One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (66 page)

‘Mum, can you weave one for me?’

‘Oh, would you like one?’ his mother answered happily. ‘What colours do you want?’

‘Blue, blue like the sky,’ he replied.

She had spent a long time on it. She had mixed blue and white so his bedcover would turn out a real sky blue. When it was done, it
was exactly as she had hoped. It was like lying in the grass on a fine summer’s day looking up as wisps of cloud went by.

She had just finished it. Her son had run a hand over the soft blanket and thanked her, said how wonderful it was. Before he left.

*   *   *

That was two years ago.

In the first months she could not bring herself to touch the loom.

Now she was gradually starting again.
But it was hard going, her fingers were stiff and slow and it wore her out.

Two years had passed, and life had only got worse.

The sense of loss, the emptiness, the lonely days. It was not true that grief faded. It grew. Because now it was final; he was never coming back.

Gerd was scared of meeting people, because it was embarrassing if she cried. It could come over her at any time, anywhere.
She felt as though everyone around her thought things ought to be better by now. She could see it in people’s eyes. Their looks said: You’ve got to move on.

Folk would ask her: ‘Are you back at work now?’

As if that were any kind of measure. No she wasn’t. Perhaps she could have coped, were it not for the fact that her job, too, meant dealing with life and death. At Bardu care home, old people
were dying all the time. She could not take it. They were old and they died natural deaths, as was the way of things. But even so, they died. She could not take any more death.

The care home management had been flexible. She could come and go as she wanted, do shifts here and there if she felt up to it.

Her son was always crashing about in her head.

Viggo missed him constantly.

Their memories
went in circles.

They buzzed round and round. They were there in their dreams. They were there in their sleepless nights.

Gerd called life ‘existing minute by minute’. Every single minute felt like a battle. Time went on but life had stopped. Meanwhile, everyone else said they would have to build it up again. But how could they build up their life without their boy? As their elder son Stian
put it when he was fed up with all the talk about Norway having won out over evil and hatred, ‘I shall never win over anyone as long as I’m a little brother short.’

The roses, rainbows and democracy that were supposed to defeat the perpetrator only increased their sadness. It made them sick to hear party leaders say that Labour was the victim of the massacre. They were upset by AUF members’ talk
of ‘reclaiming Utøya’ before the murder victims had even been buried.

They could not forget AUF leader Eskil Pedersen’s words on the first day of the trial: ‘The pain is less now.’

Hadn’t he talked to any of the bereaved, they wondered. Didn’t he know anything about how the parents of his dead members were feeling? His
The pain is less now
, a bare nine months after the killings, made it impossible
for them to listen to any of the other things he had to say.

The Kristiansen family felt bitter about a lot. First, the AUF. Anders had set up Bardu Workers’ Youth League as a fifteen-year-old in 2008. He had been leader of the local branch for two years. When he became the head of the Youth County Council for Troms, the year after Simon and Viljar’s attempted coup, he stepped down as leader
of Bardu AUF and became the treasurer instead.

When Eskil Pedersen came to visit Bardu the year after Anders’s death, the parents found out about it from the local paper. In
Troms Folkeblad
they saw the pictures of the AUF leader with new young members. No one had notified them. They had not had so much as a phone call to say that he wished to express his condolences to the parents of the late
AUF treasurer in Bardu. No, Anders was dead, so he did not matter any more; that was how it felt to them.

The AUF had planned to mark the first anniversary of the massacre, 22 July 2012, on Utøya itself. The plans excluded the parents. They could come another day.

What? Were the parents not to be allowed to commemorate their sons and daughters a year on, in the place where their children had
been killed?

No, because Utøya was the AUF’s island.

