This means they will have to live on the island right throughthe long nesting season to protect the birds and their offspring. When he realises this, Harald hesitates. He has recently secured a job at a local printer with responsibility for their garden, where he has planted fruit trees and berry bushes alongside beautiful, delicate flowers that require his attention throughout the season. He can’t spend all summer looking after the birds. Frecko and Gio, however, are thrilled. They have grown up reading boys’ books full of stories of adventures and expeditions, and they are forever bemoaning the timid world into which they were born by a cruel turn of fate. Now they can become heroes, defend the innocent inhabitants of the island against human evils! Frecko and Gio’s excitement makes John laugh, and he promises to take care of Harald’s share of guard duty.
The landowners with the deeds to Aspskär look favourably upon the brothers’ suggestion. They have nothing against the protection of the birds, so long as they can continue to fish in the waters around the island and harvest the long grass growing around the rocks once the nesting season is over. They draw up a rental agreement lasting fifteen years. With the remaining money, the brothers buy an old pump room from the city authorities. The fishermen’s hut on Aspskär will provide adequate accommodation during the summer, but the nesting season begins during the cold months of the spring, and they must start their guard duties as soon as the first goldeneyes return from the south and land in the shallow waters by the island’s shores. They load the pump room onto a sled and pull it across the brittle sea ice to the island.
For the next few years, they spend all spring and summer on the island, keeping watch and making sure the birds are never left unsupervised. John takes the longest shifts. His brothers gradually grow into adulthood, and with that comes adult concerns, wives, children and work, but John spends his time sitting on the steps outside the pump room, drawing, listening to the shipping forecast and the birds, and whenever he sees an approaching boat, he quickly strides down to the shore. He always greets the new arrivals with a smile and tells them that hunting and gathering eggs is forbidden on the island. His words and demeanour are pleasant, but he always has a rifle slung over his shoulder.
A gull is building a nest in the roof of the pump room. It plucks twigs and branches from the shore, carefully weaves them together and opens its beak in a long mating call. The squawk startles John. He steps outside, sits on the steps, and the gull continues its work without paying him the slightest attention. He is shaking off the remnants of sleep and watching the bird go about its business, when the sea carries a sound all the way to the steps of the hut. The roar of the approaching motor cuts through the birds’ cries, and he soon sees a boat approaching from the north-west. Its course shows it is heading right towards the island, and before long he can make out four men sitting on board. He doesn’t recognise the boat, and he pulls on his shirt and trousers and quickly heads down to the shoreline.
The wind brings with it a whole host of new sounds. One of the men is singing, braying so raucously that it is clear the group has been drinking more than just water. John can see the rifles propped between the thwarts and begins to fear the worst but raises his hand and calls out a hello. Upon noticing him, the men fall silent, one of them quickly hiding a bottle in the folds of his jacket. They don’t reply to his greeting, but John wishes them a pleasant day and tells them that hunting on the island is forbidden. When he hears this, the man who hid the bottle bursts into an ugly laugh. He will hunt wherever he likes, and people should think twice before trying to stop him. His comrades egg him on with a volley of cheers.
John doesn’t take the bait but explains that he can direct them to many excellent islands in the waters off Loviisa where there are plenty of birds, but that here they will have to leave empty-handed. In response, he is met with a slew of curses, and one of the men hands the spokesman a rifle. The man raises the rifle and asks whether Grönvall would still like to tell him what to do. He is drunk and unpredictable, but John continues talking as though he hadn’t noticed the weapon in the man’s hand.
He thinks about his own rifle in the pump room. He was in such a hurry to get down to the shore that he forgot to take it with him, so he’ll simply have to do without it. The seagulls have noticed the intruders, their warning calls are ringing out across the island. John listens to the gulls, takes a deep breath and doesn’t even flinch when the man fires a warning shot. The bullet strikes a boulder, sending fragments of rock into the air,and the men give a cheer, but John stands firm, though it is all he can do not to let the fear show. We could shoot you right here on this island and nobody would ever know. We could put you full of holes and leave the police to work it out, the drunkard threatens him. John nods: if you want to hunt on this island, that’s what you’ll have to do. For a moment, the men exchange confused glances, then the drunkard throws the rifle from his hand – no point wasting bullets on this bastard – and they steer their boat back out to sea.
John waits until the boat has disappeared over the horizon before slumping to the ground. The shaking lasts a long time. He sits on the rocks, trembling, and the seagull nesting on the roof of the pump room flies down and lands next to him. He looks at the bird, and it nods, raises it beak then lowers it again, and John nods back. He will not betray his birds.
