IN THE Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the novel that opens The Millennium Trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist discovers a photo taken during the Children’s Day Parade in Hedeby, the oldest neighborhood in the small town of Hedestad, on the day Harriet Vanger disappeared. Seeking information about that day to help him understand what might have frightened the teenager away, he hunts for the tourist couple who photographed the parade forty years earlier. His research takes him into northern Sweden, first to Norsjö, then to Bjursele, in Västerbotten County. Why there? For most Swedes, those are godforsaken places at the back of beyond, but Stieg knew them well. It was there that he went as a baby in 1955 to live with his maternal grandparents. His father and mother, Erland Larsson and Vivianne Boström, were too young to bring him up properly, and they left to live 600 miles away in the south. In 1957 they moved again to Umeå (pronounced Umio), a small city 125 miles southeast of Norsjö.
Writing about Norsjö and Bjursele was Stieg’s way of paying homage to the small community of people there who gave him the best moments of his youth. And a way of thanking them for the values they instilled in him.
STIEG LIVED with his grandparents in a small wooden house on the edge of a forest. Their home had a kitchen and one other room, without water, electricity, or an indoor toilet. This kind of house is typical of the Swedish countryside and its family farms, and in those days, when the next generation took over the farm, the old folks would “retire” to such a place. The walls of Stieg’s grandparents’ house were poorly insulated, and the joints between the planks were probably crammed with sawdust in the old style. The kitchen woodstove on which his grandmother cooked the meals was the only source of heat. In the winter, the temperature outside could drop to as low as -35 degrees Celsius, with—at most—thirty minutes of daylight, and Stieg used to ski cross-country to the village school in the moonlight. Prompted by his natural curiosity, he tirelessly explored the surrounding forests, lakes, and trails, hoping to meet other people and catch glimpses of animals, too. Life was tough where he lived, so it took plenty of ingenuity to survive, but such an environment breeds hardy individuals, self-reliant, resourceful, generous folks who can be counted on in a pinch. Like Stieg.
According to Stieg, his maternal grandfather, Severin, was an anti-Nazi communist who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. After the war, such militants were not exactly welcomed back into society. Even at the time, people didn’t want to talk about this period in Swedish history, and what happened then is still not common knowledge today. In 1955, Severin quit his job in a factory and left Skelleftehamn—where Stieg was born—to move into that small wooden house with his wife and their baby grandson. To support his little family, Severin repaired bikes and engines and did odd jobs on the local farms. Stieg adored going hunting and fishing with him. At the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist accepts an offer from Henrik Vanger, Harriet Vanger’s uncle, to move into the guest house not far from Hedestad. It’s the middle of winter, and he describes the “ice roses that formed on the inside of the windows”: they were the same ones that used to fascinate Stieg in his grandparents’ home, roses that grew from vapor in the family’s breath and the water always boiling on the stove. He never forgot those magnificent visions, or the cold he could describe from personal experience. His childhood was a hard one, but it was full of joy and affection.
In black-and-white family snapshots, a little boy smiles between two grown-ups who’ve been having fun disguising themselves for the camera. Those two taught Stieg that nothing is impossible in this life. And that chasing after money is contemptible. His grandfather had an old Ford Anglia, the motor of which he’d probably repaired thanks to his skills as a mechanic and handyman, and this very car, with AC on its license plate for Västerbotten, is the one Mikael must track down during his search for Harriet Vanger. To write his trilogy, Stieg used a thousand such small details taken from life. From his life, from mine, and from ours.
IN DECEMBER 1962, Severin Boström, Stieg’s grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six (as did his daughter, Stieg’s mother, in 1991). Six months later his widow, unable to stay on in that isolated house with her grandchild, moved with him to the area around Skellefteå, in Västerbotten County, where Stieg would later visit her every summer until she died, in 1968.
Severin’s death brought Stieg’s happy, carefree world to an abrupt end. He was not quite nine years old when he rejoined his parents in Umeå. In 1957 Erland and Vivianne had had another son, Joakim, and they had married in 1958. Stieg barely knew them anymore. He used to speak often about his maternal grandparents but rarely about his parents, although some very close friends of his grandparents have told me that his mama, Vivianne, did go to see him several times when he was very little. In the autumn of 1963, when Stieg began attending elementary school in Umeå, his life changed completely. He found the urban environment foreign, even hostile. He was used to living in a house out in the middle of nature, coming and going in perfect freedom, but from then on he lived shut up in a tiny apartment in the middle of town, and this switch from countryside to asphalt was painful for him. Stieg’s parents worked all day and were often absent, whereas his grandparents had always been available. The rhythm of life grew stricter, more cramped, governed by regular hours.
