One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  * * *

  ‘Anders Behring.’

  He said his name clearly, emphasising every syllable.

  ‘Do you come from the Bering Strait?’ laughed Thomas Wist-Kirkemo, one of the early arrivals.

  ‘My name does indeed,’ Anders replied. ‘I’m possibly related to Bering, the Dane who discovered the sea passage.’ He preferred his mother’s name now, it sounded posher and more select than his father’s rural last name.

  The offices were full of ashtrays. The room reeked of old cigarette ends. There were piles of beer cans on the floor. The place was used for meetings and for parties, one sometimes leading to the other.

  Someone from county level had come to lead the meeting. He was in no hurry to start: only a few had turned up. But in the end he rapped his gavel to open proceedings and everybody introduced themselves. There were five of them. They were briefly told about the policies of the Progress Party before the new Oslo West branch was formally constituted.

  ‘Which of you wants to stand for election?’ asked the leader.

  They all put up their hands.

  ‘Okay then, who’s the oldest here?’

  It was Thomas Wist-Kirkemo. He was four years older than Anders, and was unanimously voted in as chair. Then they had to elect his deputy. Anders quickly raised his hand and said ‘I’d like to do that.’ No one else laid claim to the position, so he got it. The other three were made committee members. There was a round of applause for the elections and then they decided to go for a beer at Politikern, a bar for ambitious young politicos in the arcade on Youngstorget.

  Anders was in a good mood. He had been a member of the Progress Party since he was eighteen – he had even been a committee member in the Uranienborg-Majorstuen branch – but it was only when he got the invitation from the party, eager to build up its youth wing, to join one of the three new local youth branches it was setting up in Oslo that he decided to make the commitment.

  He supported what the others said and was generous with compliments. He listened more than he spoke and was more restrained than he usually was in discussions with his friends. He could often be quite provocative and would never concede a point. Out on the town, it was not unusual for him to end up in quarrels with a certain amount of pushing and shoving, though seldom in actual fights.

  So these five – they were now a group, a gang – would have to stand together to change Norway.

  ‘We need to make our mark on the city council,’ said Anders. ‘Get more young people in.’ The others nodded. This evening they agreed about everything. ‘The trouble with the Labour Party,’ he went on, ‘is that there’s no way of getting rich with them in power!’

  After the meeting, Anders strolled westwards with his new title. The streets grew wider, the clothes in the shop-window displays more expensive, the pavements began to be lined with poplars, pollarded for the winter, and there were large detached houses with gardens.

  Here he was, the deputy chairman of the Progress Party Youth, Oslo West branch, walking home.

  * * *

  The ideals of his tagging phase had long since been abandoned. He had turned in the opposite direction. Tagging circles were more red than blue, and the hippest concerts were held at Blitz, where anti-racism was high on the agenda. Anders was now involved with the party that had most actively opposed the taggers. It was several years since he had last been arrested, with spray cans and a stolen emergency hammer in his rucksack, bombing a bridge at Storo in the north of Oslo. He was fined three thousand kroner and called it a day. By then he had already started at Hartvig Nissen, an upper secondary school specialising in drama, where many of the students had artistic aspirations. The saggy Psycho Cowboy jeans and Kebab Norwegian were out of place among the cultural snobs and would-be actors, and though he was pleased to be elected class rep, he felt uncomfortable there. He didn’t understand the codes, was seen as a social misfit, and left after a year.

  He started in the second year at Oslo Commerce School. Even in that conservative milieu he clung on to his tagger style for a while. He still favoured a cool, rolling walk like in the music videos from the Bronx. Some people sniggered openly when he used Pakistani expressions or gang-talk. But word had come with him that he was not somebody to be messed with. ‘He’s nuts, steer well clear of him,’ his new classmates were warned.

