_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [9]
Using the same words, sharing the same tastes, wanting the same things—that’s rather typical of couples who met when they were teenagers and grew into adulthood together.
And yet, it’s difficult to explain now how strongly Stieg and I felt, from the first moment we met, that we were made for each other. More than ten years later, he wrote, “I’d given up believing it could happen. I never imagined I’d meet someone like you, who would understand me.” For my part, I’d known right away that this man would put the puzzle of my life in order and make me a better person. But at the same time, finding each other like that put enormous pressure on us. How can anyone calmly accept that his or her life and very self should be completely challenged and changed? It was an anguishing feeling, like the realization that the universe is infinite. Sometimes we tried to pull back a little, to get some perspective, but the attraction we felt was too strong. We were afraid, but we were each in thrall to the other.
For thirty-two years, we always had something to say, to tell each other, to explore, to share, to read, to seek, to fight for, and to build … together.
And we had wonderful times, too. He was great fun to be with.
He was a loving and demonstrative man. A real teddy bear.
With Stieg, I understood the expression “soul mate.”
The Trip to Africa
IN FEBRUARY 1977, when he was twenty-two, one of Stieg’s dreams came true: he went to Africa.
To finance his trip, he worked hard for six months at the nearby sawmill in Hornefors. Why did he go to Africa? He never fully explained that to me, and rightly so: all I knew was that he was leaving on a mission for the Fourth International, the communist organization founded in 1938 in France by Trotsky and his supporters, whom Stalin had driven out of the Soviet Union for their opposition to the Third International. Stieg’s assignment was to contact certain groups involved in the civil war then raging in Ethiopia, probably in order to deliver some money and/or documents to them. A risky business. Stieg later told me that just by chance he wound up teaching a female militia unit how to fire mortars—which he’d learned to do during his military service—with weapons smuggled into the hills of Eritrea by the USSR.
Africa fascinated Stieg, and his ambition was to write articles about this continent where so much was happening so quickly. Between his departure in February and his return in July, however, not a single newspaper showed interest in any topic he suggested. Stieg probably seemed too young and inexperienced for the job, but no other journalists, Swedish or otherwise, were on the ground during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. It was too dangerous.
When he left Umea, Stieg passed through Stockholm to get his visas, and when I joined him there to say goodbye, he met me at the station, wild with joy.
In the months that followed, his letters arrived at irregular intervals from very different places. He wrote quite guardedly both to me and in the journal he kept on his trip, in which nothing of what he later told me was recorded. Fearing he might be arrested at any moment, he was afraid any important information would fall into the wrong hands, causing serious consequences for him and the people he was meeting.
Stieg caught malaria in Africa and became deathly ill. One day he suddenly went blind: lost in a white fog, he barely managed to return through the streets to his hotel by feeling his way along the sides of buildings. When he reached his room, he passed out, but after someone found him he was rushed to a hospital. Sometime later, he wrote me about