‘Did anyone talk to you?’
‘They shushed me. He must have come back again, I think, without me realising. So then they shushed me, like, “Please shut up!”’
‘Your brother, what happened to him?’
‘I lost track of him. The last thing I saw was him moving away from me. Like I was trying to get him to. I didn’t see him again after that, and that was the worst bit for me. I tried to distract myself by thinking about things I enjoyed in everyday life. I thought about going back home to Svalbard, and driving the snowmobile and girls and other things that are really great. I thought about all sorts of things except where my little brother was. For me, dying wasn’t an option and that was smart. Well, in a way I didn’t realise how badly injured I was. I remember I started to feel freezing and get spasms. I was shaking like mad. I remember, though I don’t know how long it lasted, that I passed out. I don’t know when that happened but I think it must have been a little while before they came for us.’
From that point, Viljar could not remember anything until he was taken aboard a boat. ‘The waves were knocking my back quite hard. There was a man beside me, asking, “What’s your name? Where do you live?” to keep me awake. I remember asking if they’d seen a small, red-haired boy. And he said no.’
‘Where did the bullets hit you?’
‘I was hit in the thigh, just a slight graze. And then there’s my fingers here, you can’t miss that, I was shot in the hand, and then it was my shoulder, all this up here was pulverised. Then I was shot in the forearm, this little scar, and then I was shot in the head. If that makes five, then that’s it.’
‘And the shot in the head, how has it affected you since?’
‘I lost this eye, but that’s usefuclass="underline" it means I don’t have to look over there.’
Viljar nodded towards the defendant, who was sitting to his right. It took a second or two, as if Breivik needed a little time to appreciate what the boy in the witness box had said before starting to smile. The whole room smiled.
‘But as for my brain and that…’ Viljar went on, ‘I’ve still got my wits about me.’
There were chuckles in the courtroom. A few people laughed out loud. A sense of release. Breivik was still smiling.
‘So we hear,’ said Beijer Engh. ‘And are things going to continue that way?’
Viljar had decided in advance what he was willing to share and what he was not. ‘Reasonably terribly, decently badly,’ he replied when asked how he was getting on at school. He could talk about phantom limb pain, operations on his head, the eye he could take in and out like a marble. But he wanted to keep what went on inside his mind to himself. The hell – he would not share that with ABB and the rest of Norway. He replied briefly to the prosecutor’s questions about how things were for him now.
‘Quite a challenge, all the anxiety and nerves,’ he said. ‘I only feel safe in a moving car. Anxiety and paranoia. I still seem to find things difficult. Not on Svalbard and maybe not in Tromsø, but I find it unpleasant being in Oslo. Being here now.’
He paused. ‘I had to cancel my place at an AUF event because I got too scared to go. It’s hard. Life has really changed,’ he said, and told the court about everything he had had to relearn: holding a pen, tying his shoelaces. He who had been so active, played football, drove snowmobiles, went skiing, loved everything that was fast and exciting, now he could do none of that. He still had fragments of the bullet inside his head. They were too close to vital nerves to be removed. If these bits moved even a millimetre, it could be lethal. He had to avoid any risk of a blow to his head. For the rest of his life.
‘I can’t just wax my skis and set off any more…’ he said, and paused before he went on. ‘We’re all dependent on having self-confidence and feeling at ease. It does something to you when your whole face has changed and…’
At that, Breivik looked down.
Viljar had no more to say.
He had shared enough.
‘I think you’ve finished, then,’ said judge Arntzen.
‘Fabulous,’ said Viljar.
He stood up, spun on his heel and went. Out.
It was almost summer.
He had his life in front of him. He could walk, sit and stand. He had his wits about him. And many people to live for.
Psycho Seminar
‘It’s insulting!’ cried Breivik. ‘It’s offensive!’
‘Breivik, you get your chance to speak later!’
‘It’s ludicrous that I’m not allowed to comment here. This is being broadcast. It’s insulting!’ Breivik was bright red in the face.
‘NRK must stop the broadcast!’ ordered judge Wenche Arntzen.
The transmission faded out, away from Breivik’s indignant face, to a picture of the main doors of the Law Courts, while the drama played out in courtroom 250.
The clash was about Breivik’s life. For Breivik, it was about the right to a private life. For the court, it was about making the correct diagnosis.
Breivik had constructed his life story as a shining suit of armour. In the lustreless courtroom, within those matte grey walls, a pack of professionals had descended to try with a variety of tools to push, worm and force their way inside his defences.
It was Friday 8 June. The day before, the court had not sat.
Wenche Arntzen had been at her father’s funeral. Supreme Court counsel Andreas Artzen had died two weeks earlier. The funeral was arranged for the first day the court was not in session.
The two professional judges in the 22 July trial came from the legal aristocracy. Wenche Arntzen’s grandfather, Sven Arntzen, was Director General of Public Prosecution in 1945, and it was he who prepared the charges against Vidkun Quisling. John Lyng, grandfather of Arntzen’s fellow judge Arne Lyng, was the public prosecutor in the legal purge of collaborators in 1945 and prosecutor in the case against the Nazi Henry Rinnan who, like Quisling, was condemned to death.
Lyng and Arntzen had with them the three lay judges, who had been selected at random from a list at the courthouse. A young, pregnant teacher of Colombian descent, a retired family counsellor in her seventies and a middle-aged consultant in the Department of Education. On the first day the court sat, there had been another lay person on the bench, but it emerged in the evening that just after the massacre he had posted on Facebook that ‘The death penalty is the only just outcome of this case!!!!!!!!!!!’ He was obliged to stand down, and the elderly family counsellor who was the reserve moved up to take his place.
These five judges were now observing Breivik’s outburst.
He had sat there so quietly for eight weeks. Now he was completely freaking out.
The week before he had been quite satisfied. The defence had called witnesses who stressed that Breivik was not alone in his thinking. Historians, philosophers and researchers in the fields of religion, terrorism and right-wing extremism took the witness stand and set out where Breivik stood in an extremist, but not unknown, ideological landscape. Representatives of Stop the Islamisation of Norway and the Norwegian Defence League were also invited to present their political views.
The court heard from a variety of standpoints about a world in which Breivik’s ideas were familiar. His thoughts were not bizarre distortions, but were in fact shared by many.
The defence had also wanted to call Breivik’s ideological lodestar Fjordman, whose actual name turned out to be Peder Are Nestvold Jensen. Forced out from behind his Fjordman shield, a rather short man in his mid-thirties, with a rounded face and dark curls, appeared. He worked as a night watchman at a nursing home in Oslo and was an anti-jihadist blogger in his spare time. He refused to accept any responsibility for having inspired Breivik.