"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (4 page)

IN THE
autumn of 1972, my sister Britt and I attended a meeting in support of the Front National de Libération in Vietnam (the FNL) at the Mimer School in Umeå. It was the first time I’d ever gone to anything like that. My father used to vote for the Liberal People’s Party, but that was the extent of his involvement, while I considered myself to be a reasonably politically aware person, and that was enough for me. The Vietnam War had upset and sickened me ever since I was fourteen, however, and now that I’d finished high school, I felt it was time for me to take a serious interest in something other than studies and diplomas.

A tall, thin guy with dark brown hair, warm eyes, and a broad, cheerful smile was greeting everyone arriving for
the meeting with an energetic “Welcome!” It was Stieg. He was barely eighteen, while I was almost nineteen. He asked Britt and me lots of questions, and when he learned that we lived in Haga, a neighborhood in Umeå, he immediately recruited us for the team he himself would be leading. Later he told me that he’d seen his chance and pounced on it!

And that’s how I became a political activist with him. We put up posters, sold newsletters, and raised funds door-to-door. We debated things, argued a lot:
I mean
, how
could an imperialist war like that have happened?
That was Stieg, a talker, curious about everything, generous, a very moral person. A bit casual for an intellectual, but absolutely irresistible. He fascinated me. There was nothing theoretical about the way he spoke from the heart, from his gut, and yet he was entertaining, too. Politics with him was not a chore or a duty, the way I’d thought it would be, but a real pleasure—which was something of a rare experience in our austere milieu. Stieg and I often thought along the same lines, while most other FNL supporters were Maoists spouting rather unrealistic, authoritarian dogma. Not us.

I found Stieg’s ideas so interesting that I began encouraging him to write about them. In Sweden, even small newspapers have a spot in their Arts & Leisure pages for opinion pieces. My father was a journalist and could have helped him, but Stieg, unsure of himself, wouldn’t hear of it. I kept pushing him, though, so he finally took the plunge, and when he saw his first published article, he was so thrilled that I think he decided to become a journalist on the spot. He took the entrance exam for a journalism
school, failed it (which wasn’t surprising, given how young he was), and like most of the other students, could have taken it again, but he refused. His self-confidence was at a low ebb again.

As for me, intrigued at first by the Maoist doctrine, I was going to meetings and even to introductory courses on the subject, which at the time was quite the thing to do. A rational person, I was looking for answers to my questions—but in the wrong places, as it turned out: the Maoist arguments were a bit fuzzy, lightweight, even childish, as if we were going to solve economic problems by simply walking on water! When the Trotskyites showed up and joined forces for a while with the Maoists, they shared the same bank account to raise funds for Vietnam, which I thought was a great idea: at last we were struggling together toward the same goal. Unfortunately, since all revolutionaries want to make their own revolutions, internal power struggles soon broke out. One day we were asked to drum up some money for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and since we had to support their politics, I wanted to know what they were. The answer arrived from on high: “Don’t ask questions, do as you’re told!” Well, Stieg and I abandoned that fund-raising effort and left the Vietnamese solidarity movement.

I then gravitated toward “the traitors”: that’s what the Maoists called the Trotskyites, whose system authorized multi-partyism (which I found more democratic), whereas the Maoists were a dictatorship. Stieg decided to stick with the latter, and throughout the year that followed, before we’d
moved in together, we fought violently over the best way to bring happiness to the world proletariat. It was awful. And often ended in tears. I thought Stieg was a stupid dreamer with his head in the clouds. At the time, I was living in a student room; I’d been accepted at the Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg but decided to register instead at the department of mathematics and economic history at Umeå University, because that way I could stay with Stieg, who had a small studio apartment in Umeå. When we first met, Stieg had been finishing up a two-year program that would allow him to enter the working world but not to attend college. Perhaps he was influenced by my example, who knows, but he then returned to high school for another two years to obtain his baccalaureate degree—and being as stubborn as he was, he got it, which didn’t surprise me at all.

