"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (16 page)

The envelope contained two letters dated February 9, 1977, when Stieg was twenty-two, in Stockholm en route to Africa. This may seem difficult to believe, but I really had never seen this envelope before. Stieg had left it with his belongings at the house of the friend with whom he’d stayed in Stockholm, before his departure. Ever since then, the box had tagged along with us on all of our moves, and Stieg had probably forgotten about it.

My finding the envelope this way was so extraordinary that I looked up to heaven and said
Thank you
to Stieg. I do not believe in a life after death, but do feel there is a spiritual dimension to some things that happen. When two people have lived together for so long, each one becomes a part of the other. Sometimes I imagine Stieg relaxing in my heart, in a hammock, smiling and giving me a little wave. And we’ve never
had
a hammock! But that’s how I see him now, lazy and carefree at last.

THE FIRST
letter, labeled “Will,” was meant for his parents. He asked them to leave me all of his possessions and his personal writings, plus everything that had to do with politics. His science fiction books, however, were to be given to my brother. Stieg had signed his will, but without witnesses. The second letter was addressed to me.

I read some passages from it during the commemoration.

I still don’t know how I managed to read his letter in front of all those people. I never looked up at anyone, but later I was told that many in the audience wept as they listened.

AFTER THE
commemoration, at around five o’clock, I went home to prepare some soup so that Stieg’s family and mine could gather quietly for a moment after that dark day. The Larssons stayed at the hall awhile to have coffee with all of our friends and colleagues from
Expo
. Later, at the apartment, Joakim reproached me for having
refused to let Norstedts pay for the ceremony, but I disagreed: Stieg was my partner, so it was up to me to handle things. That evening was the second and last time Joakim was ever in our home.

Having spent all his early childhood with his maternal grandparents, Stieg had inherited some of their possessions, but his brother Joakim had no mementos of them and asked for a few things to remember them by. I found a small blue wooden box with traditional painted decorations, which his grandmother had used as her sewing kit, and another box, of bronze, that had come from Korea and belonged to his grandfather. Joakim took both boxes when he and his family went home to Umeå at the end of the afternoon. Erland and Gun stayed in Stockholm to attend a gathering I’d organized for seven o’clock at the Södra Theater bar, to raise a glass and share memories of Stieg with our friends, families, and even people from Norstedts. All the while, Erland kept saying that he didn’t want any part of Stieg’s estate.

A FEW
days later, Stieg was buried. Our friends were there.

On the morning of December 22, I took an important step. I had a black ceramic burial urn, modeled on a Viking artifact and made on the island of Gotland by a professional potter, Eva-Marie Kothe, and into it I placed all that I had lost: our love, our affection, and our dreams.
A snapshot in which, lying on a rock, Stieg gazes at me, smiling. Another one, taken in Önnesmark in front of a cabin, up in Västerbotten: he’s gently cradling against his chest a baby hare found in the rhubarb patch. (He loved animals, especially baby ones.) And another picture, the most beautiful one and my favorite: handsome, tanned, seductive, he’s looking at me through the camera lens, cigarette in hand, at ease, as if waiting for something. Finally, a portrait in which, leaning backward, he squints into the sunlight. I also added the sketch of our cabin we’d prepared during that last summer. The final sketch, and the best one, which he’d asked to look at just once more before I sent it off to the factory that specialized in green construction. He’d pulled up a chair, sat down next to me, and we’d had fun imagining how we were going to furnish our “little writing cottage.” He was transformed: warm, tender, relaxed, happy about this new future that promised to be more intimate and serene. He’d come back to me as he used to be, and for me, it was like falling in love all over again.

Then I added to that black urn some phone numbers of rooms for rent in the archipelago that I’d written down so he could take a week’s vacation and keep working, without being bothered, on the fourth volume of the
Millennium
saga or correcting the proofs of the first three. I would often find him chuckling to himself on the living room settee: “You’ll never guess what Lisbeth is cooking up!” Then he’d start writing, adjusting some detail he’d asked me to check in my documentation files.

I placed the ceramic vessel full of our lives on a shelf. And behind it I slipped a few sheets of handmade paper I’d bought at Kvarnbyn in Mölndal, outside Gothenburg. On a blue sheet I’d written down what I had lost, and on a yellow one, what I wanted now: “To survive another year.”

IN
THE
Millennium Trilogy
, Lisbeth Salander marks her body with tattoos as a reminder of all those who have hurt her and on whom she wishes to take revenge. In my case, such people are etched into my memory.

Several weeks after Stieg’s passing, I still couldn’t manage to find words, even in my thoughts, to express the rage I felt toward this death that was so unfair—and toward those who, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, had helped it along.

Stieg and I had dreamed about changing the world, become actively involved in our causes, sacrificed so much for our battles—and now I was left with a sense of tremendous failure.

I thought back over all those years of frustration that had
wounded the man of my life, years during which some people had refused to recognize his abilities, his immense store of knowledge, and his worth. Time after time I’d watched his disappointment at not having been accepted as a journalist at TT, his pain over so many hopes that were dashed and all those promises he’d believed in only to see them broken in the end. I relived his anguish, discouragement, and his constant fear, after he’d left TT, that
Expo
would go under in spite of all his efforts every month to find funding for it. I remembered him coming home so late in the evenings, worn out, sleeping more and more badly, fitfully. I recalled a terrible period when too much stress brought on a painful, chronic gum inflammation, for which a doctor had prescribed very strong medications. Feeling pressured from all directions, Stieg talked to me about his problems, of course, seeking advice, but he had to make all of his own decisions. Overwhelmed by this horrible flood of black memories, I was in despair. I could not cope with it.

Then, sensing that I might find a way to grapple with my depression, I turned to mythology for a violent, raw, unflinching way to express all this, something that would measure up to my suffering. We had many books on the subject, and I found what I was looking for in the
Elder Edda—a
collection of poems in Old Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages—and in particular in the
Hávamál
(
Sayings of the High One
or
The Words of the Most-High
). I realized that my catharsis would pass through the writing of a
nið
(pronounced
nee
), a traditional curse, which I would recite during a magic ceremony.

I set the date: December 31.

In Scandinavian mythology, the
nið
, written in Skaldic poetry (perhaps the most complex verse form ever created in the West), is a kind of taunting curse hurled at one’s enemies. It was read or carved in the runic alphabet on a stake of hazelwood known as “the staff of infamy,” which was driven into the ground. A horse was sacrificed and its head stuck on top of the stake, turned toward the poet’s mortal enemy. Although its origins are lost to time, this rite crops up even until about the tenth century in the Icelandic sagas. And in the 1980s, Icelanders are said to have used it against the occupants of the NATO military base at the Keflavik International Airport, built by the United States during World War II. Iceland joined NATO in 1949, and Americans returned there in force in 1951. They must have been nonplussed to wake up one morning and find the grinning, blood-streaked head of a horse stuck on a stake, its mane blowing in the wind! They didn’t leave until 2006, but if the ceremony really did take place, I’m sure it did some good—at least for those who carried it out.