The Fly Trap

by Fredrik Sjoberg

  I sometimes think I would like to have such a sign myself.

  …

  There is a day in April when the southern sun opens the buds on the earliest sallows, and on that day the first hoverflies appear. Tiny, unprepossessing species that the books often describe as rarities, perhaps because they really are quite rare, but more probably because no one sees them. People collect insects mostly in summer, during the holidays. It has always been so, and for that reason the summer fauna is better known than the flies of early spring, which sometimes fly for only a week or two. Moreover, the best sallows are usually so tall that you can’t reach them with your net. You can stand under them with binoculars and watch everything going on in the flowers up top and rack your brains trying to guess which species are flying around up there. Of course you can buy a longer handle for your net (the inventive Czechs market a handle that is eight metres long) and stand there in the spring sun like a pole vaulter lost in the woods, but those long-handled nets are said to be difficult to manoeuvre with your dignity intact, so instead I have found some sallows that are short but still bloom. Four or five bushes, here and there on the island. And there I spend those days in April when the sun shines and the grass grows so fast that the dry leaves rustle on the ground. Which bush I choose depends on the direction of the wind. Then comes the blue hepatica. Followed by the white hepatica, fig buttercups, marsh marigolds, cowslips, and by the time the maples bloom in the middle of May, all the cares of the winter are forgotten.

  The colour alone puts me in a good mood. Maple blossoms are greenish yellow, and the tender leaves a yellowish green—and not the other way around. From a distance, the mix of these two tones creates a third so beautiful that the language lacks a word to describe it. As we all know, greenery deepens in colour as summer comes on, but the blooming of the maples is when it all begins, when everything is at its brightest and best. Just a week, maybe two, and then the alders burst into leaf in deadly earnest. I wish so profoundly that everyone knew. “Maples blossoming.” Those two words on answering machines would be enough. Everyone would get the message. They’d see the colour, sense its nuance, understand. Know that then everything flies, absolutely everything. A thousand commentaries. An entire apparatus of footnotes.

  Chapter 6

  René Malaise (1892–1978)

  René Edmond Malaise was born in Stockholm and was captivated early in life by the siren song of entomology. Always the same pattern. Is there a single one of us anywhere whose debut came later than childhood?

  According to family legend, the decisive impulse in his case occurred during a summer holiday in France with a cousin who collected butterflies. He got started himself that same day. He had already mastered botany, for his mother was the daughter of a gardener, or perhaps it came from the fact that a well-filled herbarium was a self-evident piece of baggage for a boy of good family. His father was a star chef, a French immigrant who was for many years the head chef at the Opera Cellar. From him, René inherited a good deal of restaurant know-how, later also some money, but no interest at all in food. On the contrary, all his life he felt that the important thing was nutritive value, not flavour. There were many tales through the years of scurvy and spit-roasted bear.

  Malaise was a born hunter and developed early on a taste for unusual prey and extravagant methods. He liked to tell people about his career as a sharpshooter when, at the turn of the century, the family lived in an apartment on one of the upper floors of a building on Östermalm Square. Inspired by some tropical adventure story, he had made himself a blowpipe and practised his aim by shooting plumed darts into the elaborate hats of ladies in the square below.

  Butterflies too were only preparation. A few years to learn the trade. If I understand him correctly, he knew that Swedish butterflies had been thoroughly studied years earlier. There wasn’t much new to discover, and supplementing earlier achievements was simply not his cup of tea. He wanted to be a pathfinder, to be his own man.

  He chose sawflies. His reasons are unclear, but it was probably because no one else was giving them serious study. Not in Sweden. On top of which, no one had ever dealt adequately with the taxonomy of sawflies, or Tenthredinidae, as they are known to science. They had the reputation of being generally troublesome creatures and hard to identify, the very sort of animal on which a young man could become an authority without conducting too many time-consuming studies in the field or in uneventful museums. A Linnaean career lay open before him. The adventures that, while they cannot slake, can still partially satisfy the yearnings of an uneasy soul lay just around the corner.

  During his time at the university in the 1910s, consequently, he undertook his first three expeditions, all to the mountains of Lapland. Not especially original, but suitable for a future sawfly expert, and in any case these trips had been journeyman expeditions for natural scientists of every kind for generations. He did not travel alone. Not yet. At this time he was accompanied in Lapland by another young field biologist, bird-watcher Sten Bergman, and for reasons we can only guess at, their fantasies about the future bounced along with all the uncontrollable joy and nuttiness of lemmings. Eager fingers roamed the map of the world while bluethroats sang in the midnight sun. There!

  When, in an earlier age, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist wrote The Significance of Swedish Poverty in 1838, his own finger came to rest on the same magical spot.

  When we observe the map of the globe, we see, farthest up in the northeast corner of the Old World Continent, a peninsula curving southward, embraced by the open sea. This is Kamchatka. It is very solitary, cut off from the civilized world. But Kamchatka has a counterpart. Farthest up in the northwest corner of the same World Continent, we see, at an even more northerly latitude, another large peninsula, which also curves southward, received and cut off by the sea. This is Scandinavia.

