The Fly Trap (18 page)

So I must say something about the “hoverfly boom.” I hear the expression from time to time among entomologists.

“So I see you’ve been drawn into this hoverfly boom.”

What these surprising words mean is that more than five people in Sweden have begun to take an interest in hoverflies in recent years. Everything is relative. But the fact is that something is happening that no one could have suspected until quite recently. Among nature’s innumerable annotations, hoverflies, the family Syrphidae, have risen up to tell an especially tempting and promising fund of useful and entertaining stories. For too long, the small change of environmental politics has been lichens, mushrooms and other humble tokens of the wilderness. But fashions change here too, and the time has now come to use the colourful yardstick of the hoverflies to measure the value of the natural world we have to some extent created.

This is an obvious idea and a good one. Partly because hoverflies tell us so very much about the landscape, inasmuch as the demands of the different species are so varied and particular. Partly because this information is readily available thanks to the fact that the creatures are relatively easy to recognize. They sit there right before our eyes, everywhere, in flowers and on sunlit leaves (when they’re sheltered from the wind). There are neither too many species nor too few. They are neither too familiar nor too exotic. In other words, everything about them is just right. People who study, say, dragonflies or butterflies quickly get to know all the different kinds, even if they have a whole country to work with. They know how they live and where they’re found and, worst of all, they soon find themselves with the saddest of all collections—one that’s complete.

Moreover, many hoverflies are good indicators of environments that today’s Europeans passionately seek out and protect—marshes, meadows, virgin forests, parks.

In short, the hoverfly boom is a European phenomenon. Lively activity has broken out in many European countries, among both scientists and amateurs. Over the course of just a few years, hoverflies have become so popular as objects of research that they compete for attention with pretty much any other insect. Maybe I’m biased, but sometimes I get the impression that not even the butterfly nuts will maintain their historically solid lead. Belgians, Brits, Danes, Germans, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Russians, Czechs and Norwegians—they all seem to be running themselves ragged after hoverflies.

The background is in some sense language-based. The appearance of a marvellous book,
De sweefvliegen van Noordwest-Europa en Europees Rusland, in het Bijzonder van de Benelux,
published in Amsterdam in 1981, introduced a trend that resulted in a whole series of splendid field guides to European hoverflies. The English and the Danes did the most to literally translate hoverflies and make them readable, but the Belgians, Russians and Germans also produced very useful, modern guides. So the way was paved.

Over the course of just a few years, hoverflies became accessible even for amateur collectors, and it wasn’t long before hoverfly literature broke through on all fronts. Titles like
Dorset Hoverflies
and
Somerset Hoverflies
began to appear in England, a kind of local guide full of species lists and range maps where each find of even the tiniest fly was marked with a black dot. The Germans, always one step behind, but on the other hand more thorough, responded with
Untersuchung zum Vorkommen der Schwebfliegen in Niedersachsen und Bremen,
more than 500 pages thick. And so it’s gone. My favourite in the genre is
Hoverflies of Surrey,
in part because the pictures are so pretty, in part because they have found just as many species—202—as I have found on the island. Surrey covers an area of 1,679 square kilometres. My island measures fifteen, as I mentioned earlier.

One day, I think, I’m going to write one of those local field guides. In English. Just to show off. No other reason.

Anyway, the identification guides set off the boom, and now everything is moving along under its own power. Every issue of the German journal
Volucella,
which deals exclusively with hoverflies, contains a special section with the title “Neue Schwebfliegen-Literatur” (“New Hoverfly Publications”). In the latest issue, which is 260 pages thick, this new publication section catalogues more than 400 titles. And the next couple of years will see the first Swedish guide since 1909. A doorstop, a magnificent book with every species portrayed in scrupulous detail in newly painted watercolours, written by my friend the foremost expert, the man who once introduced me to hoverfly high society.

Needless to say, Doctor Orlík would have been interested in hoverflies if
Utz
had been written a few years later. Take my word for it.