Were there no grown-ups in the Labour Party? Were there no manners? No, the Labour Party just said it was the AUF’s island and the young must be the ones to decide. In the end, the AUF gave in to pressure from the support group for the bereaved and they reached a compromise: the parents would be permitted to come at eight in the morning. But
they had to make sure they were off the island before the surviving AUF members, those who had defeated the perpetrator, arrived. The last boat would be leaving the island at 11.45. After that, no parents were allowed to be there, because the young people were going to recreate
the Utøya feeling
.

‘I would so much have liked to be there, to step into her world,’ one father from Nordland county
commented to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He had lost his sixteen-year-old daughter and wanted to ‘step into the atmosphere, be there together with the AUF youngsters’ to try to understand what it was about the summer camp that made his girl look forward to it all year. He simply wanted to be on the island along with the AUF crowd.

‘I want to look for what was so important to my daughter
here,’ said a mother. ‘Was it that little?’

Gerd and Viggo could not bring themselves to go to Utøya once they had seen the terms on which they would be allowed to attend. They did not feel welcome. Tone and Gunnar decided to go down anyway. Tone later said that the anniversary was the worst thing she had been through since Simon died. Making a hasty visit to the cliff, laying flowers by the
rock and then hurrying off the island because the survivors were due to arrive, getting off the ferry at the
Thorbjørn
’s jetty and having to run the gauntlet of that merry throng of AUF members tripping over themselves to get aboard. Tone had had to duck her way through the crowd of young people. She felt they avoided meeting her eye. Maybe it was all part of being young, not dwelling on the dismal
side of things. Being thoughtless.

At noon groups of AUF members were ferried over. Stoltenberg came, the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt came, the boss of the trade union confederation, Cabinet ministers, the left-wing Swedish singer Mikael Wiehe, the AUF leadership and lots of young people. They sat on the ground that sloped down to the open-air stage and listened to fine words
about democracy and solidarity. The parents did not fit in there. There was a risk they might scream or shout, ruining the carefully choreographed event.

As part of the compromise deal the parents had been told they could return to the island after 5 p.m., because by then the AUF members would have gone off to the next item on their programme, the big memorial concert on the waterfront by the
Town Hall. There was much excitement at the prospect that Bruce Springsteen was going to perform.

‘Sometimes I wonder what my lad was caught up in,’ said Gerd. ‘Would he have turned out like that too?’

The first Christmas, the Kristiansen family had received a pre-printed Christmas card from the Prime Minister. From the AUF leader, not a word. Then Jens Stoltenberg telephoned them on their first
New Year’s Eve without Anders. On the second anniversary of the killings, the foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre rang. He offered his condolences again the first time he passed through Troms after the massacre. Later they received a personal, handwritten letter from him, and a long letter from the vice-chair of the AUF, Åsmund Aukrust, who wrote of what Anders had meant to the youth organisation,
how sad he was to lose him and how much he was missed.

The parents read those letters many times.

*   *   *

Grief is a solitary journey. Their great fear was that Anders would be forgotten.

It warmed their hearts when the Children’s Ombudsman sent them a DVD of pictures and recordings of Anders taken at the National Youth Parliament at Eidsvoll, where he had been a delegate, and the County
Council sent them recordings of the speeches Anders had made there. But the best thing of all was when Viljar visited. Then it was as if Anders was just about to step through the door.

What made them so bitter was the sense that nobody was taking any real responsibility for what had happened. At about the same time, a bus driver in the district stood accused of involuntary manslaughter because
he had been
inattentive
for a moment, lost control of the vehicle and three people were killed. ‘Is it that if you’re far enough down the ladder, you get charged?’ asked Viggo.

Questions went churning round in their heads.

Could one say that the police were
inattentive
on 22 July? Could one say that the authorities were
inattentive
beforehand? Could one say it was
irresponsible
that the crew
of Norway’s sole police helicopter were all on leave for the whole of July? Could one say that individual police officers had not followed the instructions for a ‘shooting in progress’ situation, indicating that direct intervention was required? Should anyone be charged with
negligence
?

