_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [38]
I was asked whether I wanted to see Stieg. I was so lost that I even wondered, confusedly, “Should I do that?” And then I thought, yes, because otherwise I would never manage to believe it. I wanted Erland, his father, to be there with me. I called Gun again. “So,” she asked cheerfully, “how’s Stieg?”
“He’s dead,” I replied dully. Gun told me Erland had taken a plane to Stockholm. I went to the main hospital entrance to wait for him. Back and forth I went, between the lobby and the sidewalk outside, smoking almost a whole pack of cigarettes. More and more people from Expo joined us; some seemed to drift in from the darkness but they stayed outside, completely disoriented and in tears, while others literally burst out of the taxis that brought them. Everyone was hugging, embracing, weeping … except for me; I still felt turned to stone. People were in a state of collapse, dazed, at a loss, while I was simply there: I was smoking, and I didn’t understand anything. When I looked at that crowd of people in despair, though, I did tell myself that Stieg had had some good and wonderful friends at Expo.
That’s when I thought to call my sister, my brother, and our great friend Eleanor.
When Erland arrived, I went to meet him and took his arm. He asked, “How is he?” I told him Stieg was gone, that we could see him, if he wanted, and that I’d waited for him. “When you’re ready, we’ll go see him,” I added. We took a moment to pull ourselves together. The nurse asked me if I wanted her with us, and I said yes. (No one knew how I would react; they’d simply arranged that I might be admitted to the psychiatric ward if I broke down completely.) Erland and I went into the room where Stieg was, while the nurse remained discreetly by the door. I sat down next to Stieg and took his hand. He seemed peaceful. Sleeping, perhaps? He really did seem to be asleep. I held his hand, stroked his arm. “Stieg, dear?” I was freezing from having stayed outside so long. While he—he was still warm. You see, I told him in my thoughts, it’s completely crazy, you still warm me up. Erland was sitting on the other side of Stieg, but I did not see him. At some point, he left the room. So did the nurse. I caressed Stieg’s hair, his forehead, his cheeks … exactly the way I did when I had to awaken him from a deep sleep. As he gradually grew cold, I warmed up. I still couldn’t take it in. I imagined that he was going to open one eye and start raising a ruckus, the way he always did. I remember murmuring to him, “Dearest, my love, thank you for the life you gave me, thank you for everything you’ve done.” And I kept kissing his mouth and stroking his hair. Now he was icy cold. I stood up, completely drained, and before I left I looked at him again. He was sleeping. It was incomprehensible.
LATER OUR friends told me what had happened. Stieg had had an afternoon appointment at Expo, and he’d arrived at the building that morning with Jim, a friend of ours whom we’d met in Grenada in 1984. Before they went up to the Expo office, Jim noticed that Stieg seemed ill and unsteady on his feet. When Jim insisted that they should go to a hospital right away, Stieg refused because he wanted to go to the office first. Since the elevator was broken, he climbed up all seven floors only to collapse in a chair when he arrived. When Per and Monika, the accountant, noticed that his face was bathed in sweat and his breathing was labored, Stieg admitted that he felt a pain in his belly. An ambulance then took him and Per to a hospital only a few blocks away. Monika followed them with Stieg’s jacket and backpack, which contained the Expo laptop computer.
A FEW weeks later, when I returned to speak with the doctor and the nurse, I learned that the health care team had been very affected by Stieg’s death. They had rarely seen someone die so quickly that his wife couldn’t get there in time. And they’d never seen so many people rush to the hospital, either. The