One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (30 page)

An inherited costume was precisely what Bano had bought. The woman selling it had been left costumes by both her grandmothers, and since she had no daughter of her own she
thought she might as well sell one of them.

Bano’s maternal grandmother was from Kirkuk, her paternal grandmother from Erbil. Bano had always been proud of her Kurdish origins and took a keen interest in the Kurds’ struggle for their own culture and nation. She talked largely Kurdish to her parents, whereas her younger siblings tended to answer them in Norwegian. But here, now, on 17 May, it
was Norway’s independence she wanted to celebrate.

Suddenly it had a hollow ring to it.

‘So I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘I don’t really have the right to wear it.’

‘Now you just listen,’ said her father. ‘If anyone asks, then say that you had a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who fell in love with a Norwegian Viking who was on a raid in Baghdad. To escape the honour killing that
would be her fate for falling in love with a non-believer, she had to run away with him,’ he said. ‘To Trysil!’

Bano had to smile. She gave her father a hug and went back down to her room, and carefully finished getting dressed, before her mother plaited ribbons into the wavy, chestnut-brown hair that reached nearly to her waist. Bano drank her morning cup of tea carefully to keep her blouse
clean. So did Lara, who was wearing a new white lacy dress from a popular chain store. It was a dress that her mother both disliked and liked. Disliked because it was so short. Liked because its neckline was
not
low cut.

The two sisters, so alike except that Lara had ended up with long legs and Bano with a big bust. They had the same eyes, the same long brown hair. Now they emerged onto the front
steps of their terraced house, one in a proper traditional costume, the other in a revealing miniskirt. Little Ali was in a suit, as was Mustafa, and Bayan had put on a simple dress. They were all wearing national-day rosettes in the Norwegian colours – red, white and blue.

As the sisters walked side by side down the path to the main road they could already hear the brass bands. Bano gave her
younger sister a serious look. ‘This
bunad
is going to be passed down,’ she said, stroking the beautiful embroidery, ‘to whichever of us has a daughter first. That girl is going to inherit it.’

Lara smiled. Typical of Bano to have it all planned out.

‘And you can borrow it when I’m a
russ
,’ promised Bano. In the last year at upper secondary you were known as a
russ
, from the Latin
depositurus
, ‘one who is going to deposit’ – in their case, exam papers.

Bano was thinking ahead to the school graduation celebrations the following year and had already started to save up with her gang of girlfriends for an old van to decorate. She had been put in charge of the finances and had opened a savings account for the group, so everything would be transparent and above board. There were already
eight thousand kroner in it. In the course of the year she would take her driving test. How she was looking forward to putting on the red
russ
overalls and cap next year!

A
russ
van drove past them. There were two teenage girls on top, clinging on to the roof. Her mother stared at them open-mouthed, shaking her head of curls that were just starting to go grey, and gave her elder daughter a stern
look.

‘Bano, you’re not to do that when you’re a
russ
! Those girls could fall and hurt themselves!’

‘Don’t worry Mum, I won’t,’ said Bano and smiled.

Her mother was not reassured and gave a heavy sigh.

‘You know that, Mum,’ said Bano. ‘By the time I’m a
russ
I’ll have my licence. So I’ll be at the wheel, not on the roof!’

Soon the whole peninsula would see her costume. The new silver brooch
glistened on her breast. Its pin was stuck through the fine, white fabric of her blouse, level with her heart.

The President’s Speech

The grass was turning green but the trees were still without leaves.

The air temperature had risen above zero but on the shadier slopes and along the mountainsides around the village there was still snow, browny-grey with dust and soil. This far north, spring only crept up on winter slowly.

There was a murmur beneath the snow. Hardy plants were starting to send out
shoots. Soon everything would blossom into a short, intense summer, bathed in light.

