Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [48]
I had plans to continue my cooperation with Expo, but to be honest I was not at all sure how that would work out. My health had deteriorated steadily during the previous year, and it sometimes felt as if I had spent more time in hospital than in my office.
My doctors said I was displaying all the symptoms of burnout. Nobody can explain exactly what that term means. In my case it was a bit more straightforward than usual: I had absolutely no private life whatsoever.
When I told Stieg about my decision, he was sorry to hear it at first. He tried to talk me out of it, but gave up when he realized that I simply didn’t have the strength any more. In a way I suppose we both felt that the areas we had been covering in Svartvitt had started to feature in the mainstream media. But we were in complete agreement about continuing our cooperation within Expo. I said that my hope was to work on Expo as publisher and as a polemical journalist.
“We are not twenty-year-olds any more,” I said. “Both you and I must start thinking about our health.”
He nodded, but that was a subject in which he had no interest at all. Unlike me he was alert and always busy with several projects at the same time. The fact is that apart from my closing down Black and White, 2003 was a comparatively quiet year. There were no real threats, no headline-grabbing manoeuvres aimed at us, no complicated books to publish, nothing of that kind.
Naturally, we ought to have realized that it was the calm before the storm.
The following year, 2004, things happened in rapid succession. It started positively for Stieg. He was on the way to enjoying the fruits of all those sleepless nights and hard work. In the space of four months he put the finishing touches to five books, more books than he had produced during the previous forty-nine years of his life. An astonishing achievement.
As early as 22 January Debatten om hedersmord appeared. In April Stieg signed the contract with Norstedts for the publication of the three books that would become the Millennium trilogy. The very next month he worked on two central chapters of Sverigedemokraterna från insidan. He gave a lot of talks to schools and also travelled to Brussels for a conference. A paper in connection with an exhibition in Malmö took up much of his energy in the autumn. The fact is that our last conversation was about that paper, which I reckoned he should have delegated to somebody else.
In addition, it seemed that his successes were making him more extrovert than he had ever been before. He took on more and more, and went out to meet people more regularly. He became a familiar face at Café Fix, Café Anna, Café Copacabana, Café Mellqvist and Il Caffè. Although he had always felt more at home in small groups, he started to move in bigger circles and became one of the in-crowd. He was a frequent guest at the socalled multicultural events on the terrace at Södra Teatern, and stayed on until surprisingly late.
Needless to say, a lot of people continued to ask for his help and advice. A teacher in Sollentuna wanted to launch a new curriculum subject, “Tolerance and Respect”. Students asked him to read and comment on their essays about neo-Nazism or racism. Social workers responding to attacks on women needed help in various ways. And another would-be crime novelist required assistance with a manuscript.
I frequently asked myself what was going on. What had happened to Stieg’s non-stop work into the early hours? The new Stieg was barely recognizable. He had always used to slip away at the earliest opportunity in order to glue himself to his computer in peace and quiet.
I suppose it was because he had received the message he wanted to hear most of all just then. He had received confirmation that all those exhausting hours spent at the computer