by Kurdo Baksi
I have often wondered why I keep thinking back to that evening at Södra Teatern. Perhaps it was the look on Stieg’s face. It’s so easy to read things into a situation with hindsight. Or maybe it is to do with my thinking that I’d noticed a slackening off in his strict working practices. That I thought this was somehow liberating. His new way of dressing, perhaps – even if I didn’t think much of it, it did nevertheless suggest a sort of step forward.
But now, afterwards. Now that we know. The comment that his crime novels were a sort of pension insurance. I’ve no doubt he didn’t say that to trivialize his writing. He would never have done that. But I can’t help thinking that he knew what was going to happen, even then. The success lying in store for him.
He never experienced it, as we all know.
In my life the year 2004 stands out as a sort of watershed. I can divide up so many things into what happened before then and what happened afterwards. That year 2004, which as far as Stieg was concerned consisted of just 312 days.
11
Farewell
November was always the most important month in my relationship with Stieg. It was the time when the matters he and I were most concerned with were at the forefront of most people’s minds in Sweden, so we met more often than usual. If you go through the appeals and articles we wrote, you will find that most of them were written in November.
The first time we ever met with nobody else present was in November. We made a public announcement about the planned cooperation between Svartvitt and Expo in November. And of course, there is also the date that will always be connected with our work: 30 November, the anniversary of the death of the Swedish warrior-king Charles XII in 1718, a day hijacked by the nationalists for their annual celebrations.
November is not a month you can rely on. Some years ago a group of neo-Nazis shot at my flat in November. It is as if everything horrible in my life happens during that month, when the Swedish winter makes the days dark and gloomy. It’s said that Swedes always talk about the weather, and I have to agree that it’s true. But they are dependent on the weather, and the climate is cruel. In October it is just about possible for brief spells of life-giving Indian summer to interrupt the nasty, damp autumn weather and brighten up people’s minds. But November is ruthless, relentless and without compromise. Everybody knows that five months of darkness lie in store.
That in itself should be sufficient to explain why November is a month that makes you grit your teeth. I am one of many who sort of retire into themselves and become that little bit more grumpy and miserable.
I was planning a seminar that Stieg and I would be leading on 9 November. It was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Jewish pogrom carried out by German Nazis during the night of 9–10 November, 1938. It is important to remember that event, because in many ways it was the occasion when the world passed the point of no return. Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed, about twenty thousand Jews were rounded up, and many of them were never heard of again. The world was confronted by a moment of destiny and did nothing about it.
That is why Stieg and I were keen to arrange a seminar every year on that date. As I was sitting in my office, putting the finishing touches to arrangements for the evening, Stieg turned up. I have spoken to the people who were present and they have told me in detail what happened. His old friend Jim from Grenada was waiting for him outside. There was some administrative matter Jim needed help with and Stieg had promised to see what he could do.
“You don’t look too good,” was the first thing Jim had said.
Stieg shrugged and said, “Come on, let’s take the lift.”
They discovered that the lift wasn’t working. They began trudging laboriously up the seven flights of stairs. Stieg wasn’t exactly in peak condition, but now he was breathing even more heavily than usual. When they finally reached the Expo editorial offices, he could hardly breathe.
As soon as his old colleague Per saw how pale Stieg was, he decided to call an ambulance. But before anybody could get to the telephone Stieg had collapsed on to the shoulder of a new member of the Expo staff, Monika. A few seconds later he slumped to the floor. His heart was still beating.
The ambulance arrived quickly and Stieg was lifted on to a stretcher. The first thing they did was to fix an oxygen mask over his face. The crew worked quickly and efficiently – it was obvious they assumed Stieg had suffered a heart attack. Per travelled with him in the ambulance, which headed for St Göran’s Hospital. The ambulance men asked Per how old Stieg was. At which point Stieg lifted up the mask and bawled out, “I’m fifty, damn it!”
I was still in my office when Richard Slätt, Expo’s assistant editorin-chief, phoned.
“Stieg is ill,” he said. “He’s on his way to St Göran’s Hospital. No doubt he won’t be able to come to the seminar this evening.”
