The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead.

Not as a result of some form of conscious deliberation, as has been the case with rites such as funerals, the form and meaning of which are negotiable nowadays, and thus have shifted from the sphere of the irrational to the rational, from the collective to the individual – no, the way we remove bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn, you carry him indoors if you can, and if you can't, you at least cover him with a blanket.

What he was thinking on this spring evening I have no idea, nor even what perception he had of himself as he straightened up in the gloom with the sledgehammer in his hands, but I am fairly sure that there was some feeling inside him that he understood the surrounding world quite well. He knew who all the neighbours on the estate were and what social status they held in relation to himself, and I imagine he knew quite a bit about what they preferred to keep to themselves, as he taught their children and also because he had a good eye for others' weaknesses.

I was only supposed to read for half an hour, until ten o'clock, but usually read until mum came home at around half past ten. Tonight was no exception. When I heard the Beetle coming up the hill from the main road, I put the book on the floor, switched off the light and lay in the dark listening for her: the car door slamming, the crunch across the gravel, the front door opening, her coat and scarf being removed, the footsteps up the stairs … The house seemed different then, when she was in it, and the strange thing was that I could feel it; if, for example, I had gone to sleep before she returned and I awoke in the middle of the night, I could sense she was there, something in the atmosphere had changed without my being able to put my finger on quite what it was, except to say that it had a reassuring effect. The same applied to those occasions when she had come home earlier than expected while I was out: the moment I set foot in the hall I knew she was home.

The only thing that does not age in a face is the eyes. They are no less bright the day we die as the day we are born. The blood vessels in them may burst, admittedly, and the corneas may be dulled, but the light in them never changes.

I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember. … For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return.

Both Linda and I live on the brink of chaos, or the feeling of chaos: everything can fall apart at any moment and we have to force ourselves to come to terms with the demands of a life with small children. … However, this constant improvisation increases the significance of the moment, which of course then becomes extremely eventful since nothing about it is automatic, and if our lives feel good, which naturally they do at times, there is a great sense of togetherness and a correspondingly intense happiness. … The corrosive part, of course, is the awareness that being nice to them is not of the slightest help when I am in the thick of it, dragged down into a quagmire of tears and frustration. And, once in the quagmire, each further action only serves to plunge me deeper. And at least as corrosive is the awareness that I am dealing with children. That it is children who are dragging me down. There is something deeply shameful about this.

The shame of being on the verge of tears at the age of fifteen, soon sixteen, was stronger than the ignominy of his mimicking me. I did not usually cry any more, but my father had a hold on me that I never succeeded in breaking.

Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where mum and dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it. I also loved walking the kilometre or so through the old residential area to school, it always filled me with thoughts I liked, such as that I was someone.

Not doing any homework, not paying attention in the lessons was part and parcel of the same attitude. I had always been among the best in every subject, I had always enjoyed showing it, but not any more, now there was something shameful about good grades, it meant you sat at home doing your homework, you were a stick-in-the-mud, a loser. It was different with Norwegian, I associated that with writers and a bohemian lifestyle, besides you couldn't swot it up, it was something else, a feeling, a natural talent, personality.

The fact that he had defended me at the parents' evening contributed to this view of him. Indeed, it was perhaps the most significant factor of them all.

When I moved here Jan Vidar hung out with Kjetil, a boy of our age who lived in Kjevil, they were best friends and always in and out of each other's houses. Kjetil's father was in the services, and they had moved around a lot, from what I understood. When Jan Vidar started to hang out with me, mostly because of a common interest in music, Kjetil tried to win him back, kept ringing and inviting him over, made in-jokes that only they understood when the three of us were together at school; if that didn't work he resorted to more devious methods and invited both of us. We cycled round the airport, hung out in the airport café, went to Hamresanden and called on one of the girls there, Rita. Both Kjetil and Jan Vidar were interested in her. Kjetil had a bar of chocolate which he shared on the hill with Jan Vidar, and he gave me none, but that fell flat as well because all Jan Vidar did was break his piece in two and pass me half. Then Kjetil released his grip, directed his attention elsewhere, but for as long as we went to the same school he never found any friends who were as close as Jan Vidar had been. Kjetil was a person everyone liked, especially the girls, but no one wanted to be with him.

