The Fly Trap (11 page)

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…

But the hymenoptera have one quality I understand, almost the only comprehensible aspect of these insects’ peculiar world—they love sunshine and warmth as intensely as I do. Maybe that’s the reason I was drawn to them in the first place. I don’t really recall, it’s so long ago now. Thanks to this characteristic of the hymenoptera, my collection includes thousands of small labels with the date and place of capture, and these comprise a diary of clear and beautiful days, days of warmth, soft breezes and no other clouds than small, puffy cirri, and above this chest of drawers, where twenty bygone summers sleep, there might be inscribed the same words written on innumerable sundials: I count only the happy hours.

He pulls out a drawer at random and begins to read. The sun beats down, a life unfolds. All entomologists sit like this, for as long as they live. Thereafter, their friends.

If there were a database, I would only have to search the collector’s name. Or a place. Or both. Now that I’ve come to know him, it would be nice to know if Malaise was ever out here trapping, for example on a visit to Frithiof one summer. The answer is in his collections, available, unfortunately, only to the person who has time to inspect the tiny labels on several million specimens. Just going through the sawflies would be an insurmountable task. You can get answers to simple questions. Did Frithiof Nordström ever capture
Macroglossum stellatarum
on the island? The hummingbird hawk moth? You can go through that drawer in Lund and learn that the answer is no. And think, “Too bad, Frithiof. It’s flying here now.”

Of course moths and butterflies are nothing to me. Not like flies. They’re just something you see all the time and notice involuntarily, almost the way you read newspaper headlines. Like birds, trees and wildflowers, the really big, beautiful moths and butterflies are the introduction to nature’s fine print—all the tiny, subtle plants and animals that require enormous expertise to understand. If you see a hummingbird hawk moth just once in your life, you’ll never forget it, and it’s not hard to find out what it’s called. They’re unavoidable, the butterflies on warm, sunny days, the moths at dusk and later.

Summer nights are a story of their own. You can collect almost anything at night—except flies. A hoverfly at night is as inconceivable as a swallow.

The only thing I can collect at night is my own thoughts.

A theory. Some aspects of a person’s fundamental nature are inherited in the usual, prosaic fashion—musicality, intelligence, genetic diseases and so forth—whereas there is no better explanation for others than early childhood imprinting in a particular environment. We needn’t go into it deeply. There is no black and white. The outlines are diffuse. But I think we can assume that certain characteristics of what becomes a person are cultural artifacts rather than the boring, unfair consequences of cast-iron biology. One of these, I believe, is a pronounced romantic temperament. Maybe not completely, but mostly.

My next observation is equally banal—namely, that we in Sweden have the world’s loveliest summer nights. Even a short distance down into Europe the nights become gloomy, pitch-black conveyances from dusk to dawn. Tropical nights can build into tremendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas celebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later. It doesn’t come close to the endless beauty of a summer night in Sweden.

Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong—the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

Most people do, it seems. As for me, I’m on the verge of tears from happiness, and I wander around on the island till dawn and dream and think that summer nights are our most underutilized natural resource. The thought is new, but the dreams and the wanderings have gone on for as long as I can remember. For in the superficially darling town by the sea on the outskirts of which I had my childhood, I was the only kid allowed to run free at night. You can’t send a moth-hunter to bed, no matter how young he is. And my parents were—still are—touchingly unsuspecting people who never even considered the possibility that their little boy did anything but catch moths under the nearest streetlamp.

I was constantly out at night. I listened for marsh warblers, spied on badgers, stole strawberries and threw pinecones at girls’ windows. Of course I also collected moths, lots of them, and was almost always alone. It was only when I was older that I rode my bike into town and drank like a Polish translator, but that’s not relevant here. The imprinting was already irrevocable.

Ever since, I have regarded all warmish summer nights as my personal property. Sadly enough, I never have to share them with a lot of people other than Frithiof and sometimes a large toad that lives under the porch and every summer comes out to the corner of the cottage where I hang up a bedsheet in front of the moth lamp. We sit at opposite ends of the sheet as if it were a tablecloth. The toad always catches more than I do. Frithiof tells me how it used to be.

Of course it’s lonely at times. It would be silly to deny it.

“When you go to study the insect world, you need to prepare much within yourself as well,” wrote Harry Martinson, and the first thing entomologists must prepare themselves for is loneliness. I imagine that’s why the typical entomologist concentrates on butterflies or moths. Enough people know enough about them to make that activity more or less meaningful in a social context. Finding people with a similar bent is not impossible, and even if the collector usually has to work alone, his finest finds are so pretty that anyone at all can understand his pleasure and share it. Everyone knows what a death’s head hawk moth looks like, or a swallowtail. OK, not everyone, but enough to satisfy the collector’s need for companionship.

The fly expert, on the other hand, usually plugs away in vain. For me, a
Doros profuges
is like a death’s head hawk moth, but for almost no one else. A mass invasion of
Eristalis similis
is a sensation. How many people were there who even noticed? Five?

To be sure, there is a forum on the Internet that links people with similar interests all over the world, but ever since the Americans bombed Serbia I have the feeling it’s being censored. In any case, the discussions have become less interesting and too narrowly scientific since then. That’s too bad, because it could have been a breathing hole for us amateurs, too.

It was in March 1999. The bombers were fuelled and ready at their bases. They were all just waiting for the order to take off. And then a message appeared on the fly forum website from one of Europe’s leading hoverfly experts, a Serbian. It was just a short greeting, thanking everyone for their participation at the last international meeting. Nothing political. He wrote only that he was at home waiting for the bombs. And then he wished everyone good luck in their lives. That was all. The next day there were expressions of sympathy from his friends in other countries and for a moment it really felt as if we were connected. But on day three there came a message from one of the really big men in the field, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He wrote that we should all settle down, stick to the subject of insects, and keep politics out of it. (Although his was the only remotely political message.) Anyway, that was the end of that. Global conversations in open forums are rarely very rewarding, not even about flies.