One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (7 page)

In the next phase, village after village was bombed with mustard
gas, sarin and other nerve agents. This culminated in the attack on Halabja in March 1988, which killed five thousand people, and left thousands more scarred for life.

*   *   *

In the midst of all this there lived a young Kurdish man by the name of Mustafa. He was a trained engineer and had served in the Iraqi army, repairing tanks and military equipment in the south of the country. Mustafa
felt himself to be a slave of the system, trapped and under surveillance. The Iraqi intelligence services, trained by the East German Stasi, had ears and eyes everywhere.

After his military service, Mustafa found work as an engineer at the water and sewage works in the Kurdish city of Erbil, and was there when
al-Anfal
started. Frightened voices whispered stories about the mass graves, the blue-black
faces, the desiccated eyes. Stories that were dangerous to repeat.

Working in the accounts office of the waterworks was a beautiful, elegant woman with black curls, six years younger than Mustafa. She had a laugh that came floating out of the door and along the corridor as he passed. Her family had fled from Kirkuk, and she was obliged to abandon her university course when
al-Anfal
began.

Mustafa’s
first ploy was to make sure the girl got to know his sister. Then, when the entire workforce was sent by a state committee to make an inventory of a warehouse, he saw to it that he and she were standing beside each other, sorting goods.

She was called Bayan. And she was everything he wanted.

A few days after that, he got his sister to ask her: ‘Do you want to marry my brother?’

Bayan did.

*   *   *

It was snowing when they got married in February 1992. That meant good fortune!

But after the Iraqi army moved out of the town, conflicts erupted between the various Kurdish factions. There was shooting on the streets, prices went through the roof and the Iraqi dinar plummeted. Buying a simple meal took plastic bags full of banknotes.

It also snowed on one of the last days of December
that year, as Mustafa drove his pregnant wife through the potholed streets of Erbil at top speed. Bayan groaned with pain every time they hit a bump, her contractions coming thick and fast. An icy wind blew in with them as Mustafa opened the main door of the hospital. Even inside, the temperature was only just above freezing; there was no electricity and all the paraffin was gone. Once Bayan was
safely in bed, Mustafa sent word to their friends and relations, who collected enough fuel to get the hospital generator going.

The steady drone of the motor was soon providing an accompaniment to the cries of the women in labour.

Snow for their wedding in February and on the day of the birth. Doubly good fortune, thought Mustafa as he waited in a corridor reeking of paraffin. This must be a
child born under a lucky star.

Three women each gave birth to a daughter in the labour ward at Erbil that night.

Two of them were given the name Befrin, which means Snow White, after the beautiful snow flurries that were filling the air.

Bayan put her daughter to her breast. No, not Snow White, she thought. You’re not a Snow White.

‘Let’s call her Maria,’ suggested Mustafa.

‘No, I know a
sick old lady called that. She can’t be named after a dying woman,’ said Bayan.

‘You choose then,’ smiled Mustafa.

The brand-new mother looked down at her firstborn child. The baby had big, brown eyes and her head was wreathed in thick, dark hair. You look like a princess, thought Bayan.

A name that meant princess came into her mind.

‘Bano,’ she said. ‘We’ll call her Bano.’

Our Children

I am a father of two

You are a mother of two

Let hurrahs ring round the Earth

For they are our masterpiece!

Einar Skjæraasen, ‘Onga våre’

The month the Soviet Union collapsed, there were blue stripes in the pregnancy test.

At last!

It had been quite a wait. Tone and Gunnar had both qualified as teachers. They had moved north, as far north as they could get, to Kirkenes,
right up by the Norwegian–Soviet border. When they went camping and fishing round the Pasvik valley, they could see over to the formerly mighty neighbour, which was now on the verge of collapse. The same forest on both sides, but a steady and advanced welfare state on one side, and social and industrial decline in a ticking environmental nightmare on the other.

