The Fly Trap (13 page)

“Look through the insects from Kamchatka. That’s where you’ll find your answer.”

And how I looked! I spent an entire day at the museum poring over articles about all the new species René had brought home from the Far East, and some of the writing was so dry it might have burst into flame. There were some undeniably interesting items, hymenoptera with names like
bergmani, hulténi,
hedstroemi
and
sjoeblomi,
that last one named for the engineer Karl Sjöblom, who lived with René and Ester Blenda in Klyuchi in the mid-1920s. The only person missing was, in fact, Ester Blenda. On the other hand, that may not be significant, because he didn’t organize this material until the 1930s, by which time the marriage had already been dissolved.

In any case, as long as I was there I took the opportunity to glance through some other articles from a different trip Malaise made later—to Burma. And there!
Nordströmia amabilis
. But no, it wasn’t her. This insect, a butterfly new to science, was named after Frithiof, not Ester Blenda, and the man who described it (and was therefore entitled to name it whatever he wanted) was another of the period’s entomological madmen. His name was Felix Bryk (1882–1957) and he had a number of strings to his bow. Among other things, he travelled in Africa and wrote a clearly X-rated book called
Neger-Eros: Etnologische Studien über das Sexualleben bei Negern
(1928), but that needn’t concern us here.

As usual, what I found in the end was not what I was looking for.
Ebba soederhalli
. A sawfly from Burma. Malaise had finally found love. An unmistakable case.

Chapter 12

The Entomologist’s Career

René Malaise never had children. The memories were dispersed along with the heritage. Isn’t it strange how far a person like Malaise can sink into oblivion in the course of only a few decades? And yet he carved his mark as well as he could. Even his legacies were generous: the insects; his property in Roslagen, north of Stockholm; his incomparable art collection in the villa on Lidingö.

I looked up his nephews and nieces. Friendly people with bright recollections of a man whose renown belonged to a completely different age, a dotty relative who’d gone his own way, always in the same good spirits. They smiled in amazement and a kind of embarrassment when I told them that every entomologist everywhere knows his name, if only in the form of a trap. His siblings and their children had called him Puppan, no one knew exactly why. It was just a nickname of the kind people in every family have in readiness for particularly eccentric relatives.

They searched in every corner and attic for half-forgotten memories and traces. They lent me everything they found. Yellowed newspaper clippings, some letters, a bundle of postcards, his passport, photographs. Not much.

But in any case, I learned enough to understand that his heyday was the 1930s. It’s true that at times I was inclined to regard his whole life as a single unbroken heyday, because I think that’s the way he saw it himself. But if we evaluate his importance as a minor celebrity and public personality, successful in the eyes of other people, then it’s the ’30s that are his.

He went home. Why? No one knows. His return to Sweden remains as unexplained as his reasons for spending pretty much the entire 1920s in Kamchatka. Maybe the bureaucracy became too troublesome. His Soviet trade-union book, which still exists, was issued in 1929. It is full of stamps and cryptic notations, and one of the attic discoveries is a couple of badly dog-eared but legible certificates regulating the sable catch he lived on periodically. I can readily imagine that Malaise, or “Citizen M” as he’s called in the documents, was not really happy with the way the Kamchatka district agricultural administration rode hard on him. He abandoned his Kamchatka adventure and left the tundra for good. Maybe he was simply ready to leave.

After several months of intensive hymenoptera-hunting outside Vladivostok in the summer of 1930, he took the train to Stockholm.

How he supported himself over the next few years is not known, but there is reason to believe that he lived on a combination of inherited money, lecture fees, grants, and research fellowships from the Academy of Science and other institutions. It was only in 1938 that he took a position in the entomological department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, where he remained until 1958. But let’s not get ahead of our story. Let’s begin with his career. Which was brilliant.

First and foremost, Malaise was a collector. There can be no doubt about that. He had the necessary imagination and, above all, the persistence, the inexhaustible energy. But in contrast to so many other talented collectors, he was also energetic and productive when it came to organizing and systematizing his catch with scientific rigour. A flood of pedantic texts on the taxonomy of sawflies began to appear in scientific journals, and the first part of his classification table of the sawfly species that occur in Sweden, still in use, appeared as early as 1931.

