The Fly Trap (2 page)

Where I would wind up was less certain, but because it was I and I alone who was entrusted with the task of cleaning up this example of great acting—on my knees, in the dark, with a rag, hastily—it became clearer and clearer to me that my place was not, perhaps, in the theatre.

I may be exaggerating everything that happened in those days, romanticizing my longing and my fear, remembering only occasional lines of dialogue. It’s possible, I know, but it was definitely spring and I was absolutely both confused and in love. On top of which, certain lines stuck to me like birthmarks. Not because they meant so very much, not then, but maybe just because they matched the colour of something in my life.

When Wesley stands downstage and disgraces himself, and his mother Ella has just complained about the way he’s only making everything worse for his poor sister, he says, “I’m not. I’m opening up new possibilities for her. Now she’ll have to do something else. It could change her whole direction in life. She’ll look back and remember the day her brother pissed all over her charts and see that day as a turning point in her life.”

That happened in the first act. In the third, when the sister finally leaves and makes his words prophetic, she bursts out, “I’m gone. I’m gone! Never to return.”

I used to repeat those very words to myself, quietly but with the same rebellious tone used onstage, when, late at night, I returned to the stables with my shaggy friend from the country. Later that spring, I could no longer carry the lamb, so I led it on a leash, like a dog of some breed unknown even in snooty Östermalm. Elderly ladies stared after us, but we paid no attention and went on forging our plans in silence.

Only one year later, I lived here on the island—along with the girl who sat in the audience one evening and said later that the play was both funny and moving, yet wrapped in a singular fragrance of wool, piss and sautéed kidney. That was 1985. I was twenty-six years old. All this business with flies—that too was only a matter of time.

Chapter 2

My Entry into Hoverfly High Society

The theatre was my second attempt to flee from entomology. Aimless travel was the first. And I am, of course, painfully aware of how sorry a subject can seem when the only approach to it is flight. But that’s the truth, and there’s no way around it.

No sensible person is interested in flies, or anyway no woman. At least not yet, I like to think, although in the end I’m always quite happy that no one else cares. The competition isn’t exactly murderous. And when all is said and done, what I wanted to be best at was not urinating before an audience—my nerves were too delicate for that—but something else, anything at all actually, and finally it became obvious that my talents lay with flies.

That’s a fate that takes some getting used to.

Anyway, the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.

But as I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. Should someone have the desire, or simply the kindhearted impulse, they could bind it all together in the genre—mostly unknown in Sweden—so lovingly practised by the Smiths, Ken and Vera, in their quite fabulous book
A Bibliography of the Entomology of the Smaller British Offshore Islands
. It wouldn’t be easy to do, I’m afraid, but after all it’s the thought that counts.

In my library, which is large enough to withstand a Russian siege, this book occupies a unique position. It is quite thin, just over one hundred pages, light blue in colour, and it has perhaps taught me little more than that Englishmen are crazy, but I am always equally exhilarated when I see it, heft it in my hand and read its title, as if it somehow justifies my existence. The text on the back of the dust jacket tells how the authors met and fell in love at Keele University in 1954 and how, later, they began studying flies together and started to collect literature about the insects on smaller islands. The couple are pictured as well, separately, and I can assure you that they look very nice. Ken—thin-haired, dressed in a suit, waistcoat and tie—seems to be hiding an ironic smile in his neatly trimmed beard, while Vera looks a little as if she had just woken up, with rosy cheeks. She appears to be thinking about something else. You can see that he loves her.

The book consists of a long list, nothing else. A catalogue of every known book and article about insect fauna on the islands along the coasts of Great Britain, from Jersey in the south to the Shetland Islands in the north. More than a thousand titles.

What is it these people have tried to capture? Hardly just insects.

…

In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped, and my past, as always, caught up with me. When anyone asked, therefore, I said succinctly that hoverflies are meek and mild creatures, easy to collect, and that they appear in many guises. Sometimes they don’t even look like flies. Some of them look like hornets, others like honeybees, parasitic ichneumon wasps, gadflies or fragile, thin-as-thread mosquitoes so tiny that normal people never even notice them. Several species resemble large, bristly bumblebees, complete with in-flight drone and coats flecked with pollen. Only the expert is not deceived. We are not many, but we grow very old.

Nevertheless, the differences are great, in fact greater than the similarities. For example, wasps and bumblebees, like all the other hymenoptera, have four wings, whereas flies have only two. That’s elementary. But it’s a thing people seldom see, principally because flies can easily achieve several hundred wing beats per second.

The entomological literature that soon began to fill my island house tells of a Finnish scientist named Olavi Sotavalta, whose interests included an investigation of insect wing frequencies. In particular, he occupied himself with the biting midges, which manage to reach an astonishing frequency of 1,046 wing beats per second. Sophisticated instruments in his laboratory allowed him to measure exactly and unambiguously, but just as important for Sotavalta’s research was his wonderful musicality and the fact that he had perfect pitch. He could determine the frequency simply by listening to the hum, and the foundation of his renown was laid when, in a famous experiment, he managed to trim the wings of a midge in order to increase the frequency beyond the limits of what seemed possible. He warmed up the midge’s tiny body several degrees above normal and cut its wings with a scalpel to minimize air resistance, whereupon the little beast achieved no less than 2,218 wing beats per second. It was during the war.

In my mind’s eye, I see Olavi Sotavalta lying on his back in his grey-green sleeping bag somewhere in the bright summer nights of northernmost Finland, maybe on the shore of Lake Inari, smiling to himself as he listens to billions of hums from the space around him, thin as filaments of mica.

