One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  ‘Help, I’m dying, help me,’ he begged.

  But there was no one there to help him. Marte wanted to, but she could not move. He gave a jerk, but went on breathing. His breathing got quieter and quieter, until it stopped.

  Breivik had put a bullet or two in each of them. Then he had gone back and shot them again. Those who had tried to get up were shot more times; one boy had five bullets in his body.

  The weapons could be lethal over a distance of up to a couple of kilometres. Here, the gunman stood at the feet of his victims and aimed at their heads. The bullets expanded and fragmented when they made contact with tissue.

  The killer was surprised by the sound emitted by people’s heads when he shot them in the skull. It was a sort of ah, an exhalation, a breath. How interesting, he thought. I had no idea.

  The sound did not always come, but usually it did; he wondered about it each time he killed a person.

  Twenty-five spent cartridge cases were strewn around them, some on top of their bodies. Five from the pistol, twenty from the rifle.

  The smell of blood, vomit and urine hung about the eleven on the path. Two minutes earlier, the smell had been of rain, earth and fear.

  From somewhere in the middle of the group came a faint moaning. Before long there was nothing but little cheeps. And then there was silence.

  Marte’s brain was bleeding. Burnt gunpowder fouled the wound in her head. Then she too lost consciousness.

  A few raindrops hit the ground.

  * * *

  ‘Psst, Ylva, come here so I can cover you.’

  Simon sat crouched on Lovers’ Path. Ylva Schwenke, one of the youngest girls from Troms, crept towards him. ‘Come here,’ whispered Simon, holding out his hand. He had been helping people get over the log. He was strong. They could hang on to him until they got a foothold and then let go and run to hide.

  ‘Girls first,’ he said gallantly. The shots were getting closer.

  Two Troms girls came towards him, holding on to each other. Eirin Kjær was carrying Sofie Figenschou, who had been shot in the shoulder and stomach as she ran across the campsite. While the two were lifted down, the queue built up. Tonje Brenna, standing at the bottom to make sure people got down all right, needed assistance. Mari, who had been up on the path, went down to help. Simon gently lifted the badly wounded girl and passed her down.

  This was a winding section of the path. Not far away, round a couple of bends, the killer kicked the eleven on the ground to make sure they were dead.

  He was finished there. So he moved on along Lovers’ Path.

  The island was still.

  Where had they all gone?

  Then he saw a hole in the fence. A log wedged across it at an angle.

  Mari saw the policeman coming.

  That’s the man who’s shooting, he’s the one shooting us, she thought the instant before she jumped. She slid down the cliff; her foot broke on landing. People were jumping over her. She lay down flat on the ground.

  Simon came leaping down the cliff towards the water.

  A voice called out.

  ‘Simon!’

  The voice reached the jumping boy in mid-leap. It was Margrethe, his companion on the romantic walk along Lovers’ Path the night before.

  ‘Come here!’ she called.

  Simon threw himself towards her. The rock ledge was full, but they managed to make space for him.

  The murderer looked over the log and down the steep drop. He would not be able to get down to the water. It was easy to lose one’s balance with all that gear, and he would have difficulty getting up again.

  He caught sight of something brightly coloured behind a bush. Lying hidden in the scrub and undergrowth were more kids he could murder.

  ‘I will kill you all, Marxists!’ he shouted gleefully, raising Gungnir.

  He shot three girls at the top of the cliff. None of them died instantly, but they soon bled to death.

  Breivik saw a foot sticking out from under an overhanging rock and fired again. The shot hit the ankle. Simon screamed. He plunged from the rock ledge. Did he fall or did he jump? Those left sitting did not know. He flew down the cliff face, he hovered, he seemed to hang in the air, before a bullet caught him in the back.

  He landed on a rock, without bracing himself, without a shout. His arms dangled down. His feet were barely touching the ground. His left hand was clenched round a snus tin. In his right hand, Margrethe’s warmth would last for a little longer.

  * * *

  Then Viljar was shot.

