The professor had spent the evening organising a newly acquired collection of insects – the beetles gathered by Count Mannerheim – and examining their chitinous shells, but he had complained of tiredness and went to bed early. In the morning, the housekeeper found him in bed, already cold. His heart had taken its final beat. Hilda looks up at an elm swaying in the wind, and Matilda takes the folder of drawings from her friend’s arms, lest her tears smudge the pictures of the arthropods.
Their collaboration lasted six years and took in four hundred and fifty-four spiders and one sea cow, but now von Nordmann has gone the way of all living creatures.
Rain lashes down from the sky. It has been a cold, wet summer, the potatoes and crops are rotting in the ground and the earth gives off a sweet, sickly smell. Hilda Olson walks until the city turns to fields, the fields to thickets, and there are no people in sight. She heads in among the trees and kneels down. The rain has filled her trap. Muddy water spills over the edges, but there are a few shrivelled creatures at the bottom, and these she plucks out and stores. She collects the spiders and submerges them in ethanol, though she is unsure who will look at her discoveries now. The professor is gone, and she will be unable to take part in the expeditions of the naturalists’ society or play any part in putting together their exhibitions. She is not a naturalist, and she will never become one. She can no longer draw her own discoveries, not like before. The Chevalier microscope has been gifted to Bonsdorff’s nephew, Johan Axel Palmén. Now he can examine these tiny beings under the lens, and she will be left with the inadequate powers of the naked eye.
After von Nordmann’s death, she grieves for her mentor, for the friend he had become. She takes to visiting Matilda on Sundays, and together they reminisce about her wise, cheerful father. At times, Hilda tells Matilda about her own father and misses both men in equal measure, vehemently, viscerally. She is in mourning, but she would like to continue drawing, and asks Bonsdorff to spread the word to his colleagues that she is available and keen to work for them. But the naturalists would rather hire the young men from von Wright’s drawing school as their assistants. With young men, they need not consider the mores of social etiquette nor worry that their assistant will suddenly marry.The naturalists have no use for her, so she offers her services as a map sketcher and an illustrator for magazines and publishers, but even then nobody responds.
Perhaps she will simply have to make a name for herself as an artist, she thinks, and she decides to send her most beautiful spiders to an exhibition of the Art Society. Her drawings are accepted, but in the exhibition hall a terrible disappointment awaits her. Her work has been hidden away in the furthest corner of the room in light so bad that it cannot possibly do justice to the detail of her spiders, and to add insult to injury she cannot find her name in the exhibition catalogue. She studies the brochure in bewilderment until she finds the professor’s name:Councillor of State v. Nordmann. The Society has credited her drawings to the professor, and she marches out of the exhibition without speaking to a single patron.
Hilda does not find work as an illustrator and does not marry, but her landlord still demands the rent, so she accepts a position writing up notes for the magistrate. Now she spends her days reproducing letters, original documents, builders’ certificates, passports and debt notices. The work is monotonous and the pay dismal, but even she must eat, though she yearns to go back to her work as an illustrator so much that it hurts. But she does not come from a wealthy family, she has no benefactor to take care of her living costs, so she grits her teeth and writes up one document after another.
She spends the daytime copying receipts from the city’s debt payment plans, and in the evenings she feels as though nothing has any meaning anymore. She muddles up her words, and thehand holding her pen aches. At times like this, she retrieves her spiders. This she does almost daily, regardless of the weather and the smell of damp laundry that fills her small room when her clothes get wet in the rain. She does this because, kneeling down by her trap, she can imagine that when she returns there will a letter from von Nordmann waiting for her in the letterbox:Miss Olson, pack your things, we are going on a trip!
She has finished copying the city’s tax-base report, delivered the papers to the magistrate and picked up a new pile of papers covered in the officials’ smudged shorthand. The wad of paper feels heavy in her bag, leaving her in low spirits. When she gets home, she checks her letterbox. She has stopped waiting for a response to her many applications, but sometimes she receives a letter from her siblings with news of her sister’s children and her brothers’ greetings from all corners of the world. They have set off to sea, just like their father, and Hilda reads their letters with a pang of envy. Only a moment ago, she too could write to them about her exciting adventures in faraway lands, but what could she possibly tell her family now? Her life has become small and tedious. No expeditions, no research trips to Åland and Lapland nor journeys to Odesa and the Crimea, just endless documents and her small, stuffy room. But one day she opens the letterbox lid, and her gloom evaporates in an instant.
In Finland, her applications had been dismissed out of hand, but she did not give in. She switched language and sent examples of her work around Europe. Now, waiting for her in the letterbox is a letter with a stamp bearing the imposing profile of Queen Victoria. She tears open the envelope, and after readingthe words she hurries indoors, sits down at her desk without even taking off her coat, and picks up her pen: yes, yes, yes, she will take the job!
