AS HELENA AND I were walking the distance between the bus and the rocky beach, she told me about a memory, a memory of her father. She told me it came back to her when she saw the sea down the steep hill where we walked.

It was the first time she’d mentioned her dad since early summer. While she talked I got the impression that she hadn’t shared this memory with anyone in a long time, or maybe ever. It was as if she was trying out a narrative, the definitive story of who he’d been. She said: my dad always had all these antics. My dad was always very stubborn. That’s who he was. This memory was a story from back when they were still close, before she became a teenager and before her never-ending rage, a time when she did not yet have any other gods.

They were on vacation in the late 1960s. A road trip through Europe. She was too young to remember the exact route, but as far as she could recall they traveled far and were gone for a long time; her memory of this trip was that it had lasted all summer, an entire season, even if she’d understood later that this couldn’t be true. On their way down south or back up north they stopped at Møns Klint in Denmark. Had I ever been? No. She would show me a picture later. In any case, Møns Klint were some highly unusual cliffs. White cliffs. Her dad had made the entire family, her mom, her sisters, go see them.

Actually, no—Helena changed her mind. Her youngest sister wouldn’t have been born by then. And her other sister would have been very young, a baby. Maybe her mother had stayed behind with the sister in the car. But the memory was clear; in her mind the entire family had been there and everyone was scared of going up the cliffs, and her dad had gone to the very edge, close to the point where the ground just dropped, with no fence, where the trees grew straight up in defiance of gravity, and he’d roared: this is a memory for life! He raged at the family, who didn’t see it. She was laughing as she recounted the story for me.

And finally, she said, I did find the courage to get up there, I was the only one who did. She was back in the version of her memory that included the entire family. And she remembered that her father had picked her up, even though she would have been a little too old to be held at that point; it might have been the last time in her life that her father carried her. And then she saw, through the trees, the rock face down below, it was white like marble, and she saw the water, which was turquoise like the Mediterranean, turquoise like in Greece, where she would travel several years later. And it was true, it was a memory for life.