  So he reinvented himself once again. Slimmer-fit Levi’s and polo shirts were the order of the day now, preferably with the little crocodile on the chest. He adopted an educated, well-articulated way of speaking, replacing the East End elements with more refined expressions. He donned a smile and an accommodating air. At the Commerce School he found himself in the company of aspiring financial whizz-kids with inheritances to look forward to, along with yuppies keen to make money fast. Outside school he had a part-time job as a telephone salesman for Telia, in which he pushed everything from hunting, fishing and music magazines to scratch cards, wine calendars and crime fiction. He proved to have a flair for selling, but was soon working mainly on the customer-service side because he handled complaints so well. The boss saw him as responsible and entrusted him with tasks beyond what was normally expected.

  At high school he began speculating in shares, and one day made two hundred thousand kroner in a single transaction. It inspired him to carry on trading in shares, and he took an increasing number of days off. As time went by he hardly had time to attend classes, and just before Christmas in his final year he sent a letter to the school.

  I hereby give notice that after serious consideration I have decided to leave the third year. Thank you for an instructive time at the school. In brackets underneath he wrote: P.S. (Just a joke) If I had not had to do French I would be staying on.

  His mother was upset when he told her what he had done. He’d grown so headstrong lately, she said, and she was worried about his future. He’d always had good grades, often top marks, so why leave just six months before his final exams? But her eighteen-year-old had urgent things to attend to, and school was slowing him down.

  He told his mates he didn’t want a boss above him, creaming off the profits. He told his own boss he wanted to leave his job in telephone sales and set up his own business. That was where the money was. And while his fellow students were choosing their universities or colleges, he put all his energy into becoming a millionaire.

  Thanks to his little jobs and some hard saving, he had a starting capital of a hundred thousand kroner for the company, Behring & Kerner Marketing, that he was going to run with a friend. They had an office in the basement of the terrace in Konventveien into which Wenche and Anders had moved after Elisabeth emigrated to California. Anders’s business idea was inspired. He had told his former boss why he was leaving, to be sure, but he had pulled the wool over his eyes as well, because before leaving Telia he had got access to a database of foreigners in Norway, people he called ‘priority-A customers, the heavyweights’, and he had surreptitiously copied the database. Now he could ring round these customers and offer them cheaper call charges.

  But it turned out not to be that easy to get rich overnight. Most customers were sceptical about being contacted by the two teenagers and stayed with Telia. Then Anders fell out with Kerner, later referring to him as incompetent. He vowed never again to start a business with a friend without sales experience. After a year he wound up the business, all his capital gone.

  Anders went back to telephone sales. Before long he was promoted to team leader. By scrimping and saving, he slowly built up fresh starting capital. He had got a new idea. He wanted to set up databases of rich people, potential investors in industry and commerce, and then sell those databases to interested parties. But he was unable to find out how to locate the information he needed and had to shelve the idea.

  Then he decided advertising was the thing: he was a seller, after all.

  He set up a firm selling outdoor advertising space, aiming to undercut one of the big players. Clear Channel had contracts with landlords to
display advertising round the city, but while the cost of hiring advertising space had risen significantly, payment to the property owners had remained static. His plan was to ring round to the owners and offer them slightly more than they were getting. But first he needed to get hold of the property and company numbers, and they were far from readily available. It cost money and they had to be retrieved from public offices.

  One day when he was brooding on the matter he ran into Kristian, the neighbour whose parents had always given him a lift to football matches. After a brief chat in the street, Anders offered him a job in his one-man business and Kristian, bored with his own job, accepted.

  They found affordable premises on Øvre Slottsgate in the offices of a law firm. The rent included use of the communal lunch room, where they shared a fridge with Geir Lippestad, the lawyer who owned the firm. Sometimes the boys ate their lunches with Lippestad, at the time representing the neo-Nazi Ole Nicolai Kvisler, who stood accused of murdering fifteen-year-old Norwegian-Ghanaian Benjamin Hermansen in an Oslo suburb. Anders in particular was interested in talking to the lean, balding lawyer about the case.

