One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (63 page)

‘Did you know him well?’

‘Very well.’

‘And you only found out later that he was dead?’

‘Yes. I think I just didn’t want to take it in … at the time. I remember it vividly, lying there, that … well, I’ve seen lots of bad American films about how important it is
to keep breathing and stay awake. So I tried to go on talking, came out with lots of strange stuff. In the end I think I was burbling on about pirates or something.’

‘Did anyone talk to you?’

‘They shushed me. He must have come back again, I think, without me realising. So then they shushed me, like, “Please shut up!”’

‘Your brother, what happened to him?’

‘I lost track of him. The last thing
I saw was him moving away from me. Like I was trying to get him to. I didn’t see him again after that, and that was the worst bit for me. I tried to distract myself by thinking about things I enjoyed in everyday life. I thought about going back home to Svalbard, and driving the snowmobile and girls and other things that are really great. I thought about all sorts of things except where my little
brother was. For me, dying wasn’t an option and that was smart. Well, in a way I didn’t realise how badly injured I was. I remember I started to feel freezing and get spasms. I was shaking like mad. I remember, though I don’t know how long it lasted, that I passed out. I don’t know when that happened but I think it must have been a little while before they came for us.’

From that point, Viljar
could not remember anything until he was taken aboard a boat. ‘The waves were knocking my back quite hard. There was a man beside me, asking, “What’s your name? Where do you live?” to keep me awake. I remember asking if they’d seen a small, red-haired boy. And he said no.’

‘Where did the bullets hit you?’

‘I was hit in the thigh, just a slight graze. And then there’s my fingers here, you can’t
miss that, I was shot in the hand, and then it was my shoulder, all this up here was pulverised. Then I was shot in the forearm, this little scar, and then I was shot in the head. If that makes five, then that’s it.’

‘And the shot in the head, how has it affected you since?’

‘I lost this eye, but that’s useful: it means I don’t have to look over there.’

Viljar nodded towards the defendant,
who was sitting to his right. It took a second or two, as if Breivik needed a little time to appreciate what the boy in the witness box had said before starting to smile. The whole room smiled.

‘But as for my brain and that…’ Viljar went on, ‘I’ve still got my wits about me.’

There were chuckles in the courtroom. A few people laughed out loud. A sense of release. Breivik was still smiling.

‘So we hear,’ said Beijer Engh. ‘And are things going to continue that way?’

Viljar had decided in advance what he was willing to share and what he was not. ‘Reasonably terribly, decently badly,’ he replied when asked how he was getting on at school. He could talk about phantom limb pain, operations on his head, the eye he could take in and out like a marble. But he wanted to keep what went on
inside his mind to himself. The hell – he would not share that with ABB and the rest of Norway. He replied briefly to the prosecutor’s questions about how things were for him now.

‘Quite a challenge, all the anxiety and nerves,’ he said. ‘I only feel safe in a moving car. Anxiety and paranoia. I still seem to find things difficult. Not on Svalbard and maybe not in Tromsø, but I find it unpleasant
being in Oslo. Being here now.’

He paused. ‘I had to cancel my place at an AUF event because I got too scared to go. It’s hard. Life has really changed,’ he said, and told the court about everything he had had to relearn: holding a pen, tying his shoelaces. He who had been so active, played football, drove snowmobiles, went skiing, loved everything that was fast and exciting, now he could do
none of that. He still had fragments of the bullet inside his head. They were too close to vital nerves to be removed. If these bits moved even a millimetre, it could be lethal. He had to avoid any risk of a blow to his head. For the rest of his life.

‘I can’t just wax my skis and set off any more…’ he said, and paused before he went on. ‘We’re all dependent on having self-confidence and feeling
at ease. It does something to you when your whole face has changed and…’

At that, Breivik looked down.

Viljar had no more to say.

He had shared enough.

‘I think you’ve finished, then,’ said judge Arntzen.

‘Fabulous,’ said Viljar.

He stood up, spun on his heel and went. Out.

It was almost summer.

