This was a big loss to him. Without the PC he could no longer cut, paste and copy the letters he wrote. They had to be written one by one. In addition, they were now often stopped by the censor. His quality of life plummeted.
The conditions were degrading and unbearable, he wrote in his letter of complaint.
He was short of cash and wanted cigarettes, snus and his favourite sweets, liquorice logs. If he cleaned his three cells himself his daily allowance went up to fifty-nine kroner. He had done little cleaning in his life. At Hoffsveien his mother took care of it, and before that, when he lived on his own, his mother had come round to clean for him as well. At Vålstua farm, the grime had simply accumulated.
At Skien prison, where he had been held for a while, he had access to a mop. At Ila he was issued with a cloth.
‘In other words, I am forced to scrub the three cells on my knees, which I find demeaning.’
* * *
While her son was serving his sentence at Ila, Wenche Behring Breivik went back and forth between Hoffsveien and the Radium Hospital. Some months after the terror attack, a tumour had started to grow inside her. It grew rapidly. She underwent an operation, and was given chemotherapy and drugs for the pain and the nausea.
As winter was coming to an end, she got a room on the second floor of the Radium Hospital. The cancer had spread to her vital organs.
On the glass door to the corridor where Wenche Behring Breivik’s room was located, a sign informed visitors that no flowers or plants, fresh or dried, were to be taken on to the ward. External bacteria were to be kept out.
The walls of the corridors were greyish white. The doors were green, with black numbers stuck on them. A little sign hung on one of them, on a metal chain: Visitors are asked to report to the staff.
This was the room of the terrorist’s mother.
The door to the room was wide. A bed could easily be wheeled in and out. But the room itself was narrow, with space beside the bed only for an armchair and a small table. The view had the same shade of grey every day, because the room was in a corner of the building where grey walls protruded. The room looked out over a roof a floor below, covered in grey shingle. If you rested your head on the pillow, you could see a little section of sky.
‘I’m the unhappiest mother in Norway,’ Wenche had told the police just after her son’s arrest. ‘My heart is all frozen up.’
Over the winter, her heart had thawed a little. She could not bring herself to think about the terrible thing that had happened. Nor to speak of it, nor to have it in her head. She wanted to remember what was good, what had been good.
One day in early March she decided to tell her story.
The ground outside the hospital was still white and hard as ice, trampled down after a winter in which new snow kept on falling. There hadn’t been so much snow in the city for years, nor such treacherous pavements, nor such great skiing on the slopes above the hospital.
Wenche sat upright in bed in a pale blue hospital gown, her head held high. Her scalp was bare, with just a few downy bits of hair waving on top. Her blue eyes were fringed by eyelashes with black mascara, and there was a shimmer of grey-blue shadow on her eyelids. Her face was gaunt; her skin, with liver spots and patches of solar keratosis, was stretched thinly over sharp cheekbones. Her gaze was open and direct.
‘I was so proud of…’ she began.
Her voice broke. She tried to pull herself together. ‘I might start crying every so often, but it can’t be helped…’
She went on from where her tears had interrupted her: ‘… proud of being the mother of … of Anders and Elisabeth…’
Her sobbing got the better of her, her shoulders shook. She struggled to be able to speak again. ‘I, I … I did the best I could…’
She let her emotions have the upper hand for a few moments before getting a grip on herself and saying clearly:
‘Oh, we thought we’d found happiness!’
There was a metallic note to her voice, something mechanical, something a little old-fashioned.
‘Then it was Silkestrå. We bought a flat in 1982, moved in and started our homely happiness project. Which is the best thing that ever happened to me. Oh, I thought it was so nice. The children thought it was nice. We were looking forward to starting our new life. There’d be no more obstacles in our path. We could get busy on everything, things that needed doing, like decorating the flat, and I had my job as well, so they were grand times…’
Her phone played a little tune. She answered it.
‘Yes, oh hello, Elisabeth. Yes, fine. Yes, really sick, I throw up every day. Much the same, pretty bad, yes. No, they haven’t moved me yet, we shall have to see. Yes, they explain everything, but I lose the thread. You know, cancer patients have a tendency to be suspicious of what they’re told. I don’t really feel very good wherever I am, and I shall be going home soon now. All right, bye for now, Elisabeth.’
She went on with her story.
‘Things weren’t going well for Anders at the time. Dreadful. Lots of break-ups in his life. Of course he got overlooked in the midst of it all. When you’re caught up in a conflict, you’re blind to your children and other people. You don’t see yourself clearly either. You can’t.’ She paused. ‘And I felt guilty about being inadequate. I’m sure I did.’
‘In what way were you inadequate?’
‘I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t mature enough for the task.’
‘What task?’
‘Being a mother.’
She stopped, adjusted her back a little. ‘This thing with Anders has something to do with my own childhood, I expect. The circumstances I grew up in were tough. I’ve never come across anyone who had a worse time. Very poor conditions. Really harsh conditions. I had to look after my mother. Most things were taboo. I don’t know what I can say, without revealing too much. Everything was taboo. Sorry, I’m going to be sick now.’
