One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

The Mountain

He slid down the cliff.

And threw himself behind a rock.

He slithered down the cliff.

And ran under the ledge.

He skidded down on soil and gravel.

And crept behind a boulder.

He leapt down in long strides.

He readied himself. Three jumps and he’d be down.

You know, Tone, our Simon’s a fast runner and a good swimmer.

He had said on that Friday.

How many times had he slid down that cliff for Simon…

He slid in the night, he slid in the day, he slid in his dreams.

A hundred times. A thousand.

Over and over again he saw his son in front of him – jumping over the log, not stopping halfway, but sliding on.

Run, Simon! Run!

Gunnar slid.

He slithered.

And then he stumbled.

Losing Simon was like falling into a black hole.

Masterbakk Lake lay tranquil. Occasional little rings spread across the surface; an Arctic char came up for air. Some ravens flew over the treetops.

It was late summer, two years after. Tone had gone to bed. Gunnar was sitting up.

He felt he had failed as a dad. Something had gone wrong in the upbringing of his son. He who had taught the boy about the dangers of nature: wolves, bears, avalanches. Storms, angry elks and deep water.

It had let him down when it really mattered.

Why did he wait so long to run? Why did he stay there, lifting people down, and not get away himself? He must have realised he had to run now!

They had brought the boys up to be considerate. Help others. Let others go first. Gunnar remembered when he had been the trainer of the boys’ football team in Salangen. They had gone to compete in the Norway Cup, and Simon was angry because he did not get very long on the pitch, even though he was good. Gunnar impressed on him that they were all equal, the good players and the slightly less good. Everyone would play for exactly the same length of time, and if there was not enough match time for everybody, Simon would have to come off first. That was just the way it had to be.

Gunnar was back at his work in industrial and commercial development in Salangen. Sitting around idly did nothing to help. Tone was working three days a week with special needs children.

Håvard had got a place at a folk high school in Voss, on their sport and outdoor recreation programme.

But first he had gone to enrol for military service. When it came to filling in his personal details, he ground to a halt. Name, address, parents… siblings…

Siblings. Tick the box.

Should he tick the box?

Did he have a brother?

After Simon died, Håvard lost his foothold. The foundation was gone. The springboard on which the two boys had stood together gave way when one of them was gone. Initially Håvard was going to do it all. He took over the leadership of the Salangen AUF. He took over the homework-mentoring role for the refugees; he was going to be Håvard and Simon rolled into one. But it did not work. As the November darkness descended that first autumn, he broke down.

Every time he closed his eyes he saw Simon’s face. Even so, he got cross when his mother shed tears and had no patience with his parents when they sat indoors, staring into space. He could not bear to live at home any more, and moved in with his girlfriend.

It was so painful. Too painful.

The big blue house in Heiaveien was too cramped now that there were only three of them. ‘The House of Sorrows’, Håvard called it.

Two thousand people attended Simon’s funeral. As many people as there were inhabitants in town. Offices, shops and businesses all closed for the service. The Prime Minister had flown up, and spoke at the church.

All that summer, Simon had gone off to the churchyard in the mornings to his work as odd-job man. The very last thing he did before he went to Utøya was to cut the grass on top of what was to be his own grave. It was unbearable. Now it was his parents taking the steep path. Up the hill, round the curve in the road, and they were there.

Flowers, wreaths, hearts of roses, friends’ letters, pictures, tears. Among all the tokens on his grave, there was a small handwritten note: To Simon. My only Norwegian friend. Mehdi.

Three days after Simon’s funeral, Gunnar had a phone call from a friend.

‘I’ve heard the Dahl cabin is being put up for sale.’

‘Oh,’ said Gunnar faintly.

A month later, his friend rang again.

‘The cabin’s on the market now. You can find it on the web. You and Tone have always wanted a cabin.’

It was rare to find plots of land for sale in the Masterbakk mountains. This was Sami territory, the realm of the reindeer. The mountain areas were the preserve of the reindeer herders, and every May the herds were there before they moved off east to other grazing. The few cabins on the fells above Salangen had been there for generations. New plots were never for sale.

But now there was the Dahl cabin, with its wonderful location, that nobody used. The family that owned it had moved south and no longer needed a cabin in the middle of Troms.

Nor did Tone and Gunnar. Their days were black. Their nights darker still.

The friend would not give up.

‘Think of Masterbakk Lake when it’s completely calm and the char are biting,’ he said to Gunnar. ‘Think of Lørken when the high slopes are yellow with cloudberries in August. Think of skiing down from Sagvasstind when the sun comes back in February. Think of the northern lights in the winter, when—’

‘I know, I know,’ said Gunnar. He lapsed into silence, and then added, ‘I’ll talk to Tone.’

A month later, the family friend rang again. ‘The bidding has started.’

Okay then. Gunnar put in a bid too. But it wasn’t worth thinking about; the bids were likely to go sky-high.

It wasn’t the mountain peaks that drew them to it, or the fishing lakes. It was the prospect of getting away. Breaking free. Not free from the grief, for that had become a part of them, but perhaps the mountains could absorb a little of it.