He earned his living with odd jobs: delivering papers, working as a locksmith’s apprentice, a forester, a dishwasher in a restaurant, and so on. Although we disagreed about how the world works, we knew how to keep our love life separate from our political commitments, and eventually we moved into a large communal apartment with my sister and some friends.

Later on, Stieg in turn joined the Trotskyites. More senior in the movement than he was, I was in charge at the time of a youth group in the high school where he was working toward his diploma. Our roles had been reversed: I was now the teacher, and he the student.

Then the Trotskyist movement asked the students to “proletarianize” themselves by adopting a life of wage labor, and
a cell soon sprang up in the local Volvo factory. My working pals were categorical on this point, however: “
We
had no choice, no chance to study. But you do! Continue, absolutely!” And I agreed with them. Ours was the first generation to benefit from government loans for higher education, so why throw it all away? Besides, my background wasn’t middle class, my family had been farmers, so I knew perfectly well what the proletariat was—and saw no benefit to society in seeking to rejoin it! City kids kept showing up in bead necklaces and clothes they’d sewn themselves, eager to live communally and go back to the land. We, who actually came from there—we figured they must be off their rockers!

When teaching my classes, I’d use aspects of these young people’s lives to get them thinking about things. This was in 1976. My superiors would have liked me just to drill them in theory. I was dismissed from my position, replaced by someone more “red,” and I left the Trotskyites. Not Stieg. He stayed in that organization until late in the 1980s, but more for the theory than the practice, as a way to continue the political and intellectual exchanges that so impassioned him. For a long time he also contributed unpaid articles under his own name to
The International
, the official journal of the movement.

In
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, Lisbeth Salander is suspected of murdering the journalist Dag Svensson (whose investigative report on the sex trafficking of Eastern European women was published in the magazine
Millennium
) and his companion Mia Bergman, a criminologist specializing in sexual slavery. Lisbeth discovers she’s
being sought by the police when she happens to watch part of a television program in which Peter Teleborian, the assistant head physician at St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, outside Uppsala, is pontificating about her case. Lisbeth had been a virtual prisoner in this clinic for more than two years, and she realizes that no newspaper has questioned the fact that doctors are allowed to restrain unruly and difficult patients in a room “free of stimuli” for unconscionable periods of time—a practice she compares to the treatment of political prisoners during the Moscow show trials in the 1930s. Lisbeth knows that “according to the Geneva Conventions, subjecting prisoners to sensory deprivation was classified as inhumane.” And this is a topic Stieg and I knew well, because for many years we read everything we could find on it. Stalin treated political opponents as if they were traitors, making them physically disappear—even from photographs, books, and all documentary references—in order to completely rewrite history. The expression “Moscow trial” became part of our private vocabulary.

Using the same words, sharing the same tastes, wanting the same things—that’s rather typical of couples who met when they were teenagers and grew into adulthood together.

And yet, it’s difficult to explain now how strongly Stieg and I felt, from the first moment we met, that we were made for each other. More than ten years later, he wrote, “I’d given up believing it could happen. I never imagined I’d meet someone like you, who would understand me.” For my part, I’d known right away that this man would put the puzzle of my life in order and make me a better person.
But at the same time, finding each other like that put enormous pressure on us. How can anyone calmly accept that his or her life and very
self
should be completely challenged and changed? It was an anguishing feeling, like the realization that the universe is infinite. Sometimes we tried to pull back a little, to get some perspective, but the attraction we felt was too strong. We were afraid, but we were each in thrall to the other.

For thirty-two years, we always had something to say, to tell each other, to explore, to share, to read, to seek, to fight for, and to build … together.

And we had wonderful times, too. He was great fun to be with.

He was a loving and demonstrative man. A real teddy bear.

With Stieg, I understood the expression “soul mate.”

IN FEBRUARY
1977, when he was twenty-two, one of Stieg’s dreams came true: he went to Africa.