Flowers seem to burst through the image. Hilda has positioned the leaves and petals of the meadow flowers to form a most pleasing pattern. She has visited Kew Gardens and Epping Forest, drawing her surroundings, sketching snowdrops and enchanter’s nightshade, and now she has transferred everything she has learned onto wallpaper. It took her a while to find the right rhythm, but now the plants have settled, and she is pleased with the result. The work as a wallpaper designer allows her to spend her days drawing once again, and though she sometimes yearns for the past, her microscope and the strict, systematic nature of scientific work, she cannot complain. And she has found herself a good friend in London. Miss Witherwick creates wallpaper designs too, and now the two share both a job and a room, and on weekends they pack up their easels and head out to the countryside.
The image is ready, and before Hilda sends it off to be transferred onto printing plates and entered into the machine that will reproduce her design on wallpaper, she makes one last-minute addition. On the leaf of the flower at the very edge of the pattern, she draws a tiny spider, so tiny that it will barely be noticed unless one were to examine the image very carefullyindeed. But she knows it is there. A minuscule creature on a primrose leaf, a creature very nearly named after her. She moves on to the next one, arranges the plants and animals into images that people will use to decorate the walls of their salons without ever learning the name of the young lady who helped enrich their quotidian lives.
Professor of anatomy Evert Bonsdorff sits pensively amid his collections and loosens his collar. He has just seen his friend and colleague off on his final journey, looked on as von Nordmann was lowered into the earth, and he instinctively thinks about his own death. He is an anatomist and knows his own fate all too well: soon, his cells will divide for the last time, the carefully balanced system of molecules will begin to break down and his writings will be forgotten. This is how science works. New generations make new discoveries, write new studies, and it won’t be long before nobody will even remember his ground-breaking study of the human sympathetic nervous system. But he has something that time cannot erode. His body may turn to dust and his writings age, but his bones will remain and carry his name forever.
Bonsdorff leaves his bone collection to the university, but there is one condition in his will: the collection must never be merged with those of any other museum or society. Bonsdorff’s nervous system stops sending messages, blood ceases to circulate in his veins, but his anatomical museum will endure and will move into a new, beautiful space. The medical students of the future will need modern classrooms in which to observe autopsies and practise their procedures, and on the hill at Siltavuorenpenger a grand, new building is opened, the eggshell-blue Athena. The building contains microscope laboratories, morgues and a chapel where the dead can be blessedbefore their bodies are committed to the service of science. In time, Bonsdorff’s collection of skeletons makes its way to Athena too.
Bones are all that is left of the sea cow too. Some of them find their way to Paris. Cuvier has erected a sea cow skeleton in his museum, as part of the great march of creation. Visitors think they are seeing one sea cow, a whole being, but this is in fact not one but many sea cows, assembled from the pieces found on the shores of Bering Island: a female’s head on a male’s shoulders, bones from the entire herd making up the spine. As such, it is still a rare and precious sight, one of only fourteen composite sea cows, put together in museums like enormous jigsaw puzzles. In addition to these, there are seven incomplete Steller’s Sea Cows languishing in the drawers and cabinets of universities, twenty-seven skulls, fifteen ribs, seven shoulders, ten ulnas, eight shoulder blades, thirteen lower jaws, forty-one assorted vertebrae, one sternum and a radius, some skull bones and the row of teeth that Steller managed to smuggle off the island. And, most valuable of all, three complete skeletons of Steller’s Sea Cow: one in Kyiv, one in Moscow and the third in Prof. Bonsdorff’s collection in Helsinki.
The Helsinki sea cow is assembled in Athena, where it joins a group of skeletons left to teach the living. It is placed above a glass cabinet containing a row of other marine mammals: the ringed seal, the grey seal and the common seal, pinnipeds one after the other, frozen inside a glass coffin. The sea cow floats above its smaller cousins, its wooden hands outstretched like a stocky patron saint that the medical students must run past as they hurry to the autopsy room.
The years pass. Old disagreements are forgotten, and researchersbegin to wonder why a city the size of Helsinki has a full three natural history collections. The university and the Flora and Fauna Society are the first to find each other. The hides, bones and insects of these two collections are brought together, creating the Museum of Zoology. Initially, the specimens were pieced together within the walls of the university, but the department of zoology did not have any exhibition spaces of its own, and the animals were stored as best as could be. The collections were scattered, with one animal here, another there, but in the 1920s the university acquired a whole residential block on Arkadiankatu. The purchase included the Alexander Lyceum, a large neo-Baroque building that the animals will soon have to themselves.
