The Secrets of a Fire King (8 page)

Yet for all the difficulties, there was joy as well. When the dirt came, what joy then! Sacks and sacks of dirt, delivered to the courtyard behind the glass laboratory.

“Pitchblende!” she exclaimed when I inquired, watching them unload it. “At last, it is beginning!” She stood outside in her worn black dress, her arms folded against the cold, a rapturous look on her face. Before the unloading was finished, she was ripping open a sack of earth and digging her hands in deeply. Over the next many months she sifted and cooked this dirt in her big kettle, separating all the residue into smaller and smaller jars of various sorts of mud. In that way she worked painstakingly through the entire vast pile.

When I spoke of her at home, they could not believe such a woman existed. Thierry disliked to hear of her, for he knew that
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she and her husband did not go to church. So I told my stories when he was not at home, and my children came to believe that she and her husband were not exactly real, but people I had made up for their amusement.

“Tell us, Mama,” they would beg, “about that magic lady who spends all day in her laboratory.”

“Well,” I would say, “today Madame made the things in the room blue—table, chair, door, floor—everything turned a lovely sort of bluish silver, like fog. Yet by afternoon the chairs and table and beakers and even the glass windowpanes had gone pure yellow, and best of all, in the middle of the day, around noon, everything was, just for a moment, an absolute shade of green.” My children listened, fascinated, and I talked on. We were so poor, and I was happy that I could give them something lovely that would fall into their lives like shafts of light.

One day, however, when there was only bread for dinner, my son, then ten, complained loudly about Madame.

“If she is so magical,” he demanded, “why doesn’t she just turn the wooden chair and table into gold, and give some to us? Why isn’t she the richest woman in the world, that’s what I want to know!”

“Madame is as poor as we are,” I explained. “She and her husband live in simple rooms as small as ours. She does not work for gold, but for knowledge.” I paused, pouring heated milk into their cups. “I think,” I said, “that if someone offered her a thousand francs, she would not spend one centime of it on herself, but would use it to buy another mountain of dirt, or a new laboratory, or something fine for science. She is trying to do something good for all the people of the world with her work.”

“Well, then, she is crazy,” my son said. In a dozen years he would be killed in the first great war, but on that morning he was only a small boy with his dreams. “Why, with a thousand francs I would buy a castle, and eat pastry and candy at every meal!” It was not only my son who thought this, that Madame was a little crazy. All the shopkeepers still wondered at a woman who worked so hard for no money at all. They saw her daughter, cared for by the grandfather. They saw the family staying home on Sun-A Gleaming in the Darkness

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day mornings, and they shook their heads, predicted disaster.

When they spoke like this I felt myself growing angry, and I became famous among the fruit sellers for my defense of Madame. A genius, I would say. Leave her alone, she is doing things of which we cannot even dream.

I do not dream, I am awake, though the nurses think that I am sleeping. Like the famous scientists who did not notice a cleaning lady stooped low to sweep away their dust, these young nurses do not remember that a woman, even old, even dying, might have keen ears. They cluster sometimes at the foot of my bed, gossip-ing about their boyfriends, their liaisons, the new clothes they will make from bits of silk and lace they have been hoarding.

They do not see that I was once like them, with blond hair that fell to my waist, washed once a week and dried in a the soft sweet light of the sun. Sometimes I want to rise up in this bed and tell them everything, the bicycle paths edged with flowers and the young men with their glances, and all of it yielding to the years of hard work, the children, the two fearful wars to end all wars, and fi nally to this bed, where I listen to their soft laughter. The world turns and turns and is always the same.

Yet one day, to my surprise, it changes. The chief nurse, who is older than the others and smart as well as pretty, comes in.

Usually, she scatters the rest of them away. She knows about old ears. When she speaks in this room she speaks to me, telling me stories of her childhood in Breton, wrapping my hands in cotton so soft it feels like a breeze from the ocean she describes. Today she is serious, however, distracted, wrinkles spanning her wide forehead. Something has happened. She does not speak, but instead turns on a little radio. Immediately the nurses quiet down.

