certain that I was right. I simply didn’t know if our two boards would be able to continue cooperating. I didn’t even know if the relationship between Stieg and me would survive the strain.
“Stieg,” I said with a sigh, “we are talking about a seventeenyear-old. How can you possibly think that it’s acceptable for such a young person to infiltrate such a dangerous group? Still, nothing awful has happened, so we can draw a line under it. We must look to the future. You must promise me one thing: in no circumstances will you allow anybody under the age of eighteen to do anything as dangerous as this again. Neo-Nazis know no limits. They are capable of anything. We don’t have the right to expose anyone else to danger, irrespective of how important the information is that
Stieg said nothing. He stared at me for quite a while, rubbing his knees. Then he looked as if he had had second thoughts. He folded his hands over his stomach and sighed. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. We both inhaled.
“You are right,” he said.
We sat there in silence, smoking. It was impossible to know what he was thinking. Suddenly he said, “You must have lunch with Erland the next time you give a lecture in Umea.”
“Who’s that?”
“My dad.”
“Stieg, you mustn’t call your father Erland, that’s rude. You should simply say ‘my dad’.”
We both laughed. We weren’t quite sure why we laughed, I suspect. Perhaps because the difference between his background in the north of Sweden and mine in Turkish Kurdistan had suddenly become so obvious.
“I promise,” I said with a smile, “to have lunch with your father the next time I’m in Umea. It will be an honour.”
Then we struggled up out of our comfortable hotel armchairs. Stieg collected his rucksack and we went out into the chill of Kungsholmsgatan. We shook hands as colleagues and best friends. Our friendship had passed the test. It was as if we breathed a mutual sigh of relief.
A year later I heard that Stieg had been one of the instigators behind another member of the
7
It is impossible to describe Stieg without mentioning his insomnia. The man seemed never to sleep. He was aware of this and we often spoke about it. One conclusion we came to was that there are people who manage to do their jobs efficiently despite sleeping very little at night. When it comes to comparing him with insomniacs like Churchill and Napoleon, however, I sometimes have the feeling that Stieg had something else in common with them: he was always ready to do battle. The difference being that the battles Stieg fought always took place in the mind, in mental arenas. I would call them battles over human values.
I occasionally used to say that Stieg was a sleep saver. Maybe there is no such expression, but I always thought it suited him. He admitted that even as a child he had found it difficult to go to bed in the evening. He had become a night owl early on, despite the fact that his constant curiosity and his eagerness to work meant that he was driven to be just as active during the day.
We often discussed whether sleeping well resulted in a longer life. Looking back, it feels uncomfortable to recall those many discussions; we agreed it did not necessarily follow that people who always slept well accomplished more. We could think of too many cases where the opposite applied.
One might even ask if it is possible for any dedicated and committed person, always involved in hundreds of projects, to sleep well. How can a good-hearted individual relax when human rights are being violated on a daily basis? When there are people with no roofs over their heads? When there are millions of refugees in the world? For somebody unacquainted with Stieg, such questions might sound somewhat naive and illogical; but in all our conversations these undeniable facts were an overwhelming driving force that empowered his will to change things.
The fact is that Stieg himself sometimes compared his sleeping habits to Churchill’s. He used to say that they were in the same league when it came to insomnia, but that the old statesman had the edge. Apparently Churchill seldom slept for more than three hours per night. Nevertheless he lived to the ripe old age of ninety, as Stieg never failed to point out when I or somebody else complained about his bad nocturnal habits.
I suggested that the number of hours one slept was not the most important thing. When you sleep is also crucial. Stieg usually went to bed when most other people were getting up. I don’t actually know if the time when you sleep is all that significant in fact, I suppose I just wanted to see him properly rested – something as unlikely to happen as our bringing about peace. Tired, red eyes, irregular breathing and slowing reflexes spoke for themselves. Winning the peace, as we used to put it, was the greatest achievement possible.
If Churchill had his champagne and cigars, Stieg had his coffee and cigarettes. Not such a grand combination, one has to admit. I know nobody who was as inveterate a smoker as Stieg. He had been chain-smoking since he was a teenager and it was hard to imagine him not puffing away at a cigarette. Coffee was his second greatest love. Churchill wanted his champagne “cold, dry and free”, and Stieg wanted his coffee with milk but no sugar. Most of all, he wanted lots of it. There was no limit to the amount of coffee he could drink. I have never come across anybody as hooked on caffeine as Stieg. When we spent sixteen hours together at Prime Minister Persson’s international conference on the Holocaust, I kept a count of how many servings of coffee Stieg drank. I made it twenty-two, most of them plastic mugs.
That amount of coffee can hardly be conducive to decent sleep. Swilling down twenty or so cups of coffee a day and smoking two or three packets of cigarettes no doubt ruin more than just a decent night’s slumber. They must slowly but surely undermine your whole body.
The slim, elegant young man I had met at the Vasa restaurant in the autumn of 1992 started to acquire chubby cheeks. His body became increasingly bloated, and he needed to buy bigger trousers and shirts. He had no interest at all in food. He ate if and when he had the time. Usually greasy junk food. But his weight increase had no effect on his energy, his enthusiasm for work or his lust for life. He was always smiling. It is true to say that he became more and more stressed as the years went by, but he never lost focus or became distrait.
He would spend most of his time glued to his computer, focusing all his attention first on one project, then on the next. Full speed ahead all the time. Interestingly enough, he was always motionless in front of his screen. The only part of his body he kept in trim was his brain – the rest of him had to survive as best it could.
I frequently suggested that he take up swimming. He thought that sounded even worse than going for walks in the woods. He would often grasp at any excuse to avoid having to listen to all the nagging – he was under constant threat of being murdered, he couldn’t possibly risk anything of the sort. That would be reckless in the extreme. He had a point, of course: but his main reason was to avoid taking any physical exercise. He very rarely did anything of the sort. He never stopped smoking, although he did cut down during the last year or so of his life. I occasionally saw him taking snuff as well.
Whenever he thought I was nagging him too much, Stieg would tell me that he was about to take his annual fortnight’s holiday. When I asked if he was going to leave his computer at home, he would always change the subject.
You can imagine how astonished I was to hear that in his younger days, he took part in skiing competitions. That sounds so unlikely. I have never been able to establish how good he was, but the very fact that he must once have been sufficiently interested to enter flabbergasts me. I have never met anybody less interested in sport – never ever.
My friend Stieg Larsson was one of those people who believe in their own immortality. He was in good company. Most people think that accidents only happen to others. But I know that he sometimes thought about how his mother had died far too early from a cerebral haemorrhage. This was a great sorrow always at the back
