One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (62 page)

The picture was taken from the water and illustrated just how steep it was. It was
a drop of about thirteen metres. ‘This is not a place where anyone would go down to the water as a matter of course,’ said Dyvesveen. ‘I would say it is so steep that you would not get back up again without assistance.’

A white circle on the picture showed a rock. The forensic technician explained that a boy was found lying there. The pathologist described the injuries. She always gave the victim’s
name and age first.

‘Simon was three days short of his nineteenth birthday,’ she said. She indicated on the dummy where the deadly bullet had hit him: entering his back and coming out through his chest. ‘Simon died of the bullet wounds to his chest, which rapidly led to unconsciousness and death.’

Heavy breathing could be heard. Tone and Gunnar were finding it all totally unreal. Simon definitely
wasn’t here, in this place.

Public advocate Nadia Hall read the short eulogy. ‘Social commitment and an interest in culture came early for Simon. He was the leader of his local youth council from the age of fifteen. He was the founder member of the AUF branch in Salangen and was due to go straight on from Utøya to a conference in Russia. He had been to Cambodia to make a film about water. His
brutal murder before he reached nineteen is felt as a huge tragedy. The loss of Simon will leave many people poorer in the years to come. He leaves behind him a mum, a dad and a younger brother.’

Breivik spent most of the time looking down at his papers during the autopsy reports. He did the same that day.

He said nothing. He had no comment.

*   *   *

Once the court was adjourned for the day,
Tone and Gunnar Sæbø went out with Anders Kristiansen’s parents. The two sets of parents had been together for the last couple of days; they had finished in Oslo now and were going home to Troms.

On leaving the courthouse the four of them walked up towards the park round the Royal Palace. At the National Gallery, a policeman was blocking off the street. The parents stopped.

Then they saw it.

A motorcycle came at full speed, then a white van and finally a police car.

‘Cobblestones! Are there any cobblestones here?’ cried Viggo Kristiansen.

But there were no loose cobblestones.

The van sped past. The dads were left standing there.

‘Oh, we would have thrown them hard!’ said Gunnar Sæbø.

The two fathers looked at each other. Staring into the other’s powerlessness.

‘Why did we just
sit there?’ Viggo demanded fiercely. ‘There in the courtroom. Why didn’t we do anything? Why didn’t we shout something? Why did we all behave so bloody nicely?’

They had even tried to stifle their sobs, there in the grey-painted room. They had not wanted to be noticed. Did not want to be any trouble.

Gunnar looked at Viggo.

‘We were paralysed,’ he answered. ‘We are paralysed.’

The Will to Live

After a week of autopsy reports and eulogies for those murdered on Utøya, the schedule said: the aggrieved.

After the four-day break for Norwegian National Day, the court participants’ faces looked tanned. The public in the courtroom dressed more lightly in the mid-May heat of Oslo. The bereaved families had gone home to their regions and were now following the trial from
district courts all around the country.

There were no more words of remembrance to be read. Time had come for the testimonies of the survivors.

I lost my best friend.

I heard a loud, deep scream.

I’m not sure if I heard shots first, then screams, or screams first and then shots.

He begged: Please, please don’t do it.

I thought it must be my turn next.

I had two rocks in my hands.

I put my tongue between my teeth to stop them making a noise.

The survivors were muted. They were grave. Many of them felt guilty. Survivor’s guilt.

I was swimming just ahead of him. He dropped behind. Then I turned round and he wasn’t there any more.

Or the girl who had removed a bullet from her thigh before she swam for it:
I was the delegation leader of my county, and I lost the three youngest.

All the survivors were asked how they were now. There was no room for big words.

It’s going fine. Kind of at half speed.

Or:
It’ll be all right.

Or:
It varies a lot, up and down, pretty hard going actually.

Some of the young people Breivik had tried to kill asked for him to leave the room while they gave their evidence. But most of them wanted him there. Often, they did not deign to look at
him. Whereas he was there in his seat, obliged to listen to them. No one cursed or spoke directly to him. The strongest expressions came from a girl who called him
blockhead
and
idiot
.

