Stieg Larsson, My Friend

4

I’ve suddenly remembered something that happened in the early hours of 9 November, 1999. I was staying at the Prize Hotel in Stockholm. The telephone rang at 2.15. Although I was still awake, alarm bells went off inside my head – one seldom receives good news in the middle of the night.

“Stieg hasn’t come home,” Eva screamed into my mobile.

She was sniffling and sobbing. I tried to calm her down, but I could feel myself going ice cold. In as soothing a voice as I could manage, I assured her that nothing bad could have happened. A few hours later it became apparent that Stieg had fallen asleep in his office. Probably, now that I think about it, he had been working and had decided, unusually, to lie down on a sofa.

Today, so many years later, I can laugh at the memory.

Was that the moment I realized that Stieg was writing books at night? I can’t remember. But I do remember clearly how relieved I was that nothing awful had happened to him.

When Stieg was appointed to a post as a graphic designer at Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, he could hardly have realized how long he would be associated with that place of work. Although he maintained throughout those years that T.T. played an important role in independent news-reporting, he had a remarkable love-hate relationship with it. No doubt his appointment was in many ways a sort of revenge as far as he was concerned. Now he could make up for the frustration he had felt on being rejected as an eighteen-year-old by the Stockholm College of Journalism in the autumn of 1972. Now he would show them that their idiotic admissions requirements meant they had lost a reporter who was more than a match for anybody.

It was this lust for revenge which ensured that he had a plan even when he walked for the first time through the door of the Hötorget skyscraper where T.T. was based in the 1970s. He would work at everything he was required to do in the way of illustrations, diagrams, pictures and paste-ups in order to become a fully fledged, damned good reporter in due course.

Things did not go according to plan, however. He was never given the assignments he expected, and the management appeared to have no interest at all in his ideas.

Despite this, T.T. came to mean an awful lot to Stieg. It was not simply a matter of earning a living, it was more a question of living or not living. The reasons why he could never bring himself to leave T.T. were mental, not financial.

I have worked through T.T.’s digital archives in an attempt to track down Stieg’s articles. The first time his name crops up is in January 1982. On 11 July, 1985, his initials – “sla” – appear in print for the first time. In connection with an illustration. Then follow hundreds of illustrations, diagrams, pictures and paste-ups, all signed by him. Strikingly often they are linked with financial articles.

The first article he wrote dates from 22 January, 1992, and is about the history of the Swedish intelligence agency. If you consider all the years Stieg worked at T.T., he wrote comparatively few articles of any length. I have traced twenty-five written between 1992 and 1999. Eight are tips for crime novels to read at Christmas or during the summer holidays, which is interesting in view of what happened later. The articles show clearly that Stieg was impressed by the novels of Sara Paretsky, Harlan Ellison, Liza Cody and, last but by no means least, Elizabeth George.

Nevertheless, most of the articles are in his field of expertise: neo-Nazism and racism in Sweden and abroad. Three of them are about the bomb outrage in Oklahoma. Of course, there may be many more unsigned articles by Stieg, and one cannot exclude the possibility that several signed articles were overlooked during the scanning process (those who worked on it have admitted that T.T.’s repository of news articles is far from complete).

So, although he was fighting against the odds, Stieg hung on at T.T. He was pretty frank about his conviction that obstacles were constantly being placed in his way, not least because his superiors seldom allowed him to write about matters on which he was an expert. Nevertheless he never felt for one second that he was being victimized. Instead, he mounted counterattacks whenever opportunities presented themselves. He even went so far as to organize his own “resistance group” at T.T. This included several members of staff who got on well together and had more or less the same views on journalism. This group supported him when his superiors complained or prevaricated.

Now, many years later, I find it hard to understand why he behaved as he did. Why this constant battle? Couldn’t he have done what everybody else would have done and simply looked for another job? Sometimes I suspect he liked to create his own battlefield where he could leap up on to his horse and wield his sword and bayonet. The image of Don Quixote occasionally crops up in my mind’s eye.

Similarly, T.T. seems like a big windmill spinning round at a leisurely pace. Or perhaps a fan belt whizzing round out of sight inside an engine which ought to be changed after a certain number of kilometres but is still there. You almost get the feeling that the whole engine will grind to a halt when the belt eventually snaps. It often seemed as if those in charge at T.T. had no idea how to handle the bolshie employee from the far north who was at one moment an implacable warhorse and at the next moment more like a miserable schoolboy sulking in a corner of the playground. They never knew if he was going to do his own thing – and ignore their rules – or toe the line.

