There was a powerful earthquake in Kamchatka that night. He tells the story in his first book, Hunts and Earthquakes. How he just barely managed to crawl out of the yurt before the roof fell in, the terrible roaring noise, the way the birches swayed and threw themselves about in the windless night. He writes about the uncertainty in the grey light of dawn, and how he eventually found his comrades, unhurt but scared to death. On the other hand, their cache on the coast, their boat, even the forests that grew down along the shore had vanished. A tremendous tsunami had driven a wall of ice several kilometres inland like a plough or a carpenter’s plane. Everything was gone. And the aftershocks continued. “For the first three days, the earth shook about every five minutes, later every quarter of an hour, after a month once an hour, and when I left the area at the beginning of July there were one to three earthquakes a day.”
The Russians left a month later. They didn’t dare stay, so fearful were they that the land would sink into the sea. They headed south on foot, towards Petropavlovsk, but Malaise stayed on, brazen in his loneliness, actually pleased because the remaining flour would now last longer. Wolves took his dogs, unfortunately, but he seems nevertheless to have kept up his courage until relief arrived. There is a long and sensual passage in his book about the art of preparing pit-roasted bear. “The fat connective tissue under the bear’s feet, which to begin with could compete with gutta-percha for toughness, was now so tender I could eat it with a teaspoon.” Homesickness was not in his vocabulary.
As autumn approached, he went to Japan to buy film. His glass plates had been lost in the tidal wave, and ordering new ones from Kamchatka was easier said than done in the revolutionary confusion. Anyway, there were other things he needed as well. So he got a ride on a boat to Yokohama. Was going to be gone only a few weeks. As usual, things didn’t work out the way he expected.
On 1 September 1923 there occurred one of the largest earthquakes in Japan’s history—typically, only a few days after our friend Malaise arrived. At the moment of the catastrophe, he was on the second floor of a hotel in Kamakura outside Tokyo, where he had gone with some friends for what was to have been a beach holiday. He was on his way out of the door when the quake began. “I had just been telling myself that it was foolish to come to one of Japan’s finest beach resorts only to lie around in bed, and that it would be better to go down to the water and see if the breakers rolling in were suitable for what they call surfing.”
I have a hard time picturing René Malaise in bathing trunks with a surfboard under his arm, and that isn’t the way it turned out either, for a second later both roof and floor disappeared and the only thing left was Malaise standing in the doorway. “The building was thrown back and forth like a ship in the most terrible storm.” Quick as a flash he ran for the street, exactly how is unclear since the floor was gone.
Halfway out, a door suddenly opened ahead of me and an elderly, corpulent woman came through it as if shot from a cannon and was thrown against the opposite wall, where she collapsed like a rag. A couple of leaps and I was past her and out to the stairs, but when I turned around and saw her lying there, I was ashamed of myself and went back. I managed to help her out to the stairs as well and on down to the street. That the old woman and I were not shaken off the steps is more than I can explain.
What follows is an incomparable description of the devastation in Yokohama and Tokyo, incomparable because he relates it like a journey through hell—and yet not. Over a hundred thousand people died in the catastrophe, and Malaise found himself in the middle of the firestorm, saw it all with his own eyes—heaps of bodies, looting—and still he insists on narrating these scenes in the manner of a newsreel, without the slightest concession to his own terror and despair. As if nothing could upset his good spirits. “There we slept peacefully the whole night, undisturbed by the stronger and weaker aftershocks that shook the ground, while the heavens glowed blood red from Tokyo in flames.”
One possible explanation for this exhilarated style is that he saw a good deal of the Swedish humourist Albert Engström in Moscow on his way home. There was of course no real point in returning to Kamchatka now that all the film in Japan had gone up in smoke. Anyway, he had missed the last boat of the year. So, homeward. Via Vladivostok. Which was not the easiest trip to make, as his passport lacked the proper visas and permits. But he managed nevertheless, probably because no Soviet border guard in the world could resist this stubborn Swede, who, on top of everything else, had become an official courier, no mean trick under the circumstances. Before he left, a former Russian consul in some Japanese city had given him letters to deliver to a commissar in Vladivostok. For as long as the Soviet Union lasted, this was one of the best ways to clear a path through the bureaucracy.
…
It is many years ago now. I had business in Karakalpakia in Uzbekistan and took the 1:35 flight from Stockholm. On the plane, which flies over my island every day at twenty minutes to two, I wound up sitting next to the Moscow correspondent for the evening tabloid Expressen. We immediately began bragging to each other.
I was on my way to the Aral Sea. Not so awfully enviable, perhaps, but worth bragging about, since this happened before the collapse of the empire, and in those days no one went wherever he wanted to go in the USSR. But he was not impressed. He countered instead with a whole series of more or less hair-raising exploits of the kind that all foreign correspondents can tell if pressed. I tried my adventures in northern Siberia the year before. No reaction. His stories began to be absolutely surrealistic.
Short pause. We unbuckled our seat belts.
I waved my letter to the Soviet Minister of the Environment from the Swedish one, Birgitta Dahl, which in a roundabout way had been entrusted to me to deliver personally because the postal service was undependable. The foreign correspondent gave me a look that suggested he had any number of more important documents in his own diplomatic bag. After about fifteen minutes, I had only one more ace up my sleeve.
