"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (23 page)

Friday, November 25

AT AROUND
seven thirty, the delivery from Ikea was waiting for me at home. Beds, mattresses, sheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers … all there!

Went straight back out to buy the caster wheels for the beds in a store in Fridhemsplan, on Kungsholmen. Not the ones I’d planned on, since the holes turned out to be too near the edge, but similar ones, gray, instead of the taller, more slender ones of black wood that I had envisioned.

Saturday, November 26

I WENT
to fetch my drill at a friend’s house. To drill the holes, I have to clamp the feet in the workbench vise and use a 3.5 mm bit and 4 mm screws. I quickly realized I’d have to gauge the measurements with a longer screw I found in a drawer. I began attaching the feet to the first bed frame, which I installed in the “new” room. Mattress, duvet and pillowcases, satin sheets in black, white, gray, and ocher checks. I rolled the daybed over near the window and settled onto it with cushions at my back to watch Lake Mälaren flow quietly below through the Hammarby Canal. I sat there, in silence and tranquility, for a long while.

I put together and finished the second daybed and set it at an angle along the wall, facing the first one. Perfect. Now I have a room that matches my new life. An office for work, a
living room where my guests can relax after dinner, and a guest room for friends passing through. I arranged Stieg’s books on teak shelves near the window.

And then I slept there. Slept very well. All those books around me made me feel as if I were sleeping at the center of a benevolent world.

December

AT SOME
point in December, Joakim phoned Britt to tell her, among other things, that if I published the fourth volume, Norstedts would not publish the second and third ones.

Britt explained to him that the computer supposedly containing more of the
Millennium
saga was the property of
Expo
, not Stieg. Clearly, this computer has become an obsession for the Larssons! A few days later, their lawyer wrote to
Expo
to find out where the computer was. (This question would be raised at the
Expo
board meeting in January 2006, and the answer, delivered at the end of that same month, would be: “We don’t know.”)

Expecting to be driven at any moment from my apartment, I began packing my belongings in cardboard boxes. I’m handling the situation well, though, and there isn’t anything anymore that’s too painful for me to consider or imagine. I’ve recovered my balance and my inner compass. My therapist even says that I’m making particularly rapid progress.

IT’S TIME
to write the epilogue for this year just past. First, though, I must compose a summary of my life with Stieg. I cry as I write “I was loved” because, in the end, that’s the only thing that counts.

AFTER ONE
year
I wait for a call that never comes
His number in my cell phone
I wait for a smile I never get
His photo on my wall
I wait for a caress I never feel
His jacket in my closet
But I hear his voice answer me
When my despair is at its worst.

WHEN STIEG
died, I had but one objective, as I wrote on a piece of paper: “To survive.” For 2006, I write these words: “To learn how to live again.”

UNTIL
2007, I continued to work regularly with
Expo
. My chief occupations were selecting authors for the website devoted to Stieg and translating any articles that were in English. At first, I often worked at the office to show that I wasn’t abandoning the magazine, but I also went there because I needed to distract myself from missing Stieg. His death prodded many people’s consciences, so
Expo
’s financial situation had considerably improved: beginning in November 2004, spontaneous donations started coming in, and in early 2005 the Förening artister mot nazister (Association of Artists Against Nazis) committed itself for six years to an annual contribution of 500,000 kronor ($72,000). In addition, the Statens Kulturåd
(National Council of Culture) was now providing financial aid for the magazine’s printing costs, and
Expo
had begun a long-term collaboration with the publishing firm Natur & Kultur.

My last contribution to the magazine and the foundation was to renovate the office in 2007. Since the budget was barely 30,000 kronor (a little over $4,000), I spent three months washing and repainting the walls and ceilings, which were in poor shape. I wanted a warm shade for the floor, so I picked a dark red. For everything else, I used black and white, “newspaper” colors. I also built a conference table with some salvaged materials. The net effect is rather sober and spare, except for the archives room, where folders and old newspapers are piled up ad infinitum.

Today, a representative of
Expo
serves on the jury for the Stieg Larsson Prize, an award organized by the Larsson family and the Norstedts Publishing Group.

Expo
has survived and follows its path. I will follow mine.

SINCE AUTUMN
2007, my apartment in Stockholm has belonged to me free and clear. Almost three years after Stieg’s death, the Larssons suddenly had the official papers delivered to me. Until then, I’d been left hanging, ready at a moment’s notice to abandon ship, so for two years I’d been living surrounded by cardboard boxes. At last relieved of uncertainty, I unpacked my things and
threw a big housewarming party, inviting everyone who’d stood by me through thick and thin. Nowadays, books are taking up more and more room in my six hundred square feet of space and will soon start feeling crowded. Not me! I’ve repainted the walls here and had a new kitchen put in, white and olive green. The apartment no longer resembles what it was when Stieg lived here. I could no longer bear opening my front door onto our former life, where the slightest detail reminded me that he was gone. I also bought a secondhand oriental rug for the living room, cheap: it was dirty and damaged, but it’s a Kashgai woven by one of the craftswomen of that nomadic Iranian tribe. On it is a garden full of trees and flowers, with some ducks, I believe, strolling around in the greenery. After washing and mending the rug, I laid it on the floor, put on a little music, and danced the salsa barefoot on this new realm. I felt in my body that the apartment had become mine, and that my home had lost that painful echo of happy times lost forever.

I RETURNED
to my professional life in the building industry, still in the domain of sustainable development. This is my world. A hard and demanding world, but a fair one. My work has meaning because it acts on reality. I can use my skills freely and make decisions I find effective. This isn’t the virtual reality of the
Millennium
industry, where I can’t decide anything at all.

This
Millennium
industry was born in July 2005, seven months after Stieg died, when
Men Who Hate Women
(in English:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
) came out in Sweden, and it has become a juggernaut with the success of the trilogy: more than forty million books have been sold to this date throughout the world, not to mention the audiobooks and the films for TV and the cinema. Along with this industry, a myth has sprung up: the
Millennium
Stieg. Everything under the sun has since been written and said about him. And usually by people who barely knew him, knew nothing of our life, and shared none of our struggles. Why? Because Stieg and I were never celebrities, never got the red-carpet treatment at evening premieres, never had the
New York Times, Le Monde
, the
Guardian
, or
El País
clamoring to interview us the way they do now to talk to me about Stieg and the trilogy. Stieg’s real life, like mine, was often boring, always hardworking, and sometimes dangerous. That’s why those people who today have so much to say about him never came anywhere near us.