The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg Page B

her husband. Not a line. No doubt he was out somewhere with his net. Yet she is the person who provides the most probable explanation of why René Malaise stayed out there for ten years. I think he was quite simply enjoying himself. It was his kind of landscape.

Klyuchevskaya rages upward towards the sky. It’s as if she knows herself to be the world’s greatest volcano and therefore longs to reach still higher; as if she were furious at being tied to the earth and broke her way up into space to reach right to heaven in her wild, boundless vanity.

Chapter 10
The Net and Loneliness
    Ester Blenda Nordström had an older brother named Frithiof. He was for the most part her exact opposite. Quiet and stationary as a barnacle. A dentist. But he devoted all his free time to collecting butterflies. Over the years, he became the greatest of all experts in Sweden, and his career had its crowning touch from 1935 to 1941 when, with Albert Tullgren, he wrote the magnificent Svenska fjärilar ( Swedish Butterflies ), unsurpassed to this day.
    He never said much about his mysterious sister. But there is one place in John Landquist’s memoirs where Frithiof flits by in an obscure comment about her life. Professor and literary critic Landquist had been head over heels in love with Ester Blenda years earlier, as, clearly, had his wife at that time, the feminist writer Elin Wägner. Ester Blenda had lived with them for several years in her youth. Landquist writes, “Years later, after her death, her brother Dr. Frithiof Nordström, the famous butterfly expert, told me that she remained strict in erotic matters all her life.” Whatever he may have meant by that.

    In any event, it appears that Frithiof Nordström spent several summers here on the island in the 1910s. He collected here and wrote about his finds in Entomologisk Tidskrift . Maybe he came here for the butterflies. The island was already known among collectors. The locals were a little crazy, to be sure, but it had a distinctive flora and many unusual insects.
    He and I have a social life of the entomological kind. Finding new species that have never before been taken on the island or even in the whole province of Uppland can, of course, be very exciting, but it doesn’t compare with finding insects that others saw long ago and that no one has seen since. The ones presumed to have vanished. I cannot describe the feeling other than to liken it to a form of social intercourse, where time means a great deal and nevertheless nothing. If I see a rare butterfly that Frithiof once captured almost a hundred years ago, it’s like getting an unexpected picture postcard from an old acquaintance off on a long holiday.

    I look forward with impatience to the day when our natural history museums get around to cataloguing their collections in a searchable database the way the Royal Library does in Stockholm. Only then can the postcards get flowing in earnest. As things are, it’s impossible to ferret out what other people have caught on the island and when. As soon as a collector at long last dies, the fruits of his life’s labours and joys wind up at some museum, usually in Lund or Stockholm, whereupon all of it is amalgamated into the museum’s main collection, each species in its own drawer. They do this for practical reasons. And for anyone doing research on a particular insect family, this steadily growing museum collection becomes ever more usable and valuable. At the same time, however, it’s like spreading ashes in the wind. Reconstructing a collector’s journey is impossible once his prey has been dispersed.

    Sten Selander, who also lived out here at that time, described his own collection of stinging wasps as if it were one of his written works. This was in his melancholy essay “The Drawer Where Summer Dwells.” He remembers. They’re not pretty, the wasps, not like butterflies…
But the hymenoptera have one quality I understand, almost the only comprehensible aspect of