  Of all European countries, none is so separate and self-dependent as our Nordic peninsula. Literarily and politically, all the other nations are more or less integrated. They support one another like siblings. Our country is virtually an island, and so we are isolated in the geographical sense. But no less an island is our entire turn of mind, which is dependent only on itself. Everything Scandinavian must stand or fall on its own. In various respects it compares well with the rest of Europe in name; not so well in reality.

  The boys would go to Kamchatka! A scientific expedition that they themselves would lead, for the purpose of comparing these two so very analogous protuberances on the world map, their fauna and flora, their people. Adventure, perhaps fame. Certainly a wealth of hymenoptera.

  In the spring of 1919, a third member joined their planned expedition—the gifted botanist and, in the fullness of time, renowned geographical botanist Eric Hultén, born in 1895, the same year as Bergman. Now all they needed was money. And as Bergman had an incomparable gift of gab, and was a master at luring sponsors out of the woodwork, backers were soon waiting in line. In Bergman’s best seller about the Kamchatka expedition, a book translated into many languages in the 1920s, several pages of the foreword are devoted to grateful acknowledgements. They won the Vega Scholarship of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, along with other, similar travel grants, established in memory of men like Lars Johan Hierta (Sweden’s first great champion of the freedom of the press) and Johan Wahlberg (the man who died under an elephant), not to mention an astonishingly long list of war profiteers who positively bathed in money after the war and who seem to have competed for the privilege of contributing cash to what in their eyes was a fine old Swedish national sport with considerable market value.

  You have to wonder if the expedition had any expenses at all. They were given everything—clothes, canned goods, weapons, gunpowder, cameras, skis, lamps, tobacco, toothpaste, everything. The Örebro Cracker Company sent them half a ton of crackers, Marabou 150 kilos of chocolate, and the Sundbyberg Macaroni Factory added enough dry pasta for an army. And the drink! Of course Bergman was the very model of a tiresome teetotall
er, so he doesn’t say much about it, just mentions that the state spirits monopoly supported science with a generous cask of preservative. On the other hand, Hultén, who, like Malaise, had never really understood the charm of temperance, remembered that detail in particular when, more than fifty years later, he took pen in hand to write his memoirs under the title But It’s Been Fun.

  The most remarkable gift was nevertheless the spirits. Sweden was under the tyranny of a dictatorial system of alcohol rationing invented and closely controlled by a man named Ivan Bratt, and many saw their ration book as an invaluable possession. But Bratt granted us not only a steel barrel of 96 per cent alcohol for preserving specimens but also—believe it or not—a full ration of spirits for every member of the expedition for three years, the only condition being that we not open the crates until the ship had left Gothenburg harbour.

  It does sound like the boys had a very good time, but on one point we must nevertheless correct Hultén, for the most remarkable gift was not the strong drink or even one of Bergman’s many cunning advertising projects. He may have been peerless at the art of chatting up cracker-makers and the owners of companies like the Norrköping Raincoat Factory, but the most lucrative triumph of all belonged to Malaise, our hero, who, drunk and happy, caught sight of Anders Zorn one evening at Den Gyldene Freden.

  Might he possibly consider a donation in support of a scientific expedition to a foreign land?

  Yes, indeed. The very next morning, René Malaise visited the world-famous painter in his atelier, where Zorn, a bit hungover, recalled his promise of the evening before and wrote out a cheque for 10,000 crowns. It was a nice round sum, to say the least—roughly twice the annual income of an average Swedish worker—especially when you stop to think that he wanted nothing in return except pictures of naked Japanese girls. Although he never got them. The cheque is dated 20 May 1919, and Zorn had only one more year to live.

  Financially, they were now home free, and I imagine that the three friends felt that rare happiness that can transform the period between the completion of preparations and actual departure into the most pleasant part of a long journey. You never own the world the way you do before you leave.

  …

  When the days are numbered, everything seems clearer, as if the time between preparation and departure possessed a particular magic. The endless stretch of time on the other side always struck me as evasive and treacherous. But the very limited period between now and then held a liberating peace and quiet. This allotment of time was an island. And the island became, later, a measurable moment. For a long time, this discovery was the only truly unclouded dividend that I took from my travels.

  …

  They left in February 1920, six people altogether. Both Bergman and Hultén were newly married; their wives, Dagny and Elise, came along as field assistants and housekeepers. In addition, they had hired a conservator named Hedström, whose job it was to skin and preserve what they hoped would be large collections of mammals, birds and whatever else came within range of Bergman’s rifle. Malaise himself would take care of the insects. He too had had an offer of marriage before their departure, from the very young but already famous journalist Ester Blenda Nordström, but as the arrangement was to have been merely a marriage of convenience, Sten Bergman exercised his veto, as if it had already been decided that it was he and he alone from whom posterity would hear the story of the Kamchatka expedition.