To finance his trip, he worked hard for six months at the nearby sawmill in Hörnefors. Why did he go to Africa? He never fully explained that to me, and rightly so: all I knew was that he was leaving on a mission for the Fourth International, the communist organization founded in 1938 in France by Trotsky and his supporters, whom Stalin had driven out of the Soviet Union for their opposition to the Third International. Stieg’s assignment was to contact certain groups involved in the civil war then raging in Ethiopia, probably in order to deliver some money and/or documents to them. A risky business. Stieg later told me that just by chance he
wound up teaching a female militia unit how to fire mortars—which he’d learned to do during his military service—with weapons smuggled into the hills of Eritrea by the USSR.

Africa fascinated Stieg, and his ambition was to write articles about this continent where so much was happening so quickly. Between his departure in February and his return in July, however, not a single newspaper showed interest in any topic he suggested. Stieg probably seemed too young and inexperienced for the job, but no other journalists, Swedish or otherwise, were on the ground during the Eritrean–Ethiopian War. It was too dangerous.

When he left Umeå, Stieg passed through Stockholm to get his visas, and when I joined him there to say goodbye, he met me at the station, wild with joy.

In the months that followed, his letters arrived at irregular intervals from very different places. He wrote quite guardedly both to me and in the journal he kept on his trip, in which nothing of what he later told me was recorded. Fearing he might be arrested at any moment, he was afraid any important information would fall into the wrong hands, causing serious consequences for him and the people he was meeting.

Stieg caught malaria in Africa and became deathly ill. One day he suddenly went blind: lost in a white fog, he barely managed to return through the streets to his hotel by feeling his way along the sides of buildings. When he reached his room, he passed out, but after someone found him he was rushed to a hospital. Sometime later, he wrote me about his ordeal in a letter that arrived one summer
day and scared the wits out of me. It was horrible to read that his kidneys had shut down and that he’d awakened in the hospital to find dried blood from the previous patient on his pillow—only to lose consciousness again.

All in the same letter, I learned that he had almost died, that he realized how important I was to him and how much he loved me, and that he wanted to live with me from now on, as soon as he got home. I’d known that our relationship was deep and strong, but never before had he told me so with such heartfelt sincerity. I cried all through his letter, from fear, relief, and happiness.

He had survived, and we were going to build our life together.

AT UMEÅ
University, the various courses I was taking were culturally enriching, but not enough to make me want to take exams and pursue a degree in those fields. So it was time for me to choose a profession. I picked architecture, a discipline that brought together everything I loved in the way of technical skills and creative energy. In 1977 I enrolled in the department of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Stieg arrived a few months later. Housing was already in short supply in the capital, so we stayed in a student room loaned to me by Svante Branden, a psychiatrist friend of Stieg’s who was also his neighbor in Umeå.

Svante turns up in
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
, the third volume of the trilogy, when he helps out Lisbeth
Salander by denouncing the fraudulent analysis of Dr. Peter Teleborian and the arbitrary internment to which he had subjected her. That would have been just like Svante, because along with all our other friends, he was against every form of violation of human rights and freedom. When Stieg made him one of the heroes of
The Millennium Trilogy
, it was a way of paying homage to him.

Living at Svante’s place all the time was complicated because it was illegal for more than one person to stay there. In those days, young people were allowed to move into buildings slated for demolition and pay a reduced rent for places without any heat or hot water, but such lodgings were really too uncomfortable, so we didn’t take much advantage of them. Stieg then managed to find something in a southern suburb of Stockholm. It wasn’t until 1979 that I snagged one of the tiny two-room apartments in the Rinkeby district, which are reserved for university students. We lived in that apartment for six years, and we loved the neighborhood so much that when we moved, we found another place there. In the end, we stayed in Rinkeby for twelve years, at a time when few Swedish people lived in an area full of immigrants. Today the population includes more than seventy nationalities, but Rinkeby was already a wonderful melting pot of exotic cultures, which is reflected in the various foreign family names in
The Millennium Trilogy
. I earned my degree in architecture through a project related to the rehabilitation of the district, where most businesses were housed in basements; my proposal envisioned the transformation of
the downtown area by creating specific commercial spaces that would favor a more vibrant urban neighborhood atmosphere.