  Anders was busy making contacts and building networks. He dreamt of joining the Masonic lodge and was trying to find someone who would propose him as a member, someone to suck up to, as his friends put it. Once in the lodge he would be among the elite, the way Anders saw it.

  ‘You’ve really got the knack of manipulating people!’ his new partner said admiringly. Kristian was impressed by his associate’s talent for getting what he wanted. Anders had been given access to the computers at the municipal Agency for Planning and Building Services and had copied everything he needed, entirely free of charge. That was a good start. Even so, the project ran out of money after a year, and it wasn’t long before the rent and telephone bills were going unpaid. Anders sold the business to a company that dealt in billboards on a large scale, and emerged with the same sum of money he had started out with. Breaking even. Kristian, for his part, decided to work for the company that had bought them out, and the two boys parted.

  Anders had come up with a new way of getting rich. Advertising placards could also be mobile. Then you didn’t have to pay anything for the site, because the street was free. He planned to take on an unemployed academic to cycle round the city with placards fixed to a trailer. He made a prototype in the basement at home and negotiated a contract with Platekompaniet, a chain of music and DVD stores. The contraption was sent out on its rounds but the construction was not solid enough and the placard blew over on the first day, injuring a woman. The business folded, having generated no income.

  Anders’s friends made a joke of the fact that he had insisted on an unemployed academic to ride the bike. As if to make the point that education was good for nothing. Anders, who had not taken his final exams at upper secondary, boasted that he had studied enough to use the title Bachelor of Small Business and Management, and that he had completed the entire syllabus of the MBA course.

  At this time he was also taking part in the Progress Party’s course in preparation for political office. The first evening focused on ideology and, according to the programme, ‘the big names in what today we call liberalism, such as John Locke, Adam Smith and Ayn Rand’. The next session covered the history of the Progress Party, and on the third evening the aspiring politicians had to give lectures on topical party issues. In addition, they were taught how to spread the message, which felt like home ground to Anders. Selling was his forte, after all. He had just had a bit of bad luck.

  Oh, it was that irresistible urge to get rich …

  He conscientiously attended all the meetings of the Oslo West branch. They laid plans for various activities leading up to the Oslo City Council elections in 2003. But turnout at the meetings was poor, and not much came of it all. He and Thomas Wist-Kirkemo did not get on particularly well. Thomas felt he wasn’t really getting through to his deputy and invited him out for a couple of beers to get to know him.

  Anders was bubbling over with ideas for getting rich. When Thomas steered the conversation to more personal matters, Anders went quiet and turned evasive, or changed the subject back to his business ideas.

  Thomas was also juggling plans for a company and wondered if they should work together.

  ‘No thanks, I’d never dream of mixing business and friendship,’ Anders replied.

  What friendship, thought Thomas.

  Anders went on talking about his entrepreneurial schemes. He was considering fixing billboards to a car trailer rather than a bicycle; a car was more solid.

  They stayed chatting until late, before parting to go home. When Thomas got back to his student accommodation at Kringsjå, his girlfriend was already asleep. She woke up when he got into bed.

  ‘Have a nice evening?’

  ‘Well, a bit boring. I went out with Behring and it’s so hard to get anywhere near him,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t know what to make of him. He’s so ambitious, but sort of hollow at the same time.’

  * * *

  Anders was increasingly drawn into the Progress Party Youth’s social scene. They were all around the same age, most of them were single, and it was an open, liberal circle. The youth leaders saw it as part of their recruitment strategy to attract the members to social events.

  In the Oslo West gang he got to know a girl who was the same age as him, but who was already making a career for herself in the party. Lene Langemyr was as thin as a rake with a playful expression and short, untidy hair. Smart and always ready with an answer, she sailed effortlessly into Anders’s life. They went to pre-parties, parties and afterparties together, visited each other, watched films and talked, went on outings and attended meetings with the other would-be politicians.

  They fell for each other. She thought he seemed intellectual and rather exciting. She wasn’t the studious type herself, she laughed, as he lectured her on Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.