He had his life in front of him. He could walk, sit and stand. He had his wits about him. And
many people to live for.

Psycho Seminar

‘It’s insulting!’ cried Breivik. ‘It’s offensive!’

‘Breivik, you get your chance to speak later!’

‘It’s ludicrous that I’m not allowed to comment here. This is being broadcast. It’s insulting!’ Breivik was bright red in the face.

‘NRK must stop the broadcast!’ ordered judge Wenche Arntzen.

The transmission faded out, away from Breivik’s indignant face, to a picture of the
main doors of the Law Courts, while the drama played out in courtroom 250.

The clash was about Breivik’s life. For Breivik, it was about the right to a private life. For the court, it was about making the correct diagnosis.

Breivik had constructed his life story as a shining suit of armour. In the lustreless courtroom, within those matte grey walls, a pack of professionals had descended to try
with a variety of tools to push, worm and force their way inside his defences.

It was Friday 8 June. The day before, the court had not sat.

Wenche Arntzen had been at her father’s funeral. Supreme Court counsel Andreas Artzen had died two weeks earlier. The funeral was arranged for the first day the court was not in session.

The two professional judges in the 22 July trial came from the legal
aristocracy. Wenche Arntzen’s grandfather, Sven Arntzen, was Director General of Public Prosecution in 1945, and it was he who prepared the charges against Vidkun Quisling. John Lyng, grandfather of Arntzen’s fellow judge Arne Lyng, was the public prosecutor in the legal purge of collaborators in 1945 and prosecutor in the case against the Nazi Henry Rinnan who, like Quisling, was condemned to
death.

Lyng and Arntzen had with them the three lay judges, who had been selected at random from a list at the courthouse. A young, pregnant teacher of Colombian descent, a retired family counsellor in her seventies and a middle-aged consultant in the Department of Education. On the first day the court sat, there had been another lay person on the bench, but it emerged in the evening that just
after the massacre he had posted on Facebook that ‘The death penalty is the only just outcome of this case!!!!!!!!!!!’ He was obliged to stand down, and the elderly family counsellor who was the reserve moved up to take his place.

These five judges were now observing Breivik’s outburst.

He had sat there so quietly for eight weeks. Now he was completely freaking out.

The week before he had been
quite satisfied. The defence had called witnesses who stressed that Breivik was not alone in his thinking. Historians, philosophers and researchers in the fields of religion, terrorism and right-wing extremism took the witness stand and set out where Breivik stood in an extremist, but not unknown, ideological landscape. Representatives of Stop the Islamisation of Norway and the Norwegian Defence
League were also invited to present their political views.

The court heard from a variety of standpoints about a world in which Breivik’s ideas were familiar. His thoughts were not bizarre distortions, but were in fact shared by many.

The defence had also wanted to call Breivik’s ideological lodestar Fjordman, whose actual name turned out to be Peder Are Nestvold Jensen. Forced out from behind
his Fjordman shield, a rather short man in his mid-thirties, with a rounded face and dark curls, appeared. He worked as a night watchman at a nursing home in Oslo and was an anti-jihadist blogger in his spare time. He refused to accept any responsibility for having inspired Breivik.

Breivik had made Jensen’s ideas his own. The difference was that Breivik put this thinking into action.

Jensen
did not want to give evidence and moved abroad, where the Norwegian police had no legal authority to compel him to come to court.

One other individual who did not attend was Wenche Behring Breivik. She had spent part of the autumn as an in-patient at a psychiatric clinic. When she asked to be excused taking the witness stand, the District Court gave its consent. She was considered ‘unable’ to
appear as a witness.

*   *   *

Ulrik Fredrik Malt, professor of psychiatry, was an elderly gentleman who gave the impression of being used to holding forth. He was the first of a dozen experts who were to brief the court on psychiatric matters, to help it reach the correct verdict. Healthy or sick. Accountable or not. Sentence or treatment.