“Oh, look, this is where I live,” I said, as if in passing, as the island spread out beneath us. It worked. At least a little. If you live in the Stockholm archipelago, you are presumed to earn a great deal of money or at the very least to be some kind of memorable eccentric, and that sort of thing impresses journalists. In fact, few things impress them more. I held my breath and gazed down at the island. Would this impress him? Seconds passed, half a minute, not more. And then, thank goodness, I saw the signal for my decisive thrust.
“You see down there?” I said. “There, in the middle of the island, on this side of the lake, that flashing light?”
I had the window seat, and the correspondent leaned across me to look down.
Yes, of course, he saw something twinkling on the shore of the lake, whereupon, with the globetrotter’s casual ease, I could end the conversation with the words: “It’s a signal. My son, you know, sending us a signal. With the bathroom mirror.”
I was so proud of him for pulling it off. Suddenly my whole hot-air contest with the correspondent struck me as ridiculous and I just leaned back in my seat and smiled.
My seatmate didn’t know what to say, just gave me a grudgingly respectful glance, and before we reached Gotska Sandön, he’d gone off to try to impress someone else.
…
Malaise’s movements are fairly easy to follow to this point, November 1923. He had been abroad for four years. Now he was back home in Stockholm. And then he goes off the radar.
He wrote his book, which was published the following year, and nothing would have been easier than for him to travel around the country and enjoy his celebrity, the way Sten Bergman had done. As a lecturer. He was good at that. But that isn’t what he did. Instead, he went back. In the summer of 1924, he returned to his bleak outpost on the Pacific Ocean. Why?
Two clues: first, there are certain indications that Sten and René had some kind of agreement that Bergman would do all the public relations. I don’t know this for a fact, but the family has suggested
that, as an old man, Malaise was not altogether happy about having had to play second fiddle. He begins the foreword to his book with an assurance that it is not an official description of his participation in the Kamchatka expedition but deals only with the year when he remained behind. As if he were not permitted to write about the first three years. And by the time Malaise returned to Stockholm, Bergman had already become a megastar and secured his place in history.
Did Malaise return to the wilderness to prove something?
Was he fleeing?
Or was he simply in love?
The second clue is that he dedicates the book to an exceptionally dazzling woman—Ester Blenda Nordström. The woman who had not been allowed to go on the expedition in the first place, the woman Bergman had rejected. Perhaps she is the reason René came home and turned right around. I simply can’t imagine that it was hymenoptera that lured him away again, and yet I’m one of those who can believe pretty much anything of an entomologist. Whatever the role of the hymenoptera, about one year later Ester Blenda went to Kamchatka as well, and nearly two years to the day after the Japanese earthquake, on 31 August 1925, the two were married.
As I said, the trail grows indistinct at this point, but this much is clear: Malaise remained in the Far East until 1930, and Ester Blenda stayed for two years. I have found one single letter from that time, written by Malaise in December 1927 and addressed to one of his aunts. At the time, he was running a Soviet sable farm in the village of Yelisovo, near Petropavlovsk—“250 rubles a month and I don’t really have to do anything but walk around, play boss, and point out what needs to be done.” The letter also reveals that, earlier, he had lived with Ester Blenda in another village, Klyuchi, not far from the preposterously beautiful Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Eurasia’s tallest active volcano. They had apparently supported themselves as photographers. Now she was gone. He writes, “You mustn’t believe that Ester Blenda and I parted on bad terms, on the contrary, and I am quite certain that she will return.”
She didn’t. Their divorce was final in 1929, and there is no record of any further contact between them. Experts on the Nordström family maintain that their relationship was a marriage in name only. That she was not even interested in men. Others say that she was exploiting a credulous childhood friend. That may be, but equally likely is that they were just two very lonely people in exile who kept each other company where the world is at its most beautiful and most cruel and again most beautiful. But that Malaise, at least, was in love is no wild guess. Everyone loved Ester Blenda. She had something that everyone fell for, both women and men. No one has ever managed to say exactly what, although many have tried.
She was born in 1891 and, still young, made a name for herself in the Stockholm newspapers under the pseudonyms Pojken (The Boy) and, later, Bansai. Her eyes, people still talk about her eyes, their enigmatic charm, so full of contradictions. She was unpredictable, everyone who knew her agrees on that. Socially, she could glitter like a star—an irresistible party girl, high-spirited, funny, inventive, always ready to play a song on her accordion or to tell a good story in the whirl of a giddy evening. But as often as not she was overcome with sadness and withdrew, tore off on her motorcycle or disappeared on long tramps in the wilderness. She travelled a lot, often alone, sometimes incognito. Jack Kerouac had not been born when Ester Blenda Nordström bummed across the United States, hitchhiking, hopping freights and cattle trains.
