"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (11 page)

Giving some of his characters real people’s names, and even their professions or personalities, was for Stieg a mark of affection and admiration. We didn’t know the boxer Paolo Roberto personally, but in Sweden he’s a celebrity. Although he was a young delinquent in the 1980s, he then became a professional boxer and in 1987 played the lead in a film loosely dramatizing his early life: Staffan Hildebrand’s
Stockholmsnatt
(
Stockholm Night
or
The King of Kungsan
), an important cult film in Sweden. Today Paolo Roberto has a cooking show on television—and his Italian aunts don’t hesitate to grab a spoon out of his hands when he isn’t stirring tomato sauce the right way! Stieg was especially impressed by Roberto’s frankness, and his unpredictability. He can be totally macho one minute and then suddenly begin championing equality between the sexes. During the 2002 elections, he almost got into Parliament, but came in second. On the other hand, he did make it into
The Millennium Trilogy
.

THE PSYCHIATRIST
Svante Branden, who helps Lisbeth Salander defend herself against Dr. Peter Teleborian in the third volume, is one of our old friends. I’ve already mentioned that I sublet his student room when I arrived in Stockholm in
1977, before Stieg had found his job with the postal service and come to join me. Like us, Svante Branden has always been against all forms of discrimination and abuse. As a psychiatrist, he’s particularly skilled at perceiving people’s real motives behind whatever smoke screen of excuses they may make. Stieg wanted to pay homage to him by casting him as an “ordinary hero” in daily life. After Stieg’s death, however, and the behavior of his father and brother regarding the moral, intellectual, and material legacy of my partner (about which I’ll have more to say later), Svante no longer felt honored to be in the trilogy. And he wrote to the Larssons to tell them why.

The Larssons sent their answer directly to the editors of
Uppdrag Granskning
(
Mission: Investigation
), a serious television program on investigative journalism, who published it on their website. Svante then allowed the editors to publish his own letter on the website of Swedish National Television. In the Larssons’ letter, Stieg’s brother proposed sarcastically that Svante might be of some psychiatric help to me—and offered to donate all damages asked to charity.…

IN STIEG’S
manuscript, Anders Jakobsson is the doctor who admits Lisbeth Salander to the emergency room of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg at the beginning of
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
. He operates, removes the bullet lodged in her brain, and saves her life. All through her hospitalization, which lasts for dozens and dozens of pages, he helps her. He talks to her, listens to her, sneaks her Palm Tungsten T3 personal digital assistant to her, and so forth. Anders had been a friend to Stieg and me ever since the Umeå years of the 1970s. In 2006, at Eastertime—after Stieg had died and his father and brother had begun to stop considering me Stieg’s legitimate widow—Anders ran into Erland in a small supermarket in Umeå and did not conceal his opinion about the matter. After that incident, the Larssons had Norstedts Förlag, the publishers of the trilogy, change “Anders Jakobsson” to “Anders Jonasson” in the third book of the trilogy! This
story was confirmed by Norstedts and the Larssons on camera in an interview for “The Millennium Millions,” a program broadcast on
Uppdrag Granskning
in the spring of 2008. Anders Jakobsson then sent a letter to one of the journalists, which is posted on the Swedish National Television website.

Another everyday heroine in our personal pantheon who shows up in
The Millennium Trilogy
is the woman who saved a man named Joy Rahman. In
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, when Mikael and police inspector Jan Bublanski argue about whether Lisbeth is really implicated in the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman, Blomkvist brings up a miscarriage of justice that is quite well-known in Sweden, the case of Joy Rahman. This man was condemned and imprisoned for the murder of an elderly lady and would still be behind bars if a teacher at his children’s school had not devoted several years to an assiduous investigation of his case. Stieg and I knew this teacher and understood her anger, and as we followed her struggle, we were appalled by the flaws she uncovered in the Swedish justice system. Our admiration grew for this stubborn woman who simply would not give up: she managed to have new forensic tests conducted, and with the help of a good lawyer, a psychiatrist, the prison chaplain, and a journalist, she gathered enough proof to obtain a new trial for Rahman, who was
found innocent and set free after eight years in prison. In 2003, she and the journalist were awarded the Democracy Prize by Örebro University in Sweden. This schoolteacher well deserves her place in
The Millennium Trilogy
.

THE FIRST
hundred pages of
The Girl Who Played with Fire
take place on the island of Grenada, where Lisbeth has decided to spend some time. Why Grenada? Because it was our island. And that’s a long story.

Early in the 1980s, Stieg and I happened to read some articles by African American journalists about the Grenadian people in the English-language magazine of the Fourth International, in which there was an entertaining account of the popular uprising that toppled the dictator Eric Gairy, who had often deeply embarrassed his country before the entire world … 
in speeches full of references to UFOs
, in which he adamantly believes.

This spot far across the ocean intrigued us. With its crazy
mix of social democracy and Trotskyism, it seemed to enjoy a humanist attitude graced with something of a sense of humor. Stieg and I spent the summer of 1981 on this island dominated by its slumbering volcano, with its roads flanked by dense jungle. Flying out of Luxemburg, we first touched down, like Lisbeth, in Barbados, where we changed planes to a puddle jumper. The pilot, a charming Rasta with long dreadlocks, landed on a tiny runway threading between beach and mountainside. We stayed at a place called Seascape, uphill from the wharf where ships docked, and we liked to stroll along the beach at Grand Anse, where the sand was as fine as powder and we could dive through shoals of colorful fish. But we were not on vacation, oh no. We were eager to write about what was happening there, so we lost no time in making appointments with political figures. At the Ministry of Tourism, we learned that an ecotourism project was under consideration, involving small hotels integrated into the landscape and the local habitat, and meals based on local products. I remember in particular a conversation about shopkeepers who wanted to raise their prices outrageously. We were on their side and found that normal, since Grenada, like the rest of the Caribbean, must import almost everything, from auto parts to toilet paper. Stieg and I came up with a sensible solution: the implementation of two price systems, one more expensive than the other. It would be up to tourists and the more well-off islanders to choose a system in accordance with their means and their desire to help the population. Not a very practical concept, but it was certainly interesting to think about!

We would have liked to live there for years, but when that summer was over, we had to leave. As soon as we got home we contacted the Grenada Support Committee, and the Grenadian consul in Sweden, Eleanor Raiper, became a dear friend. We had wonderful times together, because Grenadians are jolly, fun-loving people who don’t get all bogged down in grandiose theories the way some of our friends do. We started a magazine, and to raise funds for the island cooperatives, we didn’t go door-to-door the way we used to, but instead organized “dinner-dances” where Caribbean food was served. A delightful way to practice politics!

In the fall of 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. Since I was working with Stieg at TT at the time to earn a little money, we heard the news as soon as it came over the wire. Then I remembered that when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, my father, who was a journalist, had had the bright idea of calling the hotels there. That’s how he quickly obtained eyewitness information, making his local paper the only one in the country to publish such scoops. Thanks to Eleanor, who had a Grenadian phone book, Stieg and I were able to pull off the same coup: TT was the only media outlet to provide interviews right away. When we learned that over 10,000 American soldiers had landed on our island, I burst into tears. Sweden hadn’t had a war in over two hundred years, and I somehow imagined that all 110,000 Grenadians were going to be massacred.

The description in
The Millennium Trilogy
of the rise and fall of the government of Maurice Bishop, the charismatic
leader of the New Jewel movement, is of course the result of everything we saw on the island and learned later on. Writing about Grenada was a way of paying tribute to people who had given us much, and with whom we had been happy.