There is no point in suppressing the fact that on occasion Stieg stretched the rules to breaking point. For instance, as a T.T. reporter he wrote news items about having himself received death threats. Nobody at T.T. seems to have noticed. Or possibly they didn’t have the strength to argue with him and so turned a blind eye. A quick glance at T.T.’s archives shows that in his capacity as a member of the Expo editorial board, he “interviewed” himself five times in the period 1992-9.

It was precisely this lack of impartiality and relevance that made his position at T.T. so complicated. Such goings-on are far removed from what a news agency ought to be doing. But Stieg simply couldn’t help himself. The moment he sat down at a computer, he took sides for or against.

These facts make it easy to understand how Expo could have become such an important part of Stieg’s life. The number of articles he wrote for T.T. declined in inverse proportion to his increasing involvement with Expo. Perhaps, paradoxically, this was what forced him to stay on at T.T. He needed his salaried post because Expo’s financial situation was always so awful.

Early on in our friendship I realized what the force was that drove Stieg: justice – irrespective of class, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. I couldn’t possibly count how many times he said “Everybody is worth the same as everybody else.” Over and over again. Most of us would agree, no doubt; but I have never heard that sentiment expressed with such emphasis and conviction. The concept of justice was an integral part of his being, I don’t know how else to describe it.

Like many others of his generation, Stieg had grown up with a political vision, in his case Trotskyism. But unlike quite a few of his generation, he never changed his views when money was involved. Financial matters simply did not exist in his conception of the world; he had zero interest in anything to do with money.

More important to him was the possibility of making a difference without being noticed. That is why it is extremely difficult to imagine how he would have handled his success as an author, forced to take a bow because of all the attention his novels had attracted. But he was a man who worked tirelessly to produce material for the rest of us to present to the general public. A man who wrote vast numbers of appeals and articles, and then asked me to attach my name to them.

I know that he thought about this because he had premonitions that the Millennium trilogy would be a success. However, for me – and for many others – the biggest question is not how he would have handled his success, but how on earth he managed to produce these books in more or less total secrecy, despite being so busy all the time.

I sometimes ask myself just how much Stieg worked. I generally answer, “I can’t say when he worked – but I can tell you when he didn’t work. When he was asleep.” I should perhaps mention that when he was not at the office, he was glued to his computer or had his mobile clamped to his ear – two indefatigable “collaborators” of Stieg’s.

When the time came for the first double edition of Svartvitt and Expo, Stieg had an unusually number of irons in the fire. He was fully occupied with contacting the parents of children who had been exposed to racist violence and with trying to find homes for women who had fled sects or families where they had been living under duress. He was also working intensively to arrange residence permits for homosexuals from Muslim backgrounds. He was helping others to finish books when they got stuck and couldn’t make progress. He was lecturing regularly to Swedish PEN, the Helsinki Committee and Scotland Yard. In addition to all that was the non-stop fund-raising for victims of racism.

Moreover, Stieg had started digging into an old legal case that later came to be called the Joy Rahman affair and that led to Rahman being released from prison in 2002 and awarded substantial damages. Rahman, employed as a home help, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for strangling a 72-year-old woman she had been working for in southern Stockholm. Stieg was convinced that Rahman was innocent, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had rejected her appeal. He thought that as a journalist I ought to be able to establish Rahman’s innocence simply by reading all the legal documents carefully. He had dumped over a thousand pages of proceedings on my desk. I read all of them, but was not convinced that Rahman had been falsely accused. Stieg disputed my conclusion.

“You’re not going to win the major journalism prize,” he said.

But I couldn’t bring myself to query the legal process. There were too many details that seemed not to fit and far too many uncertainties. In 2007 the same Joy Rahman was imprisoned for the murder of a man in Bangladesh. I wonder what Stieg would have made of that.

Despite Stieg’s enormous workload, he always met his deadlines. He never failed to complete a text by the time it was needed. Mind you, whether the article was what had been agreed in the first place was another matter.

Time was beginning to run out for our first combined issue. It was to contain no more than eight Expo pages: a single-column leader, four news reports, a commentary and a review. Stieg’s article was still outstanding, and was essential if everything was to fit together with the Svartvitt material. That is what we had agreed, and it was important that nothing went wrong. We had too many critics just waiting to pounce if we made a mess of things. And we were in desperate need of new subscribers. In no circumstances must we publish late and give the impression of being unprofessional.