All mum's kindness and thoughtfulness towards Alfhild and Yngve was completely overshadowed by dad's four-second gaze. For that matter, this is how she had probably been at weekends as well, when Yngve was here alone and dad stayed on the ground floor of the barn as much as possible, only turning up for meals, at which his refusal to ask Yngve a single question or grace him with even a minimum of attention is what lingered in the mind after the weekend, despite all mum's efforts to make Yngve feel at home. It was dad who set the tone at home; there was nothing anyone could do.

When I started at gymnas all the first years were assembled one morning on the stage at Gimle Hall, I no longer remember the occasion, but one of the teachers, a notorious nudist from Kristiansand who was said to have painted his house wearing no more than a tie, was generally scruffy, dressed in a provincial bohemian manner and had curly, unkempt, white hair, anyway he read us a poem, walking along the rows on the stage proclaiming and, to general laughter, suddenly singing the praises of the upright erection. … I didn't laugh. I think my jaw fell when I heard that. With mouth agape and eyes vacant I sat there as the insight slowly sank in. All erect dicks are bent. Or, if not all, then at least enough of them to be eulogised in a poem.

We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball's chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn't even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. On the contrary, this was what gave our lives meaning. It wasn't my music we played, but Jan Vidar's, and it went against everything I believed in, yet this is what I trusted. The intro to 'Smoke on the Water', the very incarnation of stupidity, the very antithesis of cool, was what I sat practising at Ve School in 1983: first the guitar riff, then the cymbal, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, then the bass drum, boom, boom, boom, then the snare, tick, tick, tick, and then the daft bass line started, where we often looked at each other with a smile while nodding our heads and shaking our legs as the chorus, played completely out of synch, took off.

When I was at home on my own every room had its own character, and though not directly hostile to me they were not exactly welcoming, either. It was more as if they did not want to subordinate themselves to me, but wanted to exist in their own right, with their own individual walls, floors, ceilings, skirting boards, yawning windows. I was aware of a deadness about the rooms – that was what made me uncomfortable – by which I mean not dead in the sense of life having ceased, but rather life being absent, the way that life is absent from a rock, a glass of water, a book. The presence of our cat, Mefisto, was not strong enough to dispel this, I just saw the cat in the yawning room; however, were a person to come in, even if it were only a small baby, the yawning room was gone. My father filled the rooms with disquiet, my mother filled them with gentleness, patience, melancholy, and on occasion, if she came home from work and was tired, also with a faint yet noticeable undercurrent of irritability.

But the people living on the bend did not forget. The father was too kind to intervene, but the mother … her eyes darkened every time she saw me. To me they were people I could lord it over, nothing more. If William came to school wearing trousers at half-mast he had made a monumental blunder; if he misused a word, there was no reason he shouldn't hear about it. That was only the truth, wasn't it? And it was up to him to stop our fun or find a way to overcome it. I was not exactly invulnerable, my weaknesses were there for all to see and exploit, and the fact that they didn't, because they didn't have enough insight to be able to see them, was surely not my problem. The conditions were the same for all.

I had a speech impediment, you see! I couldn't say my 'r's. After having been shown up by me it would have been enough for them to mimic me and I would have been crushed. But they never did.

I was unable to concentrate on what was happening in the lesson. I was only thinking about Hanne, even though she was sitting in the same room as I was. Or was it thinking? It was more as if I were full to the brim with emotions which did not leave any space for thought. And so it remained for the whole of the winter and spring. I was in love, and it was not one of those trivial crushes, it was one of the grands amours, the ones you may experience only three, or perhaps four, times in a lifetime. This was the first, and since everything about it was new, perhaps the greatest. Everything in me was centred on Hanne. Every morning I awoke and looked forward to going to school, where she would be. If she wasn't there, if she was ill or out of town, all meaning immediately drained out of everything, the rest of the day was just a question of endurance. For what? What was I waiting for while I was waiting? Not hot embraces and deep kisses at any rate, for a relationship in that sense simply did not exist. No, what I was waiting and lived for was the hand that lightly caressed my shoulder, it was the smile that lit up her face whenever she saw me or I said something funny, it was the hug and the embrace when we met as friends after school.

