IN FEBRUARY 1977, when he was twenty-two, one of Stieg’s dreams came true: he went to Africa.
To finance his trip, he worked hard for six months at the nearby sawmill in Hörnefors. Why did he go to Africa? He never fully explained that to me, and rightly so: all I knew was that he was leaving on a mission for the Fourth International, the communist organization founded in 1938 in France by Trotsky and his supporters, whom Stalin had driven out of the Soviet Union for their opposition to the Third International. Stieg’s assignment was to contact certain groups involved in the civil war then raging in Ethiopia, probably in order to deliver some money and/or documents to them. A risky business. Stieg later told me that just by chance he wound up teaching a female militia unit how to fire mortars—which he’d learned to do during his military service—with weapons smuggled into the hills of Eritrea by the USSR.
Africa fascinated Stieg, and his ambition was to write articles about this continent where so much was happening so quickly. Between his departure in February and his return in July, however, not a single newspaper showed interest in any topic he suggested. Stieg probably seemed too young and inexperienced for the job, but no other journalists, Swedish or otherwise, were on the ground during the Eritrean–Ethiopian War. It was too dangerous.
When he left Umeå, Stieg passed through Stockholm to get his visas, and when I joined him there to say goodbye, he met me at the station, wild with joy.
In the months that followed, his letters arrived at irregular intervals from very different places. He wrote quite guardedly both to me and in the journal he kept on his trip, in which nothing of what he later told me was recorded. Fearing he might be arrested at any moment, he was afraid any important information would fall into the wrong hands, causing serious consequences for him and the people he was meeting.
Stieg caught malaria in Africa and became deathly ill. One day he suddenly went blind: lost in a white fog, he barely managed to return through the streets to his hotel by feeling his way along the sides of buildings. When he reached his room, he passed out, but after someone found him he was rushed to a hospital. Sometime later, he wrote me about his ordeal in a letter that arrived one summer day and scared the wits out of me. It was horrible to read that his kidneys had shut down and that he’d awakened in the hospital to find dried blood from the previous patient on his pillow—only to lose consciousness again.
All in the same letter, I learned that he had almost died, that he realized how important I was to him and how much he loved me, and that he wanted to live with me from now on, as soon as he got home. I’d known that our relationship was deep and strong, but never before had he told me so with such heartfelt sincerity. I cried all through his letter, from fear, relief, and happiness.
He had survived, and we were going to build our life together.