John Grönvall is accepted to the drawing school of the Ateneum art gallery. All the Grönvall brothers are skilled illustrators, and John would happily spend all day drawing. But he is the son of a sea captain and a backwasher and does what is expected of him: he gets himself a proper job. He secures a position at the Loviisa cardboard factory, but after two years of stripping spruce trees he makes up his mind and walks up the fossil-dappled steps of the Ateneum with a portfolio under his arm. He swaps the factory floor for the drawing ateliersof the opulent palace and spends his days sketching gypsum, tracing people and animals.
John graduates, his teacher Bruno Tuukkanen hires him as an assistant, and the two work on decorating churches. John isn’t perhaps the most imaginative of his peers, but he is diligent and a pleasure to work with, not remotely predisposed to the emotional outbursts so typical of young artists, and his eye for colour is second to none. He is able to reproduce the suggested patterns with such attention to detail that Tuukkanen cannot tell his student’s work from his own, and they spend the summer on raised platforms under the vast arched ceilings, painting high above the life going on around them. John learns to unveil the work of the old masters from beneath a layer of whitewash. He reinvents the colours they used, grinding pigments until oxide green and earthy ochre come together to form just the right shade.
In his spare time, he collects eggs. Hidden in the boughs of an old spruce, he finds a goldcrest’s nest, woven together from cobwebs and lichen, and gathers its tiny eggs, wraps them in cottonwool and takes them home. Once at his desk, he carefully picks up one of the eggs, which weighs but a fraction of an ounce, drills a hole in it, blows, and his breath replaces the life hidden inside the shell. He realises that his timing was just right. He climbed up to the nest shortly after the eggs had emerged from inside the bird. The yolk dribbles out of the hole, wet and sloppy, the embryo inside hasn’t yet begun to take shape. It is possible to blow an egg even once this process has started, but tugging the foetus out via the tiny hole is difficultand unpleasant work. He wipes the emptied egg with a chamois leather, moves on to the next, tries and fails, but continues until he is able to open his cabinet, pull out a drawer and place in it a glass tube containing a row of brittle, brown-dotted eggshells.
From time to time, he attends meetings of the ornithological society. He doesn’t take part in the scientists’ conversations but listens intently and offers to help maintain the cabinets used to store the eggs, and when the Museum of Zoology advertises for an assistant who knows how to use both a chisel and a paintbrush, he gets the job. Tuukkanen loses his assistant to the birds, and John swaps the churches for the museum.
John spends the daytime at the Museum of Zoology and his evenings with Kreuger’s egg collection. These days he only rarely gets out to Aspskär, but their work there has borne fruit. Every spring, more fledglings hatch from their eggs. Many species that had abandoned the island have found their way back, and when the first couple of common guillemots choose to nest there, the brothers’ joy and pride know no bounds. Aspskär has got its birds back, and the brothers are replaced by the next generation of bird lovers, new inquisitive youngsters who take up residence in the pump room.
The birds return to Aspskär, but elsewhere numbers continue to fall, and nesting charts reveal that breeding pairs aredwindling year upon year. Marine-bird populations collapse, and there are ever fewer birds of prey. Hunters are rewarded for culling “detrimental pests and predators”, and their eggs are once again in high demand among collectors. The forests and rocky shores fall silent, and ornithological societies begin to demand hunting restrictions and measures to protect the birds, but the notion of restricting the collection of eggs is one they raise with some trepidation. It is easy to condemn the mindless slaughter of birds of prey in the hope of generous rewards, but collecting eggs is the cherished hobby of naturalists the world over. Of course, science is different from mere hunting, and how can one study birds without gathering samples, skins, eggs and nests? How can we kindle a love of birds among the youth, if the joy of collecting eggs and experiencing the beauty of egg collections is taken away?
The debate is heated. Those present fail to reach a decision, and John Grönvall leaves the meeting somewhat confused. After all, he too has cocked his shotgun and allowed pellets to pierce a ptarmigan’s heart. He too has climbed a spruce and emptied a goldcrest’s nest, but his motives were pure. He killed those birds and took their eggs out of scientific curiosity, artistic ambition, he harbours nothing but love for birds. All those countless hours dedicated to his winged friends – could this really be evil disguised as love, had he in fact harmed the thing he most wanted to save? He can’t relax in his bed but heads off to the one place that will calm his mind.
