_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [7]
Meeting
IN THE autumn of 1972, my sister Britt and I attended a meeting in support of the Front National de Liberation in Vietnam (the FNL) at the Mimer School in Umea. It was the first time I’d ever gone to anything like that. My father used to vote for the Liberal People’s Party, but that was the extent of his involvement, while I considered myself to be a reasonably politically aware person, and that was enough for me. The Vietnam War had upset and sickened me ever since I was fourteen, however, and now that I’d finished high school, I felt it was time for me to take a serious interest in something other than studies and diplomas.
A tall, thin guy with dark brown hair, warm eyes, and a broad, cheerful smile was greeting everyone arriving for the meeting with an energetic “Welcome!” It was Stieg. He was barely eighteen, while I was almost nineteen. He asked Britt and me lots of questions, and when he learned that we lived in Haga, a neighborhood in Umea, he immediately recruited us for the team he himself would be leading. Later he told me that he’d seen his chance and pounced on it!
And that’s how I became a political activist with him. We put up posters, sold newsletters, and raised funds door-to-door. We debated things, argued a lot: I mean, how could an imperialist war like that have happened? That was Stieg, a talker, curious about everything, generous, a very moral person. A bit casual for an intellectual, but absolutely irresistible. He fascinated me. There was nothing theoretical about the way he spoke from the heart, from his gut, and yet he was entertaining, too. Politics with him was not a chore or a duty, the way I’d thought it would be, but a real pleasure—which was something of a rare experience in our austere milieu. Stieg and I often thought along the same lines, while most other FNL supporters were Maoists spouting rather unrealistic, authoritarian dogma. Not us.
I found Stieg’s ideas so interesting that I began encouraging him to write about them. In Sweden, even small newspapers have a spot in their Arts & Leisure pages for opinion pieces. My father was a journalist and could have helped him, but Stieg, unsure of himself, wouldn’t hear of it. I kept pushing him, though, so he finally took the plunge, and when he saw his first published article, he was so thrilled that I think he decided to become a journalist on the spot. He took the entrance exam for a journalism school, failed it (which wasn’t surprising, given how young he was), and like most of the other students, could have taken it again, but he refused. His self-confidence was at a low ebb again.
As for me, intrigued at first by the Maoist doctrine, I was going to meetings and even to introductory courses on the subject, which at the time was quite the thing to do. A rational person, I was looking for answers to my questions—but in the wrong places, as it turned out: the Maoist arguments were a bit fuzzy, lightweight, even childish, as if we were going to solve economic problems by simply walking on water! When the Trotskyites showed up and joined forces for a while with the Maoists, they shared the same bank account to raise funds for Vietnam, which I thought was a great idea: at last we were struggling together toward the same goal. Unfortunately, since all revolutionaries want to make their own revolutions, internal power struggles soon broke out. One day we were asked to drum up some money for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and since we had to support their politics, I wanted to know what they were. The answer arrived from on high: “Don’t ask questions, do as you’re told!” Well, Stieg and I abandoned that fund-raising effort and left the Vietnamese solidarity movement.
I then gravitated toward “the traitors”: that’s what the Maoists called the Trotskyites, whose system authorized