The Fly Trap (7 page)

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 same 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.

Chapter 7

Narcissiana

The German-American psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger has pointed out that many collectors collect to escape the dreadful depressions that constantly pursue them. He takes up the question in his study of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), one of the greatest of the truly obsessive collectors, and I’m happy to grant his point, at least if we’re talking about art or books or other objects that change hands in the marketplace and are more or less difficult to find. People who collect everything, as long as it’s curious enough, are especially likely to be engaged in a form of fetishism that does indeed allay anxiety.

I know, for I was once on the verge of buying a house in Ydre solely because a dilapidated outhouse on the property was said to have belonged to the once famous poet and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846).

Natural objects, on the other hand, are not fetishes in the same way. One reason is that they can seldom be purchased for money. In addition, they almost always lack cultural provenance. Any beetle whatsoever that was caught, pinned and classified by, say, Charles Darwin, would be a wonderful fetish with which to cure a depression, but such things are impossible to come by. It’s true that I own a stuffed peacock whose history is known, including a list of everyone who’s owned it since it died in the nineteenth century, and any desperate character who came along might buy it. But the normal thing these days is that nature collectors catch the creatures themselves. That’s different from dealing in art.

I have a distinct feeling that Freudians in general have a much too diffuse picture of the passions that may express themselves in, say, fly-hunting. They are way too locked in to their squalid little standard explanations of human behaviour. Thus the aforementioned Muensterberger comes to the conclusion that your average collector represents an “anal type” who, if I understand the thing correctly, becomes a collector because in his childhood he was not given sufficient time to play with his excrement. It’s breathtaking. Not even my good friend the surrealist poet really fits in that package.

I run into him occasionally at Entomological Society meetings. An odd fellow, certainly, but no worse than the others. I like him a lot, partly because his utterly incomprehensible poems make my own books look like wonders of clarity and logic, partly because in addition to his writings he guards a position as one of northern Europe’s most distinguished experts on the range and habits of dung beetles. He was out here on the island a couple of years ago, collecting. Freudians would have gone into ecstasies if they could have seen us strolling through meadows, poking at sheep shit or hunkering down beside a fairly fresh pile of horse manure for a professional assessment. No, these are things they just don’t understand.

That I take the trouble to bring up Werner Muensterberger is because he is not always wrong. On the contrary, I think he finds his way through the mist with frightening accuracy when he writes in his book on the psychology of collecting that one thing most collectors have in common is a fairly pronounced narcissism. Well, what can I say? If nothing else, he deserves our attention for supporting his thesis with a touching little story about one of his most interesting cases, a man who falls into the unusual category of “one-object collectors.”

This man collects only a single article.

One objection is, of course, that one article cannot very well constitute a collection. But the man is special in the sense that he displays many of the manic collector’s tragicomic characteristics. He is constantly in search of a better, finer, single specimen, and when he has found it, he immediately gets rid of the old one. One object, neither more nor less. And what drives him is a compelling, intense desire to be seen and acknowledged for his exquisite taste, his mastery. The object, and vice versa—the narcissistic collector in his most crystalline form.

This is perhaps an option for an art collector with a small flat. But collecting a single fly? I don’t think so.

But if you did, it would have to be the narcissus fly,
Merodon equestris.
A highly varied species, somewhat like the Adam-and-Eve among orchids, though with more colours than just two. On top of which it’s one of those hoverflies that buzzes in such a distinctive way that you can recognize it with your eyes shut, which produces a particularly restful sense of well-being.

Not that I’m in the habit of wandering around outdoors with a blindfold, but it sometimes happens that I need to rest my overexerted, fly-spying eyes for a spell and just stare at the clouds, or at nothing, lying on my back in the grass and moss on the granite slopes. And to hear the quite singular buzz of a passing narcissus fly in the course of such a summer nap is a pleasure, for the simple reason that knowledge is pleasing.

I know this stuff. No one knows more about the flies on this island than I do. The mere sound can be like recognizing someone you know in the crowd on a railway platform. A friend who tells a story, as if in passing, about the yearning of people long since dead for beauty, for the fragrance of an evening in late May when the air is still.