The grey-haired man took his place in the witness
box and regarded the various parties. He spent the first hour on an introduction to the correct use of the handbooks on which the court would rely, before going on to the particular instance sitting a few metres away from him. ‘The Commander. The messiah aspect,’ he said. ‘Life and death. I’m thinking of the executions. There’s clearly something tending in the direction of notions of grandeur, but
are they delusions of grandeur?’

No. Breivik had given in too easily. In the case of delusions, one became aggressive when ousted from one’s elevated role. One was prepared to fight tooth and nail for the throne, whereas Breivik had simply toned down the significance of the Knights Templar and dropped the uniform as soon as someone told him it looked ridiculous.

Malt went on through the diagnosis
chart.

‘Let us look at dissocial personality disorder – cold indifference to the feelings of others. Marked, persistently irresponsible attitude to social norms and duties. Lack of ability to sustain lasting relationships. Low tolerance of frustration, low threshold for aggressive outbursts, including use of violence. Lack of ability to experience guilt or learn from punishment. Marked tendency
to generate feelings of guilt in others or to rationalise conduct that has brought the patient into conflict with society.’

Many in the room had now mentally ticked off all the criteria. But – the criteria had to have been in place before 22 July if they were to count. ‘I have not seen it said in any of the witness statements made by his friends that he was an ice-cold bastard. He did a little
tagging, but so do a lot of people. He had some dubious accounts abroad, but those of us familiar with Oslo West circles know a fair amount of it goes on there. If that is a criterion, the number of people with the disorder will have to be adjusted radically upwards. Low threshold for outbursts of rage. No indication of that before 22 July. Lack of ability to experience guilt and learn from experience
or punishment. It is possible there was a problem there.’

But it was not enough for Malt to be willing to make that his diagnosis. What about
dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits
, the diagnosis made by Tørrissen and Aspaas? ‘If one looks at what he writes in the manifesto compiled in his bedroom, fantasies about power and money and ideal love are present. That he is unique
and admires himself, yes, both of those. Unique rights, yes, we can say he feels he has those, because he definitely does not relate to the law. Lack of empathy, that certainly fits. It would be entirely natural to make a diagnosis of dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. So far, so good, you may think. But it is not good. We now come to the question that we have to ask ourselves
as a society, as human beings and as psychologists. What is it that these questions actually give us the answer to?’

An enormous question mark filled the whole screen on the wall.

Judge Arntzen interrupted to ask if it was time for a short break.

‘That would be a pity,’ exclaimed Malt. ‘But we can leave that question mark there, because now we’re coming to the really exciting part.’

Breivik
was furious. ‘He’s got to stop!’ he told Lippestad in the recess.

What enraged Breivik was that the testimony was being beamed directly to the TV viewers. Unlike the autopsy reports and witness statements from Utøya, this was going out live. And it was about his mind. People could switch on their sets, sit on their sofas and laugh at him. Yes, he would be allowed to defend himself at the end
of each day. But whereas the psychiatrists’ evidence would be broadcast, his responses would not. His comments would be filtered through cultural Marxist journalists and would never get out to people directly.

After the short break, Lippestad asked to speak and demanded that the witness be dismissed, because he had crossed the legal boundaries of personal privacy.

‘The diagnoses he is presenting
are, in parts, highly stigmatising.’

Malt was in the witness box, raring to continue. The whole thing degenerated into heated exchanges. The court retired to deliberate and reach a conclusion.

There was lively debate among those left sitting in the courtroom to await the outcome. Some of the public abandoned their seats in favour of the outdoor cafés around the Law Courts. The psychiatry seminar
spilled out into the streets.

The trial had undergone a pronounced change of mood. While even the most seasoned crime reporters had been chastened as the courtroom mourned during the autopsy reports and the brutal witness accounts, the intellectual game of diagnosis loosened their tongues.

The same lively discussions were in full swing round canteen tables at work, between mouthfuls at top Oslo
restaurants, among friends and colleagues, between couples. People on the bus started arguing about whether Breivik could be held accountable for his actions. Dinner-party guests were engrossed in the topic from their aperitifs through to the brandy and beyond. The case had turned the whole nation into amateur psychologists.