Breivik’s eyes had narrowed and were filled with tears. His mouth was drawn upwards towards his nose. His face flushed and he wept without shame, staring at the images as they faded out.
Until then, no one had seen him shed a single tear. Now he cried openly.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the female lawyer seated on his left, according to the lip-readers hired by Verdens Gang.
‘Yes, fine,’ replied Breivik. ‘I just wasn’t prepared for that.’
For the screening of his film. His. Film.
The court took a break.
In the hall outside, the journalists tried to find an explanation for his tears.
‘He feels great, tender, warm love for himself. When he sees his own product he is terribly moved. That is how I interpret it,’ said a psychologist to the media.
The tracks from Age of Conan were sung in old Norwegian by the singer Helene Bøksle. ‘Picture it… you hear this song as you battle to wipe out one flank of the enemy…’ he had written in Book 3. ‘That angelic voice singing to you from heaven… that voice is all you can hear as everything light turns dark and you enter the kingdom of heaven… that must really be the most fantastic way to die a glorious martyr’s death.’
For a moment, he had been a knight again.
It was half past one when the prosecutor showed a picture of the island, 500 metres long and 350 metres wide, given to the AUF as a gift in 1950.
Breivik stifled a yawn.
Holden related the course of events from the time Breivik was transported over to the island on MS Thorbjørn. When the prosecutor reached what happened at the café building, he said he was going to play one of the emergency calls that was made from there.
Every time Breivik’s lips curled into a smile, he doggedly attempted to moderate it. This time he hid the muscle movement by sucking his lower lip.
A dialling tone resounded from the loudspeaker system, into the room and into seventeen district courts.
A receiver was lifted, and a cool voice said, ‘Police emergency line.’
‘Hi, there’s shooting on Utøya in Buskerud in the Tyrifjord,’ said a girl in a broad accent. Her breathing was louder than her words. When she called she had just seen her boyfriend shot and killed. It was 17.26 and Breivik had been on the island for ten minutes. He had just entered the café building. The girl, whose name was Renate Tårnes, was hiding in a toilet.
The policeman asked if there were any more shots. Renate gasped for breath before she answered.
‘Yes, it’s going on the whole time. There’s total panic. He’s in here.’
The girl had lowered her voice to a whisper. She did not say anything more, just held up her phone so the operator could hear what she was hearing.
There was a sudden scream on the recording. Another. Several more. The courtroom was stock-still. Not a single movement. Not even the tapping of keys. You were there, outside it, yes, safe on a seat in the room, and yet you were there, caught up in the massacre. You heard the sound of Breivik’s weapons. Initially, the shots were sporadic. They rang out singly, then a number in swift succession. Then more and more.
The recording lasted for three minutes. Holden played it all.
Three minutes. Fifty shots. Thirteen killed.
Many in the courtroom were crying.
Breivik looked down at a fingernail.
Before he glanced back up.
The Monologue
Day two. It was the day he had been preparing for.
Later, many others would set their mark on the case: the prosecution, the witnesses, experts, the defence. But today, the floor was his alone.
He walked slowly to the witness box. In his hands he had a pile of papers. He laid them on the table in front of him and adjusted his cufflinks.
‘You must restrict yourself to the truth in matters pertinent to your case,’ the judge said severely.
‘Dear judge Arntzen, I request that I be allowed to set out the framework of my defence, and I hope you will not interrupt me; I have a list of points—’
‘You must lower the microphone a little for the transmission to the other courts to work properly.’
He was ready. This was the book launch.
‘I stand here today as a representative of the Norwegian and European resistance movement. I speak on behalf of Norwegians who do not want our rights as an indigenous population to be taken away from us. The media and the prosecutors maintain that I carried out the attacks because I am a pathetic, malicious loser, that I have no integrity, am a notorious liar with no morals, am mentally ill and should therefore be forgotten by other cultural conservatives in Europe. They say I have dropped out of working life, that I am narcissistic, antisocial, am prey to bacteria phobia, have had an incestuous relationship with my mother; that I suffer from deprivation of a father, am a child murderer, a baby murderer, despite the fact that I killed no one under fourteen. That I am cowardly, homosexual, paedophile, necrophiliac, Zionist, racist, a psychopath and a Nazi. All these claims have been made. That I am mentally and physically retarded with an IQ of around eighty.’
He read rapidly. He had a great deal to get through. The meaning of the words was more important than how they were read. ‘I am not surprised by these characterisations. I expected it. I knew the cultural elite would ridicule me. But this is bordering on farce.’
He glanced up and then looked down at his papers again.
‘The answer is simple. I have carried out the most sophisticated and spectacular attack in Europe since the Second World War. I and my nationalist brothers and sisters represent all that they fear. They want to scare others off doing the same thing.’
The judges were watching him closely, listening attentively. How was he when let off the leash? Did he ramble? Was he consistent? This was the first time they had heard him speaking freely. How would he fill the half-hour allocated to him?
Norway and Europe were suffocated by total conformity, he told them. And what they knew as democracy was in reality a cultural Marxist dictatorship. This was familiar ground now.
‘Nationalists and cultural conservatives were broken-backed after the fall of the Axis powers. Europe never had a McCarthy, so the Marxists infiltrated schools and the media. This also brought us feminism, gender quotas, the sexual revolution, a transformed church, deconstruction of social norms and a socialist, egalitarian ideal of society. Norway is suffering from cultural self-contempt as a result of multicultural ideology.’
The defendant proposed that there be a referendum asking the following question: Do you consider it undemocratic that the Norwegian people have never been asked about Norway becoming a multiethnic state? Do you consider it undemocratic that Norway takes in so many Africans and Asians that Norwegians risk becoming a minority in their own capital?
‘Nationalist and culturally conservative parties are boycotted by the media. Our opinions are seen as inferior, we are second-class citizens and this is not a proper democracy! Look at the Swedish party Sverigedemokraterna and what is happening to them. In Norway, the media have conducted a systematic smear campaign against the Progress Party for twenty years and will go on doing so. Seventy per cent of British people see immigration as a major problem and think Great Britain has become a dysfunctional country. Seventy per cent are dissatisfied with multiculturalism.’