Viljar was able to retell the tall stories Martin had recounted on that sixth night, the night the doctors said he came closest to death, when he grew colder and colder. Every heartbeat had been an exertion. His continuing pulse a succession of gifts. Viljar had been somewhere in among it all, the whole time; he remembered the cold and how much he had shivered. He recalled the hugs and the tears, and that he had wanted to respond, wanted to smile, wanted to open his eyes and laugh, but his body would not obey. It was too exhausted. And he had been so cold.
And then, when he woke up properly, he realised before they said it. So he said it himself.
‘I know Anders would have been here now, and Simon, if…’
Viljar looked at Martin.
‘They would at least have sent some kind of message, if they…’
Martin nodded. The tears flowed.
‘… had been… They’re dead, aren’t they?’
Viljar had missed Anders’s and Simon’s funerals. They were held the week Viljar turned eighteen. Jens Stoltenberg attended Simon’s funeral. At Anders’s funeral, Lars Bremnes performed his song ‘If I Could Write in the Heavens’.
Viljar stayed down in Oslo for a series of operations. It was only in October, three months after he had been shot, that they let him travel back to Svalbard.
He slept a lot. It was a real effort to regain his strength. He was a skinny teenager to start with, and had now lost twenty kilos. A red scar ran from the top of his head and down one side. His eye socket had been rebuilt. He had been fitted with a glass eye and a prosthetic hand.
Life was anguish and loss. Fear of death could paralyse him without warning. Often he felt like half a person. Not because of what had happened to him, but because he had lost his best friends. So many unlived dreams!
Over the winter he got the letter summoning him to give evidence at the trial.
He lay awake at night thinking about what he ought to say to make it right. He tested out phrases on his classmates the next day.
‘You can shoot me as many times as you like! But you didn’t get anywhere!’ he tried. ‘I’m damn well going to show this ABB that I can pull through all right!’
One evening Johannes Buø’s family came round to see the Hanssens. Johannes, the fourteen-year-old judo enthusiast and Metallica fan, Torje’s best friend, was killed in the woods by the schoolhouse. Johannes had lived on the island for the past few years with his parents and brother Elias, three years his junior. His father was the director of arts and culture on Svalbard.When Johannes’s autopsy report was presented to the court at the beginning of May, the family went to Oslo to be there. Their places were behind the glass partition, so they found themselves staring at the back of the perpetrator’s head. Elias suddenly moved from his seat to sit on his own at the far end of the front row. When the court rose for a break the freckled little boy with corkscrew curls got to his feet and went right up to the glass wall in the corner. There he stood waiting. He had noticed that when Breivik left his place among the defence lawyers and made his way out, he had to look in that direction. He would have to walk straight towards Elias. They would be separated only by the glass. Then, as Breivik approached, the little brother was going to fix him with the foulest look he could muster. And so he did.
In the Hanssens’ living room, the Buø family did a sketch map of the courtroom for Viljar. ‘He’ll be sitting there,’ they indicated. ‘With his defence team. And you’ll sit here.’
They drew a square in the middle of the room. The witness box. They put in the judges, the prosecution and the public.
‘He’ll be sitting two metres away from you, can you handle that?’
‘The closer the better,’ said Viljar.
He would have to rehearse what he was going to say if he wanted to get through this. He had to leave his feelings out of it or he would not be able to pull it off. That was why he was practising, so he did not find himself faced with anything that would throw him, anything he could not to tackle, anything that might make him break down. He would not afford ABB that satisfaction.
He was trembling as the plane landed in Oslo. But he was ready now. He must not let them down – this was for Anders, this was for Simon, it was for what they had believed in. As so often before, he wondered what they would have said now. What advice they would have given him. Anders on the content, Simon on the style. Once when he had got stuck, he started dialling Anders’s number when he— Fuck! Anders is dead!
He had to do this alone. And he had to pull it off.
On 22 May, Viljar dressed in a black shirt and black trousers as befitted the gravity of the occasion. Over the shirt he wore a jacket in a dark blue. Around his right wrist he had a thin leather strap. He had stylish glasses with black frames. Nothing was left to chance when Viljar Robert Hanssen went to Oslo to give evidence.
He walked down the central aisle to the witness box with light steps. Breivik looked at him, as he always did when someone came in. Viljar caught his eye with a searing look, held it, focused, still held it.
‘Hah,’ thought Viljar. ‘Empty. Just like Johannes’s little brother said: “You won’t find anything in his eyes.”’
A gentle voice addressed him from the left. It was Inga Bejer Engh.
‘Can you start by telling us what happened to you on Utøya?’
Yes, he could.
‘I was at the campsite. My little brother was asleep in the tent. I went to the meeting in the main building to find out what had happened in Oslo. I remember talking to Simon Sæbø. I remember he said if this is something political, we aren’t safe here either.’
He said they had gathered up everyone from Troms. Then they heard bangs. So they started running.
‘We ran across Lovers’ Path. My little brother and I made our way down a sort of slope, cliff-edge thing. The bangs were getting nearer, and in the end they were really, really close.’
The prosecution asked to see a map of the steep slope. Viljar did his best to point. ‘Whether I was hit when I was jumping – here – or when I landed, I don’t know, but I ended up down there and my brother was close by.’
At times while Viljar was giving evidence Breivik whispered little comments to one of the trainee lawyers in his defence team.
‘Then I heard this crazy whistling sound in my right ear and I found myself by the edge of the water. I tried to get up several times, I was a bit sort of Bambi on the ice, you know, and I called out to my brother. But then I decided the best thing was just to lie down in the foetal position somewhere. I curled myself round a rock on the shoreline and stayed there. I was conscious the whole time. It was very strange being shot, it didn’t hurt – it was just unpleasant. A new kind of pain. I lay there and started trying to get my bearings. I looked at my fingers and saw they were only hanging on by scraps of skin. I realised I couldn’t see out of one eye and that something must be wrong there. I started running my hand over my head and eventually I came across something soft and then I touched my brain; I was feeling my own brain. It was a weird so I took my hand away pretty quick. I remember Simon Sæbø was lying there, but I didn’t know then that he was dead. I remember I talked to him, said it would be all right and we’d get through it together.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Very well.’
‘And you only found out later that he was dead?’
‘Yes. I think I just didn’t want to take it in… at the time. I remember it vividly, lying there, that… well, I’ve seen lots of bad American films about how important it is to keep breathing and stay awake. So I tried to go on talking, came out with lots of strange stuff. In the end I think I was burbling on about pirates or something.’