The Fly Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

appeared around a crook in the road, but when the man with the rifle suddenly caught sight of me, he instantly raised the weapon and took aim. I had already realized that they must be opium smugglers. Had I made a careless movement, he would unquestionably have fired, but I relied on the fact that they must have heard about us and our insect gathering, so I turned my back and swung my net to catch an imaginary insect. I freely admit that the next few seconds were tense, but when I turned back a few moments later, all three men had disappeared.

    …
    From time to time, I decide to get to the bottom of my reluctance to travel. Why am I such an unsuccessful globetrotter? Why am I so homesick all the time? The usual result of my efforts is that I just sit somewhere engulfed in a swarm of little, round, colourless thoughts that lack any perceptible coherence. As if some higher power had emptied its hole punch into my head.

Chapter 4
The Man Who Loved Islands
    Towards the end of his brief life, D. H. Lawrence wrote a short story called “The Man Who Loved Islands.” I had never read it, knew only its title, but I was nevertheless practically certain that the story would help me answer my eternally returning question: Why an island? For years I searched for this hard-to-find book in Stockholm’s secondhand bookshops, although I felt no great urgency. The mere knowledge that Lawrence had got to the bottom of the riddle soothed me. The answer existed. Moreover, inevitably, I had theories of my own.
    For even if this island is like a Sunday afternoon, fifteen square kilometres in size, it is nevertheless so small and isolated that everyone who chooses to settle here without having deep roots in the community is expected to explain the decision as if they were joining some peculiar sect. Always the same question. Why this island? And, as ever, love is a good answer—as all the women know who arrived from distant places and married into ancient island families by way of perennial homebody boys with greasy caps and shotguns—women who now run the island’s practical and political affairs.

    It’s said to be the same all over the world, in all seven seas. Islands are matriarchies of a kind seldom seen on land. The men—as Iceland’s president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir remarked on one occasion when the subject arose—the men flee to their own preferred landscape, which is the sea. They’re simply not around. So it was and still is in places where fishing and piloting remain important. But here? No. Here something else is at work.
    It is always something else. “Circumstances.” Which is true, of course. And it makes a perfectly good answer, as does a longing for the raw beauty of the skerries and their shifting forms of silence at the edge of the open sea. Such things can be said, and in May, when the maples bloom and the rosefinch sings in the woods by the shore, no answers are needed, nor even questions. Nature is enough. Why not move out here? The change comes only later, several years later. It was only then that I thought I saw that the island had a peculiar attraction for men with a need for control and security, which they sought on land through power over others, but which out here was woven into the limitations of the insular landscape. For nothing is so enclosed and concrete as an island. In the old days, the days of seamen, the landscape was open and free in all directions. Now freedom takes a different form for those who find their way here. For us. For me.

    Whichever way I go, sooner or later I come to the sea. That’s a banal observation, but within it, I think, lies a security that for many islanders is greater than the feeling of being trapped. Maybe it’s no more remarkable than sleeping better with the door closed. The thought struck me one summer morning when we had finally decided to capture the badger. Before it tipped over the house.
    It usually lived under our cottage in the winter, right under the