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Author’s Note
Everything in this book is based on testimony. All the scenes are constructed according to witnesses’ accounts.
Anders Behring Breivik’s childhood and adolescence is told through a number of sources, including his mother and father, friends, family and his own accounts to the police and in court. I have also had access to all reports about his childhood from the Oslo social services.
When it comes to the planning of his act of terror, I have, in addition to other sources, used his diary and log from the manifesto. When I refer to what he thinks in certain situations, and how he feels about them, it is always based on what he has himself said. Often I have quoted him directly and used his exact words; at other times more indirectly, just referring to what he has recounted.
The other sources from Utøya are the surviving victims. They have shared their stories and observations with me, their thoughts and feelings. Together with the perpetrator’s accounts, this made it possible to reconstruct the terror attack minute by minute.
There is a longer review of my working methods in the epilogue at the end of the book.
Åsne Seierstad
Oslo, 12 November 2014
Prologue
She ran.
Up the hill, through the moss. Her wellingtons sank into the wet earth. The forest floor squelched beneath her feet.
She had seen it.
She had seen him fire and a boy fall.
‘We won’t die today, girls,’ she had said to her companions. ‘We won’t die today.’
More shots rang out. Rapid reports, a pause. Then another series.
She had reached Lovers’ Path. All around her there were people running, trying to find places to hide.
Behind her, a rusty wire fence ran alongside the path. On the other side of the netting, steep cliffs dropped down into the Tyrifjord. The roots of a few lilies of the valley clung to the mountainside, looking as though they had grown out of solid rock. They had finished flowering, and the bases of their leaves were filled with rainwater that had trickled over the rocky edge.
From the air, the island was green. The tops of the tall pines spread into each other. The slender branches of thin, broadleaved trees stretched into the sky.
Down here, seen from the ground, the forest was sparse.
But in a few places, the grass was tall enough to cover you. Flat rocks hung over one part of the sloping path, like shields you could creep under.
There were more shots, louder.
Who was shooting?
She crept along Lovers’ Path. Back and forth. Lots of kids were there.
‘Let’s lie down and pretend we’re dead,’ one boy said. ‘Lie down in strange positions, so they think we’re dead!’
* * *
She lay down, one cheek facing the ground. A boy lay down beside her and put his arm round her waist.
There were eleven of them.
They all did what the one boy said.
If he had said ‘Run!’ perhaps they would have run. But he said ‘Lie down!’ They lay close together, their heads turned towards the forest and the dark trunks of the trees, legs against the fence. Some of them huddled up against each other, a couple were lying in a heap. Two girls, best friends, were holding hands.
‘It’ll be fine,’ one of the eleven said.
The heavy rain had eased off, but some last drops were still trickling down their necks and sweaty cheeks.
They took in as little air as possible, trying to breathe without a sound.
A raspberry bush had strayed out onto the cliff. Wild roses, pale pink, almost white, were clinging to the fence.
Then they heard footsteps approaching.
* * *
He advanced steadily through the heather. His boots stamped deeply into the ground as he walked over harebells, clover and trefoil. Some decaying branches snapped underfoot. His skin was pale and damp, and his thin hair was swept back. His eyes were light blue. Caffeine, ephedrine and aspirin ran in his bloodstream.
By this point he had killed twenty-two people on the island.
After the first shot, it had all been easy. The first shot had cost him. It had been almost impossible. But now, pistol in hand, he was relaxed.
He stopped on the little rise that provided cover for the eleven. From there, he looked calmly down at them and asked: ‘Where the hell is he?’
His voice came loud and clear.
Nobody answered, nobody moved.
The boy’s arm lay heavily on her. She was wearing a red waterproof jacket and wellingtons, he was in checked shorts and a T-shirt. She was tanned, he was pale.
The man on the rise started from the right.
The first shot entered the head of the boy lying at the end.
Then he aimed at the back of her head. Her wavy, chestnut brown hair was wet and shiny in the rain. The shot went right through her head and into her brain. He fired again.
The boy with his arm around her was hit. The bullet went through the back of his head.
A mobile phone rang in a pocket. Another bleeped as a text came in.
A girl whispered: ‘No…’ in a low, scarcely audible voice as she was shot in the head. Her drawn-out ‘No-o-o’ faded into silence.
The shots came every few seconds.
His weapons had laser sights. The pistol sent out a green trace, the rifle a red one. The bullets hit where the trace pointed.
A girl near the end of the row caught sight of his muddy black boots. At the back of his heels, down at path level, metal spurs protruded. On his trousers a chequered reflective strip lit up.
