One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  Once all the living had been taken to the mainland, he turned to the dead.

  He went over to the tall, thin boy dangling over a rock. The boy’s face was totally white and his muscles had begun to stiffen. His left hand was clutching a snus tin.

  The policeman took hold of him. He gripped his shoulders. As he lifted the boy from the rock it came.

  The blood.

  It came gushing out.

  All the blood that had been pooling in Simon’s chest cavity came flooding over the policeman. Blood that had been kept in by the pressure of the rock sprayed his face and drenched his hair; it ran down his uniform and onto his boots, and stained his hands red.

  It was precisely as much blood as could fit in a strong young chest.

  Does Your Child Have Any Distinguishing Features?

  On Saturday morning, Jens Stoltenberg took the shortest possible route to Sundvolden. He climbed into a helicopter at Akershus Fortress and fastened his seatbelt. The machine rose into the air.

  All through the evening and night he had been in emergency meetings: the police had briefed him; PST had briefed him. Norway had been exposed to a terrorist attack from the inside. One by one his secretaries of state had come to see him at his residence, to which his staff had moved after his office in the Tower Block was reduced to rubble. Bedrooms were turned into offices, armchairs served as beds. The long wooden dining table accommodated a growing number of computers, mobile phones and notebooks. Most of his ministers were on holiday when the bomb exploded; a lot of them at summer homes the length and breadth of Norway, in the mountains, in the woods, by the sea, and they assembled gradually, depending on how far they had to come.

  Stoltenberg initially did not want to believe it.

  He clung to the hope that it was a gas leak. He was exasperated at being confined to the secure room. But it was the police, not the leader of the country, who decided such matters. He wanted to get out and set to work. In there, news from the outside world came via a couple of mobile phones. At times he was left sitting in the room on his own.

  The first intimation that something dreadful was happening at the AUF summer camp had come in a text message at a quarter to six from the Minister of Culture Anniken Huitfeldt, herself a former AUF leader. ‘Shooting incident on Utøya. Some dead, I hear.’

  The Prime Minister was kept constantly updated on the worsening situation. He received the disquieting reports of the increasing number of deaths before they reached the news media. By about ten o’clock on Friday evening, still only seven deaths had been reported. Around midnight, a figure of ten was issued.

  Then came the shock announcement at between three and four the next morning: more than eighty killed.

  Towards morning Norway’s chief of police Øystein Mæland, who had also been best man at Stoltenberg’s wedding, confirmed a total of eighty-four.

  * * *

  As the helicopter came in over the Tyrifjord, the Prime Minister asked the pilot to take a sweep over Utøya. He knew every point and bay of the island, he knew which flowers would be spreading their fragrance in late July, where there was sun and where there was shade, where Lover’s Path was at its most romantic. The year before, he and his father Thorvald had had one of the points named in their honour as a thank-you for donating to Utøya the royalties from the book they wrote together. The point was called Stoltenberget. The previous day, three young people had been killed there.

  Jens Stoltenberg was fifteen the first time he came to Utøya. That was in 1974. The AUF was in the doldrums after a divisive split in the Labour movement over EEC membership two years earlier, with the mother party campaigning wholeheartedly for YES, while the youth wing clearly came out in favour of ‘Vote NO’. The EEC was ruled by capital, the AUF argued. The Labour Party lost a lot of its votes to the more left-wing Socialist Electoral Alliance in the election the year after the referendum and had to try to pick up the pieces. The entire AUF was quite unpopular with the Labour Party leadership, particularly for its standpoint on foreign policy: the young radicals’ stance on issues like the Vietnam War, support of the PLO in Palestine, criticism of apartheid in South Africa and opposition to NATO.

  Utøya was also at a low point. The island was a heavy burden on the AUF budget and the secretary of the organisation declared that he wished the whole island would sink into the fjord so they would be rid of it. It was overrun by water voles, the buildings were rotting and there was no proper maintenance. In 1973, a German businessman had put 1.5 million kroner on the table to buy the whole island, which had been a gift to the AUF from the trade unions in 1950.

  But then the AUF took the decision to really make something of the heart-shaped island. To tempt people to the summer camp in 1974, the members’ newspaper wrote of a state it called ‘Devoted to Utøya’ and held out the prospect of community singing, political workshops, sun, summer and new issues to campaign on.

  The teenage Jens Stoltenberg was one of those who rapidly became devoted to Utøya, and since his first trip in 1974 there had only been two years when he had missed a visit. This year would have been his thirty-fifth summer.

  As the pilot swung across the island the Prime Minister stared down. He saw numerous white spots on the ground. In some places they lay like strings of pearls along the shoreline. Every pearl was a blanket. Every blanket was a human life.

  It was impossible to take in.

  He had been told what had happened, he had seen the number, but it was a number the economist simply could not grasp. He had dealt with numbers and statistics all his working life but he was not accustomed to counting life, to counting death.

  They sat in silence. The only sound as the helicopter landed was the whirring of the rotor blades.

