An inflamed wound

For a long time, every night they would go to his room to turn on the lamp and turn it off when it was time to sleep.

The blinds were lowered when the midnight sun shone in summer and when the northern lights lit up the sky in the darkest months.

They sat on her bed and fondled her clothes in the closet as the seasons changed on the other side of the window.

On his table they had found three badges.

One said: Red and proud.

Another: No to any racism.

The third, the emblem of the Youth of the Labor Party, white letters on a red background: AUF.

The boy, at 18 years old, had grown so much that his mother was afraid that he was going to bump into the walls of the coffin.

They had dressed him in his first serious suit, the one they had bought together that summer.

They wrapped him in the blue quilt that she had finished making just before he left camping.

She had asked him to weave one for her because she was leaving home for her final year of high school in Tromsø, the capital of northern Norway.

Knitting allowed her to let her imagination run wild when she returned home from her shift at the village nursing home ... Blue, blue as the sky, he answered when she asked him what color he wanted it.

More information

• That's right 'Utoya.

  July 22'

• The Utøya massacre, recounted by four survivors

On July 22, 2011, Anders Kristiansen was on duty in Utøya. "Something strange is happening," he said when he heard through the radio that a policeman had just arrived on the island. He went to check it out. The last thing he was heard shouting was: “Run! Don't stop! " . They found him with nine other young men on the Path of Lovers, his arm around a girl with long curly hair. The eleventh of the group, the only survivor, later said that when they heard the shooting approaching, they decided to lie down and pretend they were dead.

In the years since the terrorist attack I followed the life of the Kristiansen family for my book

One of us

(

Goodfellas)

. In it I study the neo-Nazi terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, and his victims, including one named after the murderer, Anders. I could glimpse the abyss that those who had lost a loved one had to endure for the rest of their lives. Anders's mother, Gerd, has taught me how dark that abyss was, so cold, so lonely. On our snowy walks around Bardu, high above the Arctic Circle, I caught a glimpse of the worst pain there is: that of losing a child.

Death, in a way, is oblivion for those who do not touch us closely. We sweep the abyss, shake it off, and look the other way. Time creates an immense distance between those who still mourn a person and others. When I worked at

One of Ours

I learned that grief wants to be seen, talked about, recognized. Still, last week I was scared to call Gerd, after all the years we hadn't spoken. She had taught me that the worst sin that can be committed against a mourning mother or father is not to mention the one who is gone, as if he had never existed. We avoid the subject because we fear doing harm, not knowing that the loss is so enormous that it may contain several of us.

When I called Gerd, he was in a workshop. She was commissioning a bronze heart to be placed on Anders' grave for the anniversary and she asked me to call her later. For years his pain was mixed with anger. It was difficult to talk about the terrorist's ideas, they were too remote and difficult to understand. Instead, he could hate the killer with all his might. I was furious with the police, with the government, with the Labor Party. It seemed as if no one wanted to take responsibility for the murdered youths. Where had the intelligence services, the secret services, the special forces, the police, the vigilantes been? I was outraged by the demonstrations of the rose, the hearts on Facebook,not being able to scream in pain in a society where we are supposed to show what they call dignity.

"This is a coup," Breivik told the policeman sitting on top of him when he was finally captured on the island. The slaughter had lasted more than an hour. He was surrounded by dead teenagers. "Hunter of Marxists," read a badge on his chest. Still on the island, he assured the police that the boys lying around were by no means innocent. “They are extremist Marxists. Spawn of Marxism. It is the Labor Party, the youth branch. They are the ones who have the power in Norway. They are the ones who have tolerated the Islamization of Norway ”.

While being interrogated, other officers searched for survivors. A police officer named Anders Viljar Hanssen's friend among the dead. "All I did was sing ...!" A girl sobbed. Viljan had part of his brain exposed, outside the skull. The eyes were a bloody mess. The policeman saw that his pulse was still beating, put the boy's brain inside the broken skull and wrapped it in a cloth. He asked a survivor who had been brought into a boat to hold Viljan's head in his lap and to "keep him alive." Viljan, who was 17 years old, woke up from a coma 10 days later: he was missing an eye, the fingers with which he had tried to protect his face from the bullets, parts of his shoulder and many friends. Bullet fragments were lodged in his brain, so deep they couldn't be removed.

Ten years after he was almost left for dead, Viljan studies in the polar capital of Tromsø. In his head he continues to discuss politics with his best friend, Anders, who was called "little Obama" for his admiration for the president of a country that none of them had visited. "He did not live until he was 18 years old, but he will always be with me," Viljan tells me in his parents' cabin, in the mountains of Valdres. "Every time I make important decisions, he is with me: sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree."

