One of Us
Page 51
At noon groups of AUF members were ferried over. Stoltenberg came, the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt came, the boss of the trade union confederation, Cabinet ministers, the left-wing Swedish singer Mikael Wiehe, the AUF leadership and lots of young people. They sat on the ground that sloped down to the open-air stage and listened to fine words about democracy and solidarity. The parents did not fit in there. There was a risk they might scream or shout, ruining the carefully choreographed event.
As part of the compromise deal the parents had been told they could return to the island after 5 p.m., because by then the AUF members would have gone off to the next item on their programme, the big memorial concert on the waterfront by the Town Hall. There was much excitement at the prospect that Bruce Springsteen was going to perform.
‘Sometimes I wonder what my lad was caught up in,’ said Gerd. ‘Would he have turned out like that too?’
The first Christmas, the Kristiansen family had received a pre-printed Christmas card from the Prime Minister. From the AUF leader, not a word. Then Jens Stoltenberg telephoned them on their first New Year’s Eve without Anders. On the second anniversary of the killings, the foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre rang. He offered his condolences again the first time he passed through Troms after the massacre. Later they received a personal, handwritten letter from him, and a long letter from the vice-chair of the AUF, Åsmund Aukrust, who wrote of what Anders had meant to the youth organisation, how sad he was to lose him and how much he was missed.
The parents read those letters many times.
* * *
Grief is a solitary journey. Their great fear was that Anders would be forgotten.
It warmed their hearts when the Children’s Ombudsman sent them a DVD of pictures and recordings of Anders taken at the National Youth Parliament at Eidsvoll, where he had been a delegate, and the County Council sent them recordings of the speeches Anders had made there. But the best thing of all was when Viljar visited. Then it was as if Anders was just about to step through the door.
What made them so bitter was the sense that nobody was taking any real responsibility for what had happened. At about the same time, a bus driver in the district stood accused of involuntary manslaughter because he had been inattentive for a moment, lost control of the vehicle and three people were killed. ‘Is it that if you’re far enough down the ladder, you get charged?’ asked Viggo.
Questions went churning round in their heads.
Could one say that the police were inattentive on 22 July? Could one say that the authorities were inattentive beforehand? Could one say it was irresponsible that the crew of Norway’s sole police helicopter were all on leave for the whole of July? Could one say that individual police officers had not followed the instructions for a ‘shooting in progress’ situation, indicating that direct intervention was required? Should anyone be charged with negligence?
Viggo could answer ‘yes’ to all those questions. He was angry when Stoltenberg said, I take responsibility. While not accepting the consequence of the errors by resigning. Events had exposed the fact that Norway had a police leadership which was paralysed in a crisis. The system had failed. Seventy-seven people had been killed. Was no one to be charged with anything?
Well yes, the perpetrator was under lock and key, and Viggo wished him all possible ill. He should have been sentenced to seventy-seven times twenty-one years in prison. But beyond that:
What responsibility did the AUF take for the children and young people on the island?
What security assessments had the AUF leadership made after the bomb in Oslo?
Were there evacuation plans?
Was there an emergency plan?
Was the MS Thorbjørn to be used in case of an evacuation of the island?
The AUF had not subsequently provided any answer to these questions. Viggo received no answers. The only thing he heard was that they were going to ‘reclaim Utøya’.
A year after the killings, the AUF presented sketches, done by a firm of architects called Fantastic Norway. The pictures showed happy, computer-generated young people round the new buildings; a central clock tower; bright, attractive modern structures. Many of the bereaved felt the plans had been drawn up too soon. Their grief was still all-consuming. Is the building where my daughter died going to be torn down? Are young people going to take romantic walks round Lovers’ Path where so many were slaughtered? Will they sunbathe on the rocks where youngsters bled to death?
Many of the bereaved protested about the plans that had been announced. The AUF leader responded: ‘When it comes down to it, I think it has to be left to the AUF to decide this question.’
‘Is that how an AUF leader should talk?’ asked Viggo.
‘Well, perhaps it is,’ was Gerd’s laconic reply. ‘Perhaps the AUF has always been like that.’
They felt they had never properly understood what Anders was involved in. Who were these people? Former AUF leaders had gone on climbing, almost without exception. They had been lifted up into the machinery of power. They had been picked up as political advisers, state secretaries, been given jobs in the administration of government.
But for the organisation to be so ruthless towards those who were grieving, no, they had not imagined that. ‘It’s as if they want me to say: Hallelujah! My son was in the AUF,’ sighed Gerd. ‘The one thing I can say is that Norway didn’t take care of Anders, and that the country isn’t taking care of us now. Taking care of also means not forgetting.’
* * *
Viggo went out. He had something to do.
It was time to paint Anders’s hut in the garden. It had been standing there untouched, just as Anders left it. His films were on the shelf. His jacket was hanging inside the door. Viggo had got hold of the right blue-green colour that Anders had once chosen.
