_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [18]
There wasn’t anything brave about living that way. We just did. We’d both chosen that. But it definitely had an effect on our lives. It was why—among other things—we’d never gotten married or had children.
It really was safer for Stieg to remain “single” in all official documents. True, his address was relatively easy to find, as I’ve explained, but since mine was the only name on our door and on all our bills, tracking down his exact whereabouts was more difficult.
In 1983, we had decided to get married. We bought rings in a store on Regeringsgatan—”Government Street”—and had them engraved with “Stieg and Eva.” We made an appointment with the minister of the parish of Spanga in northwest Stockholm to find out how long the necessary formalities would take, only to discover that getting married was more complicated and time-consuming than we’d thought. Once again, our professional obligations got in the way of our private lives, and neither one of us took the time to compile the required administrative dossier.
Then the United States invaded what we thought of as “our island,” Grenada. And we worked night and day to find out what had really happened there, so getting married was no longer our top priority. Besides, Stieg had just begun writing for Searchlight and started drawing too much interest from the extreme right to take any risks. Even though we weren’t married yet, we wore our rings; Stieg finally had to take his off when he gained weight in 1990, but it’s on his hand in many of my photographs from those days. As for me, I now wear Stieg’s ring as well as my own.
Erland, Stieg’s father, urged us several times to get married, especially at the end of the 1980s, when there was talk of eliminating the reversion of pensions on the death of a spouse if the marriage had not taken place before a certain date. Like many couples of our generation, however, we did not follow through. And with good reason, since we had to consider the very real problem of our personal safety.
I also think that our respective childhoods did not condition us to have a family. When I was a little girl, I believed my mother had abandoned me. The reality was much more complex than that, of course, but that event certainly contributed to my fear of having a child. We thought about having one, naturally, but—and I mean this without any “irony”—there was always something more urgent to take care of: we wanted our financial situation to be more stable, more promising, more secure—before taking such an important step…. And time passed….
A few months before his death, Stieg talked again about getting married. Especially since we already had our rings! With the Millennium books about to be published, we knew that our personal finances would improve, and since Stieg had decided to work only part-time at Expo, he would be less at risk from right-wing retaliation.
This time, it was death that overshadowed our private lives.
Millennium
STIEG DID not sit down one day at his computer and announce, “I’m going to write a crime novel!” In a way, he never even formally began to write one at all, because he never drew up an outline for the first book, or the next two, still less for the seven he intended should follow.
Stieg wrote sequences that were often unrelated to the others. Then he would “stitch” them together, following the thread of the story and his inclination.
In 2002, during a week’s island vacation, I could see he was a bit bored. I was working on my book about the Swedish architect Per Olof Hallman (1869-1941, a professional town planner), but Stieg was at loose ends, going around in circles.
So I asked him, “Haven’t you got some writing to work on?”
“No, but I was just thinking about that piece I wrote in 1997, the one about the old man who receives a flower in the mail every year at Christmas. Remember?”
“Of course!”
“I’ve been wondering for a long time what that was really all about.”