AT UMEÅ University, the various courses I was taking were culturally enriching, but not enough to make me want to take exams and pursue a degree in those fields. So it was time for me to choose a profession. I picked architecture, a discipline that brought together everything I loved in the way of technical skills and creative energy. In 1977 I enrolled in the department of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Stieg arrived a few months later. Housing was already in short supply in the capital, so we stayed in a student room loaned to me by Svante Branden, a psychiatrist friend of Stieg’s who was also his neighbor in Umeå.
Svante turns up in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third volume of the trilogy, when he helps out Lisbeth Salander by denouncing the fraudulent analysis of Dr. Peter Teleborian and the arbitrary internment to which he had subjected her. That would have been just like Svante, because along with all our other friends, he was against every form of violation of human rights and freedom. When Stieg made him one of the heroes of The Millennium Trilogy, it was a way of paying homage to him.
Living at Svante’s place all the time was complicated because it was illegal for more than one person to stay there. In those days, young people were allowed to move into buildings slated for demolition and pay a reduced rent for places without any heat or hot water, but such lodgings were really too uncomfortable, so we didn’t take much advantage of them. Stieg then managed to find something in a southern suburb of Stockholm. It wasn’t until 1979 that I snagged one of the tiny two-room apartments in the Rinkeby district, which are reserved for university students. We lived in that apartment for six years, and we loved the neighborhood so much that when we moved, we found another place there. In the end, we stayed in Rinkeby for twelve years, at a time when few Swedish people lived in an area full of immigrants. Today the population includes more than seventy nationalities, but Rinkeby was already a wonderful melting pot of exotic cultures, which is reflected in the various foreign family names in The Millennium Trilogy. I earned my degree in architecture through a project related to the rehabilitation of the district, where most businesses were housed in basements; my proposal envisioned the transformation of the downtown area by creating specific commercial spaces that would favor a more vibrant urban neighborhood atmosphere.
It was hard to find our own apartment in Stockholm, of course, but well worth the trouble, because we adored living there. Our favorite café was run by Greeks, the neighbors on our floor were Finns, those in the apartment below us were Roma, “gypsies,” and the tenants on the ground floor were Turks. The husband in the Roma apartment was often in jail, and when he was home, he beat his wife. I remember one time when she managed to escape and come ring our doorbell. Stieg offered her coffee, wiped the blood off her face, and called the police. Calm was restored. Then the Finnish woman next door got up a petition to have her thrown out of the building, so I contacted Social Services (which had a special program for the Roma) to explain that the poor woman was now trapped between the beatings and the threat of eviction. Things settled down again. One evening, when Stieg and I walked into the building, we noticed a strong smell of perfume wafting down the stairs. When we reached our apartment, we saw that the Finnish woman’s door was open—and there she was with the Roma, both ladies all dolled up for a night on the town! That was Rinkeby for you.
I can honestly say that I was never afraid to come home in the evening, even after Stieg began to focus on right-wing extremists and we started receiving threats. We had the whole world at our doorstep, we didn’t need to travel abroad. In fact, when we moved into Stockholm proper in 1991, it was a real culture shock to find ourselves in a city that was so ethnically homogeneous.
IN ADDITION to politics, Stieg and I had long shared a common passion for science fiction. Our favorite authors were Robert Heinlein and Samuel R. Delany, and I had translated into Swedish Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which describes what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. As soon as we’d moved to Stockholm, we’d joined the largest Swedish science fiction fan club, the SFSF (Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction), a friendly and varied collection of likeable weirdos, all of them crazy about SF. We fit right in. For two years, we were the editors in chief of Fanac, the SFSF newsletter, and from time to time we managed the association’s science fiction bookstore on Kungsholmen, a large island to the northwest of Södermalm in Lake Mälaren and part of the city of Stockholm. As business ventures go, the bookstore and newsletter were duds, but that wasn’t important, because fandom is a way of life. We were dreamers, fascinated by the alternative universes we found in that literature. Especially when they became real on the Internet. Published in 1992, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a good example of the cyberpunk milieu reflected in the cybernetic world of the hacker republic in which Lisbeth Salander is a model citizen.
In science fiction, cyborgs—half human, half machine—can plug directly into computers to join up with the cyberworld. Lisbeth Salander plugs herself into the Internet, and her extraordinary skills are quite close to those of a cyborg. The Millennium Trilogycould have made a good SF saga, too.
At that time Stieg had a job in the postal service, and I had my state scholarship. Our two incomes allowed us to live, but nothing more, especially since Stieg, unlike me, was a spendthrift. For example, even when we were practically broke, he always had breakfast at the café although it was rather expensive. I could point this out to him as often as I liked, but that’s how it was, he didn’t want to change. I was from a family of country people who had some land and a farm, true, but no money to spare. Stieg’s parents owned nothing and rented their apartment, but their furniture was actually more expensive than my family’s. Since they worked in a clothing store, they had lots of clothes at home and Vivianne, Stieg’s mother, would often give me some.
A FEW months after we moved to Stockholm, my father died. He was barely forty-six, an alcoholic, and he had started taking medications even though he was drinking, which is dangerous.
Two years earlier, he’d fallen so deeply into debt that almost everything except the family farm had been sold at auction. We’d also managed to save that little cabin and its forest in Önnesmark, sixty miles from Umeå, which Stieg and I used to go take care of with my brother and sister every so often. When he’d drawn up the inventory, the bailiff had shown an interest in the property, but my father—or perhaps Vivianne, Stieg’s mother—had come up with a way to save it. Stieg and I were clearly a couple, and our families knew each other, so they worked together on this. My father signed a lifetime lease on the property for Stieg’s parents, which meant the cabin and forest could no longer be sold. Erland and Vivianne were very happy to spend all their summers there, and planted potatoes and strawberries on the property.
After the auction, my father’s debts were discharged and there was even a little money left over. After his death, however, we discovered that he had spent everything and gone into debt again, so we had to sell the farmhouse and its contents. At that time, my brother and sister and I were still students and had left all our belongings in the house. Everything vanished: our books, schoolwork, photos—everything. Two hundred years of family memories. My grandmother was grief-stricken at losing her only son. As for everything else … she behaved once again with great dignity. Accepting her fate, she moved into the village retirement home where she lived for another fifteen years without complaint.
Stieg was deeply distressed by what had happened. My father had been very fond of him, and was the only person with whom Stieg could talk about journalism. As for me, I was in a state of collapse. Stieg wrapped a protective cocoon around me. He supported me so much that I can truly say he carried me through that awful period of my life.