‘You should know,’ I said. ‘There was an article about him in your paper.’4

‘I don’t read such rags,’ Paul Finckel said.

Jakob interrupted: ‘Do either of you know what he died of?’

Finckel nodded. ‘He fell from some scaffolding. He was a builder. Eighteen metres, straight onto concrete. Didn’t even have time to say the Lord’s Prayer.’

That silenced us – all three.

The doors opened and people began to drift into the building. The entrances to the two chapels faced each other. The smaller chapel was called Hope. It was for the select few. The bigger one was called Faith and was reserved for the great, white flock. This division wasn’t apparent during your ordinary Norwegian church service on an ordinary Sunday morning. But that is how death is. It upsets so many notions.

The service for Jan Petter was to be performed in Faith and the room was roughly half full. At the front on the right sat close family. He had a wife and two teenage children. I recognised his parents: white-haired and leaden-limbed in their sudden grief. The rest of the congregation appeared to be wider family, work colleagues and neighbours. A trade-union flag had been placed against one wall. The coffin was adorned with a large arrangement of pink roses and the floor in front strewn with wreaths and bouquets.

The chapel was fifteen years old. The interior featured light-coloured wood and grey concrete, with natural stone cemented into the walls. Above the pulpit hung a simple, black, wrought-iron cross.

Outside the tall windows, the wind took hold of the rhododendron bushes and the bare trees. Bergensians had their own special word for this kind of weather: valleslette – two or three degrees above zero, greyish-white sleet and a biting wind from the south-west.5

The priest came in and took a seat. Up in the gallery behind us, a lone violinist played a sad melody I was unable to place.

I discreetly cast my eyes around. There were only us three from our old class. Perhaps some of them no longer lived in Bergen. Perhaps others hadn’t seen or hadn’t reacted to the death notice in the papers. The rest clearly couldn’t take the time to accompany him on these, his first steps into the school corridor, on his way to see the headmaster.

The melody came to an end. The priest rose to his feet. He was a relatively young man, with a childlike face, big glasses and a fringe. To me he looked more like a confirmand than a chaplain. But his voice was deep and commanding as he said: ‘Today we are gathered here together, beside Jan Petter Olsen’s coffin…’

And my thoughts drifted back in time, to the classroom. Once again I visualised the class of almost thirty boys who had been together for seven years at the folkeskole, from 1949 to 1956.

My seat had been by the window with a view of Pudde fjord. When the lesson was too boring my eyes strayed outside, to boats of all sizes as they pitched and rolled past: tugs, the ferries to the island of Askøy, freighters and passenger ships. They were setting off for exotic places, such as Kleppestø, on the southern coast of Askøy, and Rio de Janeiro, and they returned with an ineluctable image of dried fish and bananas. The smell of both. The ineluctable sight of tied bundles and white wooden crates with blue and yellow customs labels. One was loaded; the other unloaded. Boathouses with cranes and hoists, reminiscent of gallows. Sliding doors that opened onto nothing, only air. All of us, our eyes on stalks, on the edge of Nordnes park, safely behind a fence, miles from both Kleppestø and Rio.