Free The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg Page B

ad. He referred all questions to the seller.

    This proved to be an old gentleman, slightly confused, who lived somewhere out in the woods. He chatted with me long and well, clearly both pleased and surprised that someone had an interest in his hovel. I listened, guardedly, moderately eager to own this ruin at the end of beyond. Troubles you can have for nothing, I thought. Why buy more of them in Svinhult? It was then he said the thing about the outhouse—parenthetically, no big deal, a curiosity perhaps, nothing more. It had belonged to Esaias Tegnér. Then he said that, shortly after Tegnér’s death in 1846, an auction was held at Östrabo in Växjö to sell the contents of his house. Even the outhouse was auctioned. For many years it had stood behind the parsonage in Svinhult. Now it was his.
    Municipal offices in Ydre confirmed the story. The cabin was old and ramshackle, and there was folklore about the outhouse. I was now bewitched. I called Professor Bergh in Lund, chairman of the Tegnér Society, and he couldn’t get a word in edgewise as I poured out my questions about the property auction. He hemmed and hawed for a while in confusion, then gave me an experienced assessment of my chances of establishing a provenance for the rotting outhouse. They were small. He himself had never heard of the object, but there was another individual in the society I might speak to. She was an archivist of the old school. If there was anything at all about the outhouse in writing, she would find it if anyone could. I called her. Heard how she slowly shook her head. My pulse resumed its normal rhythm.

    Three days later she called me back. It sounded as if she had run to the phone, for she was a little out of breath when she asked me if the outhouse in Svinhult was a two-seater.
    “A two-seater it is,” I said.
    “There was a two-seater sold after Tegnér died,” she said.
    There was bidding on the house, and I hung in there a good bit beyond the starting price. The broker was in Tranås with a telephone in each hand. On the one, me; on the other, a bidder from Mariannelund. He got the place for 73,000 crowns. I’ve never had any regrets. But it was only afterwards that I asked myself what I actually wanted with that house. About the point of the whole thing. The only answer I could come up with was that I had been carried away on a wave of irresistible desire to collect that outhouse. Like a fetish.

    “Hi, everyone, I’ve travelled around the world and I own Tegnér’s crapper.”
    No, it wouldn’t do. Flies are better. They allay anxiety in a different way. On top of which they’re free.

Chapter 8
The Riddle of Doros
    I have made one exception, only one, from my rigid rule about collecting only on the island. One of the 202 fly species in the rows in my cabinet is a borderline case. It was the satellite man who brought it. Eristalis oestracea, the big shaggy one.
    A pretty fly, capricious in its behaviour. Perhaps it’s had a hard time surviving, because its business plan since immemorial times, maybe millions of years, has been, like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, to plagiarize the troublesome gadfly ( Oestrus ovis ). They are truly very similar. A cow can hardly tell the difference, and neither can anyone else. The problem is just that the gadfly was eradicated from this part of the world a long time ago. And so the protective similarity vanished. For this same reason, we stand in openmouthed wonder at other insects so bizarrely designed that not even a surrealist on drugs could have made them up. Perhaps they are merely imitating something that no longer exists.

    Explaining rarity is an art, plain and simple. Sometimes you can’t escape the questions of casual observers unless you retell the story of the rare Himalayan dung beetle that once thrived far and wide on the majestic droppings of the woolly mammoth but that now, like a Russian prince in exile, gets along on the meagre manure of the yak. The more I think