The Fly Trap (6 page)

The incident was much discussed in government circles, however, and very soon a curious veterinarian appeared and asked to have a closer look at the maggots. He could not understand how such healthy fly larvae could have grown fat on the synthetic fibre used at that time in Finnish government rugs, and in hopes of clearing up the mystery he showed the creatures to an entomologist with a taste for forensics, a man who could see at once that these were larvae of the blowfly
Phaenicia sericata,
ready to pupate. This species, the entomologist explained, hatches in various kinds of carcasses, for example dead mice in the walls of a building, and when they have eaten their fill they leave the corpse at night and wander about in search of a suitable place to pupate. This was how the larvae had wound up under the angry bureaucrat’s rug. The charwoman was given her job back. It is not known if the Finnish government apologized.

You never know in advance what knowledge may be good for, however useless it may seem. More than 500 species may be involved in the decomposition of a large cadaver.

Of course it’s repulsive. I completely agree. But there is something more. Let me relate another anecdote before we return to my graceful and thoroughly delightful hoverflies. For some time now, I have been hearing reports of a study carried out by several entomologists on the mainland which has every prospect of becoming legendary. If nothing else, it will serve as an example of the irrepressible urge of curious boys to explore islands, even where islands don’t exist. Or, to be more exact, where islands are not to be discovered without the creative imagination that characterizes artists and good scientists.

Such islands are all to be found in the archipelago of buttonology. We will have cause to return there later. This is only an initial reconnaissance.

As the curtain goes up, someone has accidentally run over a badger, which now lies by the side of the road, dead. A short time later, one of these imaginative entomologists comes driving peacefully down the same road. He sees the badger and stops his car, climbs out and considers what has happened. The scene is easy to picture. Solitary driver bent over dead badger on an April day. He thinks. He has an idea. He heaves the body into the trunk and drives on.

This will perhaps remind some readers of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Clod Hans,” about a boy who finds a dead crow on the road and takes it with him, because you never know when a dead bird will come in handy. This is roughly what happened this time too, with the difference that this time the finder knew right away what he could use the carcass for. (Actually, Clod Hans knew as well. He was going to give it to the princess, which he later did. Her delight at this gift is one of Danish literature’s most puzzling passages.)

A year earlier, this particular scientist had taken a great interest in a cat he found squashed by a car “in the Forest of Brandbergen,” as he wrote in an article about the incident and all its consequences, published in the English journal
Entomologist’s Gazette
.

It turned out to be worth writing about, for our motorist and his friends began studying how the cadaver’s fauna of resident beetles took shape and changed during all the different phases of decomposition. They kept at it for four months. Altogether they captured 881 beetles, divided into no fewer than 130 different species, which is a lot. Similar research projects in other parts of the world haven’t even come close.

This got them started. The beetles in the cat (by now completely eaten) raised a number of questions about the behaviour of necrophagous fauna in general and about its dependence on the nature of the substrate on which decomposition takes place. In addition, they felt the experiment was worth expanding for the obvious reason that cadavers are like islands, where colonization and the development of the ecosystem can be followed from the very beginning, roughly the way it was on Surtsey, the volcanic island that rose from the ocean off the coast of Iceland. Or on Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, which blew up so completely in 1883 that both fauna and flora had to begin again from nil.

A badger was just what they needed, and they placed it in the same area. But in contrast to the cat case, which played out on an ordinary wooded slope with birch trees and flowers and moss on the ground, they now chose a much drier and biologically poorer location, a higher, stony spot where the plant life consisted of nothing but heather and scruffy pines. Here the dead badger had its resting place, and to prevent some fox from dragging it away when no one was looking, they put it inside a steel cage of the kind normally home to half-tamed rabbits and guinea pigs that run on treadmills. This too is easy to picture. Stone-dead badger in narrow pet cage in the woods. The sight was bizarre enough that they felt compelled to put a little sign on the cage explaining that this was a scientific experiment.

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 teetotaller, 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.