Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [3]
His name was Severin Boström. It became obvious to me that in order to know Stieg Larsson, you needed to become acquainted with his maternal grandfather. People in Ursviken said of Severin that he was “a very passionate man”. He had moved to Ursviken, between Skellefteå and Skelleftehamn, in order to run an engineering workshop. He repaired chainsaws, mopeds and bicycles. As soon as he could afford it he bought a car. During the Second World War, like so many people in those northern parts, he became a devout anti-Nazi. In his case, his convictions were so strong that they were a key influence on his notion of right and wrong.
One summer’s day in 1953, at a dance in the People’s Park in Skellefteå, Severin’s daughter Vivianne met a man by the name of Erland Larsson, who was on a fortnight’s leave from his military service. They fell in love, and a year later, on 15 August, 1954, the young pair had a son: Karl Stig-Erland Larsson.
It was far from easy for a young couple to make a living in those days. For a while Stieg’s grandfather and father both worked at the Rönnskär sawmill, but before long Erland and Vivianne decided to seek their fortune in Stockholm, realizing that they would be forced to leave their one-year-old son with his maternal grandparents near Nordsjö.
It was 1962 before the family could be reunited. By then, Stieg had acquired a younger brother, Joakim, born in 1957. They all moved into a new home in Umeå, where Vivianne worked in a clothes shop and Erland was employed as an interior decorator for the clothes chain Berlins, which had shops in central Umeå, Skellefteå, Piteå and Örnsköldsvik.
While I was tracing Stieg’s past, I frequently felt a kind of kinship with him. I was also forced to move house frequently because of my father’s political activities. I like to think that children who grow up in such conditions develop a blend of rootlessness and restlessness. Combine those qualities with curiosity and you have a mixture that can be extremely important for a journalist later in life; but when you are a child, you often feel very much alone in the world.
As a teenager I ended up in Tensta, in Greater Stockholm, in a new country and without any friends. Stieg had also moved there only a few years previously – for him it was the same country, of course, but coming from Västerbotten in the remote north no doubt caused him his fair share of culture shock.
When we first met, as adults, Stieg and I had one thing very much in common: we had very few close friends.
With hindsight I have often thought that the restlessness we shared was an important reason why we got on so well together. When you have few friends around you, you often develop interests that fit well with your situation. In Stieg’s case, films and the night sky were of great importance. Erland had a job for a while as the caretaker of a cinema, so Stieg and his younger brother were often able to sneak in and watch films. Stieg loved to immerse himself in this make-believe world, entranced by the captivating happenings on the silver screen. The same thing applied to his star-gazing, the heavens a grand mystery of which an individual could never experience more than a tiny fraction.
When Stieg celebrated his twelfth birthday he was given a Facit typewriter and a telescope. These were by no means cheap presents, probably costing a lot more than his parents could afford. For Stieg, it was the fulfilment of a dream. One of his diaries contains several entries like this one: “1/2.1968, P.S. We spent a quarter of an hour searching for Uranus, without success.”
It was around this time that Stieg became interested in politics, despite still being so young. His mother had