The Fly Trap (10 page)

Well, I certainly don’t know. But since I have captured seven of them on the island, which is a unique record in Europe, I have my theories. Let’s say that the larvae are subterranean and sensitive to the composition of the soil. As mentioned earlier, there are indications that this is the case. Maybe it likes limy soils. That would explain its rarity. Its erratic appearance might then be the result of a maturation that takes several years, which would mean that the fly doesn’t fly every year. Of my seven specimens, four are from one year and three from another. Otherwise I haven’t seen a trace of them. That could be one piece of the puzzle. Another possible explanation is that
Doros
flies for only a day or two and then dies, like a mayfly. The collector who sees one is just lucky. Only the man who never moves from his spot sees seven. Is there something sad about that fact?

Chapter 9

In the Shadow of a Volcano

On the night between 2 and 3 February 1923, all hell broke loose. The experience stayed with him. Indeed, it became one of the smash hits in his storytelling career, and, over the years, one of the foundations of his ideas about a fairy-tale island that sank in the sea. Or maybe an entire continent. That the ground he stood on was shaky—even his detractors agreed on that. And there came to be quite a few of them.

That winter, Malaise camped in the wilderness with two threadbare Russian fur hunters. They were living somewhere inland from Olga Bay in eastern Kamchatka, hundreds of kilometres from any settlement. Exactly what he was doing there, and on assignment from whom, is, as always, a little unclear, open to speculation, but the official purpose was in any case to continue collecting zoological specimens on behalf of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and at the same time to do the groundwork for a never-completed mapping of the area by taking a long series of panoramic photographs from the tops of mountains. They lived in tents or in indescribably filthy huts of turf and birch logs. Not together, each separately, miles apart—so as not to disturb one another’s hunting, they said. A double-barrelled shotgun and a Winchester, a sack of flour, salt, some sable shears. A camera, pots and pans, and high spirits.

It began well. The blizzards were dreadful and the days were short, but after only a couple of months they could change their long underwear because they had found hot springs in a valley between two volcanoes. Their way of life was extreme in its simplicity. They ate meat, boiled or grilled. Wild reindeer, bear, birds. They baked bread in a way that only a bachelor in the woods could have dreamed up. “In order to avoid carrying or having to make a kneading trough, hunters bake by digging a hole in the flour in the sack, pouring in salt, water, and sometimes baking powder too, then mixing it into dough with a stick, whereupon the flour is removed from the sides of the ‘trough.’ ” This lump of dough was then boiled in bear fat. Nutrition, nothing more.

Early in February, Malaise went down to the coast alone to fetch supplies and store specimen collections in a storehouse they had there, a few hundred metres from the shore. New snow had fallen during the night, and the trip home was harder than expected. His dogsled was heavily laden, and the surface of the trail was terrible. He had no choice but to spend the night in an old hunter’s hut along the way, a dilapidated yurt, its roof beam swaybacked like a hammock beneath the heavy turf roof. He prepared his meagre evening meal on the hut’s stove and rolled out his sleeping bag in the dark. Fell asleep at once. Woke up as if he were at sea.

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.