That night I couldn't sit still, I walked around the flat, to and fro in my room, up and down the stairs, in and out of the downstairs rooms. I felt as if I were bigger than the world, as if I had everything inside me, and that now there was nothing left to strive for. Humanity was small, history was small, the earth was small, yes, even the universe, which they said was endless, was small. I was bigger than everything. It was a fantastic feeling, but it left me restless because the most important thing in it was the longing for what was going to be, and not what I did or had done.

Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming … it is coming … One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your senses you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first.

Bodil, she must be the daughter of dad's father's second brother, whom I had never met. For some reason he had been banished from the family, long ago. I heard about him by chance for the first time a couple of years ago; there was a wedding in the family, and mum mentioned that he was also there, and that he made a passionate speech. He was a lay preacher at the Pentecostal church in town. A mechanic. Everything about him was different from his two brothers, even the name. When they, after consultation with their imposing mother, and upon entering the academic world and university, had decided to change their name from the standard Pedersen to the rather less standard Knausgaard, he had refused. Perhaps that is what caused the break?

Or was it just that he was drunk? I thought. Because I wasn't used to that either. My father had never been a drinker. The first time I saw him in an inebriated state was one evening only two months before when I visited him and Unni in the flat in Elvegate, and was served fondue, another thing which he would never have considered remotely possible in his own home on a Friday night. They had been drinking before I arrived, and although he was kindness itself, it was threatening nonetheless; not directly, of course, because, sitting there, I didn't fear him, but indirectly because I could no longer read him. It was as if all the knowledge I had acquired about him through my childhood, and which enabled me to prepare for any eventuality, was, in one fell swoop, invalid. So what was valid?

The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-70s, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered. Apart from one or two isolated events that Yngve and I had talked about so often they had almost assumed biblical proportions, I remembered hardly anything from my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. But I did remember the rooms where they took place. I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

The germ of an idea that had set the text in motion was particularly important, namely that the action took place in the 1880s while all the characters and props were from the 1980s. For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had got nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write poor books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called 'writing'. Writing is more about destroying than creating.

Linda was asleep beside me. I knew that the child she bore inside also influenced her dreams, which were worryingly often about water: enormous waves crashing down on distant beaches where she was walking; the apartment flooding with water, sometimes completely filling it, either trickling down walls or rising from sinks and toilets; lakes in new places in town, such as under the railway station where her child might be in a left-luggage locker she couldn't reach, or it simply disappeared from her side while she had her hands full of bags. She also had dreams in which the child she gave birth to had an adult face, or it turned out there wasn't a child at all and all that flowed from her during the birth was water.

I had studied the history of art and was used to describing and analysing art. But what I never wrote about, and this is all that matters, was the experience of it. Not just because I couldn't, but also because the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for. So I kept it to myself. I wandered around the Nationalgalleri in Stockholm or the Nasjonalgalleri in Oslo or the National Gallery in London and looked. There was a kind of freedom about this. I didn't need to justify my feelings, there was no one to whom I had to stand to account and no case to answer. Freedom, but not peace, for even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude's archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can't explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility.

There is no one who does not understand their own world. Someone who understands very little, a child, for example, simply moves in a more restricted world than someone who understands a lot. However, an insight into the limits of understanding has always been part of understanding a lot: the recognition that the world outside, all those things we don't understand, not only exists but is also always greater than the world inside. From time to time I thought that what had happened, at least to me, was that the children's world, where everything was known, and where with regard to the things that were not known, you leaned on others, those who had knowledge and ability, that this children's world had never actually ceased to exist, it had just expanded over all these years.