She was holding hands with her best friend. Their faces were turned to each other.
A bullet seared through the crown, the skull and the frontal lobe of her childhood friend’s head. The girl’s body jerked, the twitchings ran into her hand. Her grip slackened.
Seventeen years is not a long life, thought the one still alive.
Another shot rang out.
It whined past her ear and sliced her scalp. Blood ran over her face and covered the hands her head was resting on. One more shot.
The boy beside her whispered: ‘I’m dying.’
‘Help, I’m dying, help me,’ he begged.
His breathing grew quieter and quieter, until there was no more sound.
From somewhere in the middle of the group came a weak moaning. There were faint groans and a few gurgling sounds. Then only a little squeak or two. Before long there was silence.
There had been eleven pounding hearts on the path. Now only one was still beating.
* * *
A bit further along a log was wedged at an angle, covering a hole in the fence. Several people had crawled through the little opening and down a steep slope.<
br />
‘Girls first!’
A boy was trying to help people down. When the shots rang out from the path, he took off to make the leap himself. He jumped down from Lovers’ Path over wet sand, pebbles and shale.
A girl with long curly hair was sitting furthest out on a rocky ledge. She saw him as he jumped and called his name.
He paused as his foot made contact with the ground, stopped and looked round.
‘Sit here with me!’ she called.
There were young people all along the ledge. They squeezed together to make room. He sat down beside her.
They had met the night before. He came from up north, she was from the west.
He had lifted her up onto the stage during the concert. They’d taken a walk along Lovers’ Path and a rest on the promontory. It had been a dark and cold night for July. She had borrowed his jersey. On the final climb back up to the tents he had asked her to give him a piggyback, he was so worn out. She had laughed. But she had carried him. Just so he would be near her.
* * *
The killer kicked the eleven bodies on the path to check they were dead. Shooting them had taken two minutes.
He was finished here and so he went on along Lovers’ Path.
Inside his uniform he wore a medallion on a silver chain, a red cross on white enamel. The cross was encircled by silver decorations, a knight’s helmet and a skull. Now, it knocked against the hollow of his neck as he strode steadily on, looking about him. The sparse trees were on one side, the steep drop beyond the fence on the other.
He paused by the log. He looked over it, down the steep drop.
A foot was protruding from a rock ledge. He saw something coloured in a bush.
The boy and girl on the ledge clutched each other’s hands. When they heard the heavy footsteps come to a halt, the girl closed her eyes.
The man in the uniform raised his rifle and took aim at the foot.
He pressed the trigger.
The boy gave a cry and his hand slipped out of hers. Sand and grit sprayed into the girl’s face.
She opened her eyes.
He tumbled down. Did he fall, did he jump, she did not know. His body was thrown further as he was hit again; in the back. He floated in the air.
He landed at the water’s edge, slumped over a rock. The bullet had passed through his jacket, through the jersey he had lent her the day before, through his lung and through his chest cavity before ripping open the artery in his neck.
* * *
The man on the path was jubilant.
‘You will all die today, Marxists!’
He raised his weapon again.
Part One
A New Life (1979)
We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas, 1905
It was one of those clear, cold winter days when Oslo glistens. The sun, which people had almost forgotten, made the snow sparkle. Keen skiers cast long looks out of their office windows, up to the white hilltop, the ski jump and the blue sky.
Homebodies cursed the temperature of minus twelve, and if obliged to venture out they went with a shiver, in thick fur coats and lined boots. Children were bundled up in several layers of wool under their quilted snowsuits. There were shrieks and squeals from the toboggan slopes in the playgrounds of the kindergartens that had opened everywhere as more and more women started working full time.
Piled along the fences round the hospital grounds there were towering heaps of snow, ploughed from roads and pavements. The cold made the snow creak beneath the feet of those passing the old hospital building in the north of the city.
It was Tuesday the thirteenth, in the second month of the year.
Cars drove up to the main entrance, stopped and waited while doors opened and prospective mothers eased themselves out, leaning on men who were to become fathers. All were engrossed in their own big drama, a new life on its way.
Since the early seventies, fathers had been allowed to attend births at public hospitals. Once banished to the corridor, they could now be there for the birth, see the head pushing its way out, smell the blood, hear the baby give its first cry. Some were handed a pair of scissors by the midwife so they could cut the umbilical cord.
‘Sexual equality’ and ‘new family policy’ were key slogans through the decade. Children and home were no longer purely a women’s sphere. Fathers were to be involved in caring for their children from birth. They were to push prams, prepare baby food and join fully in raising the child.
