‘We are the only ones here,’ replied the judge. ‘This preliminary hearing is to be held behind closed doors.’
‘Who decided that?’ asked Breivik.
‘It was my decision,’ answered the seasoned judge, leaning forward to look at the accused over his spectacles.
‘I bet it was the Labour Party’s.’
‘No, it was my decision, and this is how it is to be,’ the judge said tersely. Breivik started to quibble, but was swiftly interrupted
‘We must get on with the hearing,’ said Heger. ‘This is the way it is; we are the only ones here.’ He began to read out the charges.
Anders Behring Breivik was formally charged under paragraph l47 of the Norwegian Penal Code, the so-called terror paragraph, which carries a maximum penalty of twenty-one years in prison, with the possibility of extension, if the convicted prisoner represents a danger to society.
The accused did not acknowledge his guilt, and demanded to be set free.
He expressed the wish to read something from his manifesto, and asked if he could read it in English, as that was his working language.
‘No, the language of the law in Norway is Norwegian,’ replied the judge.
Ignoring this, Breivik started to read out an extract from the manifesto, which the police had printed out for him as requested.
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? he read, and went on: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Then he was told to stop. The judge was not prepared to listen.
A crowd of reporters was also gathering outside a country house at the foot of the Pyrenees in the south of France.
Gendarmes were guarding the gate. The couple living there had called the local police and asked for assistance.
On Saturday morning, the man in the house had turned on the computer to find out more about what had happened in Norway.
He had been working in the garden on Friday when his wife called out to him: ‘We have to turn on the TV! Something has happened in Oslo – an explosion!’
The couple read about it on the web, watched the BBC, got worried.
‘It must have something to do with Islamic fundamentalism,’ Jens Breivik said to his wife. Terror had reached their peaceful home country. They sat in shock following the news, first from the government area and later from Utøya. Then they went to bed.
The next morning the seventy-six-year-old sat staring at the screen. The only thing he saw was a name written in bold letters: ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK.
He understood nothing. There was only one Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. His son. What could he have to do with this?
He continued reading.
He read it all.
He was paralysed. He just sat there. He felt he was fainting. He blacked out.
It could not be possible.
That Monday, people came together. They felt the need to gather.
In the capital, over two hundred thousand people assembled on the square in front of the Town Hall, by the quayside. In Salangen there was a torchlit procession, in Bardu and on Nesodden. On that day, more than a million Norwegians took part in a gathering or in a procession, carrying roses.
On Utøya, all the dead had been recorded. It turned out that fifteen people had been counted twice. The new totals of those lost were sixty-nine killed on Utøya and eight in the government quarter. But few of them had as yet been identified.
In front of the Town Hall people stood with roses. The Crown Prince said Tonight the streets are filled with love and the crowd sang the national anthem Yes, we love this country as a canon, passing it between them. Then Nordahl Grieg’s ‘To Youth’ – Faced by your enemies, enter your time, battle is menacing, now make a stand. The crowd filled the square, the quays, the whole Aker Brygge area and all the streets around; it extended up past Parliament and as far as the cathedral.
‘We have been crushed, but we will not give up!’
The Prime Minister was on stage. People held their roses aloft.
‘Evil can kill a human being, but never conquer a people!’
Hours later, when all the evening’s briefings and meetings were over, the Prime Minister walked quietly up Bygdøy Allé. He had walked from his residence behind the Royal Palace and through the Frogner district, and was now strolling down the middle of the avenue. The air felt pure after the days of rain, everything had turned milder, softer. He was with his State Secretary Hans Kristian Amundsen and the Cabinet Office minister Karl Eirik Schjøtt Pedersen. Security men were walking in front and behind them. Stoltenberg was humming a song from his youth. He searched for the words, and sang them as they gradually came to him.
Amundsen joined in, trying to sound like the lead singer in the Norwegian rock band deLillos.
Here, in these streets, the Prime Minister had grown up, here in Frogner he had hung out in the same places as that lead singer, Lars Lillo-Stenberg, in the 1980s. It was the time when they partied all night in the large villas in the streets off the avenue, when late arrivals at the after-party would turn up round the Stoltenberg family’s breakfast table, when what was mine was yours and ours, when the hippie era was still not quite over in Norway, when the yuppies hadn’t taken over yet, when life was simple and secure and these streets were his.
They were singing louder now.
These same streets had also been home to Anders Behring Breivik, in the first years of his life. His fashionable Fritzners gate crossed the even more exclusive Gimle Terrasse, to which the three men were now on their way, making for number 3.
They had been invited to the home of Roger Ingebrigtsen, State Secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Two days earlier he had feared that his partner Lene had lost her only child – fourteen-year-old Ylva. Now her life was no longer in danger.
They took in the scent of July after rain. ‘Like velvet,’ said Stoltenberg. It was Norwegian summer at its best. Tomorrow was going to be a fine day. They took the steps up the little hill to where Gimle Terrasse lay.
Hans Kristian Amundsen had called in advance to say they were on their way. A little red-haired boy popped up at the entrance and asked: ‘Are you coming to see Roger?’
Then he ran up the steps ahead of the security guards, ahead of the Prime Minister, to alert everyone inside.
The dining-room windows had been opened wide. Roger, himself from Troms, had gathered the families from his county, who had so suddenly been flung together in Oslo. At the long table sat Tone, Gunnar and Håvard, then Viggo and Gerd. Christin and Sveinn Are were sitting with Torje and Ylva’s mother Lene.
There were four children missing.
They had no information about Simon or Anders. Viljar was in a coma, and Ylva had just come round from her operations.
Jens Stoltenberg went in. He wondered how this was going to go and he was afraid of saying the wrong thing.