The whole of the physical world has been elevated to this sphere, everything has been incorporated into the immense imaginary realm from South American rain forests and the islands of the Pacific Ocean to the North African deserts and Eastern Europe's tired, grey towns. Our minds are flooded with images of places we have never been, yet still know, people we have never met, yet still know and in accordance with which we, to a considerable extent, live our lives. The feeling this gives, that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this to be deeply untrue, since actually we know nothing about anything, still I could not escape it. The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here. It was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself; at the same time this is also what made me fail.

What was taken up in this world was of course a question of individual taste, and soon this taste became the very core of art, which thus could and, to a certain degree in order to survive, had to admit objects from the real world, and the situation we have arrived at now whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, all the emphasis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what it thinks, what ideas it carries, such that the last remnants of objectivity, the final remnants of something outside the human world have been abandoned. Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not any more. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it.

The idea that I could scrutinise this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable. It felt like an act of violation. At the same time I sensed a hunger, an insatiability that demanded I keep looking at him, at this dead body that a few days earlier had been my father.

I clambered onto the rear seat and leaned back. Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations. Was there anything better than sitting in the rear seat of a taxi and being driven through towns and suburbs before a long journey?

There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do, and what dad didn't do was not so conspicuous, also because there was nothing at all neurotic about him. But he never went to the hairdresser's; he always cut his own hair. He never travelled by bus. He hardly ever did his shopping at the local shop, but always at the large supermarkets outside town. All these were scenarios where he might have come into contact with people, or have been seen by them, and even though he was a teacher by profession and thus stood in front of a class every day, and occasionally summoned parents to meetings, and also spoke to his colleagues in the staffroom every day, he still consistently avoided these social situations. What was it they had in common? That he might be assimilated into a community with no more than chance as its basis? That he might be seen in a way over which he had no control? That he was vulnerable sitting on the bus, in the hairdresser's chair, by the supermarket till?

At that time I had no idea that he had bought all this skiing equipment and driven us to the far side of Tromøya in an attempt to get close to me, but now, sitting there with closed eyes and pretending to sleep while the announcement to fasten seat belts and straighten seat backs was broadcast over the speakers, the thought of it threatened to send me into another bout of crying, and when yet again I leaned forward and propped my head against the side of the aircraft to hide, it was half-hearted, since my fellow passengers must already have known from take-off that they had ended up next to a young man in tears.

The essence of a nose is judgement, to judge you have to stand outside, and that is not where creativity takes place. Yngve was much more inside, he played guitar in a band, wrote his own songs, and listened to music from there; moreover, he also had an analytical, academic side that Asbjørn did not have, or use, to such an extent. Graphic design was in many ways perfect for them.

Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings. Not even the worst grief leaves traces; when it feels so overwhelming and lasts for such a long time, it is not because the feelings have set, they can't do that, they stand still, the way water in a forest mere stands still.

Not all rituals involve ceremonies, not all rituals are rigidly demarcated, there are those that take shape in the midst of everyday life, and are recognisable by the weight and charge they give the otherwise normal event. As I stepped out of the house that morning and followed Yngve to the car, for a moment, it was as if I was entering a larger story than my own. The sons leaving home to bury their father, this was the story I suddenly found myself in, as I stopped by the passenger door while Yngve unlocked the boot and stowed his bag, and Kari Anne, Ylva and Torje stood watching us from the front door.

While in my mind the undertaker's office in all its detail was very vivid and clear, the town around it was fuzzy and grey, I walked through it because I had no choice. I wasn't thinking differently, inside my mind I was unchanged, the only difference was that now I demanded more room and hence I was excluding external reality.

I didn't find it at all surprising that he was on a poster in my father's office, I was four years old and nothing in the world was incomprehensible, everything was connected with everything else. But dad and Ola Jan laughed. They laughed, and said it was impossible. That's Ibsen, they said. He died nearly a hundred years ago. But I was sure it was the same man, and I said so. They shook their heads, and now dad wasn't laughing. When I pointed to Ibsen and said I had seen him, he shooed me out.

Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could then be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a completely new and significant light.

I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every full stop was set like a mountaineer's cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences, which could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them.

For example, when I had to interview the writer Kjartan Fløgstad for a student magazine, and Yngve suggested we did it together, which I agreed to without a murmur. Fløgstad, with his mixture of down-to-earth talk and intellectualism, his theories about all things high and low, his undogmatic and independent, almost aristocratic, left-wing views, and not least his wordplay, was Yngve's favourite author. Yngve was himself infamous for his wordplay and corny puns, and his principal academic theme was the notion that a work of art's value was created in the receiver, and not in itself, and that authentic artistic expression was just as much a question of form as inauthentic artistic expression.

I began to write up the interview from the recording as soon as I got home because I knew from experience that the resistance to the voices and questions and all that had happened would increase quickly over time, so if I did it there and then while I was still relatively close to it, my doubts and the shame would be manageable.

To be sure, I did have a vague sense of unease about the imprecise parts, but I dismissed it, to my knowledge there was no requirement for interviews to be recorded verbatim. So when Fløgstad's letter fluttered into my post box some days later and I held it in my hands, I was blissfully unsuspecting. Although my palms were sweaty and my heart was pounding. Spring had come, the sun warmed, I was wearing trainers, a T-shirt and jeans and was on my way to the music conservatory where a pal of my cousin's, Jon Olav, was going to give me drum lessons. It might have been wiser to leave the letter unopened because time was tight, but curiosity got the better of me, and, ambling towards the bus, I opened it. Held the printout of the interview. It was covered with red marks and red comments in the margin. 'I never said this,' I saw, 'Imprecise,' I saw, 'No, no, no,' I saw, '???' I saw, 'Where did you get that from?' I saw. Almost every sentence had been commented on in this way.

If I suggested that we should hold the funeral here, which I was pretty certain he would say was impossible, the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, would become obvious. He would be the realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. Dad was father to both of us, but not in the same way, and my wanting to use the funeral as a kind of resurrection could, along with my tendency to cry all the time whereas Yngve had not yet shed a tear, be interpreted as evidence that my relationship was more heartfelt and, I suspected, as a covert criticism of Yngve's attitude.

It had always been said that we were identical, but that must have been an overall impression, our aura, because if you took us feature by feature there was very little similarity. The only thing was possibly the eyes, which both of us inherited from mum. Yet when I moved to Bergen and met Yngve's more peripheral acquaintances they would sometimes ask, 'Are you Yngve?' That I was not Yngve was obvious from the formulation of the question, because if they had thought I was, they clearly would not have asked. They asked because they found the similarity striking.

The smell of short freshly watered grass when you are sitting on a football pitch one summer afternoon after training, the long shadows of motionless trees, the screams and laughter of children swimming in the lake on the other side of the road, the sharp yet sweet taste of the energy drink XL-1. Or the taste of salt that inevitably gets into your mouth when you dive into the sea, even if you pinch your lips as your head sinks below the surface, the chaos of currents and rushing water beneath, but also the light playing on the seaweed and the seagrass and the bare rock face, clusters of mussels and fields of barnacles that all seem to radiate a still, gentle glow, for it is a cloudless midsummer day, and the sun is burning down through the high blue sky and sea.

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq football boots was just a pair of football boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

But the sense of adventure that surrounded the fish here was gone as soon as they were on my plate, white, quivering, salty and full of bones, the same as with the fish that dad and I caught in the sea off Tromøya, or in the sound by the mainland, with a jig, trolling line or pole, that sense left them as soon as they had been prepared for the table and lay on one of our brown lunch plates at home in Tybakken in the 1970s.

And the crabs could not have been there; the winter holiday was usually in February when you couldn't buy live crabs. If it had been February they wouldn't have been in a wooden crate. So where did this image, so distinct and detailed, actually come from?

That dad had been here only three days ago was hard to believe. That he had seen the same view three days ago, walked round the same house, seen grandma as we saw her and thought his thoughts only three days ago was hard to grasp. That is, I could grasp that he had been here recently. But not that he couldn't see this now.

