Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [7]
I was not happy with either my attempt to smooth things over or Stieg’s evasive apology, but I did my best to conceal my irritation. I ordered cod and boiled potatoes, not expecting the food to put me in a better mood.
To begin with, we talked about Svartvitt (Black and White), the anti-racist magazine of which I was editor-in-chief. It had been launched as a not-for-profit venture on 20 October, 1987, the remit being to focus on matters of tolerance that other publications seemed to shy away from. Many critics regarded it as provocative. Stieg praised it to the skies. I liked the calm way in which he talked; his tone was warm and convincing, even if there was also something intriguing about it. At first I thought it was another of his precautionary measures, trying to seem a bit mysterious and elusive, at least when meeting face to face.
We moved on to the topics of the moment – the Laser Man, the way in which the populist protest party New Democracy had wormed its way into the parliament after the 1991 general election, the increasingly anti-immigrant image of the Sweden Democrats, and the incredibly naive reaction of the established parties to the threats to democracy these developments posed.
We must have talked for at least two hours. Ashtrays were changed regularly and rapidly filled by Stieg’s cigarette butts. Despite the fact that we had only just met, it felt as if we had known each other for ages. I thought he was one of the most courageous people I had ever encountered. There was no mistaking his commitment – I had rarely come across anybody more passionately convinced of the democratic ideal and the equality of all human beings.
But at the same time there was something modest about him. I immediately detected a paradox in Stieg Larsson’s make-up, and my suspicions would be confirmed as the years passed. He would go out of his way to find people with whom he could work, but all the while he wanted to dictate the way in which the cooperation functioned. He disliked being in the limelight and doing all the talking, especially on television. This led to friction at times, and when I look back over the years we worked together, this contradiction was nearly always the root cause of our disagreements.
Having said that, the paradox was convincingly trumped by the vehemence he displayed in his fight against racism and neo-Nazism. It is simply impossible to describe how passionate, how fervent, not to say how obsessed he was by this mission. I once described him as a mixture of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Pippi Longstocking. I concede that this was perhaps a little crude, but it was a sincere attempt to pin down a man with unique and contradictory character traits of a type one rarely encounters.
Another thing that struck me that first time we sat talking – me waiting for my lunch, Stieg with his cups of coffee and his cigarettes – was how animatedly he gesticulated. He also impressed me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Naturally, we were well aware that the precarious position in which Sweden found itself in 1992 was nothing compared with the intolerant, anti-immigrant forces at work in Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium and Italy. We were indisputably living in a Europe beginning to show its claws in a way that made us worry that a catastrophe might be imminent.
You could say that Sweden was emerging from a Sleeping Beauty-like torpor. For years Swedes had been convinced that they were immune from racism – not the unease with regard to everything new and foreign that is sometimes discussed around dinner tables here and there, but the organized antipathy that arranges demonstrations at election meetings and tries to influence decisions made at local, regional and central government level. During our lunch Stieg compared these forces to a virus spreading through Sweden. He maintained that the battle against them needed fighting every day. If one ignored the situation