Crowds gather to behold a magnificent sight. Giraffes, elephants and lions on the back of trucks, travelling through the city to their new home, but Bonsdorff’s collection does not join the others. The weight of his last will and testament can still be felt, and when the other animals begin to take their leave, his skeletons remain obstinately in place. The Steller’s Sea Cow stays at Siltavuorenpenger, but the medical students no longer study animals, they do not compare species to learn about the structures hidden within them. Now they concentrate their efforts on humans, they cut open a body, weigh its heart and liver, and Bonsdorff’s museum turns from a place of learning to a curiosity taking up space that could be put to better use. And once ninety years have passed, nobody remembers the demands laid out in his will.
The doctors will not miss all those dead animals, but the curators at the Museum of Zoology are ecstatic. In terms of sheer scope, Bonsdorff’s collection is a significant addition to the museum’scollection, but its breadth creates another problem: the professor had amassed a thousand skeletons belonging to almost six hundred species. The rarest and most fascinating of these the museum plans to display for the public to admire – but where? The museum occupies a small space, and the walls of its exhibition rooms are already lined with dioramas. There is no room, so they will have to invent some. And so, the ballroom on the second level of the building is split in two. A concrete floor is constructed across its width, and with that the museum acquires a new floor dedicated to bones.
Moving the collection is a beautiful, tiresome spectacle. The curators offload one animal after another from the trucks: a humpback whale, a giraffe and a tiger, and one vehicle even comes bearing the faded skulls of one thousand five hundred human beings, which the museum staff hide in the attic, confused and embarrassed. Up there, the skulls can resume their eternal slumber, hidden in their boxes, their crimes still scrawled across their foreheads. But the staff’s embarrassment is quickly forgotten, as the next truck arrives with the most hotly anticipated of all the specimens, and with that, Steller’s Sea Cow finally arrives at the natural history museum.
The sea cow is put on display in pride of place. It is a rarity in the collection, an enormous discovery of world renown, destined to become the star of the exhibition, but before this it must be put together once again. The sea cow was first assembled almost a century earlier. Its bones need care and maintenance, its wooden limbs and cartilage have shrunk and cracked in the cold, dry air of the university corridors. The skeleton must be taken apart and put together again, and this task is given to a man with fingers whose dexterity is unrivalled.
60°10’16”N, 24°55’52”E
MUSEUM OF ZOOLOGY
HELSINKI
1950S
John Grönvall has spent all day painting canvasses, sketching mountains and fells, capturing the winter light behind the willow grouse and Arctic foxes. At six o’clock, he rinses his brushes and hangs his overalls on the coat stand, gives his colleagues a nod and takes the steps up to his lodgings, a small room above the exhibition halls in the Museum of Zoology. But once home, he doesn’t open a book or put his feet up, but pulls on his coat, hurries out into the street and jumps on a tram.
He rides all the way to Munkkiniemi. He takes a shortcut through the park at the manor house. In the summer, the gardens are beautiful, but now the plants have wilted, the greenery replaced with a flat wasteland offering no protection from the wind blowing in across the sea. Grönvall quickens his step, pulls his coat tighter. By the time he arrives at the door of the oology museum, the sun has dipped behind the horizon, making the trees in the yard cast long shadows over him, but the lights in the magnate’s window glow bright, as always. He doesn’t know when Kreuger ever sleeps. He can’t see Kreuger in the window, but out of habit he waves at it before taking the keys from his pocket, then steps inside and into the dim, its odour of wood and metal.
The darkness in the oology museum isn’t the soft, gentle half-light that the sunset leaves behind: this is an eternal,impenetrable night. The space was designed to store birds’ eggs, and the only windows in the room are narrow slits at the top of the walls. Building regulations wouldn’t allow an entirely windowless space, so small hatches were added to the walls, but they have been covered from the inside to make sure sunlight cannot get inside and destroy the museum’s collections. To an egg collector, the sun is the greatest enemy of all. In a matter of days, a blackbird’s egg, laid in among the hay, will lose its beguiling colour, the blue will fade and sunlight will singe the dotted patterning from the shells’ surface – but here they are safe.
Sensation gradually returns to Grönvall’s fingers, blue from the cold, the blood tingling as it forces its way through his contracted veins. He flicks the switch, and an electric light reveals the glass cabinets running across the room, the sketches of birds displayed on the rafters and the bureaus leaning against the walls containing a great and magnificent treasure that the average passer-by will never see.
If this were any other evening, Grönvall would walk straight to the bureaus, pull out a drawer and check the condition of the specimens inside it, decide whether to change the cotton-wool padding for fresh, check whether dust has begun to harden on the surface of the shells, but today he heads directly to his workshop, for the magnate has sent word: their hotly anticipated delivery has finally arrived.
The egg is oval, a creamy off-white, its shell dappled with streaks and spots that remind him of Japanese ink sketches, but this work of art wasn’t drawn with a brush held in a humanhand but by pigments secreted in the bird’s fallopian tubes that the auk’s body pressed into the calcium shell one hundred and fifty years ago, as the egg popped out of the bird and into the world.
