Inga answered me in Norwegian, as if the subject of our mother demanded that we use her first language. “Nei, Jei vil ikke forstyrre henne med dette.” (No, I won’t bother her with this.) “I’ve always felt,” she continued, “that there were things Pappa kept from Mamma and us, especially about his childhood. He was fifteen then. I think they’d already lost the forty acres of the farm, and unless I’m wrong, it was the year after Grandpa found out his brother David was dead.” My sister looked down at the piece of pale brown paper. “ ‘It can’t matter now she’s in heaven or to the ones here on earth.’ Somebody died.” She swallowed loudly. “Poor Pappa, swearing on the Bible.”

AFTER INGA, SONIA, and I had mailed eleven boxes of papers to New York City, most of them to my house in Brooklyn, and had returned to our respective lives, I was sitting in my study on a Sunday afternoon with my father’s memoir, letters, and small leather diary on the desk in front of me, and I recalled something Auguste Comte once wrote about the brain. He called it “a device by which the dead act upon the living.” The first time I held Dum’s brain in my hands, I was surprised first by its weight, and then by what I had suppressed—an awareness of the once-living man, a stocky seventy-year-old who had died of heart disease. When the man was alive, I thought, it was all here—internal pictures and words, memories of the dead and the living.