The price rose. One last bid, they did not dare go any higher. Then the seller suddenly called a halt to the bidding.

Somebody, maybe a friend, had dropped a hint that Sæbø was among the bidders.

‘Well, I think I’ve been offered more than enough for this cabin now,’ said the seller. ‘It goes to the most recent bidder.’

It was the Sæbø family.

The Dahl cabin had merged into its surroundings, and was in the process of being reclaimed by the natural world. The juniper bushes were encroaching on the walls. The mountain grass in the lee of the wind had become a resting place for the sheep. Bilberry scrub was growing up through the front steps. It had long been left uncared for, rot was spreading through the logs and the wood panelling had decayed.

Tone and Gunnar thought they would be able to patch it up, putty the windows, weatherproof the cracks. They could manage that.

‘Let’s raze this dump to the ground,’ said their friend when he and Gunnar went up there one day to take a look. ‘You two want a cabin for when the wind’s blowing too, don’t you? For when it’s below zero? Let’s build a new one. I’ll take charge of the building work.’

That first 17 May without Simon, they were up there on the frozen crust of the snow.

The sky was clear, the wind had dropped; there was frost at nights and summer weather in the daytime. It was light around the clock.

They splashed petrol on the walls and the turf roof. Then they threw in matches. The old timber was alight in an instant. They stood watching the flames lick rapidly up the walls. Soon the roof was ablaze.

They were there with a few close friends. None of them could face being down in the town on National Day. The memories of the previous year were too raw. Tone did not feel up to seeing people. She had become withdrawn.

The snow was still piled high. Expanses of white all around them. Below the bonfire of the cabin, the water of Masterbakk Lake was still frozen, right between the twin peaks of Snørken and Lørken.

Oh, it was a beautiful place on this Earth!

But it was impossible not to think about the year before.

‘Last year, Simon was on the podium…’ said Gunnar.

‘Yes, and what a great speech he made!’ someone said.

Tone forced out a smile.

‘Imagine him telling that story about JFK,’ said Gunnar.

They nodded. ‘Yes, and to think of…’

One day Tone and Gunnar had come across the script Simon had prepared for his speech – the school president’s 17 May speech.

Reading it was like listening to Simon’s voice.

‘They decided to name me J. F. Kennedy. He was a president like me, you know. But unfortunately he got shot in Dallas. I’m too much of an optimist to sit waiting for the same fate…’

It hurt so much.

It was the first 17 May, in the blackest of years, and here they were burning a cabin. Before long, all that was left were glowing embers in the snow.

The snow melted. Summer arrived.

‘We just wondered if you needed any help,’ said a couple with strong arms.

‘Well, I was baking anyway,’ said a neighbour, producing an apple pie from her bag.

‘We’ve no particular plans for the summer, so if you need us, we’ve got time,’ said some friends.

‘I know someone who runs a sawmill, and these materials were going spare,’ said a man.

‘Perhaps you’ve got a use for this casserole?’

‘They had a special offer on sausages, so I thought I might as well bring some along…’

‘Do you need any help with the bricklaying? Seeing as I’m free.’

The Dahl cabin was a long way off the beaten track. At first you could only guess who those dots approaching from afar might be. As they got closer their heads would disappear behind the last hump in the hill, and all at once they were there. They were always carrying something. Some planks, a hammer, home-baked bread.

By the end of the summer the cabin was finished. All it lacked was a new sign over the door. A friend had had a sign made, with the name etched into it in swirly letters. He hung it below the ridge of the roof.

It was the most beautiful sign they had ever seen. The old Dahl cabin had gone; this hut was new and it needed a new name: Simonstua – Simon’s Cottage.

Gunnar sat alone on the veranda. The sign hung behind him. Inside, Tone was fast asleep. Håvard was singing at a wedding.

The black hole still took up far too much space. They had to hold on tight so it would not swallow them up.

He was still sliding.

He slithered. He stumbled.

The sense of loss could drive him insane.

But they had started to see the starlit sky.

And the northern lights. And all the beauty around them.

Weaver’s Heaven

‘Are you in your weaver’s heaven, Mum?’

It was as if she heard his voice. He always used to come dashing in, give her a hug and comment on the pattern in the warp before he charged off again. From the earliest of ages he had seen his mother weaving, her fingers knotting threads and one colour changing to another. He had admired how the threads made such lovely patterns.

Gerd Kristiansen was much in demand as a weaver in Bardu. Her tapestries hung on walls all around the village, served as bedspreads in Finnsnes and table runners in Salangen.

For her, weaving was like entering another world. She was able to collect her thoughts at the loom and find a breathing space after heavy shifts as an auxiliary nurse at Bardu care home.

One spring day her son had come into the room she had set aside as her weaving workshop. He stood there looking at her various pieces of work.

‘Mum, can you weave one for me?’

‘Oh, would you like one?’ his mother answered happily. ‘What colours do you want?’

‘Blue, blue like the sky,’ he replied.

She had spent a long time on it. She had mixed blue and white so his bedcover would turn out a real sky blue. When it was done, it was exactly as she had hoped. It was like lying in the grass on a fine summer’s day looking up as wisps of cloud went by.

