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multi-partyism (which I found more democratic), whereas the Maoists were a dictatorship. Stieg decided to stick with the latter, and throughout the year that followed, before we’d moved in together, we fought violently over the best way to bring happiness to the world proletariat. It was awful. And often ended in tears. I thought Stieg was a stupid dreamer with his head in the clouds. At the time, I was living in a student room; I’d been accepted at the Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg but decided to register instead at the department of mathematics and economic history at Umea University, because that way I could stay with Stieg, who had a small studio apartment in Umea. When we first met, Stieg had been finishing up a two-year program that would allow him to enter the working world but not to attend college. Perhaps he was influenced by my example, who knows, but he then returned to high school for another two years to obtain his baccalaureate degree—and being as stubborn as he was, he got it, which didn’t surprise me at all.

He earned his living with odd jobs: delivering papers, working as a locksmith’s apprentice, a forester, a dishwasher in a restaurant, and so on. Although we disagreed about how the world works, we knew how to keep our love life separate from our political commitments, and eventually we moved into a large communal apartment with my sister and some friends.

Later on, Stieg in turn joined the Trotskyites. More senior in the movement than he was, I was in charge at the time of a youth group in the high school where he was working toward his diploma. Our roles had been reversed: I was now the teacher, and he the student.

Then the Trotskyist movement asked the students to “proletarianize” themselves by adopting a life of wage labor, and a cell soon sprang up in the local Volvo factory. My working pals were categorical on this point, however: “We had no choice, no chance to study. But you do! Continue, absolutely!” And I agreed with them. Ours was the first generation to benefit from government loans for higher education, so why throw it all away? Besides, my background wasn’t middle class, my family had been farmers, so I knew perfectly well what the proletariat was—and saw no benefit to society in seeking to rejoin it! City kids kept showing up in bead necklaces and clothes they’d sewn themselves, eager to live communally and go back to the land. We, who actually came from there—we figured they must be off their rockers!

When teaching my classes, I’d use aspects of these young people’s lives to get them thinking about things. This was in 1976. My superiors would have liked me just to drill them in theory. I was dismissed from my position, replaced by someone more “red,” and I left the Trotskyites. Not Stieg. He stayed in that organization until late in the 1980s, but more for the theory than the practice, as a way to continue the political and intellectual exchanges that so impassioned him. For a long time he also contributed unpaid articles under his own name to The International, the official journal of the movement.

In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth Salander is suspected of murdering the journalist Dag Svensson (whose investigative report on the sex trafficking of Eastern European women was published in the magazine Millennium) and his companion Mia Bergman, a criminologist specializing in sexual slavery. Lisbeth discovers she’s being sought by the police when she happens to watch part of a television program in which Peter Teleborian, the assistant head physician at St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, outside Uppsala, is pontificating about her case. Lisbeth had been a virtual prisoner in this clinic for more than two years, and she realizes that no newspaper has questioned the fact that doctors are allowed to restrain unruly and difficult patients in a room “free of stimuli” for unconscionable periods of time—a practice she compares to the treatment of political prisoners during the Moscow show trials in the 1930s. Lisbeth knows that “according to the Geneva Conventions,