Throughout the winter, beautiful ice patterns had formed on the surface of the sea. The salty waves had frozen into little mountains of ice, waiting to be set free. In the night-time cold the ice in the fjord compacted, and in the spring sunshine it expanded. Rifts formed as the ice crazed and thin cracks spread
at speed, making the ice tremble. The vibrations emitted a deep sound, a heavy rumble. It was the ice singing.

A procession of children made its way into the field in front of the sports hall. Their faces were hot and rosy-cheeked from marching through the village chanting and carrying flags. They had laid wreaths at the memorial stones raised for those from Salangen who had been lost at sea,
and in memory of those fallen in the Second World War.

There were bands, there were choirs, there were dignitaries. Some families were dressed in sturdy traditional costumes from the deep valleys or narrow fjords of Norway, all with warm woollen underwear. Others were wearing the colourful
kofte
or long jerkin of the Sami people, complete with reindeer-skin moccasins and a knife in the belt.
The pastor was in a full-length white robe with gold embroidered edging, while the Scottish head of the asylum seekers’ centre stood there in a purple tartan kilt and lace-up shoes, with a camera dangling round his neck and legs planted wide apart. The younger asylum seekers from Afghanistan clustered together in a group on their own, as did the Somalis and the Chechens. That year, the residents of
Sjøvegan State Asylum Centre had carried their own banner in the procession. It was sky blue, with appliqué designs depicting the changing seasons, summer and winter, midnight sun and polar night, grass and snow, a silver fox and a leaping salmon. The whole thing was crowned with a Norwegian flag. Like the rest of the village, the asylum seekers were wearing the best clothes they had, and from the
lectern a voice sang of ‘how good and beautiful Norway is’.

A listless gang dressed in red, looking rather the worse for wear, stood out from the rest in the square. Their heads were pounding. Their eyes were slits. There they huddled, some lying down, stifling yawns, a couple even asleep. Their red boiler suits were covered in dirt, seagull droppings and beer. These were the
russ
, the final-year
students who were leaving Sjøvegan upper secondary school. Most of them had been up all night and many had been partying since the first day of May. They had danced and drunk, necked and vomited. Some had found a boyfriend or girlfriend, while others had lost theirs. Only the drivers had stayed sober. They had all taken it in turns to drive, one night each, in the clapped-out old vans that got
even more scratched and dented as the
russ
season drew to a close.

Now the leavers were gathered with the rest of the town for the first time. Not yelling from open van windows as they screeched by, but assembled with the rest here on the sports field, where they had been running about not so many years ago, trying to wheedle ice creams and treating the
russ
like rock stars.

Now all they had
to do was last out until the final item on the agenda: the
russ
president’s speech.

They pulled their red caps over their ears; the alcohol was breaking down in their bodies and they were freezing. They all had their names on the peaks of their caps, names to live up to or be ashamed of, given to them by the name committee at the start of the festivities. Their nicknames didn’t feel quite so
funny now, among that crowd of solid fellow citizens, where the speeches and poetry readings inevitably conjured up a ceremonial mood. Baptism was the worst bit of the
russ
season. What power they suddenly wielded, those teenagers in the name committee, when they sat in judgement on their fellow students. It showed what a fine line there can be between teasing and bullying. A few drops of seawater
on your forehead and the verdict was delivered right there on the pebbly shore, in white letters on the shiny black peak of your cap, some of them so rude you couldn’t show your cap at home. After the baptism one boy was left sitting on the beach, saying he would throw himself into the sea, in despair at being given the name
Hole-in-One
– a reference to an abortive sexual encounter in a red VW
Golf that the whole school knew about. It was the
russ
president who decided the name had to go. He scraped the lettering off the peak with a blunt stone, took the soaking wet boy and his cap home to Heiaveien in the middle of the night, found some paint and began writing a new name with an unsteady hand. The name was to be Einstein. He started with the E, but then had an even better idea. E =
mc
²
was just right for a brainy type.

The name committee was furious; this was blatant abuse of power on the part of the president. Baptism was their business. But they let the boy keep his cap with Einstein’s formula on the peak.

