There Are Things I Want You to Know: About Stieg Larsson and Me by Eva Gabrielsson

Author:Eva Gabrielsson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: memoirs
ISBN: 1609803639
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Sailing

IN THE Millennium Trilogy, it’s no accident that for Mikael Blomkvist, everything begins on a boat. Water and the sea are inescapable when you live in a country with almost 13,000 miles of coastline and thousands of small islands.

The Stockholm archipelago is the largest one we have in Sweden, and every year Stieg and I would set off to explore one of its 24,000 islands. In the North, where we were born, we rowed our boats, since sailing was considered a sport for snobs. So before tackling a trip during which we might sink, drown, or be knocked cold by a swinging boom, I’d managed to get Stieg to join me in a crash course in sailing. He adored studying charts, having learned map reading during his military service. Me, I preferred to be at the helm. We’d take turns there, but if the weather worsened, I’d take over the wheel. We started out by buying Josephine, and we kept that name because a change would have brought bad luck. She was a secondhand motorboat, mahogany, twenty-eight feet, built in 1954, the year Stieg was born. When we began sailing, however, we always rented our boats. As a pair we functioned perfectly well, almost via osmosis. Once, whipped by a ferocious wind, the boom broke loose, and as our friend Eleanor watched in amazement, Stieg and I immediately cobbled together an emergency tie-up with some military webbing belts—without needing to exchange a single word.

Josephine’s home port was Årsta, where Mikael goes to exchange Christmas presents with his ex-wife and daughter Pernilla in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Thanks to all our trips back and forth, Stieg and I knew the area well.

When Lisbeth decides to strong-arm her way into the apartment of Per-Åke Sandström, the pimp “journalist” who is Dag Svensson’s informant, she equips herself at Watski, a hardware store on Erstagatan in Stockholm. That was where Stieg and I bought everything we needed for boating. I particularly remember an anchor and chain that must have weighed more than sixty-five pounds, and which I lugged through the Årsta forest all the way to Josephine.

To tie up Sandström, Lisbeth uses a clove hitch, a knot Stieg and I tied and retied for whole evenings to get right. As for her little Minolta 8x binoculars, they’re the ones we always had in our pockets when we were sailing, to help us spot seamarks and stay on course.

We knocked around quite a lot at the top of the archipelago, too, up by Arholma, the most northerly island, where Blomkvist meets the old school chum who gives him the idea to write about Wennerström. The guest marina there is as busy as Stieg says, and boats really have to crowd together to leave a few spaces for latecomers. I’ve never understood the strange popularity of the place, because it’s the favorite summer resort of enormous mosquitoes, twice as big as normal, which feast on visitors all night long.

After Holger Palmgren retired, the lawyer

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