* * *
A woman was lying in a room in great pain. The contractions were violent, but the baby was holding back. It was already nine days past its due date.
‘Hold my hand!’
She moaned the words to the man at the head of the bed. He took her hand and held it hard. It was his first time at a birth. He had three children from a previous marriage, but back then he would wait in the corridor until it was time to see the babies nicely parcelled up, two in pale blue blankets and one in pink.
The woman panted. The man held on.
They had met just a year earlier, in the basement laundry room of a block of flats in the Frogner area of town. She was renting a shoebox on the ground floor, while he owned a larger flat on the floor above. He – a newly divorced diplomat in the Norwegian Foreign Office, with a home posting after spells in London and Teheran. She – an auxiliary nurse and the single mother of a four-year-old daughter. He was forty-three, a gaunt man with thinning hair, she eleven years younger, slim, pretty and blonde.
Soon after they met in the laundry she found herself pregnant. They got married at the Norwegian Embassy in Bonn, where he was attending a conference. He stayed for a week, she for barely two days, while a friend looked after her daughter in Oslo.
She was initially pleased to be pregnant, but within a month or two she was racked with doubts and no longer wanted the baby. Life seemed uncertain, sinister. Whenever the three children from his previous marriage came to visit he appeared cold and remote. It felt like madness, having another baby with someone who seemed to take so little pleasure in children.
The month she became pregnant, legislation permitting abortion on demand was introduced in the Norwegian parliament and passed by a single vote. It only came into force the following year. The law gave women an unlimited right to abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy, with no requirement to appear before a medical board. After twelve weeks, abortion was only available on specific grounds. She had taken so long to make up her mind that it was in any case too late to scrape the foetus out. It took root in her womb.
She soon started to suffer from sickness and felt distaste for the tiny life that was acquiring new senses and abilities week by week as it absorbed nutrition and continued to grow. Its heart beat steadily and strongly, its head, brain and nerves were all developing at a normal rate. There was no detectable abnormality, no club foot, no indicators of extra chromosomes, no hydrocephalus. On the contrary, it was a lively baby, in good health according to the doctors. Annoying, its mother felt. ‘It’s as if he kicks me almost on purpose, to torment me,’ she told a friend.
The baby was blueish when he came out.
Abnormal, thought his mother.
A fine boy, said his father.
It was ten to two, in the middle of the day. The boy immediately exercised his lungs. A normal birth, according to the hospital.
There was an announcement in Aftenposten:
Aker Hospital. A boy.
13th February. Wenche and Jens Breivik.
* * *
Later, they would each tell their own story of the birth. She would say it was dreadful, and that it had been disgusting to have her husband there. He would say that it all went well.
The child had probably been harmed by all the pain-relief drugs she had received
, his mother said. The boy was fit and healthy, said his father.
Later still, they had differing versions of most things.
* * *
The Norwegian Foreign Office had introduced flexible working arrangements for young parents, and allowed newly fledged fathers to stay at home with the mother and baby for the initial period after the birth.
But when Wenche came home from the hospital to the flat in the patrician apartment block in Frogner, there was something missing.
A father who had not made sure there was a changing table in place when the newborn came home was one who did not welcome the baby, so Wenche had heard, and she brooded over this as she changed the baby on the bathroom floor. Times might have moved on, but Jens belonged to the old school, and she was the one who fed the baby, sang to him and lulled him to sleep. She suffered her way through breastfeeding, growing sore and tender. A darkness had descended on her, a depression that carried all her earlier life within it.
Finally she shouted at her husband, telling him to go and buy a changing table. Jens did so. But a wedge had been driven between them.
* * *
The boy was given the name Anders.
When the baby was six months old, Jens Breivik was appointed a counsellor at the Norwegian Embassy in London. He went over first and Wenche followed with the children, towards Christmas.
She was very much alone in their flat in Prince’s Gate. It was enormous and most of the rooms were not in use. When her daughter started at an English school, Wenche stayed at home with Anders and the au pair. The great metropolis made her feel stressed and uneasy. There in Prince’s Gate she shut herself increasingly into her own world, as she had learnt to do when she was little.
Not so long ago, they had been in love. Back home in Oslo she had a box of notes and love letters he had written.
Now she walked round the grand flat, filled with regrets. She reproached herself for marrying Jens and letting the baby bind her to him still further. Early on, she had noticed traits in her husband that she did not like. He was sulky, wanted everything his own way and was incapable of taking other people’s feelings into account; things like that played on her mind. I mustn’t tie myself to him, she had told herself at an early stage. Yet she had done exactly that.