When Stieg turned up at the editorial office just inside the deadline with his article, I quickly realized that it was not what we had agreed on. It was in fact a book, forty pages long, entitled Euro-Nat – A Europe for Anti-Semites, Ethnic Warriors and Political Crackpots – The Sweden Democrats’ International Network.

“It’s urgent,” he said. “Can you publish it?”

“I’ll read it by tomorrow.”

“No, you must read it now, right away.”

“But I have to make sure we don’t find ourselves with all sorts of legal problems. We can’t afford that.”

“You don’t need to worry. The only people I’ve named fully are elected officials. All the others are referred to only by their first names. You’re not risking anything. Can you give me an ISBN number from your Svartvitt list?”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and got up to fetch the list. It did occur to me that the book would be an excellent introduction to the partnership between Svartvitt and Expo.

In other words, I found myself becoming the publisher of a book I had never read. This was a reflection of how much confidence I had in Stieg. If he said that the book was important and there were no potential legal problems, I trusted him. The first thing I saw on my desk after his death was a copy of the jacket blurb for that book. It reminded me of the meeting I have just described. Stieg had written the text himself:

In the 1998 elections the Sweden Democrats polled twenty thousand votes and won eight local council seats. That meant they were the third-largest party with no representation in the national parliament, and now they are setting their sights on the 1999 E.U. elections. They hope to hoover up votes from New Democracy, which has collapsed, and from other protest parties. The keyword in the Sweden Democrats’ campaign is “respectability”. This spruced-up façade is in stark contrast with the party’s history, and its membership of the international movements Nord-Nat and Euro-Nat.

There was undeniably something electric about Stieg’s presence. If you managed to interpret the signals he sent out correctly, your whole environment was lit up. But if you misunderstood his intentions, he could burn everything that got in his way – including himself. So he was both a dream and a nightmare to work with. He was not merely seriously involved, but rather obsessed with the struggle to overcome intolerance. And he always acted spontaneously. When one least expected it, he was apt to come out with long quotations in order to illustrate his arguments. A lot of people called him un-Swedish, but I have never been able to accept that. It simply doesn’t fit comfortably with his view of the world.

Every time I think about our meetings, it strikes me that some people might think that our contact was always linked with the work we did together. I have never seen it like that. It was about as far away from a working relationship as it’s possible to get. It would be truer to say that our work was a part of our friendship.

On 30 November, 1998, T.T. issued a newsflash. The anti-racist journal Expo had been resurrected, thanks to a merger with the magazine Svartvitt.

I was quoted: “Expo has been outstandingly good at investigating racism, but they have never grasped how to make money. That is where I can help them.”

According to the newsflash, the new version of Expo hoped to sell four thousand copies to start with and eventually nine thousand. Stieg was the main protagonist at the press conference held at the Swedish W.E.A. that same day. He was wearing his now legendary grey jacket and shirt with a dark blue tie. But the resulting news item didn’t even mention his name: although he did most of the talking at the press conference, I was the one who was quoted. There again, I was the one at whom several people laughed when they heard the number of copies Expo hoped to sell. Nobody thought it was possible to achieve that ambition.

It was not only because of his shyness that Stieg maintained such a modest profile. His relationship with T.T. had reached a new low and he felt stymied. Because of his permanent post there, he was not free to be interviewed as an expert on matters involving racism or neo-Nazism. Nor was he allowed to write on these subjects. He was always being approached for articles that would have been right up his street. Sometimes he paid no attention to what his superiors said and wrote them. But that only made his position even more awkward.

You can’t serve two masters, Stieg!

You simply can’t do this.

You can’t publish a journal about right-wing extremism in your spare time and also produce credible articles on the same questions for a news agency.

You have to choose one or the other!

Over and over again he came up against the same arguments, and I could see how it was getting him down.

It soon became clear that Stieg was working day and night. We used to say that he worked from 9.00 till 5.00 – 9.00 in the morning till 5.00 the next morning. There seemed to be no limit to what he needed to do: write articles; do research; coordinate editorial activities; buy coffee, loo rolls, bookcases, computers and toners for the printer… I didn’t envy him, but I ought to have supported him more. My only consolation is that I know his pride would have prevented him from accepting more help than I gave him.

Every weekday at 1.30 he would turn up at the editorial office of either Expo or Svartvitt. He would bring a litre of milk for coffee, take a seat and talk before returning to his day job at T.T. He was back in the editorial office by 4.00. He told me that he often went to bed at about 5.00 in the morning. The last thing he always did was to switch off his mobile, which he both loved and hated.