I listen too. The signal crackles, full of static, and the announcer describes the bomb that was dropped upon Japan. No ordinary bomb, but a weapon so strong it lit the world with light that blinds, with fire that burns everything but the shadows it creates. This atom bomb will end the war, they say, and that is good. Yet the nurses, for once, stay quiet. They leave, after a mo-48

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ment, even the smart one, silenced. They forget about my hands, which burn in their bandages, as if the fl ames have reached me even here, half a world away.

And in the silence I remember her jars, lined up on the rough boards, glowing softly in the dusk. There is terror now, yes, but truly the beginning was magnificent to behold.

I discovered the jars one day when my daughter had a fever.

I nearly did not go to work at all, but late in the afternoon her fever broke, and I hurried out to do what I could. By the time I reached the glass building on the Rue Lhomond, it was dusk.

The room was dark, and I realized that Madame and Monsieur had gone to take their dinner. I did not wish to stay there alone, so I decided that I would step inside, just briefly, to make sure that no one else was working. I knew they would not care if I came and cleaned tomorrow. I pushed the door open, and peered inside.

What can I say of what I saw? All the jars upon the table were glowing softly, as if each contained a small star that had fallen, as if shafts of moonlight had been gathered into each. The simple mud she had worked on for so long had become a thing of magic. I fell on my knees as if to pray, but I could not take my eyes from the light caught within those jars. It was so beautiful, so unearthly. I wanted to take one home, to keep it in the cupboard, to know I could open the door at any time and see that luminescence. I imagined the faces of my children, the wonder that would infuse them at the sight. That greedy thought was my first. I wanted this rare beauty for myself.

The dirt floor was very cold, and soon my knees ached with it. Slowly, I stood up. I went across the room, my skin growing pale blue as I drew closer. Gingerly, I reached out, holding a single jar in the loose vessel of my hands.

It was not terribly hot. That surprised me. I had expected the sort of heat you can feel coming from a flame. But this light was only slightly warm, so faint I thought I might be imagining it altogether. Some vibration seemed to come from the jar, though perhaps this was only my imagination. Perhaps it was my own
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excitement, making my hands tremble, making my fi ngertips tingle as if with new life. I held the jars and thought of a child, unborn, moving beneath my flesh. A ripple of life, the sense of a hidden thing, growing. I thought of all the plants that had once flowered in this room, grown and died and grown again, and it seemed that the essence of their green life was caught in the jar, like a spirit in a bottle. That is how it felt. I cannot explain it. I can only say that I went there, night after night, for many months, and held the jars in my hands, and every time I touched them I experienced the same wondrous surge. It seemed to me, too, that the light was healing. My stiff joints eased, my fingers felt alive.

One night I even brought my children there. I let them touch the jars, one by one. It is impossible to believe I did this secret thing. I meant no harm. But I tampered with knowledge that was not meant for me. And look at me now, paying the stiff price, my hands twisted like a thwarted bush.

One night Madame walked in and found me.

“Marie,” she said sharply, “what are you doing there?”

“Oh Madame,” I said, stepping quickly away, pressing my hands against the folds of my skirt. “Madame, it is so beautiful.

What have you made, Madame? What is this light?” She smiled then. Her jars were safe. And what mother can resist honest praise for her creation? “I call it radium,” she said softly. “It is something very special. It will change the way we think about the world. It has the potential to do great good. Some day, Marie, no one will die of cancer because of what is in this jar.” She came close, and took my hands as I once had taken hers, and she held them to the surface of the glass.

“You can feel it, can’t you, Marie?” she asked, looking me in the eye. Her hands holding mine to the glass were very strong, the palms and fingertips as rough with callouses as mine.

I nodded.

“It is life,” she said. “It is the very energy of life you feel.”

“You took it from the dirt?” I asked, as she released my hands.

