One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (52 page)

They were calls that would never be answered.

Only the police officers set to
watch over the dead could hear the tunes or see the displays, lighting up over and over again.

Mum

Mum

Mum

Mum

Until the batteries gave up, one after another.

*   *   *

On Facebook, people were sharing their hopes and fears. Håvard followed the messages flooding onto Simon’s page.

COME ON Simon Sæbø!

Fighter!

Get in touch!

Come back hoooooome!!!!

I have hope.

Simon was not lying out
in the rain any longer. As the result of a misunderstanding, the rescue team had started to take some of the dead off the island, transporting them over to the mainland, where the civil defence force had put up a tent.

The young police officer from Nordre Buskerud who had stayed over at the
Thorbjørn
’s jetty throughout the massacre, counting the shots but never trying to interfere, was now taking
part in the rescue operation. He had been part of the team that patched up Viljar’s head and helped carry him off the island and into a boat.

Once all the living had been taken to the mainland, he turned to the dead.

He went over to the tall, thin boy dangling over a rock. The boy’s face was totally white and his muscles had begun to stiffen. His left hand was clutching a
snus
tin.

The policeman
took hold of him. He gripped his shoulders. As he lifted the boy from the rock it came.

The blood.

It came gushing out.

All the blood that had been pooling in Simon’s chest cavity came flooding over the policeman. Blood that had been kept in by the pressure of the rock sprayed his face and drenched his hair; it ran down his uniform and onto his boots, and stained his hands red.

It was precisely
as much blood as could fit in a strong young chest.

Does Your Child Have Any Distinguishing Features?

On Saturday morning, Jens Stoltenberg took the shortest possible route to Sundvolden. He climbed into a helicopter at Akershus Fortress and fastened his seatbelt. The machine rose into the air.

All through the evening and night he had been in emergency meetings: the police had briefed him; PST had briefed him. Norway had been exposed to a
terrorist attack from the inside. One by one his secretaries of state had come to see him at his residence, to which his staff had moved after his office in the Tower Block was reduced to rubble. Bedrooms were turned into offices, armchairs served as beds. The long wooden dining table accommodated a growing number of computers, mobile phones and notebooks. Most of his ministers were on holiday when
the bomb exploded; a lot of them at summer homes the length and breadth of Norway, in the mountains, in the woods, by the sea, and they assembled gradually, depending on how far they had to come.

Stoltenberg initially did not want to believe it.

He clung to the hope that it was a gas leak. He was exasperated at being confined to the secure room. But it was the police, not the leader of the country,
who decided such matters. He wanted to get out and set to work. In there, news from the outside world came via a couple of mobile phones. At times he was left sitting in the room on his own.

The first intimation that something dreadful was happening at the AUF summer camp had come in a text message at a quarter to six from the Minister of Culture Anniken Huitfeldt, herself a former AUF leader.
‘Shooting incident on Utøya. Some dead, I hear.’

The Prime Minister was kept constantly updated on the worsening situation. He received the disquieting reports of the increasing number of deaths before they reached the news media. By about ten o’clock on Friday evening, still only seven deaths had been reported. Around midnight, a figure of ten was issued.

Then came the shock announcement at
between three and four the next morning: more than eighty killed.

Towards morning Norway’s chief of police Øystein Mæland, who had also been best man at Stoltenberg’s wedding, confirmed a total of eighty-four.

*   *   *

As the helicopter came in over the Tyrifjord, the Prime Minister asked the pilot to take a sweep over Utøya. He knew every point and bay of the island, he knew which flowers
would be spreading their fragrance in late July, where there was sun and where there was shade, where Lover’s Path was at its most romantic. The year before, he and his father Thorvald had had one of the points named in their honour as a thank-you for donating to Utøya the royalties from the book they wrote together. The point was called Stoltenberget. The previous day, three young people had been
killed there.