Viggo could answer ‘yes’ to all those questions. He was angry when Stoltenberg said,
I take responsibility
. While not accepting the consequence of the errors by resigning. Events had exposed the fact that Norway had a police leadership which was paralysed in a crisis. The system had failed. Seventy-seven people had been killed. Was no one to be charged with anything?

Well yes, the perpetrator was under lock and key, and Viggo wished him all possible ill. He should have been sentenced to seventy-seven
times twenty-one years in prison. But beyond that:

What responsibility did the AUF take for the children and young people on the island?

What security assessments had the AUF leadership made after the bomb in Oslo?

Were there evacuation plans?

Was there an emergency plan?

Was the MS
Thorbjørn
to be used in case of an evacuation of the island?

The AUF had not subsequently provided any answer
to these questions. Viggo received no answers. The only thing he heard was that they were going to ‘reclaim Utøya’.

A year after the killings, the AUF presented sketches, done by a firm of architects called Fantastic Norway. The pictures showed happy, computer-generated young people round the new buildings; a central clock tower; bright, attractive modern structures. Many of the bereaved felt
the plans had been drawn up too soon. Their grief was still all-consuming. Is the building where my daughter died going to be torn down? Are young people going to take romantic walks round Lovers’ Path where so many were slaughtered? Will they sunbathe on the rocks where youngsters bled to death?

Many of the bereaved protested about the plans that had been announced. The AUF leader responded:
‘When it comes down to it, I think it has to be left to the AUF to decide this question.’

‘Is that how an AUF leader should talk?’ asked Viggo.

‘Well, perhaps it is,’ was Gerd’s laconic reply. ‘Perhaps the AUF has always been like that.’

They felt they had never properly understood what Anders was involved in. Who were these people? Former AUF leaders had gone on climbing, almost without exception.
They had been lifted up into the machinery of power. They had been picked up as political advisers, state secretaries, been given jobs in the administration of government.

But for the organisation to be so ruthless towards those who were grieving, no, they had not imagined that. ‘It’s as if they want me to say: Hallelujah! My son was in the AUF,’ sighed Gerd. ‘The one thing I can say is that
Norway didn’t take care of Anders, and that the country isn’t taking care of us now. Taking care of also means not forgetting.’

*   *   *

Viggo went out. He had something to do.

It was time to paint Anders’s hut in the garden. It had been standing there untouched, just as Anders left it. His films were on the shelf. His jacket was hanging inside the door. Viggo had got hold of the right blue-green
colour that Anders had once chosen.

His son had talked about painting the door, but he had never found time between all those meetings and trips back and forth to Tromsø. It needed a new coat now. Viggo had to keep at least something in order when everything else was falling apart around them. Grieving was heavy work.

Viggo could not get used to it, could not accept that Anders would never leap
off the school bus again, that he would never again come walking up the path. That the school bus existed, the path existed, but Anders did not.

It was not only questions to the state apparatus, the police and the AUF that were churning round inside Viggo’s head. He also had some questions for his son.

Why did you lie down on the path?

Why didn’t you run?

What were you thinking, just before
he fired?

Did it hurt?

He gave the hut one coat, the door two. He left the door open to dry.

‘Think how pleased Anders would have been to see it looking so nice,’ he said to Gerd when he came in.

They always went up to Anders’s room when evening came. They always put his light on when it got dark.

When it was time for bed they looked in to say good night, sleep well and turned off the lights.

Gerd kept the room in order. That is to say, she did not tidy or move things, she just made sure it did not get too dusty. Stian liked wearing his younger brother’s clothes when he was home on holiday. Some of Anders’s friends had also picked out items of clothing, as reminders of him.

When Anders went to Utøya there was a brand-new suit hanging in his wardrobe. Gerd and Anders had gone shopping
in Tromsø because the eighteen-year-old had wanted a proper suit. His first dark, grown-up suit. He wanted to see what they had at Moods of Norway. There, he tried on the finest suit he could find. Gerd had never seen him stand so tall and look so handsome.