It has been a dark decade. First he had to fight to live again, heal from his injuries, his fury, and adjust to the glass eye and the prosthetic hand. Then, in theory, he had to give thanks for being alive, showing no anger or remorse. But worst of all, in all these years, has been the constant harassment. Especially in the networks, and especially by middle-aged men. "Breivik should have finished the task," wrote one. Another wanted Breivik to sodomize him, constantly and without end. They all criticized his liberal ideas about immigrants, even though they are very widespread. On the internet, in theoretically peaceful, tolerant and wealthy Norway, some believed that death and rape were the punishment that AUF members deserved.Viljar shared that fierce harassment with other survivors, especially those who remain active in politics. The country was scandalized when the attacks on the survivors were shown online.

As the tone of the public debate hardened, Viljar couldn't stand it anymore and remained oblivious to politics to avoid both attention and anguish. Ten years after Utøya, a generation of politicians has been lost. "There are few survivors who are still in politics today," says Viljar. "It is no coincidence." The Labor Party was in power when Breivik committed his crime and Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg tearfully insisted that Norway would never renounce its values ​​or let the terrorist win. "We will respond to hatred with love," he said, urging "more democracy, more openness and more humanity, but never naivety."

The entire political spectrum in Norway applauded him for his leadership of the nation after the massacre. Now, the image has started to crack. What seemed more appropriate at the time - making a show of unity - has prevented important political debates, such as the need to confront radical and far-right ideas. When the AUF have indicated that Breivik's opinions are not isolated ideas on the internet, but rather reflect the words spread by some right-wing MPs, they have been ignored. When they have asked the right-wing parties to express their rejection of racist speeches, they have accused them of wanting to restrict freedom of expression. There has been a space for Breivik and another for politics, says writer Snorre Valen, "without any connection between the two."Newspaper editors have been very wary of far-right conspiracies and have been told by Labor Party Youth to keep quiet, he writes in his book.

Utøya-kortet

. The Anders Breivik case has been treated as an anomaly, not as part of a political movement with long tentacles reaching out to right-wing political parties. That is why he has not been talked about in the debates on immigration, integration or racism; up to now.

This spring something emerged that began to flow like melting snow, forming streams and rivers that grew stronger as summer approached. An avalanche of young Labor men saying "enough is enough": "The massacre was a politically motivated attack!" Writes Tonje Brenna, former secretary general of the AUAF, in her book

July 22 and Every Day After

. "It was not a natural catastrophe!" After examining emails, letters, text messages, phone calls and posts on social media, he assures that the author was not the only one who hated the Labor Party "or wanted us dead."

"This is the last chance to speak out firmly," says Viljar on the eve of the anniversary. “The window is going to close. Then it will be the historians' turn ”. Viljar has gradually returned to politics and holds a Labor Party seat in the Tromsø city parliament. Although its ballast is heavier than that of almost all the others: if the fragments lodged in your brain move a millimeter, by a blow, by a fall or by itself, they could damage your main artery. There is one of them that is only three millimeters away.

When I traveled the world to present my book, I was frequently asked how Norway has changed. Sometimes I use a metaphor: terrorism caused a deep wound that has healed, but it will never go away. It hurts, but it doesn't affect the way Norway works. We continue as before. Terror did not change us, I mean, unlike what happened with the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, which unleashed two wars in less than two years, plus radicalization, the expansion of ISIS and a third war, with a cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars spent.

Norway, I replied, remains a country in which trust, unity, consensus, openness and tolerance are deeply rooted. According to polls, those values ​​have not changed since the terrorist attack. But this spring he has made me review my views on how we have dealt with the consequences of the massacre. Sometimes you have to go a little further to see more clearly. Anders Breivik was for almost 10 years a member of the Progress Party, a far-right populist party, skeptical of immigration and critical of Islam. He tried to carve out a political career, but was unsuccessful.

Two years before the massacre, party leader Siv Jensen coined the term "stealth Islamization" and sounded the alarm about ghettos, hijabs and halal food. His party also used words such as cultural betrayal and crusades against Europe, expressions very close to Breivik's rhetorical universe which, at that time, showed the same concern as Siv Jensen: that Muslims were entering through the back door and the The Labor Party had opened it up. Keep in mind that Muslims in Norway were and still are approximately 4% of the population.

In 2009 Anders Breivik was a mere digital warrior, who coincided with members of the Progress Party on some web pages;

They were looking for arguments to justify their policies and he gathered material for his book or manifesto, which he would end up publishing on the internet the morning of the massacre.

