Beasts of the sea, p.21
Beasts of the Sea, page 21
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’t hear 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 so motionless 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.
The sea cow they built is beautiful and impressive. They did painstaking work, but mistakes were made nonetheless: the skeleton’s posture is strange, the head is too elevated and the wooden cartilages holding the ribs together too broad – and then there is the matter of the sea cow’s hands. At first, they assumed that the men who had recovered the skeleton must have been careless, that the small bones of the palm had simply gone unnoticed, but since then a lot of effort has gone into trying to locate the sea cow’s fingers. Nordenskiöld offered a handsome reward for anyone who could find them, and on Bering Island the Aleutians dug up all manner of finger bones belonging to foxes and seals, but they couldn’t find the sea cow’s hands. Additionally, there is Steller’s testimony that the sea cow’s flippers contained shrivelled, hoof-like structures that it used to wander along the ocean floor like a bull in a paddock. The sea cow’s hands are never found, and the skeleton loses its pianist’s fingers, for a researcher should not complete nature based on assumptions alone, should not make the image more perfect than it already is, and Grönvall dismantles the professors’ old joins, separates the bone from the wood and places the prostheses on his bookshelf as a reminder that science is about knowledge, not imagination.
Grönvall removes the screws and metal wires. He organises the bones and numbers them, his handwriting like a palimpsest above the professors’ already faded numbers. The sea cow’s bones are old and weather-beaten. Nobody knows how long the skeleton lay on the island before it was found, whether it had been waiting, hidden in the sands, for decades, centuries or even millennia, buried by the wind and the water in layers of silt and sediment, so slowly that its sinking motion evaded the beady eye of birds and humans, but sure enough it was buried, one grain of sand at a time. The vertebrae and the skull disappeared from view, and before long the sea cow would have disappeared completely, slipping into the sand where it could continue to decompose in peace.
An egg is designed to break, to endure only those few short days that the embryo needs to develop into a bird in the warmth underneath its mother. After this, its purpose is to allow the fledgling to tap its way through the shell. An egg exists only for a moment, while bones are designed to persist beneath muscles and tendons for years, decades, but ultimately the difference is negligible. Bone and eggshell are made of the same material, and over time a bone too will degrade and disappear, but that is not the fate of this skeleton. The sea cow was exhumed from its grave, and now it is here, halfway around the world from its island, in a small northern museum in a small northern capital, having its bones examined by the preparator John Grönvall.
He scrutinises the sea cow one bone at a time, cleans them, repairs their surfaces, but some are in poor condition, particularly one pair of ribs and the vertebrae of the lower spine and tail. To protect them, John casts replacements out of gypsum and reads up on methods for how best to make the material resemble the animal’s porous bones, striving for just the right colour, faded by time and the sea.
He tries to acquaint himself with the creature he is reconstructing, but there is only scant information available. The bones reveal that this was a young sea cow that was still growing; its growth plates were yet to reach full epiphyseal closure. Its age and sex, however, remain a mystery. We don’t know how quickly or slowly the sea cow grew or how long it took to reach the majestic dimensions of adulthood. Nobody was able to observe them long enough to watch the young achieve their full stature. The encounter between man and sea cow was brief and brutal, and none of the calves that Steller saw had the chance to die of old age.
Grönvall constructs the sea cow during the day, and in the evenings he turns his attention to restoring the great auk’s egg. It is slow work. Restoring an egg that has already been repaired once before is harder than repairing it for the first time, just as a skeleton that has already been reconstructed requires a very different approach from an animal freshly skinned and gutted. This time, he has to dismantle someone else’s handiwork, assess its traits, the qualities of its materials and joins, he must learn how hard or softly to tap a seam for the glue to give way without further damaging the shell.
Grönvall spends his days in the company of the lost. The animals are gone, but he keeps their memory alive, stopping the degradation of the shells and bones so that those who come after him will be able to pause at their remnants and see their own time reflected back at them. In the sea cow, Steller saw the hand of God, a link in the great chain of creation, another part of a beautiful, unchanging system, and perhaps he slit open the sea cow’s belly and cracked open its skull without any sense of guilt or concern. For Furuhjelm, the sea cow’s bones were a frustrating mystery, its disappearance an ominous twist of fate, but for Grönvall it reflects a possibility born out of loss, and the idea that his own species could drive another to destruction has turned from an inkling to a pattern that repeats itself over and over. But the traces that Grönvall leaves on the bones are gentle and meticulous. He repairs hairline fractures in the processus spinosus, casts new vertebrae to replace broken ones and gives the sea cow a new, more curved posture. Von Nordmann and Bonsdorff set the sea cow’s head in a proud, upward aspect, but it is more likely that it swam with its eyes and head angled downwards. It was less interested in the sky than in the strips of kelp rising from the ocean floor.
In the museum hall, John Grönvall stands examining the metal wire wound around the ribs, the arches that he has bent into shape to keep the skeleton together. He checks the joins one last time and finds everything in order. He takes a step back, inspects the animal and gives a nod of approval upon seeing that his gypsum replacements blend in with the originals so well that the average visitor will never realise that some of these bones were not created in a sea cow’s womb but in the hands of a preparator.
