_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [54]
I was so astounded that I thought the impossible, without fear or hesitation: This isn’t for real. Odin, you’ve sent me your raven?
I do not know what the bird was saying, but its magnificent voice touched my heart, soothed my despair, and brought me peace. As if I’d been told, Everything is fine, you mustn’t worry anymore. So why don’t you head back home? On the way back I stumbled sometimes, thanks to my lack of sleep and appetite, but I was no longer alone. Stieg was supporting me. “You Were Always on My Mind.” I know that, my beloved friend; even when you didn’t have much time to spend with me, I know that I was always in your thoughts. As you are in mine.
That evening, I realized that the important thing now was not to go under. When I got home, I sent a few SMS messages to say that I was fine, that I simply needed peace, some quiet time to reflect and rest.
Thursday, November 3
I CHANGED my landline and cell phone numbers. From now on, everyone except my friends and family will have to go through Per-Erik or another lawyer to reach me. I left the phone store incredibly relieved.
Then I went to see our family doctor, who was upset by my condition. I did not want any medication or a two months’ leave of absence from work, but I did accept a month of part-time. I need to work, to occupy my mind. I also need to relax and live a normal life.
Wednesday, November 9
TONIGHT WAS the commemoration of Kristallnacht and the first anniversary of Stieg’s death. I spent half the day working on the speech I’d be giving along with the photos I had to present. I put on black pants, the lavender Linnea Braun blouse I bought at Myrorna (a really neat Salvation Army store), and a suede jacket from the flea market in Falun. I wore my hair loose and put on a bit of makeup.
The gathering was held at Cirkeln, a restaurant, where coffee and cakes were served.
Daniel Poohl of Expo began his speech by saying that he didn’t have any one particular memory of Stieg, but rather, a continuous memory of him … listening. “Stieg listened to absolutely everyone, including people we found completely uninteresting. For example, we kept telling him to stop listening to that nitpicking idiot Jan Milld, of Blagula Fragor, a small political association that focuses on immigration issues: ‘You’re wasting your time with him!’ You know what happened: Jan Milld wound up the secretary general of the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist movement. Everyone was flabbergasted except … Stieg—who had listened to him! It’s not surprising that many higher-ups in that party sincerely regretted Stieg’s death, because he listened to them. He was like that, Stieg: he listened.”
I was so impressed, once again, by the elegance of Daniel’s intelligence and his conviction.
When it was my turn to speak, I was quite calm.
I began by recalling that Stieg and I had worked together for thirty-two years and lived together for thirty. And that people do what they do not by chance, but because everything in their lives has led them to do it. To understand Stieg’s work, I said, one had to know who he really was. Then I showed the black-and-white photos of his childhood with his grandparents, and the later ones in color of the kitchen with the single cookstove and the grandfather’s workshop, where he repaired bicycles, among other things. I explained that to Stieg, these people, poor and culturally marginalized, represented a minority victimized by discrimination. And that in the end, at one moment or another, we can all become such a minority and even, at the whim of history, find ourselves in deadly danger. I spoke of the Danish and Swedish internment camps (Storsien, in northern Sweden, in particular), the deportation of their prisoners, and the fortress of Theresienstadt where the internees were executed or sent on to Auschwitz