60°10”N, 24°57”E #6
The crowning glory of Bonsdorff’s skull collection is undoubtedly the head of the Vesivehmaa Ripper, the serial killer Juhani Aataminpoika.
If a man’s evil accumulates in his skull, what better skull to put on display than that of a man nicknamed the Executioner, a man who killed twelve innocent women and who is said to have gorged on the hearts of their unborn babies?
If any skull can show small bumps that indicate a propensity for cruelty, then surely it must be that of a man who could commit such atrocities.
But Bonsdorff is not interested in the constitution of people’s souls, but rather in the neurological messages passing through their nervous system.
He has no time to examine the skulls, but he amasses a collection for future scholars, and now the skull of the Executioner resides there among all the others, staring at students from its shelf with empty eyes, reminding them that behind every face is a shared structure of thick, white bone, waiting to be revealed.
Hilda Olson finds the skulls gathered on the shelves hideous, but she tries not to think about the people to whom they once belonged and instead focuses her attention on the task at hand.
She has never worked with bones or mammals before, and to her eyes the remains that the professor has laid out in the room look disproportionate and alien.
She is more used to spiders, to tiny creatures that only give up their secrets once they are placed under the ocular lens, but this animal’s bones are large and thick, and she is unsure quite where to start.
What does von Nordmann want her to do? Is there some kind of etiquette when it comes to drawing a skeleton, an order in which the bones should be committed to paper, an unspoken rule that is clear to anatomists but unknown to the daughter of a sea captain?
She does not know where to start, but neither does she wish to show them her hesitation.
She has already seen Bonsdorff’s sceptical glances, von Wright’s expectant expression, but von Nordmann does not leave her high and dry, and hands her a sheet of paper.
He has come up with a list of the images he wants: first she is to draw the skull from above, then from beneath and behind, making sure to include the internal structures of the head.
After this, she is to draw the principal vertebrae from different angles, then move on to the shoulder blades, the bones of the arms, the sternum and ribs.
A concentrated murmur ripples through Bonsdorff’s study.
Von Wright sketches a suitable frame to hold the skeleton, Hacklin the janitor writes a list of all the materials they will need, calculates the prices and begins carrying in tools and sacks of gypsum.
Von Nordmann and Bonsdorff examine the bones and compare observations, discuss qualities specific to this species, and Miss Olson sits down by the window and starts to draw.
Von Nordmann has placed the sea cow’s skull on the table in front of her.
He has turned it upside down, and she examines it, the vessel that once contained the sea cow’s brain, eyes and fleshy tongue.
Now all that is left is an empty space between the bones, and she considers the best way to represent the skull’s joins and porous surfaces.
Be it a spider or a bone, she examines her subjects like a sculpture or a bust to be reproduced, for were she to think of the creature itself, she would have to think of its death too, the traps, the nets, ropes and bullets, and then the anatomy professor’s collection would seem an unfathomable, cruel mausoleum.
But as she walks behind von Nordmann through Bonsdorff’s exhibits, she does not think of a living human or creature but imagines herself wandering through an illustrated encyclopaedia without returning to the moment when within this rib cage, now held together with bolts, was once a heart, still beating, and a set of lungs filling with air.
Von Nordmann is disappointed. Furuhjelm claimed to have found a complete skeleton, but this set of bones is incomplete: it is missing its hands and fingers.
Half of each front limb is also missing, and if they were to erect the skeleton in its current state, it would look as though it were groping at the air with blunt, inelegant stumps.
It is true that Steller wrote in his notes that the sea cow lacked bones in its hands, but this claim has since been dismissed.
All marine mammals have fingerbones hidden inside their flippers.
This is the case for whales, seals and porpoises, so why would the sea cow be an exception?
It is easier to assume the naturalist must have been mistaken.
It would hardly be surprising if a man on the verge of starvation had not noticed the slender bones hidden inside the sea cow’s rigid flippers, and his equipment and the prevailing conditions left much to be desired.
The sea cow’s fingers have not been preserved, but that doesn’t mean they did not exist. The lack of these bones is down to the ineptness of those who discovered the skeleton, and carpenters and preparators across Europe begin to imagine what the sea cow’s limbs must have been like.
The sea cow is imagined with long fingers, short fingers, broad hands, small hands, and von Nordmann recalls the specimen he saw in Cuvier’s collection in Paris, its skeleton adorned with fists cast from gypsum, and he asks von Wright to examine Bonsdorff’s collection of marine mammals, seals and walruses, and to design the sea cow some beautiful wooden prostheses.
The carpenter fashions a pair of hands, which the professors attach to the sea cow’s elbows, inserting pieces of wood to replace the decomposed cartilage so that the creature’s barrel-like chest opens up in front of them in all its beauty.
The sight is nothing short of majestic. Hacklin the janitor has built a brass trellis to support the skeleton.
A single skeleton usually requires only one or two brass pipes underneath it, but this one requires five supporting pillars, so heavy are its bones, so long its chain of vertebrae.
Upon these pillars, the professors assemble the sea cow, tying the spine together with strong metal wire and attaching the head to the atlas vertebra.
Miss Olson soon completes her own work too.
All that is missing is the final image, the complete skeleton viewed from the side, but for this she must wait until the scientists have erected the animal in full.
She has spent three weeks staring at various parts of the sea cow, concentrating her efforts on the vertebrae and the ribs, and now the parts all come together and the whole animal comes into view in front of her, one piece at a time.
With that, her work is done. She collects all the drawings she has made and takes them to the professor for approval.
Von Nordmann goes through the sketches and nods with satisfaction.
He truly has an excellent assistant, as skilled with bones as she is with insects, and he sends the sketches off to the publisher.
But there is a problem. Miss Olson has chosen to draw the complete sea cow at a scale of 1:15, but this means the image is too big to fit on the page.
There is no time to make another drawing, so the printers attach a larger page at the end of the book on which they reproduce the drawing of the complete sea cow, and this page is then folded neatly inside.
Von Nordmann smiles to himself. He could not have imagined a better way to remind readers of the sheer magnitude of the animal they are reading about, so large that it does not fit onto the pages of a book – even after being considerably shrunk.
Now scholars from far-off lands can read his presentation and flick through the skeleton like a book.
First the individual parts, the vertebrae, the ribs and skull, then finally they can unfold the page at the back and see the sea cow in full, spread the image out in front of them, imagine its scale and admire the enormous, beautiful creature that Hilda Olson has drawn for them.