  For just that reason, his story has never interested me. I find that Bergman’s thick book about their three years of privation does have a certain value, for he was a good observer and very industrious, but it all pales before the fact that he tries so hard to follow in the footsteps of the great explorer Sven Hedin, which he never succeeded in doing. He was born too late, in the wrong age. The expedition gets only as far as Alexandria (and Bergman only to page one of his book) before

  …people of all sorts, both coloured and white, crowded past one another, most of them clad in a kind of commodious trouser-skirt, and it was with the greatest reluctance that we ventured to entrust our trunks to the Negro chieftains and Arabs of dreadful countenance who assaulted us, the one filthier and more ragged than the next.

  Cheap exoticism built on racist vulgarity was of course standard fare at the time, but Bergman went on like that for another fifty years. If only he hadn’t taken himself so awfully seriously.

  Once they had arrived on the Kamchatka peninsula, after four months at sea, the Swedes installed themselves in the provincial capital, Petropavlovsk, where, rather surprisingly, the theatre in the Hall of the People was presenting Strindberg’s The Father, which may have softened the impression of having landed at the back of beyond, at least until they learned that the playwright was thought to be a Dutchman called Stenberg. They were far away, even from Moscow. The Revolution itself seemed distant and somehow preliminary. Red Guards and counterrevolutionaries traded control of the city under more or less tragicomic forms, while a Japanese cruiser lay anchored in the harbour to watch over the interests of the emperor.

  Lives were lost in the sporadic skirmishes between Reds and Whites, but the Swedes were at home in both camps and moved freely. The Hulténs went south one summer to botanize, the Bergmans and Hedström headed north to shoot birds and study the natives, and Malaise, well, exactly what he was up to is not always so easy to determine. He himself wrote very little about those years, and in the books of the others he prowls about in the margins. Some of the time he is simply missing, or else he appears unexpectedly, like a cat that’s been lost for months. He seems mostly to have operated by himself in the back country. Sten Bergman writes:

  Here our paths diverged for a time. Malaise headed off to the village of Maschura, situated 70 versts farther upriver, in a dugout canoe paddled by two Kamchatkans. From there he later started off with one native and some horses for Kronoki, a large lake that lies between the Kamchatka River and the sea.

  He caught insects, slew bears, photographed volcanoes and drew maps. Mile after mile of uninhabited territory, often unexplored. Alone. It is said that he was always in exceptionally good spirits. But what was he thinking?

  And what made him decide to stay? When the expedition had finished its work in the autumn of 1922 and started home by way of Japan, Malaise remained behind. He was the oldest of them, though not yet thirty. Bergman writes:

  Despite its tangled mountain forests and swampy tundra, its blizzards and its cold, Kamchatka had nevertheless captured our hearts in these years. All our sufferings and hardships were forgotten, but we had crystal memories of all our wonderful evenings around our campfire in the depths of the wilderness with bears as our neighbours, of clear, starry winter nights among snow-covered mountains and volcanoes, and of unforgettable hours in the shadowy yurts of the nomads.

  It was hard to tear ourselves away from all this, and one of our comrades could not. Malaise was so enchanted by this land that he decided to stay for several more years. Kamchatka has an almost magnetic attraction for everyone who has learned to know it well. It is hard to get there, but it is even harder to leave it behind.

  Malaise was the proof. For another eight years, until 1930, he simply disappeared without a trace for long periods. No one knew where he was or what he did. Back home in Stockholm, among his friends in the Entomological Society, rumours eventually began to circulate that he was the manager of a Soviet sable farm. And what about his relationships with women? Still today, no one can say with certainty how many times he was married, or why.

  Dagny Bergman also wrote a book about her youthful adventure, in many ways more charming and with greater immediacy than the book her husband managed (or wanted) to produce, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t the time to write it until their children had left home, towards the end of the 1940s. “For days on end, Malaise’s insect net fluttered across bushes and thickets,” she writes in one place, but otherwise he is often missing from her book too, absent on some vague errand. His name hardly comes up. At the sam
e time, it is she, perhaps, more than any of the other friends on the Kamchatka expedition who comes closest to solving the riddle of René Malaise.

  One meets people with the strangest fates in Kamchatka, wind-driven people who have fallen out with society and been forced to disappear, unhappy people who have lost their loved ones in revolution and war, people who have managed to hold themselves erect despite trials of every kind.

  …

  “What’s your interest in Malaise?”

  The question always took me by surprise. My answer was along the same lines—evasive. I had begun to collect what little is known about René Malaise. Bought his books, poked through archives, though without finding much. All of the older entomologists I’m acquainted with had of course met him, perhaps heard his hair-raising stories from the ’20s, but none had known him well. I got nothing but banalities, a picture of a happy gadabout who knew sawflies and invented a trap, a man with an adventurous past who later became an odd duck, an original whom no one took seriously, who made enemies and finally got lost among the legends. What did I want with him?

  Every time I thought I was beginning to understand him, he glided away and vanished into some new kind of craziness, and so every time I let him go and turned to other things. Not because I’d stopped wondering about his fate, but more because his fundamentally expansive, uncontrollable temperament made me uneasy. There was something about him that was boundless.