We could see that he was pushing himself to the limit. His bloodshot eyes often betrayed his exhaustion. But I also remember the energy he radiated. Our collaboration was going well; we could look ahead with confidence and spent hours analysing the current state of democracy, or the latest move by some person or organization we both hated.

Then the day dawned when Stieg’s book on Euro-Nat arrived from the printer’s. Two weeks later we celebrated the publication of the first issue of the combined Svartvitt and Expo journals in my office. It was a memorable day. A lot of people called it a mad project. Perhaps they were right. But no matter; it was an act of madness that I shall never regret.

I remember clearly Stieg’s pride when we sat in the editorial office with the new issue in our hands. How his voice boomed: “It’s our obligation, damn it, to comment on and analyse and take the pulse of the new Sweden.”

And then, when somebody produced a camera, how he displayed great agility in slipping off to one side and managing to avoid being in the picture. He was happy to take on work and share praise with others. But he made sure he didn’t appear in any photographs if at all possible.

I sometimes wonder if Stieg had the same working habits when he was younger. If he only had one gear: full steam ahead. Or whether the frenzy gathered pace later in his life. I would have loved to have seen him as an eighteen-year-old, doing his project on racism and political extremism. That assignment must have awakened something extraordinary in his frail teenage body. Perhaps that was a starting point for all that he came to stand for in adulthood as a journalist, author and lecturer.

“Kill your darlings,” I used to tell Stieg when he was having trouble restricting himself. I often thought he was rather too fond of his own texts, and also those of others. It made no difference if it was a news article, a leaflet, a preface, a press release, a cultural article, a polemical essay or a chapter in a textbook.

I succeeded in becoming one of the very few people who were allowed to edit his texts ruthlessly. Not without him protesting loudly, of course. Quite early on, I hit upon a trick that seemed to work: cut half the text but allow the first four or five hundred words to stand unchanged, and find an appropriate way of summing up as the last sentence but one.

I don’t suppose I shall ever see again anything like the driving force generated by Stieg when he was writing. I have never come across anybody who could write so easily and quickly the draft of a press release, a polemical article or a petition. And he seemed to be so happy as he did it. He could be hunched over and dog-tired, but when asked to write a press release, his whole body would straighten and his eyes light up.

Once as we were sitting in the Café Latte, he talked about his travels to Africa.

“Did you know I suffered from malaria while I was out there?”

“I had no idea.”

He shrugged, and we spoke no more about it. But shortly afterwards we touched on the situation in Algeria.

“I once had a job there as a dishwasher. That was after a failed trip and I’d run out of money.”

“You’ve done quite a lot of travelling.”

“So have you,” he said.

“That’s true, that’s one thing we have in common.”

“‘A woman’s relationship to a man is like the slave’s to the master, the manual labourer to the intellectual, the barbarian to the Hellene. A woman is an undeveloped man.’”

“Eh?”

“Who said that?”

“It must be some Greek philosopher,” I said hesitantly, “in view of the word ‘Hellene’.”

“Aristotle.”

How can one not miss conversations like that?

The period following our first joint issue was fantastic. Not least because we were proud of it, and of how well we had worked together. Then several things happened that shocked us deeply.

It started with the Malexander murders, one of the most discussed crimes of the 1990s in Sweden. In the course of a police chase following a bank robbery on 28 May 1999, two officers were shot dead with their own service revolvers. It seemed more like an out-and-out execution than anything else.

Only a few weeks later we received another horrific piece of news. Stieg and I were in the editorial office when the telephone rang on 28 June. A former member of the Expo staff, Peter Karlsson, his partner, Katarina Larsson, and their eight-year-old son had been victims of a car-bomb attack in the suburb of Nacka on 18 June. They had been rushed to hospital by helicopter, and we heard later that Peter had serious leg injuries. It came like a punch in the solar plexus to both Stieg and me. Threats were a normal part of our everyday life, but this was the nearest they had come to us personally.

Luckily Peter survived. What worried us most was that it ought not to have happened because Peter and his partner both carried alarm devices, but they hadn’t gone off until a second before the explosion.

We could only interpret the assassination attempt on Peter and Katarina as a direct attack on Expo. Both of them had worked for the journal until quite recently. Their exposé in Aftonbladet, Expressen and Dagens Nyheter concerning so-called White Power music attracted a lot of attention, and seemingly was the reason for the outrage.