Simon had been the obvious choice when the
russ
came to choose their president; most people were surprised that anybody else even bothered to stand against him, doomed
to defeat as they must be. Simon won, naturally, while the runner-up was put in charge of the
russ
revue.

So there he was now,
that Simon
, looking pale with dark rings under his eyes, waiting for the neatly turned out boy from the lower secondary school to finish his poem. His own hair was stiff with gel beneath his red cap and his fingers felt numb.

Down in the crowd Tone, Gunnar and Håvard
were waiting. Simon’s parents had been far from happy when he came home the previous autumn and told them he’s been elected president. ‘There goes his
russ
season,’ they sighed. For they knew that Simon got so involved in everything, in joys and sorrows, his own and others’, and as president he was bound to get drawn into disputes, caught between a rock and a hard place, between the school management
and the demanding
russ.
The bitterest clash of all was over something as minor as a hundred kroner.

The
russ
had worked and collected money to donate to the paediatric department at Tromsø’s University Hospital. There turned out to be some money left over, amounting to a hundred kroner per
russ
, and the committee proposed that everyone would receive it in the form of a discount on the cost of
the coach they were taking to a party in the neigbouring village of Finnsnes. Simon thought that was wrong, and that the money should rather go to the school’s project in Cambodia, where they were helping to sponsor a clean-water project for poor rural communities. ‘We earned it’ clashed with ‘Cambodia needs it more’. Positions that would later harden into political divisions created factions and
cliques. Nobody was prepared to give in.

In the end, Simon got his way. As he usually did.

*   *   *

But now it was nearly over. It was his turn at the microphone.

His hoarse voice rang out across the square.

‘We have been celebrating the completion of our years of study, something that has required hard work day and night!’

Rousing cheers from the
russ
.

‘We are, if not reborn, then at
least re-baptised over here at Brandy Bend,’ he bellowed to renewed howls.

‘But there’s no disgrace in a name,’ Simon went on; he knew when it was time to bury the hatchet. ‘They named me J. F. Kennedy. He was a president like me, you know. But unfortunately he got shot in Dallas.’

Simon smiled out over his audience.

‘I’m too much of an optimist to sit waiting for the same fate!’

His parents
grinned with relief. Gunnar had persuaded Simon to take the time to write his speech out properly, rather than just scribbling a few notes as he generally did. This was going really well!

From the podium Simon cautioned against bullying, in daily life, at school and above all on the internet, where the pillorying of those unable to defend themselves ‘could have far-reaching consequences’. He
ended with how much money they had raised, their contribution to the water aid project in Cambodia and the campaign against the closure of Sjøvegan Upper Secondary School.

Then he paid tribute to the Constitution and his homeland, and the school band struck up the Norwegian national anthem, ‘Yes, we love this country’.

Hundreds of voices were raised and blown out to sea by the wind. As the final
notes faded, the square came to life. Parents and young children moved on to their local parties with cake and games, the old folk headed back to their care home, the lonely returned to empty houses and the asylum seekers plodded back up the steep hill to their centre. Their sky-blue banner with the silver fox and the Norwegian flag would be stowed away in a box room until it was time to take
it out again, unroll it and press it for another 17 May.

The
russ
were off to slump in their rooms. In rooms that still harboured half-forgotten memories of a time when they were pink or pale blue. Spiderman and Britney Spears stickers still adorned the walls; football posters hung side by side with district champion certificates and school timetables. Some of the rooms were even home to a few
overlooked soft toys, and their owners could carry on being children for just a little while longer, for one more short summer.

Most of them would gradually disperse from this town of scarcely two thousand inhabitants, with one clothes shop, a chemist, a sports hall and an asylum-seekers’ centre. They would go out into the world, get down to their studies or do their military service. Some would
stay on and work at the supermarket or the care home, and others didn’t quite know what to do, there were too many options, so they would take a gap year to think it over.