  Viljar and Torje had been sitting at the other end of the rock ledge as the shots came closer. They were squeezed further and further along until they were entirely unprotected. Torje wanted to go, Viljar wanted to stay. When the shots hit the cliff face above them, Torje jumped first.

  The brothers landed at the water’s edge.

  The bullets came fast. Viljar took one in the shoulder and dropped to the ground. He stood up to run and was hit in the thigh. He fell again, and tried to get up. He lurched to his feet and was almost upright when he was hit once more and toppled back down.

  There was a buzzing and whining in his ears as he knelt at the water’s edge, and then another shot went right through his arm.

  His little brother was howling.

  ‘Torje! Get away!!’ cried Viljar. Torje must not see him like this.

  He tried to kick water at his brother to make him run away from the bullets.

  He got up once again, and staggered. Blood was running down his body.

  The fifth shot hit him in the eye and shattered his cranium. He keeled over. Five bullets had fragmented inside his body. The bullet in his head had splintered into little bits that were now embedded in his brain tissue. One bit had stopped just millimetres short of his brain stem. His shoulder and arm had been virtually shot away. Half his left hand had gone.

  But it was Torje he was thinking of.

  The little brother he should be looking after.

  ‘Torje,’ he whispered.

  There was no answer from Torje.

  Shots were raining down on the young people at the shoreline.

  Ylva Schwenke, the fourteen-year-old that Simon had lifted down from the path, had been hit in both thighs and in the stomach. Then in the neck. She pressed her hand over the bullet wound as she cried out to her childhood friend who was lying right beside her.

  ‘Viljar, I’m dying!’

  ‘Oh no you’re not,’ he answered from the water’s edge. He could no longer see.

  In films you die when one bullet hits you, thought Ylva. How could she still be alive when she had been shot four times? It’s impossible to survive that, she thought, and lay there waiting for the light.

  But no light came. So she had to try to stem the bleeding instead.

  ‘I think I’ve been shot in the eye.’ It was Viljar.

  She looked at him. ‘Oh shit!’ she said. That was all, because she didn’t know what you say to someone who has been shot in the eye.

  Eirin was lying a little further up. ‘Please don’t shoot, I don’t want to die,’ she had shouted when her leg gave way under her. A bullet was lodged in her knee. Then she was hit in the back. The bullet came out her front, and now there was blood spurting from her stomach. I’m going to bleed to death, she thought as she lay there on the shingle, coming to terms with it. They were definitely all going to die. The girl beside her had been shot in the shoulder and stomach, one lung and one arm, and was drifting in and out of consciousness. It was Cathrine, the elder sister of Elisabeth who had been shot through the ear while she was talking to their father on her pink phone.

  A girl with deep wounds in her back and legs tried to use her arms to drag herself to some sort of cover. She slipped back into the water, where she lay coughing up blood. A couple of boys pulled her out of the water before retreating to their hiding places.

  ‘Tell Dad I love him,’ they heard her say.

  The whole thing had taken the gunman two m
inutes.

  It was 17.35.

  He moved on.

  Viljar lay at the water’s edge, trying to orientate himself around his body. He discovered that his fingers were just hanging by some scraps of skin. He could see nothing out of one eye, and put his hand up to it. He could feel that there was something wrong with his head. He ran his hand over his skull and felt something soft. He was touching his brain. He took his hand away quickly.

  Viljar’s skull had been shattered.

  Bits of his brain were outside his head.

  But he was thinking. He was thinking that it was important to breathe, not to pass out, not to give up. He was thinking about things that made him happy. That he would go home to Svalbard and drive a snowmobile. He thought about a girl he wanted to kiss.

  Then he went very cold and started to convulse. He was shaking. Consciousness came and went.

  ‘This is going all right Simon, we’ll get through this together,’ he said to his friend who was hanging over the rock beside him.

  Viljar was rambling. ‘We can deal with it, Simon,’ he said, and started to hum.

  He told jokes, he sang, he called to Torje.