  The Prime Minister, dressed in a black suit and tie, entered the hotel lobby. He was taken through reception to the bar area, a place that made him think of drinks in tall glasses. Nobody was there now. They were all in the banqueting hall, up a few steps from the bar. The chief of the Hønefoss police station and a man from the Criminal Investigation Service’s ID group were up on the stage. They were giving information about the last group of young people to be identified as alive.

  Sitting in the hall were the Sæbø family from Salangen, the Kristiansen family from Bardu, the Rashid family from Nesodden and some hundred other families, next of kin of the missing.

  The police officers on the stage had a list of thirteen names. These were young people who had been missing but had now been identified, alive but injured, at hospitals all over southern Norway.

  Their names were read out one by one.

  Every name was greeted with joy by one family, and growing anxiety by the rest.

  Stoltenberg and those with him stood at the back of the hall. The Prime Minister surveyed the napes of necks. The shoulders. The backs. The sheer number of them. The number of parents. Younger siblings sitting next to a mother or father, leaning close. He could see those trembling, or shaking, and those sitting utterly, utterly still.

  There are too few names and too many parents, Stoltenberg thought.

  He knew many of those sitting in the hall; he knew their children. He had followed some of them from birth, others from the time they first spoke at the Labour Party congress. He had argued vehemently against some of them in the question of EU membership, he now being an adult in the YES camp, while they were the young radicals. Monica Bøsei – Mother Utøya – who was confirmed dead, had been a close friend.

  With every name that was read out, the chances were reduced for the parents still sitting there. Those who hoped to hear that their offspring were among the critically injured. Because that would mean they were alive.

  The last name was read out. Eighty-four was no longer a number, it was a catastrophe. There was no more hope; there were no more injured survivors.

  Stoltenberg had to struggle to keep upright. Soon they would all be coming past him on their way out of the hall.

  Then a police officer came
in with a note, which he handed to one of the men on the stage. They had been notified of one final survivor at a small hospital in Ringerike. The patient had now been sent to the larger Ullevål University hospital in Oslo.

  Stoltenberg held his breath.

  There was one last chance.

  ‘It is a girl,’ read the man on the stage.

  The parents of boys are out of hope now, thought Stoltenberg.

  It was unbearable. He himself had two children the same age as those on Utøya, a boy and a girl.

  The parents of girls glimpsed a ray of hope.

  ‘… between fourteen and twenty, about 1.62 metres tall…’

  ‘Oh God, it’s Bano!’ exulted Bayan under her breath.

  ‘… with dark hair…’

  ‘It’s Bano!’

  It all tallied: the height, the age, the hair colour!

  ‘… and blue eyes.’

  Lara looked at her mother. Her heart sank.

  ‘Contact lenses,’ whispered Bayan. ‘She must have been wearing blue contact lenses!’

  ‘She has a distinctive scar on her neck.’

  ‘It’s her,’ whispered another mother. ‘It’s Ylva.’ She was crying. ‘It has to be Ylva!’

  Ylva – Viljar and Torje’s childhood friend – had been lifted by Simon over the log and then shot four times just seconds after Simon. She had still not been able to say her name.

  Ylva’s mother turned and looked at Stoltenberg, whom she had known for some years. She came towards him. Behind her, the meeting was breaking up.

  Stoltenberg was overwhelmed. He embraced her and was about to say, ‘That’s wonderful!’

  But just as he found his voice, his eyes met those of another mother. Her last hope was gone. Her gaze burned into him.

  ‘Those eyes. Those eyes,’ he said later. ‘It was like the entrance to hell.’

  He held his tongue and gave Ylva’s mother a pat on the back instead.

  Jens Stoltenberg is a man who only believes in matters that can be proved. This atheist rarely throws big words around. He seldom talks in images and allegories, and all his life he has been direct, concrete, a little hard-edged and abrupt. But in his encounter with all those lives cut short, through those who loved them more than anything, vocabulary had to expand and broaden; the word hell acquired a concrete meaning.

  He went out to the bar. There was bright daylight outside. In here the desperate stood among disco balls and mirrored walls. It was hot and sticky, and a pungent smell spread through the room.

  Stoltenberg went over to the nearest group of seats. There a daughter was missing. In the next one it was a son. In the third they told him their son had kept on calling, and then suddenly there were no more calls. A father had heard screams down the phone, then silence. One youngster had swum with a wounded friend on his back. A girl who had not really meant to take part this year had gone to Utøya anyway; now she was missing.

  Missing gradually came to mean deceased.

  Stoltenberg knelt down beside people who were not capable of getting up from their seats. He hugged, he cried. He folded people in his arms, he patted and comforted them. It was an intense sensation: all those people, all those bodies, faces in shock, young folk telling him they had cried ‘Kill me, kill me, I can’t bear this any longer,’ when the response unit arrived.

  There was scarcely a hand’s breadth between the groups of seats. I can’t get through this, thought Stoltenberg. There are too many of them. The number that was no longer a number overpowered him.

  On the way out, numerous microphones were thrust into his face. He pulled himself together and talked, in Norwegian and English, about consideration, fellowship and warmth. While the local reporters were most preoccupied with Stoltenberg’s feelings and the fact that the royal family had arrived, the foreign journalists asked searching questions about the country’s state of preparedness for terrorist attacks.

