The Fly Trap (4 page)

There are several makes of Malaise traps, some of them extremely handy, but since my decision was a defeat disguised as homage, I ordered the largest. Mega Malaise. From the USA. I absolutely believe that a certain person in his heaven smiled as I did so. I too was pleased with myself until I got a call from customs wondering what it was I had purchased from the mystical firm in California. They had unpacked the contraption and were now lost in thought. What in the world was this thing?

“A fly trap,” I said, foolishly.

At first there was complete silence, then a lot of questions about what I meant to use it for.

“Trapping flies,” I replied wittily. But I had aroused the suspicion of the red-tape expert at the other end of the line and was then unable to make a successful case for classifying my rig under the heading “Devices for Scientific Research.” As a result, an unreasonably heavy duty was assessed on the trap. Maybe I should have said it was a party tent. That would of course have been a lie, but only partly. I was in a party mood the very first night when I examined the collection chamber and found three hoverfly species that were new to the island, among them a specimen of
Chrysotoxum fasciatum
that to this day has never been seen here again.

All I did was hang up the trap between the woodshed and one corner of the house, and that’s pretty much where it’s stayed. Sometimes I manhandle it down to the creek or some other particularly promising place on the island, but for the most part it hangs out here in the garden. Every evening I put a couple of balls of tissue drenched in chloroform into the chamber, the same way southern European train robbers would knock a whole sleeping compartment senseless. Then I sort the booty and send my friend Malaise a mental note of thanks and admiration.

Where did he get the strength?

How did he manage to retain his sanity?

Sometimes I think it was simply a question of trust. He was secure in the knowledge that, come what may, this was his destiny. And he drew his strength from this certainty. He wrote very little, most of it now forgotten, but what there is seems to point in that direction.

One day as I stood looking for insects a short distance from the road, three men with large packs on their backs appeared. One of them was carrying a rifle, quite an unusual sight, as natives in Burma are forbidden to carry firearms. I had been watching these men from the moment they appeared around a crook in the road, but when the man with the rifle suddenly caught sight of me, he instantly raised the weapon and took aim. I had already realized that they must be opium smugglers. Had I made a careless movement, he would unquestionably have fired, but I relied on the fact that they must have heard about us and our insect gathering, so I turned my back and swung my net to catch an imaginary insect. I freely admit that the next few seconds were tense, but when I turned back a few moments later, all three men had disappeared.

…

From time to time, I decide to get to the bottom of my reluctance to travel. Why am I such an unsuccessful globetrotter? Why am I so homesick all the time? The usual result of my efforts is that I just sit somewhere engulfed in a swarm of little, round, colourless thoughts that lack any perceptible coherence. As if some higher power had emptied its hole punch into my head.

Chapter 4

The Man Who Loved Islands

Towards the end of his brief life, D. H. Lawrence wrote a short story called “The Man Who Loved Islands.” I had never read it, knew only its title, but I was nevertheless practically certain that the story would help me answer my eternally returning question: Why an island? For years I searched for this hard-to-find book in Stockholm’s secondhand bookshops, although I felt no great urgency. The mere knowledge that Lawrence had got to the bottom of the riddle soothed me. The answer existed. Moreover, inevitably, I had theories of my own.

For even if this island is like a Sunday afternoon, fifteen square kilometres in size, it is nevertheless so small and isolated that everyone who chooses to settle here without having deep roots in the community is expected to explain the decision as if they were joining some peculiar sect. Always the same question. Why this island? And, as ever, love is a good answer—as all the women know who arrived from distant places and married into ancient island families by way of perennial homebody boys with greasy caps and shotguns—women who now run the island’s practical and political affairs.

It’s said to be the same all over the world, in all seven seas. Islands are matriarchies of a kind seldom seen on land. The men—as Iceland’s president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir remarked on one occasion when the subject arose—the men flee to their own preferred landscape, which is the sea. They’re simply not around. So it was and still is in places where fishing and piloting remain important. But here? No. Here something else is at work.

It is always something else. “Circumstances.” Which is true, of course. And it makes a perfectly good answer, as does a longing for the raw beauty of the skerries and their shifting forms of silence at the edge of the open sea. Such things can be said, and in May, when the maples bloom and the rosefinch sings in the woods by the shore, no answers are needed, nor even questions. Nature is enough. Why
not
move out here? The change comes only later, several years later. It was only then that I thought I saw that the island had a peculiar attraction for men with a need for control and security, which they sought on land through power over others, but which out here was woven into the limitations of the insular landscape. For nothing is so enclosed and concrete as an island. In the old days, the days of seamen, the landscape was open and free in all directions. Now freedom takes a different form for those who find their way here. For us. For me.

Whichever way I go, sooner or later I come to the sea. That’s a banal observation, but within it, I think, lies a security that for many islanders is greater than the feeling of being trapped. Maybe it’s no more remarkable than sleeping better with the door closed. The thought struck me one summer morning when we had finally decided to capture the badger. Before it tipped over the house.

It usually lived under our cottage in the winter, right under the floor, and as long as the children were little, we all thought the arrangement was exciting and congenial. The space was so small that we could sometimes hear the rough brush on his back rasping against the floorboards when he turned around in his winter sleep. It was only when we abandoned the old house and built a new one by the lake that we discovered that the foundation was so undermined by all the tunnels of his burrow that the building was about to collapse. There had to be a limit to our hospitality, so the next time the little wedge-nosed miscreant appeared and began to install himself under the cottage, we turned to one of those inscrutable men to be found on every island who always have a rancid bratwurst on hand with which to bait their galvanized badger trap. This man set up his trap by the corner of the building. The very next morning, there lay the badger rolled up in a ball inside—sound asleep.