They had moved up north because
special rates on paying down student loans were available if you took a job in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. Tone got a job at the upper secondary school in the former mining town and Gunnar taught at the secondary school, where he soon became the teachers’ union representative.

As the pregnancy test showed its blue stripes in December 1991, Gorbachev’s empire was being broken up into
fifteen republics. Tone and Gunnar decided to celebrate the pregnancy with a trip to the other side, to the nearby city of Murmansk, where people were still living in some sort of equality of poverty.

The people of northern Norway had a lot to thank the Soviets for. Hitler’s army torched every building in Kirkenes and other towns and villages in Finnmark before it was sent south by Stalin’s troops
in 1944. People up here had not forgotten it was the Red Army that liberated them. But since the war there had been precious little contact between the two peoples.

Now, the parents-to-be stood on deck in the cold on their way into the huge city and saw the vast collection of nuclear submarines in the ships’ graveyard stretching halfway along the fjord.

Tone shivered. What if the radiation damaged
the baby? A new life, vulnerable and longed for. She would have to be more careful now.

*   *   *

The snow melted, spring came, and spring turned into summer. A summer of sorts, at any rate, with average temperatures at midsummer of six to seven degrees centigrade, which suited a mother-to-be who was growing larger and feeling hotter all the time.

It was the end of July when the contractions
started.

The birth at Kirkenes hospital was long and hard. It took all the long, light night. Towards morning the baby finally arrived, big and bonny. They would call him Simon, Tone decided.

When a little brother put in an appearance eighteen months later, Simon treated him like a teddy bear. He would lie beside the baby tickling him, especially his earlobes. If Simon was going out, he would
throw his toys into the playpen so his brother wouldn’t feel lonely.

It was little Håvard who turned out to be the showman of the family. He was especially keen on singing. He often put on concerts at home, with the rest of the family as his audience.

*   *   *

Two teachers with two children, an average Norwegian family.

Every weekend they were out and about around Pasvik with the boys in
child carriers, fishing for wild salmon in the rivers, lighting bonfires under the midnight sun, before they all slept in the tent they carried with them. In July they picked bilberries, in August it was cloudberries, and in winter they wrapped the children up in sheepskin and pulled them out into open country on a little sledge.

If Simon and Håvard’s feet got cold, their parents would have them
run barefoot on the crusted surface of the snow. An old American Indian trick, their father told them. The first time, he had to dance in the snow with bare feet himself before the two chilly boys were convinced. It worked: the blood was soon coursing round their veins.

Gunnar taught his boys to distinguish between the tracks of wild creatures and tame ones. Wild animals walked in a straight
line, tame ones tended to wander more aimlessly. The lynx, with its big, round pawprints, always chose its course and stuck to it. So did the wolverine with its long, narrow prints.

He impressed on the boys that they had to be alert to the dangers of nature. Wolves could attack something as big as an elk, and scarcely an anthill was left undisturbed if bears were on the prowl.

One summer’s day,
when the family was taking a break, on the hill behind them a wolf stood staring. Thin and grey, it almost blended into the rocky mountainside. Gunnar froze.

‘Keep still. Don’t move,’ he said to the two boys. Tone picked up Håvard and Gunnar led Simon away, walking backwards. Very calmly, without any sudden movements, they withdrew up the slope to the road. The wolf slipped between the trees
and was gone.

*   *   *

‘It is time for the kids to get to know their kin,’ Tone said one day. Distances in northern Norway are vast, and trips are expensive. It was time to go home. In Kirkenes they had a council flat, it was a nice one, but it wasn’t theirs.

‘We need to find something of our own,’ Gunnar agreed.

They were lucky: the house next door to Gunnar’s grandparents fell vacant. So
they moved one county south, to the place where Tone saw Gunnar for the first time: Salangen, in Troms.

‘What a romantic place,’ exclaimed Gunnar when he returned to Upper Salangen, a short distance up from the fjord on the way to the high fells, an untamed bit of the natural world.