Her debut as an author was an immediate success. In 1914 she published a book of undercover reporting called A Maid Among Maids that sold 35,000 copies. Disguised and using a false name, she had taken employment as a housemaid with an unsuspecting farmer in Södermanland. Her book opened up a whole world of social evils whose existence her bourgeois readers had apparently forgotten. The debate was hard and long, and Ester Blenda’s name was on everyone’s lips. She herself went away to Lapland to work as a nomadic teacher in a Sami village. She was gone for nine months. It was a hard life, but The People of the Kota (1916) is one of her best books.
Nowadays, people often compare her with Günter Wallraff, who also was not yet born when she wrote her books, and the comparison is apt. She was just as fearless, just as outrageous, just as drawn to hardship. Even their success is comparable. But there is something this comparison misses. Of course it is her social reporting that people still talk about and that academics still discuss in their genre studies, but it is something else that seduces the reader who picks up one of her books. And this something is a far cry from German hard-hitting journalism.
It’s not Wallraff she resembles but, if anyone, Bruce Chatwin. No other Swedish author reminds me more of Chatwin. They are both puzzling, inaccessible and luminous. The same devastating eye and the same unbeatable brilliance in their ability to please. And they were escaping, constantly, perhaps from themselves, leaving behind a trail of dreamy-eyed admirers, questions and perpetual speculation about disjointed sexuality and conflicting passions of every kind. Even their obsessive interest in nomads and people at the edge of the world, even that is the same, almost identical. Two wanderers who disappeared. What’s left is legend. Chatwin died of AIDS at the age of forty-eight. Ester Blenda Nordström died at fifty-seven after suffering a debilitating stroke at the age of forty-five.
Her most remarkable book, and incomparably her best, is Village in the Volcano’s Shadow (1930), which is about the years in Kamchatka—“the golden land of indolence and optimism.” Its epigraph is a line from the poet Robert William Service: “Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you.” It’s a funny book, hilarious in places, but at the same time deeply gripping and melancholy. She tells about life in the village—sits at a desk somewhere at home in Sweden and looks back with a sense of loss that carries through all the sometimes uproarious, sometimes tragic human destinies that she describes.
But she never wrote about her husband. Not a line. No doubt he was out somewhere with his net. Yet she is the person who provides the most probable explanation of why René Malaise stayed out there for ten years. I think he was quite simply enjoying himself. It was his kind of landscape.
Klyuchevskaya rages upward towards the sky. It’s as if she knows herself to be the world’s greatest volcano and therefore longs to reach still higher; as if she were furious at being tied to the earth and broke her way up into space to reach right to heaven in her wild, boundless vanity.
Chapter 10
The Net and Loneliness
Ester Blenda Nordström had an older brother named Frithiof. He was for the most part her exact opposite. Quiet and stationary as a barnacle. A dentist. But he devoted all his free time to collecting butterflies. Over the years, he became the greatest of all experts in Sweden, and his career had its crowning touch from 1935 to 1941 when, with Albert Tullgren, he wrote the magnificent Svenska fjärilar (Swedish Butterflies), unsurpassed to this day.
He never said much about his mysterious sister. But there is one place in John Landquist’s memoirs where Frithiof flits by in an obscure comment about her life. Professor and literary critic Landquist had been head over heels in love with Ester Blenda years earlier, as, clearly, had his wife at that time, the feminist writer Elin Wägner. Ester Blenda had lived with them for several years in her youth. Landquist writes, “Years later, after her death, her brother Dr. Frithiof Nordström, the famous butterfly expert, told me that she remained strict in erotic matters all her life.” Whatever he may have meant by that.
In any event, it appears that Frithiof Nordström spent several summers here on the island in the 1910s. He collected here and wrote about his finds in Entomologisk Tidskrift. Maybe he came here for the butterflies. The island was already known among collectors. The locals were a little crazy, to be sure, but it had a distinctive flora and many unusual insects.
He and I have a social life of the entomological kind. Finding new species that have never before been taken on the island or even in the whole province of Uppland can, of course, be very exciting, but it doesn
’t compare with finding insects that others saw long ago and that no one has seen since. The ones presumed to have vanished. I cannot describe the feeling other than to liken it to a form of social intercourse, where time means a great deal and nevertheless nothing. If I see a rare butterfly that Frithiof once captured almost a hundred years ago, it’s like getting an unexpected picture postcard from an old acquaintance off on a long holiday.
I look forward with impatience to the day when our natural history museums get around to cataloguing their collections in a searchable database the way the Royal Library does in Stockholm. Only then can the postcards get flowing in earnest. As things are, it’s impossible to ferret out what other people have caught on the island and when. As soon as a collector at long last dies, the fruits of his life’s labours and joys wind up at some museum, usually in Lund or Stockholm, whereupon all of it is amalgamated into the museum’s main collection, each species in its own drawer. They do this for practical reasons. And for anyone doing research on a particular insect family, this steadily growing museum collection becomes ever more usable and valuable. At the same time, however, it’s like spreading ashes in the wind. Reconstructing a collector’s journey is impossible once his prey has been dispersed.
Sten Selander, who also lived out here at that time, described his own collection of stinging wasps as if it were one of his written works. This was in his melancholy essay “The Drawer Where Summer Dwells.” He remembers. They’re not pretty, the wasps, not like butterflies…
The Fly Trap Page 8