In the autumn of that year, he wrote, on the page against immigrants document.no, that multiculturalism was a hateful ideology whose objective was to destroy European culture and identity and Christianity and that “the Progress Party is a victim of that intolerance".

In January 2010 he carried out his last civil act with his attempt to create a digital newspaper in cooperation with the party newspaper,

Progress

.

The party refused, and in February Breivik began to ask for weapons, ammunition and chemicals for his bomb.

Instead of asking ourselves how being a member of the Progress Party for almost a decade influenced Breivik's thinking, what has been done is to feel sorry for the party for having him in its ranks. After the victory of the conservative party in the 2013 parliamentary elections, the Progress Party joined the government for the first time in history, in a coalition with three center-right parties. Only abroad could headlines make this clear, in newspapers like

The Independent

: "An anti-immigrant party linked to Breivik is going to enter the government." The Norwegians were too polite to mention it.

Late one afternoon, I manage to contact Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels. He left Oslo in 2014, when he was appointed Secretary General of NATO. The summit has already taken place, the conversation with Biden has been a success and family harmony seems to be reestablishing after the change of president in the United States. Consensus, agreement, unity; you can tell they are Stoltenberg's favorite words. His voice cracks a little when he greets me. He's been out of Norwegian politics for a long time. I refer without delay to the debate this summer, the date that you consider the worst day of your life. "What was appropriate then, what is appropriate now, what has changed?" There is silence in Brussels, but he recovers and asks me to understand that he needs some time. “I have been with Afghanistan all day… To suddenly return to Norway, I have to think.I have to meditate on it, meditate on my words. It is very important to me".

He emphasizes that he highly values ​​the debate that has arisen and that he has read and plans to read more books written by AUF members. "Until now, they are the ones who have carried the heaviest load," he acknowledges. And that hurts. "As years have passed, I have become more aware of how important it is to seek answers, to know

why

terrorism hit us," he says. “There is no doubt that it was an attack directed against the Labor Party and the AUF. The terrorist wanted to change our country through violence. So it was also an attack on Norway ”.

I tell him about Gerd's grief. "I remember Anders," he says. She met Gerd and her husband at a meeting three days after the massacre, when their son was still among those missing. Stoltenberg remembers that he hugged them and that he had a hard time finding the right words, for fear of saying an inconvenience. “That day we lost many of our best young people and the greatest talents in the Labor Party,” he says. "The best we can do for them is to keep talking about July 22, defend the values ​​in which they believed and fight so that something like this does not happen again." Stoltenberg will probably forever be the prime minister who held Norway together in a time of crisis. He was prime minister before he was leader of his party.

As for me, I have learned that there is something missing from the scar metaphor. The wound is filled with pus. It is infected, inflamed, so you have to open it and clean it. The best cleaning would be recognition and a request for forgiveness. The recognition that for 10 years the victims have been silenced every time they have tried to link Breivik with certain attitudes and opinions existing in the political sphere. And a request for forgiveness for not having seen it clearly until now.

“I have had two young men named Anders fighting inside the head. One good and one bad, ”Gerd tells me when he returns from the workshop where he ordered the bronze heart. “The bad guy clung to my brain and wouldn't let me find my son. How much it has tormented me! ”He exclaims. "It still annoys me that he's alive," he adds. "That I can breathe an hour in the open air every day." By the way, the name is not exactly the same, he points out. “Our son's name is Anders,” he says in his northern dialect, with the accent on the a and the d very pronounced. The baddie's name is pronounced with the snobby Oslo accent, with an unstressed a and a dumb d. "And, apart from the name, they had nothing in common," he concludes.

She starts knitting again. Before he borrowed a loom, now he has his own. "They gave us money for Anders," he says, referring to compensation for the victims. “It was disgusting. It was like having my son on my checking account ”. But he spent it on buying a loom and then that money stopped hurting him. One night she went up to his room, where his clothes still occupy the shelves 10 years after his death. He pulled out his jeans, one by one, a dozen in all, carried them into the basement, and picked up the scissors. He cut them lightly, trying to make the pieces as long as possible. Some dark blue, others stonewashed and very light, almost white. The pieces were piled up on the floor and he began to organize the colors. Then he arranged the warp and began to weave.

Blue, blue like the sky.

The color she had thought she would never be able to knit again when she saw her son dead and wrapped in the blue bedspread, with his suit and insignia.

Red and proud.

Not just any racism.

AUF.

Ten years later, the inscription has been erased.

Anders is gone.

But the AUF are back on their feet.

Asne Seierstad

is a Norwegian journalist, author of

The Kabul Bookstore

.

His book

One of us

served as the basis for the film about the Utøya massacre July 22, by Paul Greengrass

Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia