Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [31]
If Churchill had his champagne and cigars, Stieg had his coffee and cigarettes. Not such a grand combination, one has to admit. I know nobody who was as inveterate a smoker as Stieg. He had been chain-smoking since he was a teenager and it was hard to imagine him not puffing away at a cigarette. Coffee was his second greatest love. Churchill wanted his champagne “cold, dry and free”, and Stieg wanted his coffee with milk but no sugar. Most of all, he wanted lots of it. There was no limit to the amount of coffee he could drink. I have never come across anybody as hooked on caffeine as Stieg. When we spent sixteen hours together at Prime Minister Persson’s international conference on the Holocaust, I kept a count of how many servings of coffee Stieg drank. I made it twenty-two, most of them plastic mugs.
That amount of coffee can hardly be conducive to decent sleep. Swilling down twenty or so cups of coffee a day and smoking two or three packets of cigarettes no doubt ruin more than just a decent night’s slumber. They must slowly but surely undermine your whole body.
The slim, elegant young man I had met at the Vasa restaurant in the autumn of 1992 started to acquire chubby cheeks. His body became increasingly bloated, and he needed to buy bigger trousers and shirts. He had no interest at all in food. He ate if and when he had the time. Usually greasy junk food. But his weight increase had no effect on his energy, his enthusiasm for work or his lust for life. He was always smiling. It is true to say that he became more and more stressed as the years went by, but he never lost focus or became distrait.
He would spend most of his time glued to his computer, focusing all his attention first on one project, then on the next. Full speed ahead all the time. Interestingly enough, he was always motionless in front of his screen. The only part of his body he kept in trim was his brain – the rest of him had to survive as best it could.
I frequently suggested that he take up swimming. He thought that sounded even worse than going for walks in the woods. He would often grasp at any excuse to avoid having to listen to all the nagging – he was under constant threat of being murdered, he couldn’t possibly risk anything of the sort. That would be reckless in the extreme. He had a point, of course: but his main reason was to avoid taking any physical exercise. He very rarely did anything of the sort. He never stopped smoking, although he did cut down during the last year or so of his life. I occasionally saw him taking snuff as well.
Whenever he thought I was nagging him too much, Stieg would tell me that he was about to take his annual fortnight’s holiday. When I asked if he was going to leave his computer at home, he would always change the subject.
You can imagine how astonished I was to hear that in his younger days, he took part in skiing competitions. That sounds so unlikely. I have never been able to establish how good he was, but the very fact that he must once have been sufficiently interested to enter flabbergasts me. I have never met anybody less interested in sport – never ever.
My friend Stieg Larsson was one of those people who believe in their own immortality. He was in good company. Most people think that accidents only happen to others. But I know that he sometimes thought about how his mother had died far too early from a cerebral haemorrhage. This was a great sorrow always at the back of his mind. She died at the age of fifty-six in Erland’s arms, one summer’s day in 1991, as he was combing her hair. Shortly before her death she had read Stieg’s newly published book on the Extreme Right, Extremhögern, at a single sitting.
No, there is no explanation for the way in which Stieg waged war on his own body. Nor would he ever be able to explain it himself. More than anything else it was like a vicious circle that could not be broken.
Yet again I come back to the contradictory nature of Stieg’s character. That overwhelming