Stoltenberg had to struggle to keep upright. Soon they would all be coming past him on their way out of the hall.
Then a police officer came in with a note, which he handed to one of the men on the stage. They had been notified of one final survivor at a small hospital in Ringerike. The patient had now been sent to the larger Ullevål University hospital in Oslo.
Stoltenberg held his breath.
There was one last chance.
‘It is a girl,’ read the man on the stage.
The parents of boys are out of hope now, thought Stoltenberg.
It was unbearable. He himself had two children the same age as those on Utøya, a boy and a girl.
The parents of girls glimpsed a ray of hope.
‘… between fourteen and twenty, about 1.62 metres tall…’
‘Oh God, it’s Bano!’ exulted Bayan under her breath.
‘… with dark hair…’
‘It’s Bano!’
It all tallied: the height, the age, the hair colour!
‘… and blue eyes.’
Lara looked at her mother. Her heart sank.
‘Contact lenses,’ whispered Bayan. ‘She must have been wearing blue contact lenses!’
‘She has a distinctive scar on her neck.’
‘It’s her,’ whispered another mother. ‘It’s Ylva.’ She was crying. ‘It has to be Ylva!’
Ylva – Viljar and Torje’s childhood friend – had been lifted by Simon over the log and then shot four times just seconds after Simon. She had still not been able to say her name.
Ylva’s mother turned and looked at Stoltenberg, whom she had known for some years. She came towards him. Behind her, the meeting was breaking up.
Stoltenberg was overwhelmed. He embraced her and was about to say, ‘That’s wonderful!’
But just as he found his voice, his eyes met those of another mother. Her last hope was gone. Her gaze burned into him.
‘Those eyes. Those eyes,’ he said later. ‘It was like the entrance to hell.’
He held his tongue and gave Ylva’s mother a pat on the back instead.
Jens Stoltenberg is a man who only believes in matters that can be proved. This atheist rarely throws big words around. He seldom talks in images and allegories, and all his life he has been direct, concrete, a little hard-edged and abrupt. But in his encounter with all those lives cut short, through those who loved them more than anything, vocabulary had to expand and broaden; the word hell acquired a concrete meaning.
He went out to the bar. There was bright daylight outside. In here the desperate stood among disco balls and mirrored walls. It was hot and sticky, and a pungent smell spread through the room.
Stoltenberg went over to the nearest group of seats. There a daughter was missing. In the next one it was a son. In the third they told him their son had kept on calling, and then suddenly there were no more calls. A father had heard screams down the phone, then silence. One youngster had swum with a wounded friend on his back. A girl who had not really meant to take part this year had gone to Utøya anyway; now she was missing.
Missing gradually came to mean deceased.
Stoltenberg knelt down beside people who were not capable of getting up from their seats. He hugged, he cried. He folded people in his arms, he patted and comforted them. It was an intense sensation: all those people, all those bodies, faces in shock, young folk telling him they had cried ‘Kill me, kill me, I can’t bear this any longer,’ when the response unit arrived.
There was scarcely a hand’s breadth between the groups of seats. I can’t get through this, thought Stoltenberg. There are too many of them. The number that was no longer a number overpowered him.
On the way out, numerous microphones were thrust into his face. He pulled himself together and talked, in Norwegian and English, about consideration, fellowship and warmth. While the local reporters were most preoccupied with Stoltenberg’s feelings and the fact that the royal family had arrived, the foreign journalists asked searching questions about the country’s state of preparedness for terrorist attacks.
‘Do you have confidence in the police and the security apparatus, Mr Stoltenberg?’ asked an American reporter.
‘Yes, I do,’ said the Prime Minister.
But today, feelings were his strongest point. ‘Utøya is the paradise of my youth and yesterday it was turned into a hell.’
That was how it was.
After the meeting in the banqueting hall, Gunnar had to find Geir Kåre.
The Sæbø family had got seats on a flight from Bardufoss early that morning. Viggo and Gerd Kristiansen were on the same plane. They knew nothing, nothing at all, about their son. Nobody had seen Anders after he ran from the campsite. Roald and Inger Linaker had also flown with them. They had found out that their son was in hospital, badly hurt. They had no idea how badly.
Håvard had been given a sleeping pill before take-off, and he fell asleep. Tone and Gunnar sat clasping hands.
Simon had been shot, they realised that. He would have called otherwise. He must be on an operating table somewhere. That was why he could not call.
Before leaving Salangen they had sent pictures of him to the emergency ward at Ullevål, where the most critically injured had been flown. The hospital had asked if there was any distinguishing feature they could look for.
‘Distinguishing feature? Tone! Does Simon have any distinguishing features?’
Tears ran down Tone’s cheeks. ‘Distinguishing features?’
She wanted to answer that they should look for a beautiful boy. The most beautiful of all.
Then she remembered the mole on his chest.
Once they had registered at Sundvolden, Tone gave her DNA; a cotton-bud swab in her mouth, that was it. The parents were asked again about Simon’s distinguishing features: had he any scars, piercings, tattoos, distinctive clothing or hair? They had to fill in a yellow form called an ante mortem, to make it easier for the police to find Simon. This was something everybody had to do, the two of them agreed. The form was to help to identify Simon if they found him alive, but terribly injured.
Back at reception, they once again looked very thoroughly through all the lists of survivors that were up on the walls.
‘I must find Geir Kåre. I’m sure he knows something. Do you want to come with me?’
No, Tone did not want to. She wanted to sit at a table in a corner and wait for him. She could not bring herself to talk to someone who knew.
Gunnar found Geir Kåre.
Geir Kåre took him in his arms. Held him.
Until then, Gunnar had clung to a tiny hope.
But Geir Kåre had seen everything.
Gunnar wandered in a daze across the terrace of café tables and parasols. He crossed the road and went down to the water. There he had to stop.
He couldn’t get any air. It all went black. There was no air reaching his lungs. He stood there fighting uncontrollably for breath. His chest constricted.
His thoughts choked him, stabbed him and sank. Certainty took hold. His loss was so vivid to him, and memories flooded in. And everything that would not become memories.
There on the shore, Gunnar wept.
It came home to him now.
It was so final. We won’t see Simon again.
Then he went up to Tone.
And told her.
A priest came over to them and sat down by Håvard, who had been going about like a sleepwalker ever since he locked himself into his room the previous evening. He sat there stiffly, shut away inside himself.
‘Do you want to tell me about your brother?’ asked the priest.
Håvard nodded.
There were skilled people going among them: priests, psychologists and people from the Red Cross. The King and Queen were there, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. They were discreet, circumspect, warm. Besides Stoltenberg, a number of his ministers were also circulating. Anniken Huitfeldt, the Minister of Culture, came over to their table.