Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [50]
Nevertheless, neither Stieg nor I was welcomed with open arms. We shrugged that off, maintaining that the important thing was that the centre had come into being. But deep down we were both rather offended.
In September the bomb I had been warning about for so long finally exploded. Stieg phoned and said curtly, “Have you seen
the article about us employing only men at Expo?”
“No,” I said with a sigh.
“We’re in the shit.”
Of course we were. There was an article in a weekly magazine under the less than flattering headline “Only white men at Expo”. And the content was exactly what we had feared: how Expo didn’t employ women or Swedes with an immigrant background.
Stieg had given an interview and made a bold attempt to save the situation. But he wasn’t very successful. Expo had an obvious credibility problem, and he ought to have simply apologized, regretting the situation, and promised to put matters right.
Instead he suggested that it seemed unfortunate that so few immigrants had any interest in questioning nationalist movements. And he added for good measure, “But we have had our nigger-in-chief, Kurdo Baksi, as publisher.”
I thought he must have been under a lot of stress when the interviewer phoned him. It didn’t sound like Stieg at all. Then it occurred to me that what he needed was some peace and quiet. I wanted to tell him that his body was not made of iron. He needed to rest.
He called and apologized for what he had said about me. Then he seemed to find a new source of energy.
“We’ll be getting lots of women and immigrants on Expo, just you wait and see.”
Oddly enough, it was only a couple of days later that we met and he showed me the first interview he had given as a crime novelist. Svensk Bokhandel, the Swedish book trade journal, had carried a long article about the books he was about to publish.
The very headline stopped me in my tracks: “A man for the history books”. It was impossible not to see how thrilled Stieg was. All I felt when I read the text was incredible pride and happiness. There was one sentence which attracted my particular attention. It was a quotation from Stieg: “I can tell you that this is my pension insurance.”
I have often wondered why I keep thinking back to that evening at Södra Teatern. Perhaps it was the look on Stieg’s face. It’s so easy to read things into a situation with hindsight. Or maybe it is to do with my thinking that I’d noticed a slackening off in his strict working practices. That I thought this was somehow liberating. His new way of dressing, perhaps – even if I didn’t think much of it, it did nevertheless suggest a sort of step forward.
But now, afterwards. Now that we know. The comment that his crime novels were a sort of pension insurance. I’ve no doubt he didn’t say that to trivialize his writing. He would never have done that. But I can’t help thinking that he knew what was going to happen, even then. The success lying in store for him.
He never experienced it, as we all know.
In my life the year 2004 stands out as a sort of watershed. I can divide up so many things into what happened before then and what happened afterwards. That year 2004, which as far as Stieg was concerned consisted of just 312 days.
11
Farewell
November was always the most important month in my relationship with Stieg. It was the time when the matters he and I were most concerned with were at the forefront of most people’s minds in Sweden, so we met more often than usual. If you go through the appeals and articles we wrote, you will find that most of them were written in November.
The first time we ever met with nobody else present was in November. We made a public announcement about the planned cooperation between Svartvitt and Expo in November. And of course, there is also the date that will always be connected with our work: 30 November, the anniversary of the death of the Swedish warrior-king Charles XII in 1718, a day hijacked by the nationalists for their annual celebrations.
November is not a month you can rely on. Some years ago a group of neo-Nazis shot at my