

And there was more, because following that loss my faith had disappeared, and it seemed to me that I alone among the shopkeepers had come to understand why she would not enter any church.

I still attended—for Thierry, for my first son, I had to go—but prayer no longer brought me any solace. So on that dreary evening I took her hands in mine, her rough hands with their chapped fi ngers, and I pressed them.

“I’m sorry, Madame,” I said, nodding to the brown jar. “It’s a mystery to me, what you do. But you work so hard, I’m sure it will come out right.”

She looked at me so oddly then. I pulled my hands away, suddenly embarrassed. “Excuse me,” I said, looking down. “Excuse me please, Madame.”

She looked at her right hand then. She held it flat and turned it in front of her, examining it as if it belonged to someone else entirely. She rubbed her thumb against her fi rst finger, then all her fi ngertips, and then she turned her palm down and let her hand rest, very gently, upon my arm.

“Not at all, Marie,” she said. “I thank you.”
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So you see how she was, her deep kindness. Her life was conse-crated to her work, but it is not true that she lacked emotion. She was a passionate woman, I can attest to it. She loved what she loved, and if it was a strange thing for a woman to love her work, so be it.

Except for that love, what would be the difference between herself, boiling up a kettle of her mysterious earth, and another woman stirring the cauldron of her stew? Or even myself, for I worked as hard as she did, scrubbing day after day at the dirty corners of that university. I heard the men speak of her sometimes, with wonder and derision. I cleaned their offices, their laboratories, so much nicer than she had herself, and heard them gossip.

“She has a fi ne mind,” they would acknowledge. “And she is meticulous. But this business with the atoms—well, it is on the wrong track completely.”

Even after Madame and Monsieur were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium, I heard people say it was her husband alone who deserved the credit—his labor, his intelligence, that fueled the fascinating work. Years later, when the whole world honored her discoveries, there were still those in France who were grudging with their praise. All of Paris talked of her, of radium, but she stayed in that small rude laboratory because they would give her nothing else.