Too Much Happiness

Kharkov. He has, however, been forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, because of being a Liberal.
    His name suits him. Maksim. Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky.
    The woman with him is also a Kovalevsky. She was married to a distant cousin of his, but is now a widow.
    She speaks to him teasingly.
    “You know that one of us will die,” she says. “One of us will die this year.”
    Only half listening, he asks her, Why is that?
    “Because we have gone walking in a graveyard on the first day of the New Year.”
    “Indeed.”
    “There are still a few things you don’t know,” she says in her pert but anxious way. “I knew that before I was eight years old.”
    “Girls spend more time with kitchen maids and boys in the stables-I suppose that is why.”
    “Boys in the stables do not hear about death?”
    “Not so much. Concentration is on other things.”
    There is snow that day but it is soft. They leave melted, black footprints where they’ve walked.
    She met him for the first time in 1888. He had come to Stockholm to advise on the foundation of a school of social sciences. Their shared nationality, going so far as a shared family name, would have thrown them together even if there was no particular attraction. She would have had a responsibility to entertain and generally take care of a fellow Liberal, unwelcome at home.
    But that turned out to be no duty at all. They flew at each other as if they had indeed been long-lost relatives. A torrent of jokes and questions followed, an immediate understanding, a rich gabble of Russian, as if the languages of Western Europe had been flimsy formal cages in which they had been too long confined, or paltry substitutes for true human speech. Their behavior, as well, soon overflowed the proprieties of Stockholm. He stayed late at her apartment. She went alone to lunch with him at his hotel. When he hurt his leg in a mishap on the ice, she helped him with the soaking and dressing and, what was more, she told people about it. She was so sure of herself then, and especially sure of him. She wrote a description of him to a friend, borrowing from De Musset.
    He is very joyful, and at the same time very gloomy-
    Disagreeable neighbor, excellent comrade-
    Extremely light-minded, and yet very affected-
    Indignantly naïve, nevertheless very blasé-
    Terribly sincere, and at the same time very sly
.
    And at the end she wrote, “A real Russian, he is, into the bargain.”
    Fat Maksim, she called him then.
    “I have never been so tempted to write romances, as when with Fat Maksim.”
    And “He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one’s mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, to think of anything but him.”
    This was at the very time when she should have been working day and night, preparing her submission for the Bordin Prize. “I am neglecting not only my Functions but my Elliptic Integrals and my Rigid Body,” she joked to her fellow mathematician, Mittag-Leffler, who persuaded Maksim that it was time to go and deliver lectures in Uppsala for a while. She tore herself from thoughts of him, from daydreams, back to the movement of rigid bodies and the solution of the so-called mermaid problem by the use of theta functions with two independent variables. She worked desperately but happily, because he was still in the back of her mind. When he returned she was worn out but triumphant. Two triumphs-her paper ready for its last polishing and anonymous submission; her lover growling but cheerful, eagerly returned from his banishment and giving every indication, as she thought, that he intended to make her the woman of his life.
    The Bordin Prize was what spoiled them. So Sophia believed. She herself was taken in by it at first, dazzled by all the chandeliers and champagne. The compliments quite dizzying, the marvelling and the hand kissing spread thick on top of certain inconvenient but immutable facts. The fact that they would never grant her a job worthy of her gift, that she would be lucky indeed to find herself teaching in a provincial girls’ high school. While she was basking Maksim decamped. Never a word about the real reason, of course-just the papers he had to write, his need for the peace and quiet of Beaulieu.
    He had felt himself ignored. A man who was not used to being ignored, who had probably never been in any salon, at any reception, since he was a grown man, where that had been the case. And it wasn’t so much the case in Paris