She had just finished it. Her son had run a hand over the soft blanket and thanked her, said how wonderful it was. Before he left.

That was two years ago.

In the first months she could not bring herself to touch the loom.

Now she was gradually starting again. But it was hard going, her fingers were stiff and slow and it wore her out.

Two years had passed, and life had only got worse.

The sense of loss, the emptiness, the lonely days. It was not true that grief faded. It grew. Because now it was final; he was never coming back.

Gerd was scared of meeting people, because it was embarrassing if she cried. It could come over her at any time, anywhere. She felt as though everyone around her thought things ought to be better by now. She could see it in people’s eyes. Their looks said: You’ve got to move on.

Folk would ask her: ‘Are you back at work now?’

As if that were any kind of measure. No she wasn’t. Perhaps she could have coped, were it not for the fact that her job, too, meant dealing with life and death. At Bardu care home, old people were dying all the time. She could not take it. They were old and they died natural deaths, as was the way of things. But even so, they died. She could not take any more death.

The care home management had been flexible. She could come and go as she wanted, do shifts here and there if she felt up to it.

Her son was always crashing about in her head.

Viggo missed him constantly.

Their memories went in circles.

They buzzed round and round. They were there in their dreams. They were there in their sleepless nights.

Gerd called life ‘existing minute by minute’. Every single minute felt like a battle. Time went on but life had stopped. Meanwhile, everyone else said they would have to build it up again. But how could they build up their life without their boy? As their elder son Stian put it when he was fed up with all the talk about Norway having won out over evil and hatred, ‘I shall never win over anyone as long as I’m a little brother short.’

The roses, rainbows and democracy that were supposed to defeat the perpetrator only increased their sadness. It made them sick to hear party leaders say that Labour was the victim of the massacre. They were upset by AUF members’ talk of ‘reclaiming Utøya’ before the murder victims had even been buried.

They could not forget AUF leader Eskil Pedersen’s words on the first day of the trial: ‘The pain is less now.’

Hadn’t he talked to any of the bereaved, they wondered. Didn’t he know anything about how the parents of his dead members were feeling? His The pain is less now, a bare nine months after the killings, made it impossible for them to listen to any of the other things he had to say.

The Kristiansen family felt bitter about a lot. First, the AUF. Anders had set up Bardu Workers’ Youth League as a fifteen-year-old in 2008. He had been leader of the local branch for two years. When he became the head of the Youth County Council for Troms, the year after Simon and Viljar’s attempted coup, he stepped down as leader of Bardu AUF and became the treasurer instead.

When Eskil Pedersen came to visit Bardu the year after Anders’s death, the parents found out about it from the local paper. In Troms Folkeblad they saw the pictures of the AUF leader with new young members. No one had notified them. They had not had so much as a phone call to say that he wished to express his condolences to the parents of the late AUF treasurer in Bardu. No, Anders was dead, so he did not matter any more; that was how it felt to them.

The AUF had planned to mark the first anniversary of the massacre, 22 July 2012, on Utøya itself. The plans excluded the parents. They could come another day.

What? Were the parents not to be allowed to commemorate their sons and daughters a year on, in the place where their children had been killed?

No, because Utøya was the AUF’s island.

Were there no grown-ups in the Labour Party? Were there no manners? No, the Labour Party just said it was the AUF’s island and the young must be the ones to decide. In the end, the AUF gave in to pressure from the support group for the bereaved and they reached a compromise: the parents would be permitted to come at eight in the morning. But they had to make sure they were off the island before the surviving AUF members, those who had defeated the perpetrator, arrived. The last boat would be leaving the island at 11.45. After that, no parents were allowed to be there, because the young people were going to recreate the Utøya feeling.

‘I would so much have liked to be there, to step into her world,’ one father from Nordland county commented to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He had lost his sixteen-year-old daughter and wanted to ‘step into the atmosphere, be there together with the AUF youngsters’ to try to understand what it was about the summer camp that made his girl look forward to it all year. He simply wanted to be on the island along with the AUF crowd.

‘I want to look for what was so important to my daughter here,’ said a mother. ‘Was it that little?’

Gerd and Viggo could not bring themselves to go to Utøya once they had seen the terms on which they would be allowed to attend. They did not feel welcome. Tone and Gunnar decided to go down anyway. Tone later said that the anniversary was the worst thing she had been through since Simon died. Making a hasty visit to the cliff, laying flowers by the rock and then hurrying off the island because the survivors were due to arrive, getting off the ferry at the Thorbjørn’s jetty and having to run the gauntlet of that merry throng of AUF members tripping over themselves to get aboard. Tone had had to duck her way through the crowd of young people. She felt they avoided meeting her eye. Maybe it was all part of being young, not dwelling on the dismal side of things. Being thoughtless.

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.’

They buried him in that suit. On the lapel they pinned three badges that had been lying on his desk. No to All Racism, one of them said. Red and Proud, said another. On the last, AUF shone white against red.

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.

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.’

She shook her head.

‘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.

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.

The letter changed tone.

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 like 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.