One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (68 page)

Her sobbing got the better of her, her shoulders shook. She struggled to be able to speak again. ‘I, I … I did the best I could…’

She let her emotions have the upper hand for a few moments before getting a grip on herself and saying clearly:

‘Oh, we thought we’d found happiness!’

There was a metallic note to her voice, something mechanical, something a little old-fashioned.

‘Then it was Silkestrå.
We bought a flat in 1982, moved in and started our homely happiness project. Which is the best thing that ever happened to me. Oh, I thought it was so nice. The children thought it was nice. We were looking forward to starting our new life. There’d be no more obstacles in our path. We could get busy on everything, things that needed doing, like decorating the flat, and I had my job as well,
so they were grand times…’

Her phone played a little tune. She answered it.

‘Yes, oh hello, Elisabeth. Yes, fine. Yes, really sick, I throw up every day. Much the same, pretty bad, yes. No, they haven’t moved me yet, we shall have to see. Yes, they explain everything, but I lose the thread. You know, cancer patients have a tendency to be suspicious of what they’re told. I don’t really feel very
good wherever I am, and I shall be going home soon now. All right, bye for now, Elisabeth.’

She went on with her story.

‘Things weren’t going well for Anders at the time. Dreadful. Lots of break-ups in his life. Of course he got overlooked in the midst of it all. When you’re caught up in a conflict, you’re blind to your children and other people. You don’t see yourself clearly either. You can’t.’
She paused. ‘And I felt guilty about being inadequate. I’m sure I did.’

‘In what way were you inadequate?’

‘I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t mature enough for the task.’

‘What task?’

‘Being a mother.’

She stopped, adjusted her back a little. ‘This thing with Anders has something to do with my own childhood, I expect. The circumstances I grew up in were tough. I’ve never come across anyone
who had a worse time. Very poor conditions. Really harsh conditions. I had to look after my mother. Most things were taboo. I don’t know what I can say, without revealing too much. Everything was taboo. Sorry, I’m going to be sick now.’

‘Shall I get a nurse?’

‘Yes, please do.’

A young woman in a white uniform was fetched in from the corridor and she called out to another nurse that the lady
in 334 needed to throw up.

Afterwards Wenche sat in bed smiling; the queasiness had gone and she felt a bit stronger. She went on with her account. ‘Well, we always come back to Silkestrå. All those cute little clothes and little presents in their bags when anyone had a birthday. That was how it was then. Lots of birthdays and school parties and nice things like that. And everyday life was much
as it usually is, getting up early, school, homework, children’s programmes on TV, baking apple cake, just like ordinary people, nothing to find fault with.’

‘It says in the report that Anders was passive when playing.’

‘Well you have to consider. For one thing, they placed him up there at the centre, with strangers, in a strange setting, so it all goes wrong. I know very well it made him passive
being up there. Anders was a self-conscious child. Reserved. And that psychiatrist who made his statement, the nasty one … they came round to the flat too, that psychiatrist or psychologist, to study us, judge us.’

They wanted to observe the bedtime routines in the family, Wenche remarked.

‘And Anders was so neat and tidy, you know. He couldn’t help the fact that he had an orderly mother.’

She took a breath. ‘It wasn’t his fault. I brought the boy up to be like me.’ She gave a tired sigh. ‘I’d said to Anders: we’re going to start a new game here at home. You and I are going to get undressed, and we’ll see who finishes first. I’ll time us, starting now! So I timed us, and Anders won. And there was his neat little pile, with mine beside it, and that was wrong too. And when he got a real
psychiatric … psychiatric … psychiatric, no. I can’t find the word. Anyway, you have to get undressed first and then wash your hands, he was very keen on washing his hands, being clean, and then you put on your pyjamas, and then you have some supper and then clear up and so on, and then you wash your hands again. And they presented that as wrong, too.’

She shook her head.

‘What did Anders like
best when he was little?’

‘He really liked to be praised when he’d been clever. When we played that undressing game in the evenings and he won, came first, he thought that was great. I could see how much he liked it. How they can say the opposite, that there was something wrong with the boy, I can’t understand.’

‘What did he play when he was at home?’

‘We played Lego, we did. Playmobil. We
played everything there was. Duplo, Taplo, Poplo, you name it,’ she laughed.

‘In the report from the Centre for Child Psychiatry it says that on the one hand you bound him to you, and the two of you slept close together in the same bed, while on the other you could suddenly reject him and say hateful things to him.’

‘I still haven’t finished,’ she said, feeling for the thin plastic sick bag
that lay close to hand.

‘I’ll go and get a nurse.’

‘Well if it happens, it happens,’ said Wenche.

Once the nausea had subsided, Wenche wanted to go on.

‘There has to be room for … room for … what’s it called again? There has to be room for – reconciliation, that’s it. Time for reconciliation,’ she said slowly, stressing every syllable. ‘We can’t change anything, after all. So let things rest.
Try to understand instead. There’s a lot still to find out.’

‘For you too?’

‘Yes, for me too.’

‘Have you reconciled yourself to Anders’s actions?’

‘I reconciled myself a few months after it happened. I was convinced I’d be able to do it. Perhaps it’s just that I’m a forgiving mother.’

‘Have you forgiven him?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘What do you think, was he sick or was it a political act?’

‘It
was a rational political act. No question. It was unexpected, but perhaps not that unexpected.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think we’ll call it a day now. Better for us to follow up later. Now, you go home and think it all through.’ Right at the end, after all the goodbyes and wishes for better days, she said:

‘Well, Anders is content now, anyway. At least that’s what he told me.’

*   *   *

The
nurse came in with painkillers. ‘Oh, that’s sweet of you,’ said Wenche Behring Breivik to the young girl in white. ‘Would you mind closing the window too? I’m freezing.’