  ‘Shush, he might come back and then he’ll get us,’ said the others around him.

  But Viljar did not hear them.

  Oh if I could write in the heavens, yours is the name I would write … sang Viljar.

  And if my life were a sailing ship …

  * * *

  Torje had thought his brother was running along beside him, until he looked round and saw Viljar fall, get up and fall again. He stopped and cried out. Then he turned, ran out into the water and started to swim.

  What Torje had seen was instantly wiped out of his mind. He would have no memory of the shots hitting his elder brother.

  He swam along the edge of the island and found a large crevice in the limestone cliff. Standing in it, he had water up to his neck. He was there all alone at first, then others came to join him. Those swimming past heard a small, red-haired boy screaming.

  ‘Where’s Viljar? Where’s Viljar?’

  * * *

  At 17.38, the first patrol left Hønefoss police station. Nobody at the station had a very clear idea of where Utøya was despite the fact that the island lay in their district and was visited every year by the Labour Prime Minister or party leader. Now they had checked it on the map.

  The two officers in the first patrol had pistols and sub-machine guns and were wearing body armour. The tactical commander had ordered them to drive towards Utøya and ‘observe’.

  They went at full speed, blue lights flashing.

  As they drove, Breivik was moving south across the island. He had now reloaded the Glock and the rifle several times. He had to avoid running out of ammunition in both weapons simultaneously. Sometimes he changed magazines even though he had a few rounds left. He had got through a lot of bullets, but he still had more.

  He fired at someone swimming. Between the trees he spied two figures. A Norwegian man and an Arab woman, he would later call them. They looked very disorientated, he thought.

  One of them was Johannes, Torje’s best friend from Svalbard.

  When the Troms contingent had scattered in panic, all fleeing in different directions, the others had lost track of Johannes. He had run towards the southern tip of the island and hidden there, then he had run back on his own, into the woods.

  Breivik stood there quietly, waiting for them to come closer. He did not raise his weapon; that would only make them turn and run. No, he waited.

  As Breivik raised his weapon, Johannes cried out to the girl.

  ‘Run! Run!’

  The bullets were faster. Three slammed into Johannes. Two into Gizem. Johannes was fourteen. Gizem had just turned seventeen.

  * * *

  ‘Daddy! I want a hug!’

  ‘No, not now, I haven’t got time.’

  ‘Cuddle,’ shouted Eilif. But his father just snatched up his keys and police badge from the shelf by the door at home in Hønefoss. Håvard Gåsbakk put his foot down and raced to the police station, ignoring the red lights. As he swung into the station, he almost crashed into patrol number two, which was just on its way out of the car park.

  The experienced police officer had been following the TV coverage of the explosion in Oslo. Gas tanks underneath the government quarter was his first thought. Then al-Qaida. Gåsbakk had been a member of Delta, the emergency response unit, before he and his family moved to Hønefoss, where police life revolved round thefts from the local supermarket and the occasional brawl. The most daring thing he ever did these days was to climb to the top of the forty-metre pine tree on his property, which gave him a view over the whole of the Tyrifjord.

  As Nordre Buskerud started calling in reinforcements, he had a call from a friend, occupying the line.

  ‘So terrorism’s reached Norway now,’ said Gåsbakk.

  ‘Yes, your lot will have to mobilise round the local town hall!’

  They chatted for a quarter of an hour. Only after he hung up, did Gåsbakk did notice that a colleague had rung and left a message on his answering machine: ‘Come in to work. There’s shooting on Utøya.’

  The patrol on the way out of the car park spotted Gåsbakk arriving and informed the chief of operations that a more senior officer was now at the station and should take over as on-scene commander.

  Gåsbakk dashed into the station, put on his uniform and body armour, unlocked the weapons room and saw a sniper rifle on a shelf. He took that in addition to his own MP5, because the local marksman was on holiday. He fetched radio equipment and the keys to one of the police cars. Now he had to get to the island as fast as he could.