It was also at this time, 1933, that he married Ebba Söderhell, a teacher of biology and religion at Lidingö High School. And the fact that he named a Burmese sawfly after her should not be misinterpreted. We must understand it—according to the prevalent custom among entomologists—as love.

Now there are those who insist that our hero had in the meantime entered into a second marriage of convenience, with the writer Vivi Laurent. But I’ve done a good deal of research in this matter, and I’ve been unable to find evidence for anything more than a close friendship. Frankly, I think this relationship is a family rumour that has been blown out of proportion over the years. Maybe it was René himself who invented the whole story. It wouldn’t surprise me. They
could
have been married. According to the legend, spelled out in a little biography of Malaise that was printed or rather stencilled in a handful of copies, the idea behind the marriage was that they were going to Egypt together. Once there, however, Vivi paired up with the botanist Gunnar Täckholm (whom she demonstrably did marry), whereupon René is supposed to have come home. As I said, however, I don’t believe the rumour is true.

I mention it anyway, partly because life on the island has taught me to appreciate hearsay, partly because the friendship with Vivi, however close it may or may not have been, may tell us something about René Malaise. For example, that he was drawn to strong, independent, adventurous women. Long before Vivi Laurent-Täckholm became an honoured and world-renowned professor of botany at the University of Cairo, she enjoyed great success as a young writer, much the same way Ester Blenda Nordström did, and partly with the same kind of daring, caustic social reporting. They truly had much in common, although their destinies were incomparably different. For one thing, Vivi lived as long as René. At his eightieth birthday party in 1972, there she is making her way through the crowd. I’ve seen the photograph.

Undeniably, Ebba Malaise makes a somewhat more restful impression. But only somewhat. She was not one to sit at home in Stockholm and knit while her husband saw the world. On the contrary. The year they were married she went along happily on the poorly financed and, to say the least, dangerous expedition to Burma, and there, in the wilderness, it was often her contributions that made the trip such a great success.

Malaise, in short, had not had enough. He was an explorer, after all, and he had truly mastered the art of travelling. Several years at a microscope had been very quiet, perhaps, but they had shown him that a really pioneering dissertation on Asiatic sawflies would necessitate further collecting expeditions in addition to those he had made to the Soviet Union. And the whitest areas on the biologists’ maps were in northern Burma and in the neighbouring province of Yunnan in southern China. That’s where he’d go. There he would test his ingenious trap. He had demonstrated the invention both in Stockholm and at the British Museum in London, although most people had just laughed at him. They had the greatest faith in him as a specimen collector, but the fly trap was considered a joke. In time, it would prove to be anything but.

The Burma expedition was a fairly brief excursion, at least by his standards. It lasted from the end of 1933 to the beginning of 1935. Nevertheless, it was a triumph, thanks in great part to the traps he had sewn in Rangoon. They exceeded all expectations, even his own. In addition, he managed with Ebba’s help to transform all the village children into field assistants, as tireless as he himself. It was Ebba who ran the pharmacy, and her renown as a healer spread rapidly in that wild country. In a description of the journey that he wrote for the journal
Ymer,
René writes:

People often appeared with all sorts of lizards, snakes, household utensils, and anything else they thought we might want, and every morning when the sick bay was completed, all the children in the village would come, each with a little bamboo tube, and when they took out the wad of moss in one end and tipped out the contents, I had to make a quick grab for the scampering beetles, centipedes, or whatever else they’d had in their bamboo shoots.

They had set up base in Kambaiti, a small village 2,000 metres above sea level in the northeast corner of the country, a stone’s throw from the Chinese border and not far from the headwaters of the Mekong River. It was virgin country, wild in every sense of the word. The rain forest was pretty much untouched, the insect life was almost completely unknown, and the people who lived there in the mountains had only recently given up headhunting and other customs so barbaric that the British, the colonial authorities, had prevailed upon Malaise to give them a written assurance that he travelled the area at his own risk.

