Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [23]
The Swedish National Encyclopedia defines a traitor as “an individual who betrays a person or thing to which he or she is expected to be loyal”. Perhaps that is how the racists regarded Stieg. Some countries only resort to the death penalty in cases of one kind: treason. Vidkun Quisling is in many ways the perfect example of how a person can betray his country. The way in which Stieg so doggedly opposed people and organizations who spoke about their country under the influence of their twisted view of humankind – well, it is easy to understand how he became a symbol for them. A symbol and a quarry to be hunted down.
I would even say that Stieg had a couple of bad habits. On the one hand, he was so considerate that he would often exaggerate threats aimed at people close to him. On the other hand, he would trivialize nearly all threats aimed at himself and did not take many precautions to protect himself from people who considered him to be dangerous.
He was shadowed by neo-Nazis whenever he travelled on the underground; racists kept an eye on him when he walked around Stockholm. They knew exactly where they had him. “I get off a stop before the one I’m actually going to,” he would say diffidently. I sometimes felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and giving him a good shake. His unruffled behaviour, so typical of the north of Sweden, where he was born, could drive me up the wall. But he refused all suggestions – to keep changing his address (which I did at the time and still do), to accept free hotel passes (which I used to give him when things were especially threatening) or to go off on holiday when the situation became too tense (as I generally do when I don’t feel safe in my flat).
“I get off a stop early.”
In time our mutual enemies began to lump Stieg and me together. We had been in the business of fighting prejudice for a long time. We knew most of our tormentors. We were so experienced that we could tell from their handwriting if a person was dangerous or not. We regarded threats a bit like ordinary people examine the use-by date on a carton of milk. How current is this letter? This person has got tired by now, that’s obvious. Ah, this one has struck a new note, don’t you think?
We kept the whole business of threats at arm’s length. Was that healthy? Probably not, but I think one’s mind works like that so that one has the will to get up in the morning. In our darkest moments we both felt that we were living on borrowed time. Sooner or later something would happen.
Stieg was forty-five, I was thirty-four. We were grateful for the time we were being granted.
All the letter writers were men. Without exception. Young men and very old men.
The “November man” wrote threatening letters – but only in November. The “posh one” lived in Oskarshamn and wrote long, hate-filled rants, all in elegant Swedish. And then there was the “Thursday man”, a tormentor approaching seventy who lived in Helsingborg. We had mixed feeling about him. We had first got to know him when he was fifty-eight and writing articles for a regional racist magazine. Should we feel sorry for him or take him seriously? What drives a person like that? We could never quite make him out. On the other hand, we were reluctantly impressed by his inexhaustible commitment, even if he was a bit short of ideas and kept repeating himself. Every week he collected articles that in one way or another dealt with the costs of immigration, and statistics on assaults committed in Sweden by people born abroad. In the margins he would make unpleasant notes, usually threatening murder, in red ink and with lots of exclamation marks.
It wasn’t enough for him to send these threatening letters just to us. He would make a hundred photocopies of the ten most negative articles, put them in a hundred envelopes,