Fifty thousand eggs, eighteen thousand nests, three thousand two hundred species of bird, all packed into a single room.Imagine what kind of flock they would have made – ostriches, ducks, chickens, grebes, doves, cuckoos, spinners, cranes, owls, sparrows, penguins, storks, birds of prey – a whole aviary packed away in cabinets, tens of thousands of fledglings pushing free of their shells with a dizzying squawk. But the collection around him is neat and silent. Where once there were living, breathing, straggly creatures, now there are rows of empty, beautifully arranged shells, eggs from which the possibility of life was blown away before the beak could form and tap its way to freedom. Grönvall stands surrounded by cabinets, lists the species and numbers in his head, and for the first time, the collection’s silence feels ear-splitting.
Kreuger doesn’t wait for public opinion to change but sets to work. The time for private collections has passed, but he has an idea to make sure that his treasures are never seen as mere hunting trophies. He enters negotiations with the Museum of Zoology: he is prepared to offer his collection for the benefit of science. The museum is thrilled at the offer. Kreuger’s collection is magnificent, an almost complete catalogue of European nesting birds, only missing the eggs of two species, the wallcreeper and the white-winged snowfinch. It includes four hundred species that are so rare that they can only be found in the industrial magnate’s boxes. The museum board accepts the donation and can hardly believe their luck.
In its comprehensiveness, Kreuger’s collection is stunning, but its sheer scope brings with it a number of challenges. An egg is a demanding exhibit requiring stable conditions, a spacedesigned especially to preserve the shells. Where can they possibly house 50,000 eggs? But Kreuger has thought of everything. It’s clear that the Museum of Zoology doesn’t have enough room to house his collection. To that end, a new space is planned specifically for the eggs. He has already selected a suitable plot of land and has begun negotiations with the architects, and all city hall and the museum have to do is sign the paperwork.
When the university’s collections moved into the Museum of Zoology, the process was a public spectacle. People gathered on the streets, took their children along to wave at the stuffed animals as they travelled through the city. The egg collection, however, moves to its new premises in secret. The new building doesn’t draw much attention either, and many people walk right past without realising what is held inside it, they don’t notice the dark slate next to the door bearing the mysterious engraving OOLOGICUM R. KREUGER.
Kreuger gets his museum, and it truly is his museum, for it never opens its doors to the public. The staff at the Museum of Zoology worry that the specimens on display might prove irresistible, that the eggs might rekindle a passion for the very kind of egg collecting that they are trying so hard to snuff out, and their concern is not entirely unfounded.
One day, an English researcher pays a visit to the museum. Under normal circumstances, nobody is allowed inside unsupervised, as Kreuger has taken it upon himself to be present whenever an expert is given access to the collection, but a rare twist of fate makes this visit very different. Though usually in fine health, Kreuger is bedridden with such a fever that even hemust admit that he won’t be much of a guide, but since the visitor is one of the most respected oologists in the field, Kreuger makes an exception and allows the man into the collection without supervision.
The following day, Grönvall appears at the magnate’s door, beside himself. On the desk he found a note left by the researcher explaining that he had borrowed a few of the rarer eggs from Kreuger’s collection to compare them to those in British collections. The eggs were never returned.
Kreuger’s collection can turn even a researcher into a thief. Mercifully, Kreuger himself is not there to witness the greatest misfortune to befall his specimens, as this occurs many decades after his death. The magnate is spared the knowledge that his magnificent collection gave rise to one of the most scandalous environmental crimes in Finnish history. The Museum of Zoology employs a young intern to look after the eggs. He shows a great interest in oology, asks insightful, educated questions about the location of certain nesting sites and the process of gathering eggs. In fact, he asks so many questions that the senior researchers begin to the fear the worst. Once the intern’s tenure comes to an end, he is no longer allowed access to the collection.
Some years later, the police knock on the door of a detached house in rural Närpiö. A customs office has opened a parcel addressed to the young man containing the eggs of several rare birds. The police are duly informed of the illegal shipment and drive to Närpiö to raid the man’s house, but nothing can prepare them for the sight that awaits them.
The intern has put together an egg collection of his own. He has taught himself how to find nests, engaged in secret correspondence with other collectors, exchanged one rarity for another, and over the years his collection has grown so much that the police find more than nine thousand eggs in the house. In court, the man is asked what drove him to do this, but he can’t give any rationale for his actions. His only explanation is that he found it impossible to resist the beauty of the eggs, that they consumed him, took over his mind, and he couldn’t stop himself, though he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Kreuger’s collection is too beguiling, too dangerous, and for this reason it becomes a shrine, a place where mere mortals have no business.
The magnate is lying in bed, staring at the wall. His mind is a flurry of thoughts – drainage systems, contracts, negotiations. He is hunting for rest, but sleep eludes him, and eventually he gives up, gets dressed, walks downstairs and opens the door to the egg collection. He had an apartment built in conjunction with the collection’s new home and asked the architects to add a door directly from his home into the museum. A strange decision, but Kreuger is paying for such a large chunk of the costs that he can have whatever he wants, and now he opens the door and steps from his living room right into John Grönvall’s workshop. Grönvall has done a hard day’s work – Kreuger didn’thear the door close until gone midnight, and he looks at the preparator’s desk. John has everything he needs in his workshop, and more, because he never throws anything away. He even saves the greasy paper bags in which he brings fresh cinnamon buns from a local bakery, and the workshop is home to a glorious clutter that would seem more fitting for an alchemist than a pedantic servant of the natural sciences. Every surface is covered in equipment: tools, pots of paint and ink, packaging, drawing paper, notes, pens, brushes, glass jars full of pigment – the antithesis of Kreuger’s own study, where every piece of paper is in its rightful place, but because he has never found fault with Grönvall’s work, the magnate sees no reason to complain about the state of the workshop and looks instead at the sketchbook left open on the table.
Grönvall has been experimenting with different stencils, cutting different-shaped holes in pieces of cardboard and blowing ink through them to reproduce the patterns of the eggs he is restoring. He has spent his evening developing just the right paint, making one version after another, and continuing only once he has made a stencil that will leave brown speckles on the peregrine falcon’s egg. He has forgotten to turn off his desk lamp; Kreuger flicks the switch, and the light disappears. For a moment he can’t see anything, but gradually the forms of the trees in the garden begin to take shape, the last leaves clinging to their branches. The next gust of wind will separate them from their moorings and send them shimmering down to the withered lawn, but for now the air is still and the leaves remain where they are, the garden and the workshop, both somotionless that the magnate’s heartbeat is the only sign that time is marching onwards. He steps from the workshop through into the museum hall. He doesn’t switch on the lights but allows his eyes to become accustomed to the dark in the windowless room, walks to one of the display cases and places his hand against the glass. On their velvet cushions, the eggs appear as distinct blotches in the darkness, but he doesn’t need light to see their shapes and patterns, or the porous surface of an elephant bird’s egg. He spends his nights watching over his treasures, and the agony of those sleepless hours turns to a silent euphoria.
Egg collecting is eventually made illegal, but John Grönvall continues his work. He repairs shells and restores colours, carefully and precisely, and when it’s ready his work is hidden away in a cabinet to protect it from light and dust, in a museum that nobody is allowed to visit. Very few people ever see his work, but that doesn’t stop his reputation from spreading, because he has become the last of his kind. One country after another outlaws the collection of birds’ eggs. From now on, researchers and responsible enthusiasts no longer gather eggs but fill out a form where they log the number of eggs, the location of the nest and any other relevant information, and over time paper records replace physical eggshells. Birding books no longer teach readers how to blow an egg or stuff a bird’s skin, and teachers stop showing children how to find nests.
The delicate and curious skill of egg restoration gradually wanes, and museums including the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institute turn to Grönvall, sending their most precious eggs to the son of a Loviisa sea captain for restoration.Stepping into the museum has begun to feel like stepping into the past, a time when a collector might pluck the eggs right from their nest, imagining he is recording one tiny piece of an unchanging world in the belief that a scientist cannot possibly affect his subject, but beyond the walls of the egg museum, such a world is already gone.
Now John Grönvall has been given the task of putting together the first of the disappeared species that forced humans to look at themselves in the mirror. The skeleton of Steller’s Sea Cow was first assembled ninety years earlier. Now it is being examined by the eyes of researchers a century younger, and in its construction they see a number of incorrect assumptions and outdated notions. The people who first assembled the sea cow weren’t very familiar with its evolutionary family – and how could they be? Professors and illustrators from a country on the Baltic coastline, they were acquainted with different types of seals, the skeletons of the various whales and porpoises on display in local collections, but they had only a superficial understanding of sirenians, and though von Nordmann had seen the Paris sea cow, all he had at his disposal was his imagination and a general idea of how this mammal fits together.
