Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [20]
I succeeded in becoming one of the very few people who were allowed to edit his texts ruthlessly. Not without him protesting loudly, of course. Quite early on, I hit upon a trick that seemed to work: cut half the text but allow the first four or five hundred words to stand unchanged, and find an appropriate way of summing up as the last sentence but one.
I don’t suppose I shall ever see again anything like the driving force generated by Stieg when he was writing. I have never come across anybody who could write so easily and quickly the draft of a press release, a polemical article or a petition. And he seemed to be so happy as he did it. He could be hunched over and dog-tired, but when asked to write a press release, his whole body would straighten and his eyes light up.
Once as we were sitting in the Café Latte, he talked about his travels to Africa.
“Did you know I suffered from malaria while I was out there?”
“I had no idea.”
He shrugged, and we spoke no more about it. But shortly afterwards we touched on the situation in Algeria.
“I once had a job there as a dishwasher. That was after a failed trip and I’d run out of money.”
“You’ve done quite a lot of travelling.”
“So have you,” he said.
“That’s true, that’s one thing we have in common.”
“‘A woman’s relationship to a man is like the slave’s to the master, the manual labourer to the intellectual, the barbarian to the Hellene. A woman is an undeveloped man.’”
“Eh?”
“Who said that?”
“It must be some Greek philosopher,” I said hesitantly, “in view of the word ‘Hellene’.”
“Aristotle.”
How can one not miss conversations like that?
The period following our first joint issue was fantastic. Not least because we were proud of it, and of how well we had worked together. Then several things happened that shocked us deeply.
It started with the Malexander murders, one of the most discussed crimes of the 1990s in Sweden. In the course of a police chase following a bank robbery on 28 May 1999, two officers were shot dead with their own service revolvers. It seemed more like an out-and-out execution than anything else.
Only a few weeks later we received another horrific piece of news. Stieg and I were in the editorial office when the telephone rang on 28 June. A former member of the Expo staff, Peter Karlsson, his partner, Katarina Larsson, and their eight-year-old son had been victims of a car-bomb attack in the suburb of Nacka on 18 June. They had been rushed to hospital by helicopter, and we heard later that Peter had serious leg injuries. It came like a punch in the solar plexus to both Stieg and me. Threats were a normal part of our everyday life, but this was the nearest they had come to us personally.
Luckily Peter survived. What worried us most was that it ought not to have happened because Peter and his partner both carried alarm devices, but they hadn’t gone off until a second before the explosion.
We could only interpret the assassination attempt on Peter and Katarina as a direct attack on Expo. Both of them had worked for the journal until quite recently. Their exposé in Aftonbladet, Expressen and Dagens Nyheter concerning so-called White Power music attracted a lot of attention, and seemingly was the reason for the outrage.
It was merely minutes after we’d heard the news ourselves that we began to receive a deluge of calls from the press. I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear; Stieg sat beside me writing a series of statements on Post-it notes. “Democracy cannot be taken for granted”, “Every day and at every level of society we must fight for democracy, tolerance and respect”. I read out what he had written, and could hear the reporters noting it down.
They asked how often we received death threats ourselves.
“All the time,” I replied.
They wondered if it reminded me of my life in Kurdistan.
“That’s