But that’s not important. There’s another side of Orlík that both attracts and frightens me, as is so often the case with guardian angels. He really knows how to limit himself. I mean, he studies only one species of fly. But at the same time, there’s something superficial about him, and vacillating, as if at any moment he was about to run away. Chatwin knew what he was doing when he created this man.

And yet Chatwin himself was not much of an entomologist, although it’s said that he collected butterflies once when he was fifteen years old and spent a couple of months on Lundby Farm by Lake Yngaren in Södermanland. Much has been written about Bruce Chatwin’s travels around the world, but this, his first trip abroad, in the summer of 1955, remains a footnote.

The farm was owned by the once famous doctor Ivan Bratt—the man who invented Sweden’s version of alcohol rationing in 1917—and the idea was that during his stay in Sweden, Bruce would teach a bit of the noble art of English conversation to two of Bratt’s grandsons, Thomas and Peter. But little came of it. The boys thought Bruce was odd and undeserving of anything but nettles in his bed and other forms of bullying, so he hunted butterflies instead. And spent time with the boys’ uncle Percival, who lived on the farm, an elderly eccentric who in his youth had abandoned everything and tried to treat a deep depression by retreating to the Sahara Desert. In his old age, he still kept a small chest of sand from that journey.

When he visited Peter Bratt in Stockholm shortly before his death, Chatwin said it was during his meetings with Percival that summer in Södermanland that he decided what he wanted to do with his life. What became of the butterfly collection is not known. Presumably it was thrown out and is gone for good.

…

Doctor Orlík, too, had other interests.
Utz
is a rather complex novel for all its simplicity. The narrator tries to maintain contact with the bizarre Meissen collector, but the connection is broken after the Soviet occupation. Orlík, on the other hand, continues to write. In a stream of letters in his illegible scrawl, he honours his English acquaintance with pleas for expensive books and photocopies of scientific articles, begs money, asks for forty pairs of socks or orders his correspondent to track down some odd woolly mammoth bones in the Natural History Museum.

One letter informed me of his current project: a study of the house-fly (Musca domestica), as painted in Dutch and Flemish still-lifes of the seventeenth century. My role in this enterprise was to examine every photograph of paintings by Bosschaert, van Huysum or van Kessel, and check whether or not there was a fly in them.

I did not reply.

This correspondence too dries up, but many years later, when the narrator happens to pass through Prague, he decides to track down Utz’s long-since-vanished porcelain collection. In the palaeontological department of the National Museum he finds the now retired Doctor Orlík busy cleaning the shinbone of a mammoth. Together they make their way once again to Restaurant Pstruh.

“How are the flies?” I asked.

“I have returned to the mammoth.”

“I mean your collection of flies.”

“I have thrown.”

Chapter 17

The Allotted Time

The children were swimming down by the jetty, the sun was hot, everyone was in the water except me, sitting in the shade with my back against the wall. All I could manage was to read the paper, only the shortest items, meaningless summer news stories, of which one of thirteen lines informed me that a group of scientists in Australia had succeeded in figuring out how many stars there are in the universe. To be more exact, it seems there are ten times as many stars as there are grains of sand on earth.

On all the beaches, in all the deserts, everywhere.

This cheered me up at once and I forgot the heat. I travelled across the Sahara once, from Ouargla to Agadez, so I understand very well the scope of the astronomers’ discovery. Just estimating the total number of sand grains can be considered something of an achievement. But it was not this that cooled me and made me so happy, not the counting itself, but rather the fresh and nearly idiotic optimism of their attempt to explain. They didn’t say that the stars are incomprehensibly numerous, which would have been correct but still only a lifeless fact. They gave a number. With more zeros than you can count. Explaining the comprehensible is no challenge. But this!