But I was going to talk about disguises, about the art of mimicking a bumblebee. We all know why. Profitability. Birds like to eat flies but usually avoid hymenoptera, which can sting. And so nature’s perpetual arms race has formed masses of harmless flies into lifelike reproductions of all sorts of unpleasant things. I don’t know why hoverflies have become such superb impostors, but that’s what’s happened, just as surely as the sun was shining from a clear blue high-summer sky one day when, at the very beginning of my career as a fly expert, I stood on watch in a clump of bishop’s weed in bloom. There were insects everywhere. Pearl butterflies, rose chafers, longhorn beetles, bumblebees, flies, all sorts. And me, of course, wearing shorts and a sunhat, armed with the blissful thoughtlessness of the trigger-happy hunter and a short-shafted, collapsible tulle net of Czech design.

Then, suddenly, a coal-black missile came in from the right two metres above the nettles. I had just enough time to think “stone bumblebee,” no more, but within a fraction of a second I also thought I sensed a strange lightness of behaviour. Very subtle, barely perceptible, but the very suspicion released a reflex backhand sweep of my net.

That catch came to be my ticket of admission into hoverfly high society.

But first, a more comprehensive setting of the scene. We’ll need to take this from the top. And what better place to start than with a description of how the hunt takes place. We are all familiar with the conventional image of the entomologist as a breathless twit rushing wildly across fields and meadows in pursuit of swiftly fleeing butterflies. Quite aside from the fact that this image is not entirely true to life, I can assure you that it is utterly incorrect when it comes to collectors of hoverflies. We are quiet, contemplative people, and our behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic. Running is not necessarily beneath our dignity, but it is in any case pointless because the flies move much too fast. Consequently, we stand still, as if on guard, and moreover almost exclusively in places with blazing sunshine, little breeze and fragrant flowers. Passersby can therefore easily get the impression that the fly-hunter is a convalescent of some kind, momentarily lost in meditation. This is not wholly inaccurate.

The equipment is not remarkable. Net in one hand, pooter in the other. The latter is a sucking device consisting of a short, transparent fibreglass cylinder with corks at both ends. A plastic tube runs through one of the corks and a long hose through the other. The tube is pointed carefully at sitting flies, the hose is held in the user’s mouth. And if he can get close enough without scaring the fly, a quick intake of breath is all it takes to suck it into the fibreglass cylinder. A fine-mesh filter in the rear cork prevents the animal from continuing on down his throat. Answering constant impertinent questions about his sanity is, however, unpreventable. Believe me, I have heard every conceivable insinuation and witticism along these lines. So I know from experience that the only way to cool off the grinning idiots is with an unexpected demonstration of the third piece of equipment—the poison bottle.

With the casual ease of a man of the world, I haul it out of my pocket and remark, truthfully, that I have in my hand enough cyanide to put the entire population of the island to sleep for good. All the cheap grins are then promptly transformed into respectful questions about how in hell a person gets his hands on cyanide, which I never reveal. Many experts use ethyl acetate, others chloroform, but I prefer cyanide. It’s more effective.

Almost three hundred people live on the island.

The big black fly flapped about and died quickly in the poison fumes, and since this occurred during my first summer of fly catching (we had then lived on the island for ten years), I didn’t know right away what species I had captured. I could see it was a hoverfly, that’s something you learn in a few days, but it was only later that day, at the microscope, surrounded by teetering stacks of books with titles such as
British Hoverflies,
Danmarks Svirrefluer
and
Biologie der Schwebfliegen Deutschlands,
that I realized it was a rare
Criorhina ranunculi.

The very next morning, for the first time, the island received a visit from the country’s foremost expert on the
Syrphidae,
the hoverfly family. He examined my trophy sceptically but then brightened up, questioned me at length about the place of capture, congratulated me and then, over coffee, related the following history.

Of all the hoverflies in the country,
Criorhina ranunculi
is not only one of the largest and most beautiful, it is also so rare that in the early 1990s the decision was made to list it as extinct in Sweden. At that time, it had not been seen for sixty years. The total number of sightings was three: two in Östergötland and one in Småland.

My newfound friend paused for effect and poured a dollop of milk into his coffee cup. The swifts cried, a great loon was fishing out beyond the dock, and far away I could hear taxi boats in the strait that divides the island from the mainland. It was a hot July day.

The species was seen for the first time in 1874, in Gusum in the province of Östergötland. The man holding the net was no less a personage than Peter Wahlberg, the man who succeeded Berzelius in the post of permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in the eventful year 1848. After a long life in the service of research as a botanist and professor of materia medica at the Karolinska Institute, he had now worked his way up to flies, which strikes me as reasonable and logical considering the fact that back in 1833 he was one of the founders of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, later dissolved. He was probably a happy man. His portrait in the encyclopaedia suggests as much. His younger brother, on the other hand, looks mostly angry, as if he suffered from toothache or poor finances. His name was Johan Wahlberg and he was more the adventurous type, known to posterity as an African explorer, big game–hunter and manic collector of articles of natural history. He died before his time in a fight with an elephant.

The next time
Criorhina ranunculi
turned up was in Korsberga on the Småland plateau. That was in 1928, the collector was Daniel Gaunitz, and four years later another specimen was caught in Borensberg by his brother Sven, later the author of a series of informative articles including “The Old-House Borer in Mariefred” and “Coprophiles of Åtvidaberg.” There was a third brother, too, named Carl Bertil. They came from Sorsele. All of them wrote books, mostly about insects.

Anyway, after Borensberg,
Criorhina ranunculi
vanished for a generation, until the man across the table from me on the terrace managed to find a couple of specimens on the western outskirts of Stockholm. My fly was in any case the sixth one ever seen in Sweden. It was my first triumph. Since then, I and others have seen the species many times, either because it has become more common or, more likely, because we have learned more about which flowers it visits, and when, and what kind of rotting deciduous trees its larvae cannot easily survive without. And how to distinguish it from a stone bumblebee.