…

I need to interject here that the natives on our island are by no means exceptionally odd. Come to think of it, neither are the summer people. At least not compared with the new settlers, the enthusiasts who move out to the island, or anyway try to. Many come and leave again quickly, always with some equally idiotic project for which they’re hoping to get a government grant, since the island is so sparsely populated that no project is too harebrained to get official support.

People sometimes call me for help in investigating the possibilities. I am a biologist, after all. Their projects are often said to have an environmental dimension—the infallible key to getting grants—so I’m considered a good person to talk to. When we were new out here, I used to say that I was a writer, but all the women on the island felt so sorry for my wife that I started insisting I was a biologist instead. What else could I do? And if you’re a biologist on an island widely known for its rich biosphere, you have to put up with a lot of phone calls from morons. They always seem to assume that I’m a moron myself.

One man called because he wanted to, as he put it, reconnoitre the island for a small-scale industrial initiative that ought to be a dream project for some EU structural fund with the proper environmental orientation. He told me he’d been sitting at home one day watching the opening ceremony of some great sporting event—the Olympic Games, maybe, I don’t remember exactly. Anyway there was a gigantic stadium and a brass band, a parade of national teams, speeches and acrobats. Buckets of polychrome metallic confetti had rained down like an April snow shower past the cameras flashing from the seats, and at that moment he was transformed from a couch potato into an entrepreneur.

His idea was very simple. He himself thought it was also brilliant. He was going to raise Brimstone butterflies. In humongous greenhouses, he would breed prodigious quantities of Brimstone larvae and then manipulate the pupation in a cooling chamber in order to somehow synchronize the emergence of the adult insects.

He was going to cripple the confetti industry by inducing tens of thousands of Brimstones to do something almost impossible to achieve with, say, three Peacock butterflies. That was his plan. He had seen hundreds of white doves released when events were launched on television. Bright yellow butterflies would be much prettier. “You know, perfect.”

I told him the truth, that I thought his idea was just a tad optimistic, but that I would give a lot to see the result on a live broadcast, especially if it was raining. Thousands of butterflies floundering around on the grass, looking for something to hide under. It will make sports history, I said. He never called back. Neither did the genius who called to hear what I thought of the chances of leasing a little land on the island, which isn’t hard to do. He wanted to start an organic horseradish farm, which didn’t sound impractical either, I remarked. But to then sell it for the production of environmentally friendly tear gas to be used at riots? What was I supposed to say?

…

The man who loved islands was, of course, Lawrence himself, and the story was an allegory about his constant

wandering among different cultures and philosophies. When I finally got my hands on the book, I was disappointed. Was this all? A man inclined to misanthropy buys an island intending to mould it to his own personality and make it his own world, but agriculture doesn’t pay and his servants cheat him. So he sells the island and moves to a smaller one, with fewer servants and still fewer illusions, stands there in the wind and feels nothing, no joy, no longing, but has a child with the housekeeper’s daughter, whereupon all desire dies within him with such sickening finality that he has to flee again, to a third island, just a rock in the roaring sea, where he loses his mind among lumpish, bleating sheep and finally freezes to death in his primitive shack. One of the man’s final pleasures is that his cat vanishes and never reappears.

Only he still derived his single satisfaction from being alone, absolutely alone, with the space soaking into him. The grey sea alone, and the footing of his sea-washed island. No other contact. Nothing human to bring its horror into contact with him. Only space, damp, twilit, sea-washed space! This was the bread of his soul.

Frustrated, I stuffed the book back on the shelf and thought, this story is about neither islands nor love.

A couple of years later, I read it again, and then again, periodically, many times, especially when life on the island grew rigid from the pressure of encircling darkness and tragedy of a kind that the newcomer doesn’t see. My first impression of that text no longer fit. Lawrence had seen something that on certain days I wanted to call true.

Out of the very air came a stony, heavy malevolence. The island itself seemed malicious. It would go on being hurtful and evil for weeks at a time. Then suddenly again one morning it would be fair, lovely as a morning in Paradise, everything beautiful and flowing. And everybody would begin to feel a great relief, and a hope for happiness.

The parents in the story say that by living on the island they are not doing right by their children. Those who have no children feel they are not doing right by themselves. Yes, that’s how it is, exactly.

But everything fell into place with the flies. In exercising control over something, however insignificant and apparently meaningless, there is a peaceful euphoria, however ephemeral and fleeting, which Lawrence manages to evoke when he has his alter ego on the islands recover his balance by means of more or less primitive botanical collecting. On the first island he seeks shelter in his well-filled library, where he is absorbed in endless labour on a book about all the flowers mentioned by the Greek and Latin writers of the ancient world. Later, on the second, smaller island, he fills his prison with a sometimes enthralling effort to compile a complete catalogue of all the plants on the island.

It is only on the third island that he loses all interest in botany. “He was glad. He didn’t want trees or bushes. They stood up like people, too assertive. His bare, low-pitched island in the pale blue sea was all he wanted.”

“Buttonology” is what it’s called—disrespectful but accurate. As a collector, the man who loved islands is by disposition a classic buttonologist. He compiles catalogues. The idea is to be exhaustive, to include everything. In this way, the buttonologist differs from the mapmaker, whom he resembles and can easily be confused with. But the person who makes maps can never include everything in his picture of reality, which remains a simplification no matter what scale he chooses. Both attempt to capture something and to preserve it. And yet they are very different.

What bothers me is that on occasion the buttonologist, as in Lawrence’s case, seems to be merely an erstwhile mapmaker, now well on his way to madness. It’s just a phase.