_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [4]
Aside from the all too rare times when we went sailing, Stieg, like Mikael Blomkvist, didn’t go in much for sports, ate indiscriminately, smoked, and I’ve already said he drank too much coffee. Which, given the stressful life he led, doubtless contributed to his premature death.
After I met Stieg, in 1972, he returned only once to his childhood home, in the autumn of 1996.
Norsjo and Bjursele are in Vasterbotten County, where my brother, sister, and I own about eighteen acres of woodlands that have been in our family for generations. In the 1990s, Stieg and I went up there twice to clear some brush. The second time, in 1996, we spent several days working hard among the snakes and biting flies, but it felt good to get out of our offices and do some manual labor. And when we’d finished clearing the undergrowth, we went to see his grandparents’ little house with some neighbors of ours from the nearby village of Onnesmark, since they were curious to know more about Stieg’s childhood days.
The house was shut up tight, so Stieg pressed his face to the window. Nothing had changed.
“It’s just like it was back then! Look, that’s where I slept, with Grandfather. And it’s still the same old stove! I remember it was stone cold in the morning, and we would all freeze.”
He revisited every square yard, every tree, every stone, every hill…. Slowly, his memories came back to him. He was deeply moved and I, I was stunned. I had never seen him like that. Even his voice was transformed: it was warmer, more solemn, and he was speaking so softly, almost in a whisper. Spurred on by our questions, he told story after story. When the time came to leave, he kept saying, “One moment more, just a moment more …” He could not tear himself away from the place.
It was getting later and later. Then he turned to me, pleadingly, and asked, “Eva, couldn’t we buy the house?”
“But dear, it’s more than six hundred miles from Stockholm, it’s too far away! We wouldn’t be able to come very often. And since we haven’t enough money or time to spend here, the place would just go to ruin.”
Then, with infinite sadness, he murmured, “But … it’s all I have.” He seemed overwhelmed by the fathomless sorrow of a child, as if, drawn more than thirty years back into the past, he were once more being torn away from his roots. We all stood there for a long time, silent, lost in our own thoughts. Then Stieg said, as if giving up, “It’s impossible.” And we left, with heavy hearts.
I’d taken lots of photos of that little house, which I later made into a collage that I framed and gave to Stieg. He was so pleased with it that he hung it on the wall over our bed.
WE OFTEN talked about that trip as if it had been a magical moment. In the summer of 2004, after he’d delivered the three Millennium volumes to the publisher, we made heaps of plans for the future. We used to imagine—among other things, and I’ll say more about this later—”our little writing cottage,” which we wanted to build on an island. Stieg and I would make drawings of it, each off on our own, and then compare our sketches, sitting side by side on our kokssoffa, which is a wooden settee with an upholstered seat. (Many Swedish kitchens have one for seating and as an extra bed, but our settee was in the living room, since the kitchen was too small.) I often studied Stieg’s snapshots of his grandparents’ wooden house, and I wanted to surprise him by using the same entryway and blue-and-white doors in our cottage.
Our Mamas
PEOPLE HAVE pointed out to me that, aside from Mikael Blomkvist’s sister, there are no conventional mothers in The Millennium Trilogy, or any traditional families, either. Lisbeth Salander’s mother remained a passive victim of her husband Zala’s violence and was unable to protect her child, which leads to tragedy. Brain-damaged by his beatings,