Too Much Happiness

among the Swedes. Civility can be maintained without that.
    The crossing was a little rough, but she was not seasick. She remembered the tablet but she did not need it. And the boat must have been heated, because some people had taken off the upper layer of their winter clothing. But she still shivered. Perhaps it was necessary to shiver, she had collected so much cold in her body in her journey through Denmark. It had been stored inside her, the cold, and now she could shiver it out.
    The train for Stockholm was waiting, as promised, in the busy port of Helsingborg, so much livelier and larger than its similarly named cousin across the water. The Swedes might not smile at you, but the information they gave out would be correct. A porter reached for her bags and held them while she searched in her purse for some coins. She took a generous number out and put them in his hand, thinking they were Danish; she would not need them anymore.
    They were Danish. He gave them back to her, saying in Swedish, “These will not do.”
    “They are all I have,” she cried, realizing two things. Her throat felt better and indeed she had no Swedish money.
    He put down her bags and walked away.
    French money, German money, Danish money. She had forgotten Swedish.
    The train was getting up steam, the passengers boarding, while she still stood there in her quandary. She could not carry her bags. But if she could not, they would be left behind.
    She grasped the various straps and started to run. She ran lurching and panting with a pain in her chest and around under her arms and the bags bumping against her legs. There were steps to climb. If she stopped for a breath she would be too late. She climbed. With tears of self-pity filling her eyes she beseeched the train not to move.
    And it did not. Not till the conductor, leaning out to fasten the door, caught her arm, then somehow managed to catch her bags and pulled all aboard.
    Once saved, she began to cough. She was trying to cough something out of her chest. The pain, out of her chest. The pain and tightness out of her throat. But she had to follow the conductor to her compartment, and she was laughing with triumph in between spells of coughing. The conductor looked into a compartment where there were already some people sitting, then took her along to one that was empty.
    “You were right. To put me where I cannot. Be a nuisance,” she said, beaming. “I didn’t have money. Swedish money. All other kinds but Swedish. I had to run. I never thought I could-”
    He told her to sit down and save her breath. He went away and came back soon with a glass of water. As she drank she thought of the tablet that had been given her, and took it with the last gulp of water. The coughing subsided.
    “You must not do that again,” he said. “Your chest is heaving. Up and down.”
    Swedes were very frank, as well as being reserved and punctual.
    “Wait,” she said.
    For there was something else to be established, almost as if the train could not get her to the right place otherwise.
    “Wait a moment. Did you hear about-? Did you hear there is smallpox? In Copenhagen?”
    “I shouldn’t think so,” he said. He gave a severe though courteous nod and left her.
    “Thank you. Thank you,” she called after him.
    Sophia has never been drunk in her life. Any medicine she has taken, that might addle her brain, has put her to sleep before any such disturbance could happen. So she has nothing with which to compare the extraordinary feeling-the change of perception-which is rippling through her now. At first it might have been just relief, a grand though silly sense of being favored, because she had managed to carry her bags and run up the steps and reach her train. And then she had survived the fit of coughing and the squeezing of her heart and been able somehow to disregard her throat.
    But there is more, as if her heart could go on expanding, regaining its normal condition, and continuing after that to grow lighter and fresher and puff things almost humorously out of her way. Even the epidemic in Copenhagen could now become something like a plague in a ballad, part of an old story. As her own life could be, its bumps and sorrows turning into illusions. Events and ideas now taking on a new shape, seen through sheets of clear intelligence, a transforming glass.
    There was one experience that this reminded her of. That was her first stumbling on trigonometry, when she was twelve years old.