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
“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
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