_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [10]
All in the same letter, I learned that he had almost died, that he realized how important I was to him and how much he loved me, and that he wanted to live with me from now on, as soon as he got home. I’d known that our relationship was deep and strong, but never before had he told me so with such heartfelt sincerity. I cried all through his letter, from fear, relief, and happiness.
He had survived, and we were going to build our life together.
Stockholm
AT UMEA University, the various courses I was taking were culturally enriching, but not enough to make me want to take exams and pursue a degree in those fields. So it was time for me to choose a profession. I picked architecture, a discipline that brought together everything I loved in the way of technical skills and creative energy. In 1977 I enrolled in the department of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Stieg arrived a few months later. Housing was already in short supply in the capital, so we stayed in a student room loaned to me by Svante Branden, a psychiatrist friend of Stieg’s who was also his neighbor in Umea.
Svante turns up in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third volume of the trilogy, when he helps out Lisbeth Salander by denouncing the fraudulent analysis of Dr. Peter Teleborian and the arbitrary internment to which he had subjected her. That would have been just like Svante, because along with all our other friends, he was against every form of violation of human rights and freedom. When Stieg made him one of the heroes of The Millennium Trilogy, it was a way of paying homage to him.
Living at Svante’s place all the time was complicated because it was illegal for more than one person to stay there. In those days, young people were allowed to move into buildings slated for demolition and pay a reduced rent for places without any heat or hot water, but such lodgings were really too uncomfortable, so we didn’t take much advantage of them. Stieg then managed to find something in a southern suburb of Stockholm. It wasn’t until 1979 that I snagged one of the tiny two-room apartments in the Rinkeby district, which are reserved for university students. We lived in that apartment for six years, and we loved the neighborhood so much that when we moved, we found another place there. In the end, we stayed in Rinkeby for twelve years, at a time when few Swedish people lived in an area full of immigrants. Today the population includes more than seventy nationalities, but Rinkeby was already a wonderful melting pot of exotic cultures, which is reflected in the various foreign family names in The Millennium Trilogy. I earned my degree in architecture through a project related to the rehabilitation of the district, where most businesses were housed in basements; my proposal envisioned the transformation of the downtown area by creating specific commercial spaces that would favor a more vibrant urban neighborhood atmosphere.
It was hard to find our own apartment in Stockholm, of course, but well worth the trouble, because we adored living there. Our favorite cafe was run by Greeks, the neighbors on our floor were Finns, those in the apartment below us were Roma, “gypsies,” and the tenants on the ground floor were Turks. The husband in the Roma apartment was often in jail, and when he was home, he beat his wife. I remember one time when she managed to escape and come ring our doorbell. Stieg offered her coffee, wiped the blood off her face, and called the police. Calm was restored. Then the Finnish woman next door got up a petition to have her thrown out of the building, so I contacted Social Services (which had a special program for the Roma) to explain that the poor woman was now trapped between the beatings and the threat of eviction. Things settled down