IN THE autumn of 1972, my sister Britt and I attended a meeting in support of the Front National de Libération in Vietnam (the FNL) at the Mimer School in Umeå. It was the first time I’d ever gone to anything like that. My father used to vote for the Liberal People’s Party, but that was the extent of his involvement, while I considered myself to be a reasonably politically aware person, and that was enough for me. The Vietnam War had upset and sickened me ever since I was fourteen, however, and now that I’d finished high school, I felt it was time for me to take a serious interest in something other than studies and diplomas.
A tall, thin guy with dark brown hair, warm eyes, and a broad, cheerful smile was greeting everyone arriving for the meeting with an energetic “Welcome!” It was Stieg. He was barely eighteen, while I was almost nineteen. He asked Britt and me lots of questions, and when he learned that we lived in Haga, a neighborhood in Umeå, he immediately recruited us for the team he himself would be leading. Later he told me that he’d seen his chance and pounced on it!
And that’s how I became a political activist with him. We put up posters, sold newsletters, and raised funds door-to-door. We debated things, argued a lot: I mean, how could an imperialist war like that have happened? That was Stieg, a talker, curious about everything, generous, a very moral person. A bit casual for an intellectual, but absolutely irresistible. He fascinated me. There was nothing theoretical about the way he spoke from the heart, from his gut, and yet he was entertaining, too. Politics with him was not a chore or a duty, the way I’d thought it would be, but a real pleasure—which was something of a rare experience in our austere milieu. Stieg and I often thought along the same lines, while most other FNL supporters were Maoists spouting rather unrealistic, authoritarian dogma. Not us.
I found Stieg’s ideas so interesting that I began encouraging him to write about them. In Sweden, even small newspapers have a spot in their Arts & Leisure pages for opinion pieces. My father was a journalist and could have helped him, but Stieg, unsure of himself, wouldn’t hear of it. I kept pushing him, though, so he finally took the plunge, and when he saw his first published article, he was so thrilled that I think he decided to become a journalist on the spot. He took the entrance exam for a journalism school, failed it (which wasn’t surprising, given how young he was), and like most of the other students, could have taken it again, but he refused. His self-confidence was at a low ebb again.
As for me, intrigued at first by the Maoist doctrine, I was going to meetings and even to introductory courses on the subject, which at the time was quite the thing to do. A rational person, I was looking for answers to my questions—but in the wrong places, as it turned out: the Maoist arguments were a bit fuzzy, lightweight, even childish, as if we were going to solve economic problems by simply walking on water! When the Trotskyites showed up and joined forces for a while with the Maoists, they shared the same bank account to raise funds for Vietnam, which I thought was a great idea: at last we were struggling together toward the same goal. Unfortunately, since all revolutionaries want to make their own revolutions, internal power struggles soon broke out. One day we were asked to drum up some money for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and since we had to support their politics, I wanted to know what they were. The answer arrived from on high: “Don’t ask questions, do as you’re told!” Well, Stieg and I abandoned that fund-raising effort and left the Vietnamese solidarity movement.
I then gravitated toward “the traitors”: that’s what the Maoists called the Trotskyites, whose system authorized multi-partyism (which I found more democratic), whereas the Maoists were a dictatorship. Stieg decided to stick with the latter, and throughout the year that followed, before we’d moved in together, we fought violently over the best way to bring happiness to the world proletariat. It was awful. And often ended in tears. I thought Stieg was a stupid dreamer with his head in the clouds. At the time, I was living in a student room; I’d been accepted at the Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg but decided to register instead at the department of mathematics and economic history at Umeå University, because that way I could stay with Stieg, who had a small studio apartment in Umeå. When we first met, Stieg had been finishing up a two-year program that would allow him to enter the working world but not to attend college. Perhaps he was influenced by my example, who knows, but he then returned to high school for another two years to obtain his baccalaureate degree—and being as stubborn as he was, he got it, which didn’t surprise me at all.
He earned his living with odd jobs: delivering papers, working as a locksmith’s apprentice, a forester, a dishwasher in a restaurant, and so on. Although we disagreed about how the world works, we knew how to keep our love life separate from our political commitments, and eventually we moved into a large communal apartment with my sister and some friends.
Later on, Stieg in turn joined the Trotskyites. More senior in the movement than he was, I was in charge at the time of a youth group in the high school where he was working toward his diploma. Our roles had been reversed: I was now the teacher, and he the student.
Then the Trotskyist movement asked the students to “proletarianize” themselves by adopting a life of wage labor, and a cell soon sprang up in the local Volvo factory. My working pals were categorical on this point, however: “We had no choice, no chance to study. But you do! Continue, absolutely!” And I agreed with them. Ours was the first generation to benefit from government loans for higher education, so why throw it all away? Besides, my background wasn’t middle class, my family had been farmers, so I knew perfectly well what the proletariat was—and saw no benefit to society in seeking to rejoin it! City kids kept showing up in bead necklaces and clothes they’d sewn themselves, eager to live communally and go back to the land. We, who actually came from there—we figured they must be off their rockers!
When teaching my classes, I’d use aspects of these young people’s lives to get them thinking about things. This was in 1976. My superiors would have liked me just to drill them in theory. I was dismissed from my position, replaced by someone more “red,” and I left the Trotskyites. Not Stieg. He stayed in that organization until late in the 1980s, but more for the theory than the practice, as a way to continue the political and intellectual exchanges that so impassioned him. For a long time he also contributed unpaid articles under his own name to The International, the official journal of the movement.
In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth Salander is suspected of murdering the journalist Dag Svensson (whose investigative report on the sex trafficking of Eastern European women was published in the magazine Millennium) and his companion Mia Bergman, a criminologist specializing in sexual slavery. Lisbeth discovers she’s being sought by the police when she happens to watch part of a television program in which Peter Teleborian, the assistant head physician at St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, outside Uppsala, is pontificating about her case. Lisbeth had been a virtual prisoner in this clinic for more than two years, and she realizes that no newspaper has questioned the fact that doctors are allowed to restrain unruly and difficult patients in a room “free of stimuli” for unconscionable periods of time—a practice she compares to the treatment of political prisoners during the Moscow show trials in the 1930s. Lisbeth knows that “according to the Geneva Conventions, subjecting prisoners to sensory deprivation was classified as inhumane.” And this is a topic Stieg and I knew well, because for many years we read everything we could find on it. Stalin treated political opponents as if they were traitors, making them physically disappear—even from photographs, books, and all documentary references—in order to completely rewrite history. The expression “Moscow trial” became part of our private vocabulary.
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.”