_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [43]
Having spent all his early childhood with his maternal grandparents, Stieg had inherited some of their possessions, but his brother Joakim had no mementos of them and asked for a few things to remember them by. I found a small blue wooden box with traditional painted decorations, which his grandmother had used as her sewing kit, and another box, of bronze, that had come from Korea and belonged to his grandfather. Joakim took both boxes when he and his family went home to Umea at the end of the afternoon. Erland and Gun stayed in Stockholm to attend a gathering I’d organized for seven o’clock at the Sodra Theater bar, to raise a glass and share memories of Stieg with our friends, families, and even people from Norstedts. All the while, Erland kept saying that he didn’t want any part of Stieg’s estate.
A FEW days later, Stieg was buried. Our friends were there.
On the morning of December 22, I took an important step. I had a black ceramic burial urn, modeled on a Viking artifact and made on the island of Gotland by a professional potter, Eva-Marie Kothe, and into it I placed all that I had lost: our love, our affection, and our dreams. A snapshot in which, lying on a rock, Stieg gazes at me, smiling. Another one, taken in Onnesmark in front of a cabin, up in Vasterbotten: he’s gently cradling against his chest a baby hare found in the rhubarb patch. (He loved animals, especially baby ones.) And another picture, the most beautiful one and my favorite: handsome, tanned, seductive, he’s looking at me through the camera lens, cigarette in hand, at ease, as if waiting for something. Finally, a portrait in which, leaning backward, he squints into the sunlight. I also added the sketch of our cabin we’d prepared during that last summer. The final sketch, and the best one, which he’d asked to look at just once more before I sent it off to the factory that specialized in green construction. He’d pulled up a chair, sat down next to me, and we’d had fun imagining how we were going to furnish our “little writing cottage.” He was transformed: warm, tender, relaxed, happy about this new future that promised to be more intimate and serene. He’d come back to me as he used to be, and for me, it was like falling in love all over again.
Then I added to that black urn some phone numbers of rooms for rent in the archipelago that I’d written down so he could take a week’s vacation and keep working, without being bothered, on the fourth volume of the Millennium saga or correcting the proofs of the first three. I would often find him chuckling to himself on the living room settee: “You’ll never guess what Lisbeth is cooking up!” Then he’d start writing, adjusting some detail he’d asked me to check in my documentation files.
I placed the ceramic vessel full of our lives on a shelf. And behind it I slipped a few sheets of handmade paper I’d bought at Kvarnbyn in Molndal, outside Gothenburg. On a blue sheet I’d written down what I had lost, and on a yellow one, what I wanted now: “To survive another year.”
The Vengeance of the Gods
IN THE Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth Salander marks her body with tattoos as a reminder of all those who have hurt her and on whom she wishes to take revenge. In my case, such people are etched into my memory.
Several weeks after Stieg’s passing, I still couldn’t manage to find words, even in my thoughts, to express the rage I felt toward this death that was so unfair—and toward those who, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, had helped it along.
Stieg and I had dreamed about changing the world, become actively