‘Shall I get a nurse?’
‘Yes, please do.’
A young woman in a white uniform was fetched in from the corridor and she called out to another nurse that the lady in 334 needed to throw up.
Afterwards Wenche sat in bed smiling; the queasiness had gone and she felt a bit stronger. She went on with her account. ‘Well, we always come back to Silkestrå. All those cute little clothes and little presents in their bags when anyone had a birthday. That was how it was then. Lots of birthdays and school parties and nice things like that. And everyday life was much as it usually is, getting up early, school, homework, children’s programmes on TV, baking apple cake, just like ordinary people, nothing to find fault with.’
‘It says in the report that Anders was passive when playing.’
‘Well you have to consider. For one thing, they placed him up there at the centre, with strangers, in a strange setting, so it all goes wrong. I know very well it made him passive being up there. Anders was a self-conscious child. Reserved. And that psychiatrist who made his statement, the nasty one … they came round to the flat too, that psychiatrist or psychologist, to study us, judge us.’
They wanted to observe the bedtime routines in the family, Wenche remarked.
‘And Anders was so neat and tidy, you know. He couldn’t help the fact that he had an orderly mother.’
She took a breath. ‘It wasn’t his fault. I brought the boy up to be like me.’ She gave a tired sigh. ‘I’d said to Anders: we’re going to start a new game here at home. You and I are going to get undressed, and we’ll see who finishes first. I’ll time us, starting now! So I timed us, and Anders won. And there was his neat little pile, with mine beside it, and that was wrong too. And when he got a real psychiatric … psychiatric … psychiatric, no. I can’t find the word. Anyway, you have to get undressed first and then wash your hands, he was very keen on washing his hands, being clean, and then you put on your pyjamas, and then you have some supper and then clear up and so on, and then you wash your hands again. And they presented that as wrong, too.’
‘What did Anders like best when he was little?’
‘He really liked to be praised when he’d been clever. When we played that undressing game in the evenings and he won, came first, he thought that was great. I could see how much he liked it. How they can say the opposite, that there was something wrong with the boy, I can’t understand.’
‘What did he play when he was at home?’
‘We played Lego, we did. Playmobil. We played everything there was. Duplo, Taplo, Poplo, you name it,’ she laughed.
‘In the report from the Centre for Child Psychiatry it says that on the one hand you bound him to you, and the two of you slept close together in the same bed, while on the other you could suddenly reject him and say hateful things to him.’
‘I still haven’t finished,’ she said, feeling for the thin plastic sick bag that lay close to hand.
‘I’ll go and get a nurse.’
‘Well if it happens, it happens,’ said Wenche.
Once the nausea had subsided, Wenche wanted to go on.
‘There has to be room for … room for … what’s it called again? There has to be room for – reconciliation, that’s it. Time for reconciliation,’ she said slowly, stressing every syllable. ‘We can’t change anything, after all. So let things rest. Try to understand instead. There’s a lot still to find out.’
‘For you too?’
‘Yes, for me too.’
‘Have you reconciled yourself to Anders’s actions?’
‘I reconciled myself a few months after it happened. I was convinced I’d be able to do it. Perhaps it’s just that I’m a forgiving mother.’
‘Have you forgiven him?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘What do you think, was he sick or was it a political act?’
‘It was a rational political act. No question. It was unexpected, but perhaps not that unexpected.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think we’ll call it a day now. Better for us to follow up later. Now, you go home and think it all through.’ Right at the end, after all the goodbyes and wishes for better days, she said:
‘Well, Anders is content now, anyway. At least that’s what he told me.’
* * *
The nurse came in with painkillers. ‘Oh, that’s sweet of you,’ said Wenche Behring Breivik to the young girl in white. ‘Would you mind closing the window too? I’m freezing.’
The nurse closed the window, which had been on the latch, letting in the cold of the March day outside. Spring was taking its time. There was a hint of sleet in the air.
On the windowsill of room 334 there was a pink plastic orchid, still in its crisp cellophane packet. It was getting late. The scrap of sky that Wenche could see when she rested her head on the pillow was growing darker. From there she could see the tiny snowflakes, so light that they seemed to take forever to reach the ground.
* * *
Wenche Behring Breivik died eight days later.
She passed away just before Easter. Her son sought permission to attend her funeral. His application was refused.
He had no contact with his father. Nor with his sister. None of his friends had written to him. Many of his closest friends said they had put him behind them. ‘I’m through with Anders,’ said one. And yet hardly a day passed without them thinking of him. Many of them were troubled by feelings of guilt. Should they have realised?
He had hardly anyone to correspond with any more. In the letters that he did receive, most of the words were blacked out. He replied to them with letters he knew would be censored. The correspondence petered out. The letters stopped coming. His prison cell had not become the writer’s workshop he had planned. Some journalists asked for interviews. He visualised the queue of reporters eager to interview him, dreaming of being the first. But he did not want to meet any of them. If he gave an interview he imagined the queue evaporating, interest tailing off. He would no longer be in demand.