René had been through this before. Afraid he was not—not of savages nor of miserable living conditions in smoky huts with mouldy floors and leaky roofs. And, however it happened, it seems that Ebba was made of the same stuff. One of her tasks in Burma was to buy and trade for ethnographic objects—costumes, weapons, musical instruments, pieces of art, tools of every description—and a look at the result (the collection is in the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg) shows that she must have thrown herself into the adventure without much hesitation. One day they crossed the border into China:

Only a few kilometres on the other side of the border we discovered that the official warning was not entirely unjustified. Our boy was walking ahead of us when he was suddenly stopped by three mountain tribesmen. One of them was armed with a rifle, which he pointed at the boy’s chest. But when the man caught sight of my wife and me, he lowered the rifle and waited to see what would happen. Our boy was unarmed, but I had a revolver in my pocket and a shotgun on my back. As we approached, the boy took the opportunity to move away, but when my wife saw the tribesman’s rifle, it aroused her ethnographic interest and she walked up to examine it more closely. This made me uneasy, for if it came to hostilities, she stood directly in my line of fire and would have kept me from shooting. She apparently understood the danger, for she pulled a butterfly jar from her pocket, showed it to the three men, and spoke to them, as usual, in Swedish.

Swedish schoolteacher with dead butterfly in jar. Not surprisingly, the bandits were utterly befuddled.

When the monsoon rains rendered all further specimen collection in the mountains impossible, they headed south to the Shan States—closer to the northern border of Thailand and difficult to reach even today—into the area now called the Golden Triangle. René moved ahead like a thrashing machine with his net. Ebba traded for hundreds of objects, including a canoe. You have to wonder how they dealt with all the baggage.

…

Is it energy that’s the secret? Perseverance? Can it be that simple?

I myself just get tired and gloomy, sometimes apathetic. The last thing I want is adventure. And, least of all, people speaking a language I don’t understand. The easiest days are when I meet a fellow Swede, as if the invisible codes of language and culture were the combination to a lock. I am forever sitting around the hotel or the hostel. At a café, a bar. The first such place where I became a “regular” was in Ouagadougou. Always a regular. If I’m in a city for only a week, I find a place to go back to. Before the week is out, I don’t even need to order. They know what I want. The usual.

How can you long to go back to a place before you’ve even been there?

…

Their homecoming was grand. A media event. “Distinguished Scientist and Wife Return from Burma and South China,” cried one newspaper on its front page. Another headline declared, “Dr. Malaise and Wife Home Today.” In Gothenburg, there was wild rejoicing at the wonderful collection of
ethnographica,
unique in the world, and at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, which was to share the insects with the British Museum, they were prostrate with admiration and respect.

If there had been a great deal of material to organize after the Kamchatka expedition, it was nothing compared with what the entomology department now unpacked. Over time, the specimens would be sorted, prepared, labelled and sent to experts all over the world, family by family, genus by genus, species by species, endlessly. Still today, seventy years later, they haven’t seen the bottom of every jar (which is probably scandalous) and the number of scientific articles the Burmese insects have given rise to is difficult to estimate.

Because so much was new to science, a number of species were named after their eminent collector. Just among the click beetles, a relatively small family, there are thirteen Burmese species in different genera with the species name
malaisei
. In addition, he managed to bring home 1,700 freshwater fish in formalin, which he seems to have grabbed almost absentmindedly in the frenzy of collecting.

He gave interviews, delivered lectures on the radio, and appeared at every conceivable kind of event whenever he wasn’t doing research or publishing articles. He now began in earnest to work on his magnum opus on sawflies, and of course to prepare his next expedition—to Ceylon, southern India and the western Himalayas. Attracting financial backing was no trouble this time, for he was now once and for all an established explorer. His renown had spread far beyond narrow scientific circles, indeed all the way to the weeklies and the daily verses of the major newspapers. Some doggerel from
Dagens Nyheter
may say more about his position in society at that time than all the praise pouring in from scientists all over the world.