His son had talked about painting the door, but he had never found time between all those meetings and trips back and forth to Tromsø. It needed a new coat now. Viggo had to keep at least something in order when everything else was falling apart around them. Grieving was heavy work.
Viggo could not get used to it, could not accept that Anders would never leap off the school bus again, that he would never again come walking up the path. That the school bus existed, the path existed, but Anders did not.
It was not only questions to the state apparatus, the police and the AUF that were churning round inside Viggo’s head. He also had some questions for his son.
Why did you lie down on the path?
Why didn’t you run?
What were you thinking, just before he fired?
Did it hurt?
He gave the hut one coat, the door two. He left the door open to dry.
‘Think how pleased Anders would have been to see it looking so nice,’ he said to Gerd when he came in.
They always went up to Anders’s room when evening came. They always put his light on when it got dark.
When it was time for bed they looked in to say good night, sleep well and turned off the lights.
Gerd kept the room in order. That is to say, she did not tidy or move things, she just made sure it did not get too dusty. Stian liked wearing his younger brother’s clothes when he was home on holiday. Some of Anders’s friends had also picked out items of clothing, as reminders of him.
When Anders went to Utøya there was a brand-new suit hanging in his wardrobe. Gerd and Anders had gone shopping in Tromsø because the eighteen-year-old had wanted a proper suit. His first dark, grown-up suit. He wanted to see what they had at Moods of Norway. There, he tried on the finest suit he could find. Gerd had never seen him stand so tall and look so handsome.
‘Get it,’ she said.
‘But it’s expensive, Mum.’
‘We’ll split the bill,’ said Gerd.
Then her eyes fell on a matching waistcoat. ‘Try that,’ she said.
It was a perfect fit. ‘We’ll take that too,’ she said. ‘I’m paying.’
* * *
As he lay in his coffin in the white-painted chapel in Bardu, Gerd spread the blue woven cover over him. Sky blue, blue as the sky. Just as Anders had wanted it.
She could never weave with that colour again.
The Sentence
He had brought some of his clothes. But it wasn’t like at home, where he had a wardrobe in his room.
Garments from his earlier life were kept in the storeroom with the other inmates’ clothes. When he wanted to change, he had to ask.
Within a few months of starting his sentence he had had enough, and composed a letter of complaint to the Directorate of Correctional Service at Ila prison.
‘Since it is usually quite chilly in the cell, I generally wear a thick sweater or jacket,’ he wrote. ‘I regularly have problems when asking for one. For some reason they often bring me one of my Lacoste jerseys, despite my having pointed out on several occasions that I do not want one of these as they are valuable and must be preserved from too much wear and tear. I have therefore ended up on various occasions having to freeze for one or two days until I can talk one of the warders into going down to the store to get one of the three proper sweaters.’
Anders Behring Breivik was detained in the high-security section; daily routines were strict. It annoyed him intensely. At home he had kept various creams and perfume bottles, whereas here he was not even permitted a tiny tube of moisturiser. Every morning he was given a little plastic cup with some of his day cream in it. Unfortunately the cream dried up and became unfit for use in the course of the day. This was grounds for complaint.
He was often given only enough butter for two or, at a pinch, three slices of bread, even though they knew that he ate four. ‘This creates unnecessary annoyance because I either have to eat dry bread or be made to feel guilty for asking for more.’ He described the warders’ collection of the plastic cutlery and other items after meals as a form of low-intensity psychological terror. They came so quickly that he felt obliged to hurry his food and drink. And because he was not allowed a thermos flask in the cell, his coffee was cold when he got it, eighty per cent of the time.
In his complaint he alleged that he was considering reporting the prison to the police for breaches of the Norwegian constitution, human rights legislation and the Convention against Torture.
* * *
He was in solitary confinement, in a cell stripped of furniture, with white walls on which no decoration was allowed. The section was commonly known as the Basement. He complained about the lack of furnishing and the fact that he was ‘denied the inspiration and mental energy which art on the walls’ could provide. He also complained about the view: ‘A nine-metre prison wall blocks out everything except the tops of the trees.’ He complained that the windows were covered in a dark film that kept out some of the natural light. ‘As a result I have to take vitamin pills to prevent vitamin D deficiency, among other things.’
Lighting was a general problem. The switch was outside the cell. It was frustrating to wait ‘up to forty minutes’ for them to turn up with his toothbrush and switch off the lights. The on–off switch for the TV was also outside the room. He had to tell them what he wanted to watch, and on which channel. The picture was poor and there was an annoying echo on the sound because the set was inside a secure box made of perspex and steel. As for radio, he was not pleased that he could only get P1 and P3 programmes and not the culture channel, P2. This was detrimental to his intellectual wellbeing.