It was merely minutes after we’d heard the news ourselves that we began to receive a deluge of calls from the press. I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear; Stieg sat beside me writing a series of statements on Post-it notes. “Democracy cannot be taken for granted”, “Every day and at every level of society we must fight for democracy, tolerance and respect”. I read out what he had written, and could hear the reporters noting it down.

They asked how often we received death threats ourselves.

“All the time,” I replied.

They wondered if it reminded me of my life in Kurdistan.

“That’s an absurd comparison,” I said as politely as I could.

Then a photographer arrived. He had been assigned to take pictures of the threats directed at Svartvitt and Expo. I produced an entire file full of threatening letters. He picked out examples that he considered to be “real threats” and was particularly interested in those decorated with swastikas.

Stieg, who had hidden himself away behind a computer screen, was grinning broadly and shaking his head. We both knew that news of this sort during the so-called silly season was a goldmine for hard-pressed editors. I would very much have liked to have passed them over to Stieg directly, but all I could do was get him to answer the telephone. He refused point blank to be photographed. As soon as he had a minute to spare, he wrote out new statements on our joint behalf. It was obvious how agitated he was.

“We can’t just sit at home and allow the anti-democrats to take over the streets,” he swore. He explained how far-right groups were associated especially with letter bombs. Moreover, he had heard that two neo-Nazis wanted by the police in Austria had gone to ground in Sweden and were being protected by people in Helsingborg linked with the far-right international organization Blood & Honour.

“There is a risk that they will take the opportunity to give Swedish neo-Nazis tips on how to make letter bombs,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

Everybody in the editorial office was worried. How bad was the situation in reality? Was the attack on Peter an isolated event, or was it the first in a series? The mood was not improved when Stieg related in detail how a Danish neo-Nazi from the Blood & Honour network in Malmö had posted three letter bombs addressed to targets in England. We all knew that a Nazi sympathizer had been arrested the previous year at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in possession of explosives.

Never before had we been in such complete agreement that we needed to mobilize as much opposition as possible.

“We must write a forceful manifesto. It’s important that all well-known homosexuals, immigrants and women sign it,” said Stieg, looking hard at me. “You can fix that. You know them.”

“In that case I must have the final version as soon as possible so I can read it out to them. Damn it, it’s the middle of summer – it won’t be easy to get everything sorted at short notice.”

That was all Stieg needed to hear. He raced over to my blue Apple Mac and seven minutes later he had finished our first joint petition.

All the celebrities we managed to get hold of signed it and on 7 July, 1999, the “Stop the Neo-Nazi and Racist Violence” petition was published in Aftonbladet:

A neo-Nazi terrorist movement has grown up stealthily in Sweden. The worst fears seem to have been confirmed by the attempted assassination of the journalists Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson. Nevertheless, the recent car-bomb attack is only the tip of the iceberg. According to Säpo [the Swedish Security Service] 327 cases of assault on racist grounds took place in 1997.

Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson are among the few who have blown the whistle on right-wing extremism in our society, which is becoming increasingly unsafe. And now, if not before, it is clear that it is not sufficient to talk about “drunken misbehaviour”, “youthful folly” or “routine criminality”, as we often hear from the police and authorities.

We, the signatories to this petition, therefore demand:

• That the security services finally acknowledge and prioritize the neo-Nazi terror and support the police in their work.

• That the police give adequate protection to people who are threatened by right-wing extremists.

• That the Minister of Justice draws up an action programme to get neo-Nazi and racist violence under control.

• That a crisis centre is established to assist the victims of racism.

Break the silence! We all have a responsibility to combat racism and neo-Nazism.

Everyone who wishes to live in a tolerant, democratic, humane and multicultural Sweden is urged to sign this petition…

Within twenty-four hours over a thousand signatures of ordinary Swedes were added to the petition. I asked Stieg to accompany me to Rosenbad, the prime minister’s office, the following morning in order to hand over the list.

“A quarter to nine is too early for me. Besides, it would be better for a man and a woman born in different countries to go to the ministry.”

I realized that it was a waste of time trying to persuade him and asked the journalist Bella Frank of the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren to accompany me to hand the petition to Deputy Prime Minister Lena Hjelm-Wallén.

What none of us knew at the time was that it was already fiftysix days since a group of known neo-Nazis had ordered passport photographs and “current addresses” of Stieg, his partner, Eva, and me.