For many, it was a stage in working through their trauma to see him sitting there. The man who had opened fire on them would not be able to harm anyone again.

*   *   *

One boy had prepared himself for giving
evidence more thoroughly than he had ever prepared for anything.

He was summoned to appear as a witness on 22 May.

It was Viljar.

After he started singing on that sixth night, he fell asleep again. He drifted in and out of consciousness, a state that gradually became more of a morphine-induced haze than a coma. He woke and slept, woke and dozed off again. His parents and the doctors still knew
nothing about how his brain was faring, how badly damaged it had been by the shot through his eye that had smashed his skull. It was a good sign that he had remembered those lines of the song, said the doctors. But then he said no more after that, just went back to sleep again. The corners of his mouth would occasionally twitch when Martin said something funny, when his mother stroked his cheek
and his father gave him a hug, or when Torje told him about the Norway Cup match he had played in. Only Viljar knew what was going on inside his head, and he lacked the strength to tell anyone.

The day he woke up and summoned enough energy to say something, he called out to his mother: ‘Mum, I can’t see at all well. Can you get my glasses for me?’

‘Viljar, you’ve … lost an eye, you were shot
in the eye, but the other eye—’

‘It’ll still be better with the glasses,’ he insisted. These were his longest sentences since he was brought from Utøya.

‘They’re on the top shelf on the left just inside the living room in Roger’s flat,’ said Viljar.

And so they were. ‘A really, really good sign,’ the doctors said in relief.

Viljar was able to retell the tall stories Martin had recounted on
that sixth night, the night the doctors said he came closest to death, when he grew colder and colder. Every heartbeat had been an exertion. His continuing pulse a succession of gifts. Viljar had been somewhere in among it all, the whole time; he remembered the cold and how much he had shivered. He recalled the hugs and the tears, and that he had wanted to respond, wanted to smile, wanted to open
his eyes and laugh, but his body would not obey. It was too exhausted. And he had been so cold.

And then, when he woke up properly, he realised before they said it. So he said it himself.

‘I know Anders would have been here now, and Simon, if…’

Viljar looked at Martin.

‘They would at least have sent some kind of message, if they…’

Martin nodded. The tears flowed.

‘… had been … They’re dead,
aren’t they?’

Viljar had missed Anders’s and Simon’s funerals. They were held the week Viljar turned eighteen. Jens Stoltenberg attended Simon’s funeral. At Anders’s funeral, Lars Bremnes performed his song ‘If I Could Write in the Heavens’.

Viljar stayed down in Oslo for a series of operations. It was only in October, three months after he had been shot, that they let him travel back to Svalbard.

He slept a lot. It was a real effort to regain his strength. He was a skinny teenager to start with, and had now lost twenty kilos. A red scar ran from the top of his head and down one side. His eye socket had been rebuilt. He had been fitted with a glass eye and a prosthetic hand.

Life was anguish and loss. Fear of death could paralyse him without warning. Often he felt like half a person. Not
because of what had happened to him, but because he had lost his best friends. So many unlived dreams!

Over the winter he got the letter summoning him to give evidence at the trial.

He lay awake at night thinking about what he ought to say to make it right. He tested out phrases on his classmates the next day.

‘You can shoot me as many times as you like! But you didn’t get anywhere!’ he tried.
‘I’m damn well going to show this ABB that I can pull through all right!’