He had three cells at his disposal. The first was a living cell with a bed, a place to eat and a cupboard. The second was a work cell with a typewriter firmly stuck to a table. The third was a workout cell with a treadmill. He was not satisfied with the running machine. He was not a long-distance runner, he had told the prison, but a body builder. Naturally, free weights were out of the question on security grounds, but already on his very first week in prison he had devised ways of toning his body with the help of his own body weight. Then he lost his motivation. Through the autumn of 2012 he lost his spark. ‘A sense of resignation,’ his lawyer called it.
* * *
He was working on a manuscript about the trial, with the title The Breivik Diaries. He was writing it in English. Norwegian readers did not interest him; it was the international book market that he wanted to reach.
But his working conditions were not the best. He could not move freely between the cells. He often had to wait when he asked to be transferred to the work cell. For a time, he did not want to go there at all. ‘I feel that the price I have to pay for using this facility is too high, as I have to fight a daily battle to get access to the cell for a full working day.’
The worst part of being moved between cells was the strip searches. ‘A strip search involves being ordered to take off all my clothes, which are then thoroughly checked, item by item,’ he wrote. This was something he dreaded every day, he commented. It also annoyed him that he had to organise his papers again after every such search. He also had to remake his bed. The place was such a mess whenever they had been there.
If he did not use the work cell with the table-mounted typewriter, he was limited to pen and paper. He had been given a soft rubber pen and complained that he could not write more than ten to fifteen words a minute with it. The pen was not ergonomic and made his hand hurt.
There were various things about life in prison that he found painful. Among them the handcuffs he had to wear when he was moved between cells or taken out into the exercise yard. He claimed he had developed ‘friction cuts’ because ‘the steel rim on the inside of the cuffs rubs the skin on my wrists painfully raw’. He noted that he had developed a sense of anxiety about handcuffs, perceiving them as ‘a violation and mental burden’. There were several stresses and strains of that kind.
‘The two cameras and the peephole in the door of the study cell contribute to a constant sense of tension and surveillance.’ Checks through the hatch could come at inconvenient times, such as ‘just at the moment one is using the toilet, which adds considerably to the sense of physical strain. It feels at times like a mental shock, especially if the hatch is slammed as well.’ At nights he could be woken by a torch shining in through the hatch.
At times it was hard to concentrate when he was writing. Some of the other prisoners in solitary confinement turned up the volume of their music just to provoke him, he wrote. The sound of wardens yelling and fellow prisoners shouting also threw him out. ‘I want peace and quiet. I want to be left undisturbed,’ he wrote.
* * *
For a time, prison life had not been too bad. When the ban on letters and visits was lifted in December 2011, four months before the trial, there was a pile of correspondence waiting for him. Some of it was from like-minded people. He answered many of the letters, and what he wrote was then reproduced on various blogs. The police had kept their promise and had provided a PC, so he made a template for a letter of reply and could simply insert the name of the addressee and at times amend the introduction a little. Then all he had to do was ask for the letters to be printed out and then he could send them off by post. It was just as he had wanted it. His words were being disseminated. They were reproduced on blogs and floated round in cyberspace and got out to his supporters. His throne grew taller.
His only slight problem was a lack of stamps. He therefore urged all those writing to him to enclose stamps for return postage. His daily allowance of forty-one kroner did not go very far when stamps cost ten apiece.
One of his correspondents was someone calling himself Angus. That username put everything he received on the website The Breivik Archive.
In July 2012, a few weeks after the end of the trial, Breivik wrote to him: ‘I shall sleep for a year now!’ He wrote that he was very keen to establish contact with sympathisers on the internet, via
blogs and on Facebook. He would be happy to write essays about the battle against cultural Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamisation.
‘I sacrificed and forfeited my old family and friends on 22/7, so my correspondents will be the closest thing I have to a family. Don’t be freaked out by that, because I can assure you I am corresponding with many brothers and sisters all round the world :-) I am now living in isolation and will very likely do so for many, many years. This is not problematic, as it was clearly my own choice. I am used to living ascetically, so it will not be difficult to carry on in the same way :-) In fact, it has given me a focused and balanced mind, not polluted by greed, desires and appetites – and one can work. If I tell myself this often enough, I’m bound to believe it in the end, haha!’
Prison inmate Anders Behring Breivik could, in short, communicate with anyone he wished. He could write anything apart from texts that could be seen as a direct incitement to criminal acts.
After the trial, Ila prison requested new guidelines about how to handle his correspondence. The answer came back that the existing rules were to be interpreted and applied more strictly. In the light of the act of terrorism committed by the prisoner, and what he had said at the trial about it still not being complete, all political statements to sympathisers were to be viewed as incitements to violence.
The tightened-up regime came into force in August 2012. Once the deadline for appealing the custody verdict passed in September, the PC was taken away from him. The detainee was no longer the responsibility of the police, but of the Directorate of Correctional Service. Only in special circumstances, and solely for educational purposes, were prisoners allowed to borrow a computer. The prison would not make an exception for Breivik.