_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [5]
When I think about this, I don’t believe it’s an accident. Stieg and I grew up motherless, since we were both brought up by our grandparents. But the most attentive and affectionate of grandmothers, as ours were, cannot replace a child’s mama.
Being raised by that older generation also meant that in a way we were growing up in the nineteenth century, in a time untouched by modern mores. We were taught old-fashioned values, a strict and sometimes severe morality. In our homes, an honorable reputation did not depend on money and success, but on integrity. Once given, a person’s word was sacred. These rules were inviolable.
Stieg and I were alike in many, many ways, especially in our thinking and our reactions to things. We found that funny, but it was hardly surprising, after all, since we shared the same background.
I was born on November 17, 1953, in Lovanger, about sixty miles north of Umea, in the Skelleftea Municipality of Vasterbotten County. I was the oldest of three children born a little more than a year apart. Our parents separated when I was seven, and we children stayed on the family farm with our father and paternal grandparents. Father hadn’t wanted to become a farmer, and although he’d left school at the age of thirteen, he’d still managed to become a journalist at a regional daily newspaper. My parents had married for love and could have spent their lives together, if only they had lived in the city. Gudrun, my mother, was a secondary school graduate and had worked as a secretary in a metallurgy factory before her marriage. For a time, my grandmother had hoped that her daughter-in-law would help out on the farm, but she soon saw how unfit for country life Mama was in her lipstick, high heels, and tailored suits. Such frills were completely useless, in Grandmother’s eyes, whereas I thought Mama was lively and pretty. My parents’ divorce was a harrowing experience, and their two families also split apart during the ordeal. My father obtained custody of his children, which was a rare thing at the time, by showing that he had a job, a place to live, and that my paternal grandparents would look after us. I also think the fact that my father belonged to the Liberal People’s Party and knew influential people in the area weighed heavily in his favor.
So my mother went to live on her own in Stockholm, where she studied and became a nurse. In thirty-one years, I saw her only six times. She never remarried. My father died in 1977, and my mother died of cancer in December 1992, during the Christmas holidays. Although my paternal grandmother, a kind and honest woman, felt that my father had made a mistake in marrying my mother, she would never, ever, have tried to prevent her from seeing us again. So I just don’t know what went on in Mama’s head. I think she was a sensitive and psychologically fragile person. She suffered cruelly at being separated from her children, but we were far away and she hadn’t much money, so what could she do? When she went away in 1961, my siblings and I lost not just our mama, but our entire maternal family, forever.
And then I felt absolutely abandoned, just as Stieg did when he was separated from his grandparents in 1962.
STIEG AND my grandmother got along wonderfully from the moment they met. She used to say that he was “a good man,” while he thought she was “fabulous.” I must say that she was a determined woman who knew what she wanted. So did her father: after sailing the seven seas for more than twenty-one years, he became a farmer so that he could marry his beloved young fiancee. My grandmother had a way of saying, “Well, here’s what I think,” that gave us all pause before we embarked