60°10”N, 24°57”E #2
The professor shows her the Gardens’ rarities, their exotic, long-leaved plants, the like of which she has never seen before, and after walking around the greenhouses they retire indoors for a hot drink.
She stirs honey into her tea and savours its sweetness.
Her own honey ran out before Christmas, and she cannot afford to buy any more.
Work has been hard to come by, and since Topelius passed on the message that the professor might have some work for her, she has been sitting at home waiting for word to come.
Word eventually did come, and here she is, sitting on the professor’s couch with a cup in her hands.
Von Nordmann tells her of his plans to develop the Gardens, he talks about the weather and Olson tells him about her family and work.
The professor’s tone is jovial, but she notes how carefully he weighs up her every word, and she does her best to give a good impression.
Yes, she did study at the drawing school, but it is hard to find work as an artist. She has designed a few board games for Edlund’s publishing house, which he sells in his bookshop, and which earn her a modest income, but for the most part she makes a living by teaching English and translating short stories and articles from England and the United States.
She learned the language from her father, who was a sea captain and spoke many tongues, a skill that he passed on to his children.
When talking about her father, her voice quavers slightly, but she continues, explains that her skills as an artist come from him too.
Captain Olson understood not only ships but beauty too, and when he returned from his journeys, he showed the children sketches of far-off towns and lands in his notebook.
While her father was away, the family hung his drawings on the wall in the children’s room and imagined themselves on mountainsides, dreamed of his life in bustling squares.
In return, they drew their father pictures of events in the home, and when she heard the familiar steps coming from the porch, Hilda would run to meet him, notebook in hand, and show him drawings of the kittens that had been born under the stairs and the birds nesting in the eaves.
Von Nordmann likes the fact that Miss Olson sits so calmly.
Many would be nervous at an invitation to see the professor, but she looks him in the eye and answers his questions directly and without any fuss.
It makes the professor think of his own wife.
Anna Helena’s father was a jeweller, a man whose clients were among the highest-ranking noblemen in the land.
He too learned the ways of the nobility and gave his children an excellent education: Anna Helena understood etiquette, she dressed impeccably and spoke more languages than many a scientist or man of letters, though there are always those to whose mind no amount of style or learning can ever remove the shame of being a craftsman’s daughter.
But von Nordmann did not allow such condescension to disturb him.
Anna Helena knew she was a better wife to her husband than any finicky noblewoman who would have had conniptions at the thought of a long and bothersome expedition, and when her shoe sank into the mud on an unknown path in the Crimea, they giggled like children, and von Nordmann knew that he had taken the only possible woman as his wife.
Anna Helena’s father taught her to recognise precious rocks and the wonders hidden within them, and she saw the same beauty in her husband’s work too.
She was not repelled by the contents of fish guts, and when von Nordmann showed her the Diplozoon paradoxum she gripped his hand, and he knew that she understood what he was trying to say.
The Diplozoon paradoxum is an extraordinary creature.
The flatworm begins its life alone, but once it finds a mate, the functions of the two individuals become conjoined.
From that moment, they continue their lives as one, fusing together so that separation is no longer possible.
When one dies, the other cannot go on living, and when Anna Helena left this world, von Nordmann lay down in his bed and waited for death to come.
He remained there for four days and four nights, but on the morning of the fifth day there came a knock at the door, and to his astonishment he realised he was still alive.
A confused courier stood timidly at the threshold, apologised for disturbing the house during this period of mourning, but explained that von Nordmann’s publisher had asked him to deliver the plates he had promised, and he got up and, admonishing himself, began to mix his paints: as a husband, he was not worthy of the flatworm.
Anna Helena’s last wish was that their children be brought back to Finland.
To that end, von Nordmann accepted the invitation that the Imperial Alexander University had extended many times and took up the professorship in zoology and botany, turned his back on the university libraries and scientific palaces of the great metropolises and returned to Finland.
Never again will he be happy, of that he is certain, but this notwithstanding, life in Helsinki is a pleasant surprise.
He is given the practical, comfortable house designed by Engels in the grounds of the botanical gardens in Kaisaniemi, where he can escape his grief by delving into work.
Some thirty years earlier, the great fire of Turku destroyed the work of previous generations, and he must begin putting his collections together from scratch, laying the foundations upon which to build a new garden.
He undertakes fundraising trips, writes to his colleagues and acquires seeds and saplings, classifies and catalogues them, and gazing into his microscope, he momentarily forgets all about human sorrows.
Miss Olson places her cup on the saucer, and the clink of porcelain brings von Nordmann back to the salon.
He has to force himself to shake off his woes – these days they seem to stalk him like a needy cat – but she takes another sip of tea and allows the professor to compose himself.
She recognises her own sadness in his eyes, allows him to linger in his memories, and does the same.
When Hilda realised that she wanted to draw, to study, to learn how to construct images and to mix colours, her father was not unduly shocked, he did not start talking about the benefits of marriage or a woman’s duty, and instead he paid for her art studies.
But alas he did not live to witness Hilda’s joy when she was accepted into the drawing school.
Tuberculosis cut his life short, too quickly and yet too slowly, and she tries to banish the images that begin to appear in her mind, his skeletal, emaciated figure, the sheets spattered with blood.
The pause in their conversation has lasted too long.
Miss Olson’s attention is inevitably drawn to the silence, but she does not glance furtively around, trying to find an exit or a way back to their original conversation, and instead remains in her chair, calm and alert.
The moment does not feel awkward and, grateful for this, von Nordmann decides to get to the point.
What does Miss Olson think about spiders?
The professor’s expression is expectant, and she realises that the question is an important one, that much depends on her answer, but she has never given spiders much thought.
She dusts their webs from her room, but their life and character are a mystery to her.
Eventually, she simply states that all God’s creatures are interesting and beautiful.
This appears to suffice, as the professor stands up and beckons for her to follow him.
The professor’s study smells of mahogany and plants pressed between sheets of paper.
Lining the walls is a series of glass cabinets containing insect charts and catalogues of plants, and hanging above them are brightly coloured maps with the winding routes of expeditions marked across the continents.
A room full of the strange and fascinating, the weird and wonderful, but Olson’s attention is drawn to a contraption on the desk.
The professor notes her gaze and is thrilled: his microscope is truly the finest in the realm.
As a young researcher, von Nordmann financed his studies by illustrating other people’s work.
He examined the creatures that researchers had brought back from their expeditions and replicated them through the glass walls of preserving jars, trying to bring their faded colours back to life.
The Russian ambassador himself commissioned some illustrations from him, and when he saw von Nordmann’s plates, von Alopaeus was so thrilled that he gave the young researcher a very rare gift indeed.
The Chevalier microscope is a miraculous contraption, a device whose mirrors have been sanded and smoothed by a renowned family of Parisian opticians to make them thinner and sharper than was ever thought possible.
Von Nordmann could scarce believe his luck: he had managed to acquire the Microscope Achromatique Universel.
He placed a perch under the lenses, and all of a sudden he saw other animals within this animal, worms, shellfish and spores clinging to the gills and to the inside of the guts, and whenever he opened up a fish, the microscope revealed new, tiny beings, nature within nature.
Von Nordmann picked up his pen, started writing and later published a study featuring illustrations with a level of detail that had never been seen before, revealing to his readers the wonders of the egg pouches of water fleas, the double-tailed spores of the Henneguya zschokkei endoparasite and the hooks of the Diplozoon paradoxum, which it uses to latch onto its host’s gills.