One evening Johannes Buø’s family came round to see the Hanssens. Johannes, the fourteen-year-old judo enthusiast and Metallica fan, Torje’s best friend, was killed in the woods by the schoolhouse. Johannes had lived on the island for the past few years with his parents and brother Elias, three years his junior. His father
was the director of arts and culture on Svalbard.When Johannes’s autopsy report was presented to the court at the beginning of May, the family went to Oslo to be there. Their places were behind the glass partition, so they found themselves staring at the back of the perpetrator’s head. Elias suddenly moved from his seat to sit on his own at the far end of the front row. When the court rose for
a break the freckled little boy with corkscrew curls got to his feet and went right up to the glass wall in the corner. There he stood waiting. He had noticed that when Breivik left his place among the defence lawyers and made his way out, he had to look in that direction. He would have to walk straight towards Elias. They would be separated only by the glass. Then, as Breivik approached, the little
brother was going to fix him with the foulest look he could muster. And so he did.

In the Hanssens’ living room, the Buø family did a sketch map of the courtroom for Viljar. ‘He’ll be sitting there,’ they indicated. ‘With his defence team. And you’ll sit here.’

They drew a square in the middle of the room. The witness box. They put in the judges, the prosecution and the public.

‘He’ll be sitting
two metres away from you, can you handle that?’

‘The closer the better,’ said Viljar.

He would have to rehearse what he was going to say if he wanted to get through this. He had to leave his feelings out of it or he would not be able to pull it off. That was why he was practising, so he did not find himself faced with anything that would throw him, anything he could not to tackle, anything that
might make him break down. He would not afford ABB that satisfaction.

He was trembling as the plane landed in Oslo. But he was ready now. He must not let them down – this was for Anders, this was for Simon, it was for what they had believed in. As so often before, he wondered what they would have said now. What advice they would have given him. Anders on the content, Simon on the style. Once
when he had got stuck, he started dialling Anders’s number when he— Fuck! Anders is dead!

He had to do this alone. And he had to pull it off.

*   *   *

On 22 May, Viljar dressed in a black shirt and black trousers as befitted the gravity of the occasion. Over the shirt he wore a jacket in a dark blue. Around his right wrist he had a thin leather strap. He had stylish glasses with black frames.
Nothing was left to chance when Viljar Robert Hanssen went to Oslo to give evidence.

He walked down the central aisle to the witness box with light steps. Breivik looked at him, as he always did when someone came in. Viljar caught his eye with a searing look, held it, focused, still held it.

‘Hah,’ thought Viljar. ‘Empty. Just like Johannes’s little brother said: “You won’t find anything in
his eyes.”’

A gentle voice addressed him from the left. It was Inga Bejer Engh.

‘Can you start by telling us what happened to you on Utøya?’

Yes, he could.

‘I was at the campsite. My little brother was asleep in the tent. I went to the meeting in the main building to find out what had happened in Oslo. I remember talking to Simon Sæbø. I remember he said if this is something political, we
aren’t safe here either.’

He said they had gathered up everyone from Troms. Then they heard bangs. So they started running.

‘We ran across Lovers’ Path. My little brother and I made our way down a sort of slope, cliff-edge thing. The bangs were getting nearer, and in the end they were really, really close.’

The prosecution asked to see a map of the steep slope. Viljar did his best to point.
‘Whether I was hit when I was jumping – here – or when I landed, I don’t know, but I ended up down there and my brother was close by.’

At times while Viljar was giving evidence Breivik whispered little comments to one of the trainee lawyers in his defence team.

‘Then I heard this crazy whistling sound in my right ear and I found myself by the edge of the water. I tried to get up several times,
I was a bit sort of Bambi on the ice, you know, and I called out to my brother. But then I decided the best thing was just to lie down in the foetal position somewhere. I curled myself round a rock on the shoreline and stayed there. I was conscious the whole time. It was very strange being shot, it didn’t hurt – it was just unpleasant. A new kind of pain. I lay there and started trying to get my
bearings. I looked at my fingers and saw they were only hanging on by scraps of skin. I realised I couldn’t see out of one eye and that something must be wrong there. I started running my hand over my head and eventually I came across something soft and then I touched my brain; I was feeling my own brain. It was a weird so I took my hand away pretty quick. I remember Simon Sæbø was lying there,
but I didn’t know then that he was dead. I remember I talked to him, said it would be all right and we’d get through it together.’