"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (19 page)

IN THE
days that follow, my sister Britt calls me. She wants me to authorize her to speak to Erland about that letter from the tax authorities. When I won’t allow her to get involved, she finally blurts out, “Eva, I know something you don’t and that I didn’t want to tell you earlier, because you were in no condition to hear it.” On the evening of Stieg’s funeral service, on December 10, 2004, someone came over to Britt to tell her, “Watch out, they’ve already talked about taking it all.” I stand there, paralyzed, clutching my cell phone. So everything had already been decided.

Britt did try to talk to Erland. He told her that I was mentally ill. The proof? That I wanted to give money to
Expo
! “And a foundation in Stieg’s memory—what do you think of that?” she asked him. Long silence. In fact, he doesn’t want any money given to anyone. Conclusion: Stieg must also have been mentally ill, since he was the one who wanted
Expo
to receive some money.

When the news of these developments got around, I began receiving wonderful messages from my friends. Some of them even offered to be my guarantor so I could borrow money to buy Stieg’s half of our apartment from his family. That’s when I realized that at least I was rich … in friendship.

STIEG HAS
been gone now for seven months. I’m barely starting to recover. Today I talked with Gruvstad, the therapist, about this deeply rooted belief I’ve had ever since childhood: a great happiness is always followed by a misfortune that is just as intense. She assured me that this isn’t true and that I mustn’t always be afraid of being punished if I feel good. I came home with a (very) tiny sensation of lightness. I took out a new lamp of yellow glass I’d bought, set it on the glossy white windowsill, and turned it on for the first time. Then I put together a whatnot, an étagère for Stieg’s office, and on it I placed three pictures: the black-and-white photograph of him as a child with his grandparents, in front of their little wooden house; the photo I’d taken of the inside of their kitchen when we went back there; and a snapshot of me. I looked at Stieg and asked him to watch over me. Then I started crying again, with my head hanging, for a long time.

Tuesday, June 7

THROUGH THE
Föreningsbanken in Umeå, where the Larssons live, I received a bankbook representing what is left—after they’d helped themselves—of a building society account Stieg had: 1,290.63 kronor, or $181.41. What humiliation. What contempt. Aside from that bankbook, no other news from Erland or Joakim.

Friday, June 10

WENT TO
Handelsbanken to take out enough from our joint account, Stieg’s and mine, to pay the 8,640 kronor ($1,282) due the lawyers for their inventory of Stieg’s assets. Of the 30,000 kronor that remained, I took 15,000 ($2,250) without informing the estate. I couldn’t care less. I don’t want to have anything more do to with the Larssons.

What I’d like to see passed is a legislative amendment to the law on concubinage. I don’t want other people to suffer the same injustice I did! I called Ronny Olander, a Swedish MP in the Social Democratic Party, and Gustav Fridolin, a Green Party MP. The latter was so shaken by my story that he asked me to send him an email right away with full details.

Saturday, June 11

WHILE GETTING
ready to refinish the floor in Stieg’s office, I carried piles of papers into the living room, and so came across some documents from the Ikano Bank. I’d completely forgotten that I’d transferred Stieg’s life insurance policy there. Now I can get money to pay for the trip from Falun to Stockholm to attend the first executive meeting of
Expo
’s new board next Thursday. For travel during the day, the ticket costs more, going from 26 to 69 euros (from $34 to $91). I didn’t have enough in my account and won’t get my next paycheck for two weeks.

THE REFINISHED
floor is a disaster! I have to call the supplier of the compound used to fill in the cracks. It’s really a miserable chore to make this room over, but I must do it. I can’t subcontract this job. One can’t farm out grief. What with shifting around all I have left of Stieg, various objects and books, he’s everywhere in the apartment. And that reminds me of all the things he was interested in, all he did, all he cared about so passionately.… It moves me and upsets me, and it hurts.

Saturday, July 2

I REDID
the floor. I’ve wept nonstop over these few square feet of wood, the tears trickling down between the floorboards on which I knelt, slaving away. What a hell. But why didn’t I do this when Stieg was alive? He would have been so happy to have the floor looking nice. I do have to make over this room now, though, to have a place where I can finish my book on Hallman and organize the Stieg Larsson Foundation I hope to create. And for that I’ll need to be able to hang on to the apartment! The constant anguish I live in is just awful. Per-Erik Nilsson made an offer to the Larssons and to Svante Weyler at Norstedts: that I should manage Stieg’s literary estate. And he raised the question of the apartment. Deafening silence. Since March, nothing from the Larssons, nothing from Norstedts.

DURING JULY
, I learn that a
Millennium
audiobook edition is due to come out. I remember Weyler mentioning this in December 2004. But there was no contract for audiobooks between Stieg and Norstedts.…

Wednesday, July 20

FIRST WEEK
of vacation. I’ve learned that an offer for the
film rights of the trilogy from Strix, a Swedish television production company with major dealings in the Nordic countries, has been rejected by Norstedts, which wants a bigger suitor. I took another look at the contract Norstedts has for Stieg’s crime novels to see if they really control those rights. And no, they don’t. There’s nothing there about any audiobooks, either. After talking with friends and colleagues in publishing, Stieg had in fact decided not to let Norstedts be the agent for film rights to his work. If a film adaptation of the trilogy became a possibility, he wanted to make any decisions about that two or three years down the line, after the first book had come out, meaning in around 2007–2008. Stieg intended to find an agent and a production company in the United States, to make sure any film would be a top-quality product. So in that contract Stieg signed in April 2004, he didn’t check off the box for film rights. What’s more, strangely enough, outside of the separate agreement giving the Pan Agency (the Norstedts foreign rights department) the right to sell the novels abroad, the main contract deals only with a paperback edition.

Puzzling over this oddity, I found an explanation: when it was time to sign the contracts, the two separate documents were presented to Stieg for his signature, but no one realized that the second one was actually
both
contracts, stapled together by mistake. The first document concerned the paperback rights, and Stieg signed the last page, so that contract is valid. When he signed the last page of the second document, which was supposed to be the main
publishing contract, he was really signing only the Pan Agency contract again. So Stieg never signed the principal contract. Stieg and I never noticed, and neither did Norstedts.