  She was from the town of Grimstad in the south of Norway, not far from where Anders’s mother grew up. But really she was from New Delhi. There, she had been left on the doorstep of one of the city’s many orphanages one April day in 1979. Six weeks later she was brought to Norway. On Whit Sunday, a couple stood waiting at Oslo airport for the tiny girl. The information pack from the adoption agency had advised them, ‘If you cannot see a dark-skinned child fitting into your home then do not take the risk of adopting a baby from another country’ as the children could ‘turn out to be quite dark-complexioned’. In addition, the skin could darken with age.

  Dolly, as she had been called at the children’s home, found herself growing up in a ready-made family of three older brothers. She tried to emulate them, her body grew strong and swift, she wanted to prove herself their equal and never cried when she hurt herself. Lene was eight when she first learned to fire an airgun; she loved the shooting range and being taken along on hunting and fishing expeditions.

  Lene showed no interest in researching her roots. What would be the point? She was Norwegian and had a family who loved her. But sometimes the feeling of having been unwanted overwhelmed her.

  ‘I wasn’t loved by my mother,’ she told Anders. ‘I wouldn’t have been left there otherwise.’ She struggled with her sense of guilt at not having come up to scratch, she skipped school, wanted to get away, broke any rule she could, left upper secondary in the second year and rang the local recruitment office of the National Service Centre. The summer she turned eighteen she passed the physical tests and was called in for evaluation at Camp Madla, Norway’s largest recruit-training college, just outside Stavanger.

  ‘Hah, you’ll be home after a week,’ predicted her mother.

  After two weeks she was elected to represent the other recruits. She was the first girl, and the first dark-skinned recruit to fill the position.

  Lene was absorbed in being Norwegian and saw red on manoeuvres when Muslim recruits would not eat because they were served pork in their field rations. She was not sympathetic to those who asked fo
r the kitchen to use special pots and pans to prepare halal food.

  ‘What if there’s a war? Is the field kitchen going to take special pans on operations for you? No, everybody has to adapt to conditions,’ she informed them.

  Adapt, as she had done herself. She felt it in her bones. These guys had been born in Norway; they were Norwegian and couldn’t expect special treatment.

  ‘It brings out the hatred. I find it so dispiriting,’ she told Anders later. ‘My mother always said that wherever you go, you ought to adapt to the local way of life. Out of respect. They’ve got to do that too.’ The armed forces should stand for integration, not segregation.

  It was her experiences in the military that prompted her to get involved in politics. She had moved to Tromsø, where she got in touch with two right-wing parties and asked them to send their material. The Progress Party Youth got in first. Within a few months, Lene was its leader in Tromsø and the regional chair in the Troms county organisation. In October 2000, Norway’s largest paper, Verdens Gang, published a big feature: ‘Dark-skinned and leader of Progress Party Youth’. A barrier had been broken, the paper said. Lene was quoted as saying that ‘tougher immigration policies and strengthening the armed forces are the things I care about most’.

  Then restlessness set in again and she moved to Oslo, where she became the manager of a clothes shop in the Oslo City shopping centre. Once the shop closed for the day she made her way on high heels over to Youngstorget. There she would hang out at Progress Party HQ or prepare meetings and speeches. It was there she and Anders met.

  A critical attitude toward Islam was common ground for Lene and Anders at the time. Because Lene’s appearance meant she was often mistaken for a Pakistani girl, she was frequently on the receiving end of comments in the street. ‘Get dressed!’ Muslim men would shout at her if she were wearing a strappy summer dress. She complained to Anders that men sometimes harassed her when she was lightly clothed, rubbing up against her in queues or groping her in the street. She was annoyed that it was immigrants, not Norwegians, who called her Norwegianness into question. She felt she was more exposed than her blonde sisters, and if she tried to buy a smoky-bacon sausage at a kiosk, she would often be asked if she realised it had pork in it. ‘I know that, and I love them,’ Lene would answer, in her sing-song Grimstad dialect.