True, the item ended somewhat timidly by saying that the estimate was valid only for that part of the universe that could be seen with a telescope, but by the time I’d read that far my failing will to live had already been restored. And when a certain Dr. Simon Driver on the next-to-last line extended the accumulating indecisiveness by remarking that the number of stars might also be infinite, I was already on my way. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, stimulates my imagination like this kind of utterly ineffective effort to describe something, the dumber the better.

Against all odds, some poor presbyopic chump takes a shot at it, maybe so he won’t make himself ill by sensing a truth no one else sees. And he falls flat on his face, of course, his truth as incomprehensible and strange as it was to begin with. But at least he’s tried.

And I thought, if someone can cheer me up this much by completely failing to describe a thing that doesn’t even interest me, then the last barrier has fallen. Nothing can stop me now. In his metaphor about the stars and the grains of sand, Dr. Driver had set the bar quite wonderfully low. Now everything was possible. At one blow, the heat had lost its power over my senses. I stood up and went into the library, closed the door, sat down at my desk, pulled out the telephone jack. Closed my eyes.

I had always imagined that this story would be quick to tell.

That isn’t the way it’s turned out.

No, nothing’s turned out the way I imagined. This simple history that interests no one turned out to be inhabited by a person named René Malaise, a madman who invented a trap and then went off the tracks, a man forgotten for good reason. What was he doing in here? Was it just my old attraction to losers? Or was it simply that Malaise—the prolific Malaise, the man who truly never limited himself—reminded me that concentration is always greatest when there is no rear exit? When time is measured, and maybe space?

Someone had told me about his death. A banal anecdote, one of many, but for me of course it was more important than all the others. It reminded me of travel, my own youthful travels. Because we all go off on long journeys that turn out to be full of disappointments. It is only much later that the earthquakes or other experiences, whatever they may have been, acquire significance.

Malaise grew old the way entomologists do. Ebba had been dead for several years, and he lived by himself on memories and fish. Until well into November, he usually stayed alone in Simpnäs, up in Roslagen, mostly for the sake of the fishing and fighting with his neighbours, but since he already had four heart attacks behind him, his doctors tried to get him to take it a little easier that last summer. Lay four nets, they said, not eight. He laid twelve—of course. There had been a strong wind that day at the end of June 1978, so his nets had picked up a lot of seaweed. Just pulling them out of the water was a tough job, but he wouldn’t give up. He wasn’t the type. It was only when he was back at his leaky house, beating the seaweed out of his twelve nets, that he had the final heart attack.

He managed to call the helicopter ambulance himself, and he was conscious the whole way in to Danderyd Hospital, where he died.

Malaise was a good storyteller. Everyone agrees on that. And he was one hell of a traveller. But that last journey, as it’s been related to me, was a confirmation of something else as well. Of what can happen when time is short and you know it. For it’s said that he lay at the front of the helicopter’s glass bubble, dying, and talked with beaming delight and almost lyrical euphoria about all the islands they passed, down there beneath them in the glittering sea. It was all over and he knew it. I want to believe that he was satisfied.

…

Not four years later, in March 1982, I sat on a black plastic sofa one whole night waiting for a flight at Los Angeles International Airport. After thirteen months of travels around the world, I was now finally on my way home, tired and disillusioned. Miserable. Of course I would keep up appearances—later. It wouldn’t be hard, because if you traced my route on a map with your finger, my trip was impressive. But deep down, I never understood what it meant. Except right then, that night.

I had flown in from Tahiti and was waiting for a flight to London. Then home by train and boat. But my plane didn’t leave for ten hours. I wasn’t particularly sleepy.

For some reason, there weren’t many people in the transit hall that night, but right across from me, on a similar sofa, on the other side of a low table, sat a woman of my own age, reading a book by Eduardo Galeano. We started talking, the way you do in airports at night. She was from Chile. Now she was on her way home to Santiago from Hawaii, where, if I remember right, she had taken part in a course at the university. She too was looking at a ten-hour wait. There were only a few minutes between her departure and mine. Neither of us would be left behind. We would never see one another again. We started talking.