The nurse closed the window, which had been on the latch, letting in the cold of the March day outside. Spring was taking its time. There was a hint of sleet in the air.

On the windowsill of room 334 there was a pink plastic
orchid, still in its crisp cellophane packet. It was getting late. The scrap of sky that Wenche could see when she rested her head on the pillow was growing darker. From there she could see the tiny snowflakes, so light that they seemed to take forever to reach the ground.

*   *   *

Wenche Behring Breivik died eight days later.

She passed away just before Easter. Her son sought permission to
attend her funeral. His application was refused.

He had no contact with his father. Nor with his sister. None of his friends had written to him. Many of his closest friends said they had put him behind them. ‘I’m through with Anders,’ said one. And yet hardly a day passed without them thinking of him. Many of them were troubled by feelings of guilt. Should they have realised?

He had hardly anyone
to correspond with any more. In the letters that he did receive, most of the words were blacked out. He replied to them with letters he knew would be censored. The correspondence petered out. The letters stopped coming. His prison cell had not become the writer’s workshop he had planned. Some journalists asked for interviews. He visualised the queue of reporters eager to interview him, dreaming
of being
the first
. But he did not want to meet any of them. If he gave an interview he imagined the queue evaporating, interest tailing off. He would no longer be in demand.

He did respond to one of the interview requests. The request arrived just after the trial He spent a long time thinking about whether to write back. Only a year later, in June 2013, did he decide to answer. The journalist
had included a stamped addressed envelope. He located it among his other documents, where he had been keeping it for almost a year. He elected to start on a jovial note.

Dear Åsne! :-)

I have been following your career with great interest since 2003. I both respect and admire you for your mentality, competence and intelligence, which afford you opportunities that almost all women and most men can only dream of ;-)

Flattery was the style he adopted. ‘What’s so unique about you is that you achieved so much at such a young age, and in addition to that are so beautiful! ;-)’ he wrote.

Then he described the strategy he had employed throughout the trial. Double psychology, he called it. Calculated deception, to put it simply. A necessary evil to counter the propaganda and deceit of the
other parties. And it was for this reason that the full truth about his operation had not come out. He wrote that ever since the trial he had wanted to be open about everything, but that he had been prevented from expressing himself since the stricter regime was implemented after the verdict.

I understand that among left-wing journalists there is some prestige attached to getting the opportunity to be the first to really put the knife into the ‘worst ultra-nationalist terrorist in the European world since WW2’ and inflict the worst damage, and there are undoubtedly many ‘right-wing extremists’ in Europe who would have been retarded enough to contribute to their own character assassination. In my eyes, people like you are extremely dangerous predators from whom I instinctively want to keep my distance. I know that someone like you will stab deep, and if I were stupid enough to participate you might even be able to stab deeper than Husby/Sørheim and Lippestad. I have no wish to contribute to this, either by meeting you or by clarifying what remains unclarified on any terms but my own. I therefore do not want to have anything to do with your work.

The letter changed tone.

I would like, however, to make you a counter-offer. I have enough insight to realise that ‘The Breivik Diaries’ will be boycotted by the established publishing houses, and therefore want to offer you the chance of selling the book as a package within your project, that is, that you top and/or tail your book with a quick hack job by me, with or without your name on the book, and that you in addition get all the income (the author’s share). So you will gain financially, while those you want to impress will still congratulate you on a great character assassination. I can live with my story coming out in this form, provided that the book is removed from the boycott lists of at least some of the major distributors.

To tie in with the book launch, provided that it is successful, you will be given the opportunity to conduct the first and only interview that I shall give, and you will also get the sales rights to this, enabling you to write another crude character assassination to ‘wash your hands’ of any accusations that may by then have been made that you are a useful idiot etc.

With narcissistic and revolutionary wishes.

Anders Behring Breivik

That was how he signed off.

In a letter
the following month, which he opened with the far cooler ‘To Miss Seierstad,’ he wrote that all criticism of him could actually be viewed as a bonus. It was so detached from reality as to give him a valuable advantage, which he wanted to exploit to the full against the propagandists. He was now waiting for the end of the ban on his freedom of speech and took the view that he should have the right
to defend himself against all the propaganda now being pumped out. ‘Because the “Character” who is being constructed and peddled by authors and journalists on the left is, after all, a very long way from the truth.’

No interview took place.

*   *   *

The inmate was annoyed at receiving the wrong letters. He only got letters from ‘New Testament Christians and people who do not like me’, he complained.

These were not the sorts of letters he wanted.

He wanted the other letters. The letters that must be piling up in the censor’s office. The letters to the
Commander of the Norwegian anti-communist resistance movement
. The letters from the people who wanted a signed copy of his book. The letters to Andrew Berwick. The letters to Anders B. Those were the letters he wanted.

But they did not come.

He aimed to set up a prison alliance of militant nationalists with himself at its head. So far, he was the only member. But then, as the civil war spread, as people got swept along, inspired by his manifesto, he would be freed by his brothers.

In the meantime, while he was waiting, his Lacoste jersey was spared. It was safely put away in the prison’s dark storeroom.

All he saw of the real world
were the tops of the trees round the prison.

And its white walls.

Epilogue

It was only supposed to be an article for
Newsweek
.

‘Get me anything you can on
that man
!’ said
Newsweek
editor Tina Brown on the phone from New York. It was early on; the terrorist attack had only just hit us. The country was in shock. I was in shock.

I did not find out much about
that man
in the summer of 2011.

Having written about Norway’s reaction to the attack instead, I put
the country behind me, as always, and pursued my original plan for the autumn – covering the continuous uprisings around the Arab world. My next stop was Tripoli in Libya. While Norway was grieving, I went back to the Middle East.