From the roundabout by Skøyen station, Breivik followed Hoffsveien on towards Hoff. Maybe he threw a glance back towards Skøyen bus depot, where once he had become king of the number 32 bus? Hoff was still in the West End, but the detached villas here were mixed with flats and workers’ houses. Factory workers had once lived here. They spoke a different sociolect from the indigenous population and built a People's House as a kind of socialist Trojan horse in the surrounding Conservative Party country.
Breivik set off on the last few metres home, crossing the tramlines by Hoff station and continuing past the Coop Mega supermarket up towards the anonymous low-rise building where his mother lived. When he reached home, he let himself into the ground-floor flat. Breivik went into his messy room. The computer was whirring. Long curtains concealed the window. From the wall, colourful, cartoonish and slightly disturbing faces by the graffiti artist Coderock stared down at him. The paintings were a memento of Breivik's own time as an ‘artist’ on Oslo's concrete walls, buses and metro carriages.
Breivik was tired after busy weeks with little sleep. The last week before the ‘operation’ was spent travelling back and forth to the farm at Åsta, a couple of hours north from Oslo, by train and taxi and hire car. He had already finished making a new Facebook profile, which said that he was a Christian and liked hunting, and set up a Twitter account in which he cited John Stuart Milclass="underline" ‘One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.’
This was only a part of the press pack that Breivik had prepared. The video was already done, ready to be uploaded, but the compendium, his 1,500-page pet project, the key to his distinctive split mind and one of the most remarkable testimonies that has ever been written in Norway, was still not ready. This enormous, disorganized manuscript pointed not only forward to his ‘operation’ but also, in a way, back to his childhood.
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.
1 Torgeir P. Krokfjord, Anders Holth Johansen, Sindre Granly Meldalen and Frode Hansen, ‘Breivik festet på kjendisbar natta før massemordet’ [Breivik partied at celebrity bar the night before the mass murder], Dagbladet, 19 August 2011, www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/19/nyheter/anders_behring_breivik/innenriks/terror/terrorangrepet/17724429/. According to one of the Dagbladet journalists who worked on the story, their source later told them that Breivik had not been at Skaugum the evening before, as the article states, but another day that week.
2 Breivik's entries on the forum of the Progress Party youth wing (Fremskrittspartiets Ungdom; FPU) were to be found online but have since been removed: http://fpu.no/2011/08/anders-behring-breiviks-debattinnlegg/.
3 Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim, ‘Rettspsykriatisk erklæring’ [Forensic psychiatric report], 29 November 2011 (the first psychiatric report), reproduced by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/, pp. 36, 38, 105–6.
4 See note 1 above. The depiction of Breivik is based on Husby and Sørheim's description of his body language.
5 Andrew Berwick [Anders Behring Breivik], 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence (hereinafter referred to as 2083), p. 1401.
6 Ibid., p. 687.
7 Ibid., p. 1171.
8 Ibid., pp. 1424–5.
9 This literary scholar is an acquaintance of mine.
10 2083, pp. 1406, 1434.
11 Ibid., pp. 1401–2.
12 This episode is retold based on an interview with the literary scholar who met Breivik that evening.
13 2083, p. 1424.
14 Ibid., p. 839.
15 To borrow a term from the court-appointed psychiatrists Husby and Sørheim.
16 In a comment on Document.no. Breivik's comments on Document.no can be found at www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/.
17 André Glucksmann, Dostoïevski à Manhattan (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), p. 24.
18 Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, trans. Ivan Morris (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 5.
19 Ibid., p. 204.
20 Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), p. 79.
21 Ibid., p. 82.
22 Ibid., p. 104.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
24 2083, p. 1371.
25 Ibid., p. 1424.
3
A West End Family1
Anders Behring Breivik's Childhood
‘The Fatherless Civilisation’2
This time, Tove was furious. Jens could be so strangely insensitive. There were few faults to find with him, as he was a great husband in many respects, but he could sometimes be distant and rigid, principled in the wrong way – like now. Anders himself was not making a big fuss about it. The little boy with his milky, almost transparent complexion sniffled and his narrow eyes ran, but he was not whining.
‘Come on!’ said Tove.
She stomped off down the gravel path with Anders in tow behind her, slammed the little white wooden gate shut after them and walked over to the car. She sat down behind the wheel, while Anders crawled into the back. In the mirror, Tove saw him put on his safety belt. His face was red because of the allergic reaction, and he was possibly upset too. She turned out onto the road, changed gear and set off for Cabourg.
Behind them was the little white summer cottage, an old half-timbered farmhouse with a thatched roof. On the lawn outside, which was as straight as an arrow, Jens Breivik walked along pushing the mower. Although Tove had asked him to wait to cut the grass until Anders had gone home, Jens had stuck to his guns. The grass had to be mown, irrespective of whether it made his little son from Norway poorly and gave him the sniffles.
Normandy was at its most beautiful in the summer holidays, but Tove was seething with rage. When the little boy visited them, surely Jens could change his routine. Anders did suffer when he had his attacks. He was a sensitive boy and cried the time they drove over a mouse. Anders was not with them very often: sometimes at the holiday cabin in Telemark and here at the cottage in Bassenville. There was a farm nearby, and Anders was always thrilled to see the animals. He was sweet and well mannered, easy to deal with, confident and happy when guests came and played badminton with him. A wary and slightly meticulous boy who looked up to his father but stuck close to her, his step-mother.
The road wound between dense spinneys, past green openings and yellow fields on the way towards Caen. The first time Tove had met Jens Breivik was in London in the sixties, twenty years earlier. Tove had more or less done a runner from a summer job at a psychiatric hospital. She was in her early twenties and was fed up with the hospital. Tove thought it was the English doctors and nurses who were the real lunatics at the asylum. It was no place for her. She loved being in England but had to find something else to do. She turned up at the Norwegian Embassy to borrow the phone book, where she met a man staring at her with scrutinizing eyes. ‘Can you type?’ he asked.