The sea cow is intact once again. Grönvall wonders how he might celebrate its completion and decides to start by smoking a cigarette. He steps into the courtyard and watches the wagtails bobbing across the lawn. He wonders where they have built their nests, but the possibilities are endless. The wagtail isn’t a fussy bird; it will build its nest almost anywhere. He leans against the museum wall and waits, but the birds don’t reveal the location of their nest and simply dive here and there across the lawn hunting invertebrates that he cannot see. The janitor opens the door and the birds flutter away. He comes bringing a message. Grönvall unfolds the telegram, reads it, and a broad smile spreads across his face. He couldn’t have imagined a better way to celebrate.
A gust of wind catches the sheets of paper, and John holds them against his chest to stop them flying off across the island. The seagulls let the wind carry them high up into the air, screeching as they rise, and he gathers his sketches and steps into the pump room before the rain starts. He boils some water, makes a pot of tea and tastes the words in his mouth: Aspskär Nature Reserve. Twenty-seven hectares of land and 342 hectares of protected water. Their association has taken care of the island for thirty years, but now the birds are protected by the letter of the law, and the brothers’ shifts on guard duty can finally come to an end.
A bolt of lightning strikes the rocks, and the whole island trembles. John wakes with a start. He rolls over in his bed but still can’t get to sleep, so he gets up, places a chair next to the window and gazes out at the rain lashing down upon the sea. Lightning illuminates the sky, and all at once he can just discern a dark shape far out at sea, something large and round among the waves. He waits for the next flash, but when it comes the shape has gone and doesn’t return. The downpour settles into a drizzle, and the sea is calm once more. John returns to his bed, and as he sleeps the sea cows surround the island, herds of them, quietly grazing, and John Grönvall smiles. Here they are safe, with 342 hectares of water to protect them.
The industrial magnate Kreuger keeps the great auk’s egg for himself; the museum only receives it after his death. He keeps it because, for him, the egg of an extinct bird is not a story of greed and destruction but one of skill and love. When, at the fine age of 97, Kreuger closes his eyes for the final time, the auk’s egg is at last inducted into the collection at the Museum of Zoology. A label is added to it indicating that it has been repaired, as the cracks are invisible to the naked eye.
In 2017 the egg collection closes its doors. The university decides to streamline its activities and eventually gives up its Munkkiniemi campus. Kreuger’s bespoke cabinets and glass cases are dismantled, and the eggs housed within them are moved to the basement of what is now known as the Natural History Museum, which boasts storage facilities meeting modern standards. The building that once housed the egg collection is now home to a gym and a massage parlour, but before leaving for the last time, museum manager Stjernberg collects all the papers Grönvall left in the workshop, all the jotters, photographs and grease-stained paper bags with which he created his unique world of colour. Then he opens the desk drawer and picks up the old cigarette packets on whose unfolded cardboard John Grönvall inscribed his notes about the sea cow’s bones in a beautiful, semi-legible hand.
The sea cow is assembled and displayed in the great hall at the Museum of Zoology. It is the most splendid of rarities, but in the great seats of scientific learning, researchers focus their efforts on other species, other specimens. Museum visitors pause in front of the sea cow for a moment, marvel at its large, bony form, but otherwise it is left to slumber in peace for decades until a curious incident is revealed by one of the museum’s assistants in a naturalist magazine a full four decades later.
The assistant is presenting the skeleton of Steller’s Sea Cow to a group of biology students. As he is describing the animal’s structure, he gently taps one of the spinous processes and is taken aback: the bone responds to his touch and rings against his finger. He continues his presentation, but he cannot forget the sound made by the vertebra, and once the students have left, he hurries back to the sea cow. After checking to make sure he is alone, he starts tapping the creature’s bones and realises he was right: spinous processes of different lengths produce a scale of different pitches. Thus begins a unique hobby. Once the museum is closed for the day, the assistant returns to the sea cow’s skeleton and practises until he is ready.
Eventually, he invites his colleagues to gather around the skeleton. As they look on in bewilderment, the assistant performs the poco allegretto theme from Brahm’s third symphony, which Yves Montand later borrowed in a wistful song of his own. He raps and taps the bones, and the conservators and janitors gathered for the occasion listen as the sound of an extinct animal echoes through the hall.
Steller’s Sea Cow is gone, but in the world’s oceans its extinction continues to this day. At the Great Barrier Reef, the seabed is vacuumed by its cousin, the last of the sea cows. The dugong is a shy creature about which we know very little. It shuns human contact, and unlike its larger relative, it is a skilled diver and spends most of its time underwater. We have the dugong and three manatees: the Amazonian manatee grazing on water grass in the flood plains along the Amazon; the West Indian manatee, which prefers the warm waters around Florida and the Caribbean; and the African manatee living among the mangroves of West Africa. Four sirenians still carry the memory of their lost relative in their genes, though their future is far from certain.
But the dugong doesn’t bemoan its fate. It sinks its lips into the sands of the seabed and tugs the grass into its mouth, constantly followed by a shoal of sprightly yellow fish. They shelter underneath the dugong and nibble at the tiny beings that its tail whips up from the sand. The sea cow rolls over, turns its wrinkly belly towards the sky, and as it turns its iris makes out the lights shimmering on the water’s surface. It leans on its tail for support, then pushes off, rising slowly through the bright water until its head pierces the surface. It doesn’t look at the heavenly bodies above, pays no attention to the birds swooping overhead or the ship barely visible on the horizon, but fills its lungs and dives back down into the depths.