He did respond to one of the interview requests. The request arrived just after the trial He spent a long time thinking about whether to write back. Only a year later, in June 2013, did he decide to answer. The journalist had included a stamped addressed envelope. He located it among his other documents, where he had been keeping it for almost a year. He elected to start on a jovial note.
Dear Åsne! :-)
I have been following your career with great interest since 2003. I both respect and admire you for your mentality, competence and intelligence, which afford you opportunities that almost all women and most men can only dream of ;-)
Flattery was the style he adopted. ‘What’s so unique about you is that you achieved so much at such a young age, and in addition to that are so beautiful! ;-)’ he wrote.
Then he described the strategy he had employed throughout the trial. Double psychology, he called it. Calculated deception, to put it simply. A necessary evil to counter the propaganda and deceit of the other parties. And it was for this reason that the full truth about his operation had not come out. He wrote that ever since the trial he had wanted to be open about everything, but that he had been prevented from expressing himself since the stricter regime was implemented after the verdict.
I understand that among left-wing journalists there is some prestige attached to getting the opportunity to be the first to really put the knife into the ‘worst ultra-nationalist terrorist in the European world since WW2’ and inflict the worst damage, and there are undoubtedly many ‘right-wing extremists’ in Europe who would have been retarded enough to contribute to their own character assassination. In my eyes, people like you are extremely dangerous predators from whom I instinctively want to keep my distance. I know that someone like you will stab deep, and if I were stupid enough to participate you might even be able to stab deeper than Husby/Sørheim and Lippestad. I have no wish to contribute to this, either by meeting you or by clarifying what remains unclarified on any terms but my own. I therefore do not want to have anything to do with your work.
The letter changed tone.
I would like, however, to make you a counter-offer. I have enough insight to realise that ‘The Breivik Diaries’ will be boycotted by the established publishing houses, and therefore want to offer you the chance of selling the book as a package within your project, that is, that you top and/or tail your book with a quick hack job by me, with or without your name on the book, and that you in addition get all the income (the author’s share). So you will gain financially, while those you want to impress will still congratulate you on a great character assassination. I can live with my story coming out in this form, provided that the book is removed from the boycott lists of at least some of the major distributors.
To tie in with the book launch, provided that it is successful, you will be given the opportunity to conduct the first and only interview that I shall give, and you will also get the sales rights to this, enabling you to write another crude character assassination to ‘wash your hands’ of any accusations that may by then have been made that you are a useful idiot etc.
With narcissistic and revolutionary wishes.
Anders Behring Breivik
That was how he signed off.
In a letter the following month, which he opened with the far cooler ‘To Miss Seierstad,’ he wrote that all criticism of him could actually be viewed as a bonus. It was so detached from reality as to give him a valuable advantage, which he wanted to exploit to the full against the propagandists. He was now waiting for the end of the ban on his freedom of speech and took the view that he should have the right to defend himself against all the propaganda now being pumped out. ‘Because the “Character” who is being constructed and peddled by authors and journalists on the left is, after all, a very long way from the truth.’
No interview took place.
* * *
The inmate was annoyed at receiving the wrong letters. He only got letters from ‘New Testament Christians and people who do not l
ike me’, he complained.
These were not the sorts of letters he wanted.
He wanted the other letters. The letters that must be piling up in the censor’s office. The letters to the Commander of the Norwegian anti-communist resistance movement. The letters from the people who wanted a signed copy of his book. The letters to Andrew Berwick. The letters to Anders B. Those were the letters he wanted.
But they did not come.
He aimed to set up a prison alliance of militant nationalists with himself at its head. So far, he was the only member. But then, as the civil war spread, as people got swept along, inspired by his manifesto, he would be freed by his brothers.
In the meantime, while he was waiting, his Lacoste jersey was spared. It was safely put away in the prison’s dark storeroom.
All he saw of the real world were the tops of the trees round the prison.
And its white walls.
Epilogue
It was only supposed to be an article for Newsweek.
‘Get me anything you can on that man!’ said Newsweek editor Tina Brown on the phone from New York. It was early on; the terrorist attack had only just hit us. The country was in shock. I was in shock.
I did not find out much about that man in the summer of 2011.
Having written about Norway’s reaction to the attack instead, I put the country behind me, as always, and pursued my original plan for the autumn – covering the continuous uprisings around the Arab world. My next stop was Tripoli in Libya. While Norway was grieving, I went back to the Middle East.
Then the date was set for the trial. Newsweek asked me to write one more story when the court case against Anders Behring Breivik opened in April 2012. That was to be my second article about Norway. Until terror struck us, I had never written anything about my own country. It was uncharted territory. All my working life, I had been a foreign correspondent, starting off as a Moscow correspondent at twenty-three, straight from Russian studies at Oslo University. My home country was my refuge, not a place to write about. I came home from Tripoli just before the trial was due to start, got my accreditation and a seat in the courtroom, and found myself knocked sideways.
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