‘What is it?’ asked Anders. He was fourteen years old, no longer a boy and on the cusp of adolescence.
‘I think’, Tove said, ‘I think there's something under your bed.’
Anders’ bed was against the wall. Tove switched on the main light. They bent down and Tove carefully lifted the sheet hanging down from his mattress. There was something small and dark beneath his bed. A head and some paws. It was a cat, and there was something hanging out of it. The cat mewed again, a hideous sound, and Tove suddenly realized what was going on. It was giving birth. The small lumps next to the mother were kittens.
‘Oh dear,’ said Tove.
‘Cool!’ said Anders.
‘Please, Tove,’ Anders pleaded the next morning, ‘do you have to tell them? Can't I just keep one of the little kittens?’ But Tove was adamant. She went down to reception and asked them to remove the cats.
Anders was completely fascinated by the little family beneath his bed, so small and helpless, and Tove was not sure whether he had slept at all that night. He stared at the shivering blind lumps of life and watched the mother licking them clean and lifting them by the scruffs of their necks. The kittens made their first, trembling movements. Their small voices mewed. They crawled up against their mother, blind and seeking out warmth. Gradually, the small balls of fluff dried off. There was fur on the unprotected bodies lying at their mother's side, drinking their first meal. The mystery of life. The kittens lay against their mother in a fan formation, like a crystal formed of the will to live. None of them were bigger than the palm of his hand. Perhaps he wanted to give one of the small kittens a home in Oslo – care for it, give it warmth, look after it. Because what would happen to them here? Would their mother be able to look after her small family? How would the small kittens fare? Perhaps there was something exciting about such a defenceless creature. You could do whatever you wanted with it. But it was no use begging. The cat family was gone when they returned to their room that evening.
In the winter of 1993, Tove separated from Jens Breivik, but she stressed that she did not want to lose contact with his children, especially the youngest, Anders, with whom she had always got on well. She had sat him on her lap when he was little, treated him as her own child. She decided to take him with her on an Easter holiday to do something he would enjoy. While Anders’ classmates at Ris Lower Secondary School sat in traffic on their way up to their families’ holiday cabins in the mountains, he and his step-mother went on board a charter flight to Ayia Napa in Cyprus. All the packing and organizing had gone well, as Tove had always been on good terms with Anders’ mother.
The days they were in Cyprus went by in a flash. They stayed at a hotel right by the beach, and the water was already warm. They had been taking holidays together for ten years, and Tove knew well what Anders liked to do. He was older now, and more daring. Tove watched in surprise as Anders zoomed about by the beach on a jet ski, sending the water spraying. Although he was a careful boy, he had another side too. At Smestad Primary School, he was one of the cool kids in the Skøyen Killers gang. He was active and quick-witted in many ways. Anders was adept at fixing all kinds of technical things, sorting out settings on TVs or video machines when they went wrong. He had evidently learnt something from the computer games in which he was so interested. Tove had a soft spot for the types who did well at school, and Anders reminded her a little of his father in that way: he knew a lot of things and used foreign words as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They travelled around a lot and only came back to the hotel in the evenings, tired and happy.
In Larnaca, they went up to the demarcation line, the border between the Turkish and Greek parts of Cyprus. There were watch-towers, barbed wire and barriers, remains of the war that had raged in the seventies. The border was like a weak echo of the iron curtain that had divided Europe into two ideological camps for forty-five years and had just been dismantled: a small and forgotten provincial version of Checkpoint Charlie. The churches on the Greek side stood directly across from the mosques on the Turkish side. Tove gazed across the border pensively, looking at the roofs on the Muslim side. Turkey: that was where she was headed. Her next posting from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was at the Norwegian Embassy in Ankara. Another chapter of her life was around the corner, and Jens Breivik was no longer part of the story.
Anders was not very interested in the geopolitical drama visible with the ruins and the soldiers, as well as the backdrop of historical conflict between Christianity and Islam. Big, black sunglasses under his blond fringe. His white skin was exposed to the Mediterranean sun, but Tove made sure that he did not get burnt. On their way back to Ayia Napa, he went across to her. He reached out his hand. ‘Here you go,’ he said, opening his hand. In his palm was a small key-ring. Tove picked it up and peered at the picture in the plastic disc attached to the ring.
‘Thank you!’ she said happily. The picture showed a nude woman stepping out of a shell, partly wrapped in her long, brown hair. It had to be a Greek goddess. ‘What's the picture of?’ Tove asked.
‘Don't you recognize her?’ Anders said a little reproachfully. ‘It's Aphrodite.’ The goddess of love, no less. The boy was certainly growing, Tove thought to herself. He was entering puberty now.
There was only one time Tove got cross. She had hired a small moped for Anders on the condition that it would only be used while she was there, but boys will be boys. When she found out that Anders had borrowed the moped without asking and driven around by himself, she gave him quite an earful. ‘That was really bad of you!’ she said angrily. ‘We had a deal!’
Anders hung his head. The boy was not used to boundaries. At home he did what he wanted to, and he was always good and easy-going with Tove. She had never needed to tell him off. Pranks had never been his style, but now he was getting a talking-to and was very sorry. He promised not to do it again, and Tove softened up when she saw his remorseful face. Borrowing the little moped with a shopping basket on its handlebars was no major crime, after all. It was the first time she had come into conflict with Anders, but he took it well.
Afterwards, everything was back to normal, and the usual light atmosphere quickly came back. Anders was open and chatty, but never confided anything, and he did not like to talk about sad or difficult things. ‘Don't ask,’ he had said that time she inquired whether he was feeling bad because of his allergy.
Tove drew a deep breath as their aircraft descended and started its approach to Oslo Airport, Fornebu. Their stay on the island of love had been a pleasant departure from everyday life, but now she was about to start a new life in Ankara. She would not see much of Anders for a while now. And how would the relationship between him and his father go without her? In any case he was not a child any more; he was a teenager now and would find his own path at Ris School. Who would have thought that this bright lad with his knowledge of Greek mythology had been treated as one in a thousand by child psychiatrists? But he was not completely grown up. Even on their way onto the flight, he had spoken about the kitten he could have taken home. It was as if he were obsessed with the little family that had come into being under his bed.
Notes
All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.