“Yes,” she said. “I took it from the earth.” She was looking at
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the jar, her face softened, her voice was low and dreamy. “Please,” she said, “look all you want, Marie, but do not touch it again. It is very rare, this element.”

I agreed, of course, but it was a promise I did not keep. Instead, every night, I put my hands against a jar, carefully, just for a moment, and felt the mystery. I remembered her great dreams.

Madame believed that scientific progress would improve society.

I heard her say this more than once, that the salvation of the world lay not in faith or social programs, but rather in the steady march of science. Later, during the first great war, she and her daughter traveled to the front with an X-ray machine, using the wondrous new tool to see inside the body, to examine shattered bones and ruptured organs, assisting surgeons with their grim task of mending broken bodies. Before he died in battle my son saw her once, and he remembered my old stories. He wrote to me of the way she worked, taking soldier after soldier to her tent, seeking to understand their wounds.
It is a fi ne thing,
he wrote to me,
what she does for us, the way she heals, but what I want to know
is why doesn’t she invent something really useful to rout the German
bastards once and for all?

For many years, long after she had won her second Nobel Prize—this time alone, for isolating a gram of pure radium—and had become so busy that it was rare for me to even catch a glimpse of her, I kept the image of those jars, glowing a soft blue on the rough wooden tables, like a treasure in the back of my mind. My husband never knew that I had taken the children there, and in time they themselves forgot what they had seen. I asked my daughter once, when she was grown, what she remembered of that visit, and she looked at me blankly for a long moment.

“Oh yes,” she said finally. “That funny woman. I remember that she worked in a glass house. I thought it must be so cold. It was cold, the day we went. I felt sorry for her. She was a little crazy, wasn’t she?”

“What about the jars,” I insisted. “Don’t you remember?” She paused over the carrots she was peeling. “Let me see,” she said, frowning faint lines into her forehead. “Yes, I think so.

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We walked a long way, and then you made us put our hands around the little jars of paint. They were blue, as I remember.”

“Not paint,” I sighed. “Something more extraordinary.”

“Was it?” my daughter asked. She thought a moment, shrugged. “Well, extraordinary or not, it never did us any good.” She was like her father, that one, practical and to the point, but she was wrong about Madame and her jars. For they did me good, even the memory of them, which I held in my mind like a scrap of brilliant cloth hidden in a drawer, something rare and numinous to be fingered in a quiet moment. Late at night, drifting off to sleep, I took those memories out, the stuff of dreams.

Or in church, when I should have listened to the priest, I remembered the way the jars had felt, alive against my fl esh.

One mass we had a new priest, a visitor, and though I was not in the habit of listening anymore, his speaking was so forceful that he caught my attention. “Imagine the human soul,” he said.

“Look at each person present, and do not see a face before you, but a soul.”

Curious, I tried to do this, but it was a concentration I could not hold. For weeks I had been feeling ill, dizzy when I stood, silverfi sh fl ying across my vision. This happened now, though I was sitting down. I stared hard at the graying hair of the man ahead of me, but he began to blur, until I could no longer distinguish him from the woman who sat beside him. I remember that I stood up, my hand gripping the cold smooth wood, my eyes scanning the faces in the crowded church, seeking some bright color, some odd feature on which to focus. But they too dissolved, became one. My own skin seemed to fade, and I grew so weightless that for an instant I seemed to merge with all that lived around me, as if, like minute particles of light, we were each nothing in isolation from the others.

I fainted then. They carried me out into the small garden behind the church. I woke up to the splash of water on my face, a cold slap back into the brilliant world. It was a sunny morning in early April and the crocuses were blooming in the priests’ garden. Father Jean was kneeling over me, holding my hand. My husband was next to him, gazing at me with a puzzled wonder.

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“What was it you meant?” he asked me when my eyes fl uttered open.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My skirts were up around my knees and I blushed to think of myself lying there, exposed, beneath the priest’s eyes. I sat up too quickly, reaching to push my skirts down.