Jens Stoltenberg was fifteen the first time he came to Utøya. That was in 1974. The AUF was in the doldrums after a divisive split in the Labour movement over EEC membership two years earlier, with the mother party campaigning wholeheartedly for YES, while the youth wing clearly came out in favour of ‘Vote NO’. The EEC was ruled by capital, the AUF argued. The Labour Party lost
a lot of its votes to the more left-wing Socialist Electoral Alliance in the election the year after the referendum and had to try to pick up the pieces. The entire AUF was quite unpopular with the Labour Party leadership, particularly for its standpoint on foreign policy: the young radicals’ stance on issues like the Vietnam War, support of the PLO in Palestine, criticism of apartheid in South Africa
and opposition to NATO.

Utøya was also at a low point. The island was a heavy burden on the AUF budget and the secretary of the organisation declared that he wished the whole island would sink into the fjord so they would be rid of it. It was overrun by water voles, the buildings were rotting and there was no proper maintenance. In 1973, a German businessman had put 1.5 million kroner on the
table to buy the whole island, which had been a gift to the AUF from the trade unions in 1950.

But then the AUF took the decision to really make something of the heart-shaped island. To tempt people to the summer camp in 1974, the members’ newspaper wrote of a state it called ‘Devoted to Utøya’ and held out the prospect of community singing, political workshops, sun, summer and new issues to
campaign on.

The teenage Jens Stoltenberg was one of those who rapidly became devoted to Utøya, and since his first trip in 1974 there had only been two years when he had missed a visit. This year would have been his thirty-fifth summer.

As the pilot swung across the island the Prime Minister stared down. He saw numerous white spots on the ground. In some places they lay like strings of pearls
along the shoreline. Every pearl was a blanket. Every blanket was a human life.

It was impossible to take in.

He had been told what had happened, he had seen the number, but it was a number the economist simply could not grasp. He had dealt with numbers and statistics all his working life but he was not accustomed to counting life, to counting death.

They sat in silence. The only sound as the
helicopter landed was the whirring of the rotor blades.

The Prime Minister, dressed in a black suit and tie, entered the hotel lobby. He was taken through reception to the bar area, a place that made him think of drinks in tall glasses. Nobody was there now. They were all in the banqueting hall, up a few steps from the bar. The chief of the Hønefoss police station and a man from the Criminal
Investigation Service’s ID group were up on the stage. They were giving information about the last group of young people to be identified as alive.

Sitting in the hall were the Sæbø family from Salangen, the Kristiansen family from Bardu, the Rashid family from Nesodden and some hundred other families, next of kin of the missing.

The police officers on the stage had a list of thirteen names.
These were young people who had been missing but had now been identified, alive but injured, at hospitals all over southern Norway.

Their names were read out one by one.

Every name was greeted with joy by one family, and growing anxiety by the rest.

Stoltenberg and those with him stood at the back of the hall. The Prime Minister surveyed the napes of necks. The shoulders. The backs. The sheer
number of them. The number of parents. Younger siblings sitting next to a mother or father, leaning close. He could see those trembling, or shaking, and those sitting utterly, utterly still.

There are too few names and too many parents, Stoltenberg thought.

He knew many of those sitting in the hall; he knew their children. He had followed some of them from birth, others from the time they first
spoke at the Labour Party congress. He had argued vehemently against some of them in the question of EU membership, he now being an adult in the YES camp, while they were the young radicals. Monica Bøsei – Mother Utøya – who was confirmed dead, had been a close friend.

With every name that was read out, the chances were reduced for the parents still sitting there. Those who hoped to hear that
their offspring were among the critically injured. Because that would mean they were alive.

The last name was read out. Eighty-four was no longer a number, it was a catastrophe. There was no more hope; there were no more injured survivors.

Stoltenberg had to struggle to keep upright. Soon they would all be coming past him on their way out of the hall.

Then a police officer came in with a note,
which he handed to one of the men on the stage. They had been notified of one final survivor at a small hospital in Ringerike. The patient had now been sent to the larger Ullevål University hospital in Oslo.