  ‘Do you have confidence in the police and the security apparatus, Mr Stoltenberg?’ asked an American reporter.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said the Prime Minister.

  But today, feelings were his strongest point. ‘Utøya is the paradise of my youth and yesterday it was turned into a hell.’

  That was how it was.

  * * *

  After the meeting in the banqueting hall, Gunnar had to find Geir Kåre.

  The Sæbø family had got seats on a flight from Bardufoss early that morning. Viggo and Gerd Kristiansen were on the same plane. They knew nothing, nothing at all, about their son. Nobody had seen Anders after he ran from the campsite. Roald and Inger Linaker had also flown with them. They had found out that their son was in hospital, badly hurt. They had no idea how badly.

  Håvard had been given a sleeping pill before take-off, and he fell asleep. Tone and Gunnar sat clasping hands.

  Simon had been shot, they realised that. He would have called otherwise. He must be on an operating table somewhere. That was why he could not call.

  Before leaving Salangen they had sent pictures of him to the emergency ward at Ullevål, where the most critically injured had been flown. The hospital had asked if there was any distinguishing feature they could look for.

  ‘Distinguishing feature? Tone! Does Simon have any distinguishing features?’

  Tears ran down Tone’s cheeks. ‘Distinguishing features?’

  She wanted to answer that they should look for a beautiful boy. The most beautiful of all.

  Then she remembered the mole on his chest.

  Once they had registered at Sundvolden, Tone gave her DNA; a cotton-bud swab in her mouth, that was it. The parents were asked again about Simon’s distinguishing features: had he any scars, piercings, tattoos, distinctive clothing or hair? They had to fill in a yellow form called an ante mortem, to make it easier for the police to find Simon. This was something everybody had to do, the two of them agreed. The form was to help to identify Simon if they found him alive, but terribly injured.

  Back at reception, they once again looked very thoroughly through all the lists of survivors that were up on the walls.

  ‘I must find Geir Kåre. I’m sure he knows something. Do you want to come with me?’

  No, Tone did not want to. She wanted to sit at a table in a corner and wait for him. She could not bring herself to talk to someone who knew.

  * * *

  Gunnar found Geir Kåre.

  Geir Kåre took him in his arms. Held him.

  Until then, Gunnar had clung to a tiny hope.

  But Geir Kåre had seen everything.

  Gunnar wandered in a daze across the terrace of café tables and parasols. He crossed the road and went down to the water. There he had to stop.

  He couldn’t get any air. It all went black. There was no air reaching his lungs. He stood there fighting uncontrollably for breath. His chest constricted.

  His thoughts choked him, stabbed him and sank. Certainty took hold. His loss was so vivid to him, and memories flooded in. And everything that would not become memories.

  There on the shore, Gunnar wept.

  It came home to him now.

  It was so final. We won’t see Simon again.

  Then he went up to Tone.

  And told her.

  A priest came over to them and sat down by Håvard, who had been going about like a sleepwalker ever since he locked himself into his room the previous evening. He sat there stiffly, shut away inside himself.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about your brother?’ asked the priest.

  Håvard nodded.

  There were skilled people going among them: priests, psychologists and people from the Red Cross. The King and Queen were there, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. They were discreet, circumspect, warm. Besides Stoltenberg, a number of his ministers were also circulating. Anniken Huitfeldt, the Minister of Culture, came over to their table.

  ‘Who are you here for?’ she asked.

  ‘Simon Sæbø,’ said Gunnar, his voice giving way.

&nbs
p; ‘Oh, the one who saved so many!’ the Minister exclaimed.

  ‘What’s that?’ Gunnar gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘Yes, he was the one who helped people down from the path and gave away his own place!’ said the minister.

  What? Had he sacrificed his own life?

  Gunnar was bewildered. What was she saying?

  A boy who could have been alive, but wasn’t. Is that what she was saying?

  Had he chosen others’ lives over his own?

  More people came up and told him the same thing, or variations on it.

  That Simon had saved lots of people at the cliff’s edge.

  A new sadness stampeded over them.

  An unspeakable sadness.

  He could have been alive! It was his own fault!

  * * *

  In Ullevål hospital, Viljar Hanssen was fighting for his life, while Gunnar Linaker, the goalkeeper of the Troms football team, had given up. That is, his body had given up. The king of keepers was still breathing when the police lifted him from the ground at the campsite, where he had been shot in the act of shouting ‘Run!’ to the rest of the Troms camp. He was still breathing when they took him down to a boat. On the way over the strait, his breathing stopped, but the rescue team got it going again. In the helicopter, they connected him to a respirator.

  He was on the machine when his parents arrived from the airport. The doctor explained that if they took him off it, he would not live. The first shot had hit him in the back and gone on up the back of his neck and head, where it had expanded. The second had gone straight into the back of his head. He was knocked out by the first shot, the doctor said, but it had not penetrated the cerebellum, so he had carried on breathing. But now, there was no longer any blood supply to the brain.

  ‘It’s so unfair! It’s so unfair!’ cried his sister Hanne in the sterile hospital room. She had first recognised her brother by the tattoo on his leg when they were carrying him off the island, covered by a blanket.