Actually everyone ought to be in the streets, I thought, cars ought to stop, doors ought to be opened and drivers and passengers emerge with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads? … However, a few glances at most were cast upwards, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional; on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought.

In this house where we had always been so careful to prevent others from prying, where we had always been so careful to be beyond reproach in everything that could be seen, from clothes to garden, from house front to car to children's behaviour, the closest you could come to the absolutely unthinkable was to exhibit a bottle of booze in a brightly lit window. That was why they, and eventually I too, laughed as we did.

This was how Giotto painted people. They never seemed to be aware that they were being watched. Giotto was the only painter to depict the aura of vulnerability this gave them. It was probably something to do with the era because succeeding generations of Italian painters, the great generations, had always interwoven an awareness of watching eyes in their pictures. It made them less naïve, but they also revealed less.

It was only when I was back in grandma's house, after seeing Yngve off for Stavanger, that the matter of the blood came back to me. How could it have ended like that? Grandma said she had found him dead in the chair, and on the basis of this information it would have been natural to assume his heart had given out while he was sitting there, presumably while he was sleeping. The funeral director, however, had said there was not only blood but a great deal of it. And dad's nose had been broken. So, some form of mortal combat must have taken place? Had he got up, in pain, and fallen against the chimney breast? To the floor? But if so, why wasn't there any blood on the wall or the floor? And how come grandma hadn't said anything about the blood? Because something must have happened, he could not have died peacefully in his sleep, not with all that blood there. Had she washed it off and then forgotten to say? Why would she? She hadn't washed anything else, it didn't seem to be one of the things she did.

It was odd that, twenty years later, after so much had changed, the smell in the house should be the same. It is conceivable that it was all to do with habit, using the same soaps, the same detergents, the same perfumes and aftershave lotions, cooking the same food in the same way, coming home from the same job and doing the same things in the afternoons and evenings. If you worked on cars, there would be traces of oil and white spirit, metal and exhaust fumes in the smell, if you collected old books, there would be traces of yellowing paper and old leather in the smell, but in a house where all previous habits had stopped, where people had died off, and those left were too old to do what they used to do, what about the smell in these houses, how could it be unchanged? Were the walls impregnated with forty years of living, was that what I could smell every time I stepped inside?

Her detachment had nothing to do with the gentle otherworldliness or contentedness of old people, her detachment was as hard and lean as the body in which it resided.

The first time I realised what I was writing really was something, not just me wanting to be someone, or pretending to be, was when I wrote a passage about dad and started crying while I was writing. I had never done that before, never even been close. I wrote about dad and the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I could barely see the keyboard or the screen, I just hammered away. Of the existence of the grief inside me that had been released at that moment I had known nothing; I had not had an inkling. My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn't a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.

Once back in my bedroom, I was afraid. Death was everywhere. Death was in the jacket in the hall, where the envelope containing my father's possessions was, death was in the chair in the living room, where she had found him, death was on the stairs, where they had carried him, death was in the bathroom, where grandad had collapsed, his stomach covered with blood. … Once my consciousness had opened in this way, I was sure his body was in the wardrobe, and I checked, rummaged through all the dresses hanging there, checked the next, and the next, and having done that, I went back to bed and continued sleeping. In my dreams he was sometimes dead, sometimes alive, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the past. It was as if he had completely taken me over, as if he controlled everything inside me, and when at last I awoke, at around eight o'clock, my first thought was it had been a nocturnal visitation, the second that I had to see him again.

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the table lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

The more there is at stake for us, the more unruly they become, and even though the summer house was large and spacious it was not large or spacious enough for them to be overlooked. Erik pretended to be unconcerned, he wanted to appear generous and child-friendly, but this was continually contradicted by his body language, his arms pinned to his sides, the way he went round putting things back in their places and that faraway look in his eyes.

People who don't have children seldom understand what it involves, no matter how mature and intelligent they might otherwise be, at least that was how it was with me before I had children myself.