I didn’t realize the implications of that telephone call. Like everybody else who receives that kind of message, I tried to assess Richard’s tone of voice. He seemed quite calm and collected, which reassured me. I was well aware of course that Stieg would never choose to go to hospital of his own volition, but on the other hand, both of us had needed to go for check-ups in the recent past. No big deal. I did wonder about a heart attack; I have to say that only a couple of days previously I had read an article with the ominous headline “Men between fifty and sixty run the biggest risk of dying from a heart attack”.
But it had never occurred to me that this might apply to Stieg. Yes, he worked under pressure all the time; yes, he had all the characteristic symptoms. But even so, he still looked like an overgrown schoolboy.
Besides, it wasn’t so long ago that, feeling a bit down after yet another hospital visit, I had jokingly suggested that he should give a lively speech at my funeral. We’d both had a good laugh at that, as one does.
After the call from Richard I continued to put the finishing touches to the preparations for that evening’s event at the Swedish W.E.A. Stieg’s enforced absence meant that there was more for me to do, but I thought I’d be able to get round that. I decided not to telephone the police and ask for special protection: it should be sufficient to warn the organizers that quite a few neo-Nazis would turn up. I didn’t tell them that Stieg was unable to attend, but asked them to make sure that some extra security staff were on duty in the lecture room.
Having replaced the receiver after talking to the organizers, I thought about Stieg again. It struck me that it was only eleven days since I had replaced him as the main speaker at an event in Söderhamn. But when we had met only a couple of days ago, he had been in excellent spirits. He had given me a copy of the interview Svensk Bokhandel had published with Stieg Larsson the crime novelist. I had been surprised.
“Will the book be out as early as next June?” I had asked.
Surely he can’t fall ill now, I thought. He has too many irons in the fire. Things he has longed to experience all his life. I stood up and walked over to the window. But there again, a hospital visit can act as a wake-up call. He must calm down, enjoy the fact that his novel is shortly going to appear in the bookshops.
I returned to planning the seminar. It would turn out all right. I was used to playing multiple roles and, after all, we had done it several times before.
No, I didn’t take Stieg’s illness seriously. I knew that in the mid-1970s he had collapsed in Addis Ababa and been in a coma for several hours. He eventually discovered that he had a kidney infection. No doubt it would be something similar this time.
At 6.00 p.m. I officially opened the seminar despite the absence of the star turn. There were about a hundred people in the lecture room; eighty of them were known neo-Nazis.
The mood soon became strained, and several Holocaust survivors were uncertain whether or not they dared to stay on. I had to fight hard to ensure that it would be possible to complete the seminar – but I had no intention of cancelling or suspending it. I had never done so before and was not going to do so this time. I gave my intr
oductory talk on Kristallnacht, and that was followed by two talks on the current mood of xenophobia in Sweden. Then came a question-and-answer session that was anything but easy to control. I was completely exhausted when I rather brusquely wound up proceedings at the advertised time, 7.10 p.m.
The volunteer security men helped me to leave the premises quickly. A few people I had promised to meet for a glass of wine after the seminar were waiting in the Indian restaurant on the ground floor. They asked where Stieg was, and I told them that unfortunately he had been held up at the last minute. Shortly afterwards, I checked my mobile. It was now 7.16 – I remember that clearly. It is as if etched into my memory. That was when I heard the brief recorded message.
“Stieg is dead.”
I raced outside and was lucky enough to get a taxi to St Göran’s Hospital immediately. The journey took only a few minutes. All the time the words were echoing round my head. Stieg is dead. It can’t be true, I thought. I must have misheard it. There must be some kind of mistake.
When I entered the hospital waiting room, I found the Expo staff sitting there, all staring into space. They told me that Stieg’s family had been informed. Per had phoned from the ambulance and told Eva and Erland that Stieg was seriously ill and on his way to hospital. Stieg’s father had immediately raced to Umeå airport in order to catch the first available flight to Stockholm. And Eva was on her way from Falun.
The silence was tangible.
More friends turned up, and there were soon about twenty of us sitting there, comforting one another. But most of the time we sat in silence. Several people didn’t seem to have grasped what had happened. The hospital staff served us coffee and ginger biscuits. In my confused state I was unable to make out their faces. They were simply grey shadows wafting past. But suddenly I heard a woman say in a calm tone of voice, “You can say farewell to your friend now.”
