"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (5 page)

It was hard to find our own apartment in Stockholm, of course, but well worth the trouble, because we adored living there. Our favorite café was run by Greeks, the neighbors on our floor were Finns, those in the apartment below us were Roma, “gypsies,” and the tenants on the ground floor were Turks. The husband in the Roma apartment was often in jail, and when he was home, he beat his wife. I remember one time when she managed to escape and come ring our doorbell. Stieg offered her coffee, wiped the blood off her face, and called the police. Calm was restored. Then the Finnish woman next door got up a petition to have her thrown out of the building, so I contacted Social Services (which had a special program for the Roma) to explain that the poor woman was now trapped between the beatings and the threat of eviction. Things settled down again. One evening, when Stieg and I walked into the building, we noticed a strong smell of perfume wafting down the stairs. When we reached our apartment, we saw that the Finnish woman’s door was open—and there she was with the Roma, both ladies all dolled up for a night on the town! That was Rinkeby for you.

I can honestly say that I was never afraid to come home in the evening, even after Stieg began to focus on right-wing extremists and we started receiving threats. We had the whole world at our doorstep, we didn’t need to travel abroad. In fact, when we moved into Stockholm proper in
1991, it was a real culture shock to find ourselves in a city that was so ethnically homogeneous.

IN ADDITION
to politics, Stieg and I had long shared a common passion for science fiction. Our favorite authors were Robert Heinlein and Samuel R. Delany, and I had translated into Swedish Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
, which describes what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. As soon as we’d moved to Stockholm, we’d joined the largest Swedish science fiction fan club, the SFSF (Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction), a friendly and varied collection of likeable weirdos, all of them crazy about SF. We fit right in. For two years, we were the editors in chief of
Fanac
, the SFSF newsletter, and from time to time we managed the association’s science fiction bookstore on Kungsholmen, a large island to the northwest of Södermalm in Lake Mälaren and part of the city of Stockholm. As business ventures go, the bookstore and newsletter were duds, but that wasn’t important, because
fandom is a way of life
. We were dreamers, fascinated by the alternative universes we found in that literature. Especially when they became real on the Internet. Published in 1992, Neal Stephenson’s
Snow Crash
is a good example of the cyberpunk milieu reflected in the cybernetic world of the hacker republic in which Lisbeth Salander is a model citizen.

In science fiction, cyborgs—half human, half machine—can plug directly into computers to join up with the cyberworld.
Lisbeth Salander plugs herself into the Internet, and her extraordinary skills are quite close to those of a cyborg.
The Millennium Trilogy
could have made a good SF saga, too.

At that time Stieg had a job in the postal service, and I had my state scholarship. Our two incomes allowed us to live, but nothing more, especially since Stieg, unlike me, was a spendthrift. For example, even when we were practically broke, he always had breakfast at the café although it was rather expensive. I could point this out to him as often as I liked, but that’s how it was, he didn’t want to change. I was from a family of country people who had some land and a farm, true, but no money to spare. Stieg’s parents owned nothing and rented their apartment, but their furniture was actually more expensive than my family’s. Since they worked in a clothing store, they had lots of clothes at home and Vivianne, Stieg’s mother, would often give me some.

A FEW
months after we moved to Stockholm, my father died. He was barely forty-six, an alcoholic, and he had started taking medications even though he was drinking, which is dangerous.

Two years earlier, he’d fallen so deeply into debt that almost everything except the family farm had been sold at auction. We’d also managed to save that little cabin and its forest in Önnesmark, sixty miles from Umeå, which Stieg and I used to go take care of with my brother and sister
every so often. When he’d drawn up the inventory, the bailiff had shown an interest in the property, but my father—or perhaps Vivianne, Stieg’s mother—had come up with a way to save it. Stieg and I were clearly a couple, and our families knew each other, so they worked together on this. My father signed a lifetime lease on the property for Stieg’s parents, which meant the cabin and forest could no longer be sold. Erland and Vivianne were very happy to spend all their summers there, and planted potatoes and strawberries on the property.