Stoltenberg held his breath.

There was one last chance.

‘It is a girl,’ read the man on the stage.

The parents of boys are out of hope now, thought Stoltenberg.

It was unbearable. He
himself had two children the same age as those on Utøya, a boy and a girl.

The parents of girls glimpsed a ray of hope.

‘… between fourteen and twenty, about 1.62 metres tall…’

‘Oh God, it’s Bano!’ exulted Bayan under her breath.

‘… with dark hair…’

‘It’s Bano!’

It all tallied: the height, the age, the hair colour!

‘… and blue eyes.’

Lara looked at her mother. Her heart sank.

‘Contact
lenses,’ whispered Bayan. ‘She must have been wearing blue contact lenses!’

‘She has a distinctive scar on her neck.’

‘It’s her,’ whispered another mother. ‘It’s Ylva.’ She was crying. ‘It has to be Ylva!’

Ylva – Viljar and Torje’s childhood friend – had been lifted by Simon over the log and then shot four times just seconds after Simon. She had still not been able to say her name.

Ylva’s
mother turned and looked at Stoltenberg, whom she had known for some years. She came towards him. Behind her, the meeting was breaking up.

Stoltenberg was overwhelmed. He embraced her and was about to say, ‘That’s wonderful!’

But just as he found his voice, his eyes met those of another mother. Her last hope was gone. Her gaze burned into him.

‘Those eyes. Those eyes,’ he said later. ‘It was
like the entrance to hell.’

He held his tongue and gave Ylva’s mother a pat on the back instead.

Jens Stoltenberg is a man who only believes in matters that can be proved. This atheist rarely throws big words around. He seldom talks in images and allegories, and all his life he has been direct, concrete, a little hard-edged and abrupt. But in his encounter with all those lives cut short, through
those who loved them more than anything, vocabulary had to expand and broaden; the word hell acquired a concrete meaning.

He went out to the bar. There was bright daylight outside. In here the desperate stood among disco balls and mirrored walls. It was hot and sticky, and a pungent smell spread through the room.

Stoltenberg went over to the nearest group of seats. There a daughter was missing.
In the next one it was a son. In the third they told him their son had kept on calling, and then suddenly there were no more calls. A father had heard screams down the phone, then silence. One youngster had swum with a wounded friend on his back. A girl who had not really meant to take part this year had gone to Utøya anyway; now she was missing.

Missing gradually came to mean deceased.

Stoltenberg
knelt down beside people who were not capable of getting up from their seats. He hugged, he cried. He folded people in his arms, he patted and comforted them. It was an intense sensation: all those people, all those bodies, faces in shock, young folk telling him they had cried ‘Kill me, kill me, I can’t bear this any longer,’ when the response unit arrived.

There was scarcely a hand’s breadth
between the groups of seats. I can’t get through this, thought Stoltenberg. There are too many of them. The number that was no longer a number overpowered him.

On the way out, numerous microphones were thrust into his face. He pulled himself together and talked, in Norwegian and English, about consideration, fellowship and warmth. While the local reporters were most preoccupied with Stoltenberg’s
feelings and the fact that the royal family had arrived, the foreign journalists asked searching questions about the country’s state of preparedness for terrorist attacks.

‘Do you have confidence in the police and the security apparatus, Mr Stoltenberg?’ asked an American reporter.

‘Yes, I do,’ said the Prime Minister.

But today, feelings were his strongest point. ‘Utøya is the paradise of
my youth and yesterday it was turned into a hell.’

That was how it was.

*   *   *

After the meeting in the banqueting hall, Gunnar had to find Geir Kåre.

The Sæbø family had got seats on a flight from Bardufoss early that morning. Viggo and Gerd Kristiansen were on the same plane. They knew nothing, nothing at all, about their son. Nobody had seen Anders after he ran from the campsite. Roald
and Inger Linaker had also flown with them. They had found out that their son was in hospital, badly hurt. They had no idea how badly.