  He got in the police car, but it would not start. Dammit – flat battery. There was an emergency starter in the garage and he finally got the engine going. In common with all other police cars in Norway, this one had no data transmission display. All agreements, all communication, had to be oral. Amid the constant flow of messages on the communications radio his mobile kept ringing, from the same number. It rang and he rejected the call, it rang, he rejected, he kept on pressing the button until he finally had to take it and say, ‘I don’t give a toss about the raspberries. Don’t ring again!’ It was an old friend of his mother’s who had picked some raspberries for them. They were ready for collection.

  Håvard Gåsbakk took the road to Utøya.

  * * *

  At 17.42, as Gåsbakk listened to his phone message about the shooting on Utøya, a task force of twenty-six men left the capital. It was his old colleagues of the emergency response unit – Delta – redeployed from the government quarter, now heading for Utøya, thirty-eight kilometres away. These were heavy vehicles, the roads were wet from the rain and there was a lot of traffic. On the way, they overtook a series of ambulances that had been mobilised.

  They also swept past Viljar and Torje’s parents, who had not heard anything from the boys since Torje cried on the phone and Viljar tried to reassure them.

  Their parents, Christin Kristoffersen and Sveinn Are Hanssen, had come down from icy Svalbard for the holidays and were visiting friends in Oslo while the boys were at the summer camp. They exchanged looks as a convoy of heavy black vehicles with flashing blue lights thundered by.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  It was as if all the air had been forced out of them. It was hard to breathe. The last vehicle left a swishing sound in its wake.

  Just before Sollihøgda, the boys’ parents were stopped. A roadblock was being set up, right in front of their car. Christin leapt out.

  ‘My boys are on the island! Let us through!’

  But it was no good. She tried to force herself past the roadblock.

  ‘You won’t get through here,’ said the policeman. ‘There are lots more of us. And we’re faster than you.’

  Christin realised it would be impossible either to get past by car or to run to Utøya on foot. She went back to the car, where Sveinn Are was sitt
ing quietly. Perhaps they would open the road soon. There had still been nothing on the news about an incident on Utøya.

  * * *

  Mustafa had bought all the parts for the shower cabinet before he took Ali to the football championship in Sweden. He usually shopped where things were cheapest, and then assembled them himself to make what he needed. At the hardware store in Ski he had had them cut him a 70x120 centimetre sheet to hide the pipework at the side of the cabinet. Bano had always complained that it did not look very nice with the pipes showing.

  The only thing still missing was a handle for the sliding door. ‘Typical Dad work,’ Bano would say if the shower was still unfinished when the girls got back from Utøya. ‘Those doors will never get handles,’ she would say. ‘It’s like all the jobs Dad does round the house.’

  The whole family complained about the bathroom. The bathtub was old and stained, and the walls and floor were so ingrained with grime after years of use that they had lost their original colour. Bayan tried to mop under the bath but she couldn’t get to it; the floor was always wet and the ceiling was sagging with damp. Mustafa had installed an extractor fan but it did not help. His wife wanted to get a plumber in, but Mustafa was, after all, a mechanical engineer who specialised in water and drains, so that was out of the question.

  He wanted to surprise the girls with a brand-new bathroom when they got back from Utøya. So on his return from Sweden, he went to the big store in Ski to buy a handle for the sliding door. That was where he was when he got the calls, first from Ali and then from Bano, about the bomb in Oslo.

  Now he was on his way home with the shiny new handle.

  The radio was on in the car.

  They were talking about who could be behind the Oslo bomb when a text message came through to Mustafa’s phone:

  Welove you more than anything in the world banoANDlara

  theres a man with a gunHere will ring when we are safe

  It was tricky typing on the boy’s phone; it did not have the same settings as hers. Lara had wondered whether to send the text, because she did not know where Bano was. She dared not tell her parents. So many shots, it never ended! And every single shot could be Bano. Lara and the four boys were still hiding in the bay beyond the little pumping station, where lots of the young people were now gathered.