After the auction, my father’s debts were discharged and there was even a little money left over. After his death, however, we discovered that he had spent everything and gone into debt again, so we had to sell the farmhouse and its contents. At that time, my brother and sister and I were still students and had left all our belongings in the house. Everything vanished: our books, schoolwork, photos—everything. Two hundred years of family memories. My grandmother was grief-stricken at losing her only son. As for everything else … she behaved once again with great dignity. Accepting her fate, she moved into the village retirement home where she lived for another fifteen years without complaint.

Stieg was deeply distressed by what had happened. My father had been very fond of him, and was the only person with whom Stieg could talk about journalism. As for me, I was in a state of collapse. Stieg wrapped a protective cocoon around me. He supported me so much that I can truly say he carried me through that awful period of my life.

IN
1979, Stieg left the postal service and joined TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå), the big Swedish news agency, our equivalent of the Associated Press. He stayed there for twenty years. Starting out in the editorial department, he manned the phone as a kind of editorial secretary, receiving news items and articles from the reporters in all of the news services and correcting the copy before it went off to various papers. Then he became an illustrator in the TT Images and Features department, where he could also write about many subjects that interested him: Darwin, Robin Hood, World War II—you name it. Not to mention crime novels, which were also one of his specialties. In particular those written by women, whose style he found in
general much better than that of most men. A typical autodidact, Stieg had a vast fount of eclectic knowledge at his fingertips, and our home was always cluttered with books on all sorts of subjects: science fiction, politics, espionage, counterespionage, military strategy, feminism, computer science, and so on. To get them as cheaply as possible, we bought them in the original version, usually in English. Most of his colleagues saw Stieg as a pleasant person, intelligent, but difficult to get a handle on, especially since he tended to keep his private life to himself. Around the mid-1980s, when militants on the extreme right began robbing banks to finance their activities, breaking into military installations to steal weapons, and killing people for racist or political reasons, the Legal Affairs and News in Brief department within the agency began consulting Stieg. More often than not, he would know the past political affiliations of the suspects, their accomplices, and even the milieus they frequented! Working his way through a mass of often contradictory data, Stieg would swiftly figure out what was really going on. In 1999, for example, at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and wounded 680, Stieg understood from the beginning—unlike all the media—that the culprit was most likely an American militia member inspired by the far-right rhetoric of William Pierce’s
Turner Diaries
.

From the 1990s on, TT topped the list of the news media best informed about such subjects. The number one expert in this domain was right there at TT, and yet, even with the support of the other journalists, Stieg was never
transferred to a job at any of the regular desks. Reason given: “Stieg Larsson cannot write.” What do the millions of readers of
The Millennium Trilogy
think about that?

IN THE
mid-1990s, the media struggled through a severe economic crisis. Ad pages fell sharply, lots of journalists were laid off, and various newspapers folded. Although TT did not escape this storm battering the print press, the small Images and Features department kept doing well, selling photos and articles—in fact, against all expectations, it even made a profit. In spite of this, when the agency began downsizing across the board to increase efficiency, Stieg’s entire department was eliminated. This was the opportune moment to move Stieg to the Legal Affairs and News in Brief section, because he had recently proved, once again, that it was the right place for him.

In the aftermath of a bank robbery in 1999, two police officers had been killed execution-style in Malexander, a village a hundred miles from Stockholm. The circumstances surrounding these murders alerted Stieg to a connection with the extreme right, which later proved correct, but the manager in charge of staff layoffs refused to transfer Stieg, falling back on the same old argument: “Stieg Larsson cannot write!” Stieg and I talked and argued a great deal about what he should do. I thought it was high time for him to devote more than weekends and evenings late into the night to his passion for investigative journalism.
True, we hadn’t any savings and earned only enough to pay our basic expenses, and I couldn’t remember buying any clothes that weren’t on sale or shopping anywhere but in a discount store. Still, even though it was financially risky, the moment had come for him to strike out on his own.

In the end, realizing that he would never get ahead at TT, Stieg chose to take the severance package and was let go in 1999.

SO HE
walked away from twenty years of work at TT and never went back. Later on, when he had appointments with journalists still at the agency, he met them in a café. Stieg never forgot or forgave what he and other perfectly competent journalists had gone through during the almost completely irrational dismemberment of Sweden’s greatest news agency.