*   *   *

‘We’ve got to make sure we meet people,’ Tone soon concluded. So she and the woman next door started
a revue group. Then they needed writers and performers. Gunnar had once penned love poems, hadn’t he, so perhaps he could write some scripts? As for Tone, she was eager to try her hand as a stage diva.

The car was a great place for practising revue numbers. The whole family bellowing out. Håvard always the loudest.

A girl lives in Havana, makes her living how she can, sitting by her window, beckons to a man!

Every year, after the New Year’s Eve fireworks, the children of Upper Salangen put on a show. Astrid, the eldest of the neighbours’ children, was the director. The children devised comedy routines and practised their gymnastic displays. As the new year started,
Reserved
signs on cushions and chairs around the house showed the grown-ups where to sit.

Håvard usually opened proceedings
with a show tune. Simon was too shy to stand on stage, so he was the lighting technician. Throughout the show he carefully kept the family flashlight trained on the performers on the stage. He was never prouder of his younger sibling than on New Year’s Eve, when Håvard stood up there alone on stage, expertly illuminated by his big brother.

Gunnar’s scripts and lyrics soon earned quite a reputation
in the district, and schools and children’s clubs started to ring up and ask him to write something for them. The PE and IT teacher spent whole evenings writing and composing. He learnt to read and write music, and once the children were in bed he would sit, polishing up dialogues and scales.

The two boys learnt to trust in themselves early on. From Year 1 at school they went off on their own
across the garden, up the lane to the main road, then along to the crossroads where the school bus stopped. In winter, when the polar night descended on northern Norway, it was mostly pitch dark, as neither the lane nor the main road had street lights. One morning Tone was standing at the window with her coffee when she saw a shadow in the early-morning gloom. A huge bull elk was bearing down at
top speed on Simon, who was ploughing along, head down, through the squally wind and snow. The elk and the seven-year-old were on course to blunder straight into each other. Tone cried out as she lost them both from sight in the snowy storm. She rushed out in her slippers and yelled.

When she caught up with Simon, down by the road, he looked up at her and asked, ‘Why are you shouting?’

The boy
hadn’t even noticed the elk. With his back to the wind Simon looked at his mother.

‘Don’t worry about me, Mum,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a man of nature.’

Young Dreams

Journey with me

Into the mind of a maniac

Doomed to be a killer

Since I came out of the nutsac

Dr Dre & Ice Cube, ‘Natural Born Killaz’, 1994

Anders had to find a name. Before he could write on walls, he needed to find a really good
writer
name. It mustn’t have too many letters, preferably between three and five. Some letters were cooler than others, and it was important
that they looked good together, leaning on each other. He experimented in his room with felt pens and paper, producing several rough sketches.

The more you wrote your name, the more the name became yours. He had admired the big boys’ signatures around the city. Bye-bye, dull, ordinary Anders, hello tagger. The name was supposed to express something of who you wanted to be, mark you out from the
crowd.

He chose a character from Marvel Comics. The Marvel universe was ruled over by the all-powerful Galactus. One of his henchmen had betrayed his race by executing his own people. This executioner was fearless and unscrupulous, filled with defiance and greed – qualities that appealed to the mighty Galactus after several of his henchmen had fallen prey to pangs of conscience on being obliged
to kill their own. Galactus entrusted him with the job of head executioner and gave him a double-edged axe to carry out the death raid. The executioner’s name was Morg.

M and O flowed nicely across the sheet of paper, the R was hypercool but the G was tricky.

Anders left the narrow footpath between the apartment blocks in Silkestrå, looking for flat surfaces. In place of a double-edged axe,
the thirteen-year-old had equipped himself with marker pens and aerosol cans. He had bought them with the money he’d earned delivering papers in the neighbourhood. The world beyond the blue garden and the copse lay before him, waiting. He discarded his childhood like an old rag. Suddenly there were lots of identities he could choose from.