Stieg’s first name was originally spelled without an e, and I’m not sure when he added the extra letter because he was already “Stieg” when I met him. There was another Stig Larsson in Umeå, and the story goes that they flipped a coin one day to see who would change his name. What I do know is that after Stieg received an impressive number of letters from the village library demanding the return of books checked out by the other Stig, he decided it was time for a new name. (And I’m always amused when people trot out similar anecdotes about him as if they’d been there at the time or Stieg had personally told them what happened, when I’m the only one who knew those particular stories, which they’ve gleaned from the interviews I’ve given.)
When he was seventeen, Stieg moved out of his family’s apartment into a small studio in the basement of the building where they lived. Beyond the fact that he wasn’t too happy, I don’t know what really went on during all those years. I have the distinct impression, though, that it was from that time on that he stopped taking care of himself and began neglecting his health. As if all that simply weren’t important anymore. As if he weren’t important, either to himself or to others.
Aside from the all too rare times when we went sailing, Stieg, like Mikael Blomkvist, didn’t go in much for sports, ate indiscriminately, smoked, and I’ve already said he drank too much coffee. Which, given the stressful life he led, doubtless contributed to his premature death.
After I met Stieg, in 1972, he returned only once to his childhood home, in the autumn of 1996.
Norsjö and Bjursele are in Västerbotten County, where my brother, sister, and I own about eighteen acres of woodlands that have been in our family for generations. In the 1990s, Stieg and I went up there twice to clear some brush. The second time, in 1996, we spent several days working hard among the snakes and biting flies, but it felt good to get out of our offices and do some manual labor. And when we’d finished clearing the undergrowth, we went to see his grandparents’ little house with some neighbors of ours from the nearby village of Önnesmark, since they were curious to know more about Stieg’s childhood days.
The house was shut up tight, so Stieg pressed his face to the window. Nothing had changed.
“It’s just like it was back then! Look, that’s where I slept, with Grandfather. And it’s still the same old stove! I remember it was stone cold in the morning, and we would all freeze.”
He revisited every square yard, every tree, every stone, every hill.… Slowly, his memories came back to him. He was deeply moved and I, I was stunned. I had never seen him like that. Even his voice was transformed: it was warmer, more solemn, and he was speaking so softly, almost in a whisper. Spurred on by our questions, he told story after story. When the time came to leave, he kept saying, “One moment more, just a moment more …” He could not tear himself away from the place.
It was getting later and later. Then he turned to me, pleadingly, and asked, “Eva, couldn’t we buy the house?”
“But dear, it’s more than six hundred miles from Stockholm, it’s too far away! We wouldn’t be able to come very often. And since we haven’t enough money or time to spend here, the place would just go to ruin.”
Then, with infinite sadness, he murmured, “But … it’s all I have.” He seemed overwhelmed by the fathomless sorrow of a child, as if, drawn more than thirty years back into the past, he were once more being torn away from his roots. We all stood there for a long time, silent, lost in our own thoughts. Then Stieg said, as if giving up, “It’s impossible.” And we left, with heavy hearts.
I’d taken lots of photos of that little house, which I later made into a collage that I framed and gave to Stieg. He was so pleased with it that he hung it on the wall over our bed.
WE OFTEN talked about that trip as if it had been a magical moment. In the summer of 2004, after he’d delivered the three Millennium volumes to the publisher, we made heaps of plans for the future. We used to imagine—among other things, and I’ll say more about this later—“our little writing cottage,” which we wanted to build on an island. Stieg and I would make drawings of it, each off on our own, and then compare our sketches, sitting side by side on our kökssoffa, which is a wooden settee with an upholstered seat. (Many Swedish kitchens have one for seating and as an extra bed, but our settee was in the living room, since the kitchen was too small.) I often studied Stieg’s snapshots of his grandparents’ wooden house, and I wanted to surprise him by using the same entryway and blue-and-white doors in our cottage.