I was unable to lift my gaze and see exactly where the voice came from. The ground was shifting under my feet. Everything was so improbable. What was I doing there? What had really happened? I wanted to stand up and tell her she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t simply appear and say something like that. You can say farewell to your friend now. It seemed so cruel, so final.
For me there is a life before and a life after that sentence.
It was that sentence which robbed me of my friend in a concrete, brutal and naked way.
It is so absurd. My first thought was how we were soon going to celebrate, after the event, Stieg’s fiftieth birthday. Fragments of memories staggered through my mind. I saw him before me on New Year’s Eve, 2000, at the home of a colleague somewhere in southern Stockholm, not far from Expo’s first office. Then the two of us on the balcony of his home. We were smoking cigarettes, drinking whisky and talking. What were we talking about? What on earth were we talking about? Then our first joint press conference, when he dealt with all the journalists and photographers with his inimitable charm.
I realized that I was crying. I had lost my mentor, and my best discussion partner – but most of all I had lost my unconditional friend. My big brother.
Eva arrived. Naturally, she was heartbroken. We embraced. Shortly afterwards Erland arrived from Umeå. By then it was 9.00 p.m. Still nobody had gone in to say farewell to Stieg.
I was the first to enter the final room Stieg occupied on this earth. He was lying on the bed. He was nicely dressed. He was wearing his glasses. His black and white tie was in place. His eyes were shut. I couldn’t grasp that this man had left us.
There was a little stool at the side of the bed. Should I sit there? I walked hesitantly towards Stieg. I clasped my hands together and listened to my own voice.
“Stieg, you are leaving your nearest and dearest very early in life. I want to thank you for all the good times we had together. And for all the difficult ones. I hope I have never hurt you, ever.”
Over and over again I had to wipe away tears with the back of my hand.
I was not as strong as I had thought. I left Stieg with slow, stumbling steps.
The others went in to say their farewells. Some went in alone, others in small groups. The last person to say farewell to Stieg was Eva.
Deep down inside me I could hear Stieg’s voice repeating the last words he ever said: “I’m fifty, damn it!”
His last words which I didn’t actually hear myself. Nevertheless, I could hear them echoing inside me. This was the end of his fifty-year-long journey. A journey that began in Skelleftehamn and continued through his childhood in Bjursele and Sandbacka, and his youth in Umeå, with a few excursions to Eritrea, Morocco, Algeria, Gibraltar, Grenada.
A journey that came to an end one chilly November night at St Göran’s Hospital in Stockholm.
No. November is not a month to be relied upon. But, I thought, the considerate Stieg Larsson no doubt had a good reason for leaving when he did. As he almost always had. As usual, I realized that I trusted him, no matter what happened. It could quite simply be, I thought to myself, that his mother, Vivianne, his grandfather Severin and his grandmother Tekla had been kept waiting for him far too long.
Yes, I know, Stieg, it may be a naive thought, but as I write these words I think that despite everything, one of these days we can win peace. We can. All of us. I hope so.
Sleep well, Stieg.
Afterword
This is not a blind tribute to a friend. Everybody who met Stieg Larsson will have their own picture of him. The same applies to those who were close to him.
For more than ten years Stieg and I met almost every day. I was with him during his most difficult times, and I was present and able to share in his successes and happiness.
Despite the fact that he was eleven years older than I, we were colleagues and friends. You could almost say that we were each other’s boss. Stieg was the most unassuming person I have ever met, and the unconditional friendship he gave me is irreplaceable.
As his enormous success as a novelist grows, there is a danger that his single-minded fight does not receive the attention it deserves. That fight was such an important part of him, both as a person and as a writer. My hope is that to some extent this book has succeeded in describing it.
It is only now, after almost five years of mourning, that I have been able to summon up enough courage to write about my friend and colleague. This book is my picture of Stieg Larsson.
In conclusion I would like to thank Håkan Bravinger and Eva Gedin at Norstedts for all their help and advice.
Kurdo Baksi
September 2009
