Too Much Happiness

isn’t coming, the men with the chain saws are not converging. The ash, the maple, the beech, the ironwood, the cherry, are all safe for him. For the time being, all safe.
    Lea is out of breath with the effort of supporting him, but able to say, “Great minds think alike.”
    This is not the moment to mention the change in her. No more than you’d call your congratulations to somebody up on a ladder.
    He has knocked his foot hoisting himself-and partly being hoisted-into the passenger seat of the truck. He groans, and it’s a different kind of groan than would come out of him if he was alone. It’s not that he means to dramatize the pain, just that he takes this way of describing it to his wife.
    Or even offering it to his wife. Because he knows that he isn’t feeling quite the way he thought he would if her vitality came back to her. And the noise he makes could be to cover that lack, or excuse it. Of course it’s natural that he’d feel a bit cautious, not knowing if this is for good, or just a flash in the pan.
    But even if it is for good, even if it’s all good there’s something more. Some loss fogging up this gain. Some loss he’d be ashamed to admit to, if he had the energy.
    The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.
    There’s another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It’s a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent.
    “I left the ax,” he says mechanically. “I left the saw.”
    “So what if you did. We’ll find somebody to go and get them.”
    “And there’s the car too. Are you going to get out and drive that and let me take the truck?”
    “Are you insane?”
    Her voice is absentminded, because she is in the process of backing the truck into the turnaround. Slowly but not too slowly, bouncing in the ruts but keeping on the track. He is not used to the rearview mirrors from this angle, so he lowers the window and cranes around, getting the snow in his face. This is not just to see how she’s doing but to clear to a certain extent the warm wooziness coming on him.
    “Easy,” he says. “That’s it. Easy. Okay now. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
    While he is saying this she is saying something about the hospital.
    “… get them to take a look at you. First things first.”
    To his knowledge, she has never driven the truck before.
    It’s remarkable the way she manages it.
    Forest
. That’s the word. Not a strange word at all but one he has possibly never used. A formality about it that he would usually back away from.
    “The Deserted Forest,” he says, as if that put the cap on something.

Too Much Happiness

    Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy
.
    – Sophia Kovalevsky

I
    On the first day of January, in the year 1891, a small woman and a large man are walking in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old. The woman has a childishly large head, with a thicket of dark curls, and her expression is eager, faintly pleading. Her face has begun to look worn. The man is immense. He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack. At present he is crouching over tombstones and writing in his notebook, collecting inscriptions and puzzling over abbreviations not immediately clear to him, though he speaks Russian, French, English, Italian and has an understanding of classical and medieval Latin. His knowledge is as expansive as his physique, and though his speciality is governmental law, he is capable of lecturing on the growth of contemporary political institutions in America, the peculiarities of society in Russia and the West, and the laws and practices of ancient empires. But he is not a pedant. He is witty and popular, at ease on various levels, and able to live a most comfortable life, due to his properties near