Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He hadn’t noticed any of this while they worked there. The landscape was like a thought that, at regular intervals, came back, something he suddenly remembered and just as suddenly forgot again. Now he sees it. But just as the landscape reveals itself to him, it’s as if it also recedes. As if, in one and the same motion, it draws closer and draws away. For just as he sees everything, it all slowly turns its back on the intimacy with which he endows it and suddenly seems alien and terrifying. The field lies there mute. The trees stand there mute. The sky, in its deep blue and with its slowly moving clouds, is mute. And the tools lying in a pile a few yards away from him are mute. And the baskets. And the stones. And the torn-up, matted tree stumps in the grass by the forest’s edge.

He lays his hoe on the pile of tools and takes a sledgehammer over to one of the large boulders at the end of the field. The first blow echoes off the mountainsides, a short cack! is hurled across the valley and the next instant strikes the mountain there. Cack-cah . He lifts the sledgehammer above his head and strikes again. Cackcah . After a few blows he finds the rhythm and, filled with the pleasure of repetition, begins to shout each time the sledgehammer strikes. Ahoy! he shouts, lifts the sledgehammer above his shoulder, swings it in an arc toward the stone, loosens the grip of his lower hand and lets it slide up the shaft just before it strikes, feels the blow transmit itself to his arm all the same, shouts his Ahoy! , hears the blow, cack! around the mountainsides, moves his hand down again, grips hard, lifts the sledgehammer above his shoulder, swings it in an arc toward the stone, shouts. Ahoy. Cack-cah. Ahoy. Cack-cah .

At last the stone splits and he pries the pieces apart and carries them one by one to the edge of the field. When this is done, he wipes the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, turns toward the houses, and sees that a figure is coming across the field.

It must be Cain coming to fetch him, he thinks. Even though he knows how much Cain dislikes this task, he doesn’t go to meet him but stays where he is.

In a while the darkness will begin to ooze up from its great subterranean pools and spread itself across the valley. He’d liked to have stood there and watched it happen. How the darkness, without a sound, thickens about the trees on the forest brow, the stone wall, and the unharnessed plow that lies close to it, the three hummocks lying like small islands in the field, the bushes bordering the stream, the promontory on the mountainside, which high above hangs over him. How it slowly would fill up the valley like a bowl and leave him at the bottom, dark as the night around him.

He turns and sees that his brother will soon be halfway. When he turns back, a deer is standing on the edge of the forest, perhaps fifty yards away, staring at him. After a few seconds of complete immobility, it raises its head a few times to test the scents from the field. When it has assured itself that all is safe, or as safe as it can be, it begins to walk along the edge of the field. The next moment two more deer appear from the edge of the forest, and then two more.

How odd, he thinks. They never usually come out into the field before dusk. Could something have frightened them?

He follows them with his gaze until they are lost behind the rise. Then he peers up one last time at the glow from the flaming angels, far away, before he turns to go and meet his brother.

Just then, there is the sound of Cain’s shout across the field.

“Abel!”

He thinks the shout is born of impatience and tries to sound as jovial as possible when he answers. “I’m coming!” he calls, “Just wait there!”

“No,” returns his brother, “ I’ll come, you wait there!”

Somewhat surprised, Abel does what he’s told. He’s beginning to feel cold and rubs his forearms with his hands a few times while he stares at the lean figure of his brother taking the path by the stream with long strides. Something must have happened. But his brother’s movements give nothing away, he’s walking as he always has, the top half of his body stooped and his gaze on the ground as if afraid that his connection with it will cease if he doesn’t watch out.

My brother, Cain , he thinks, and has to smile. Even when his brother is walking alone and thinks himself unobserved, his entire being radiates reluctance. As if everything he does, even something as simple as lifting one foot and placing it before the other, has been forced on him. Reluctance and suspicion. That’s Cain. If you smile at him, the smile isn’t infectious as it is with ordinary people, not at all, he’ll immediately look up and bore into you with his suspicion.

Oh, if only he’d let himself go occasionally! Stop guarding the boundaries of his being and open up to everything that went on outside it!

Abel can’t count the number of times he’s tried to get him to come out of himself, but he never budges. You’d think there was something of enormous value inside him, which he was protecting and wouldn’t exchange for all the world. But no matter how much Abel pondered the matter, he couldn’t work out what it could be.

His soul?

Maybe. Abel thought of Cain’s soul as a tree stump, it was the closest he could get. A rotten tree stump, deep in the forest somewhere next to a bog, beneath constantly drenching rain. Yellow grass, yellow leaves, gray sky, waterlogged ground and Cain’s soul just protruding from the scree.

His mind?

Just as deeply rooted, almost as unshakable, but not as stunted, the branches of Cain’s mind stretched stiffly up into the sky, where for the most part they remained motionless: even the wildest mental storm didn’t manage to do more than sway them gently.

My brother is a tree , Abel thinks, and begins to sing to himself:

My brother is a tree

And that’s a certainty

If he could have his will

He’d stand completely still

And let his two big boots

Grow down just like roots

So deep into the soil

Oh, so deep into the soil

He laughs at this little song of his, and as he lifts his head and meets Cain’s glance — he’s now only a few yards away — he decides that he’ll remember the words and sing them to the others when he gets home.

“Jared hasn’t come back,” Cain says, halting. “He should have come down early today. We’ll have to go up and search for him.”

“Just us two?” asks Abel.

Cain nods.

“It’ll be dark soon. Come on.”

They follow the pass up to the top of the mountain. Even though it’s in shadow for much of the day, the vegetation in the lower reaches is luxuriant. Between the moss-grown rocks that have rolled down in aeons past, thick clumps of foxgloves light up the green gloom with their small lamps. Everywhere, the bracken reaches out its greedy leaves, in places it covers the ground entirely and the brothers must test each footstep as if they’re wading in turbid water. But it soon becomes so steep and stony that all vegetation, apart from the smallest and most hardy species, ceases. The path they’re following zigzags upward, the distance between each twist becomes less and less until, a hundred yards from the top, it peters out completely. From here they must climb.

Cain, who doesn’t like having anyone behind him, lets Abel go first. There is no more unpleasant feeling than having him at his back all the time, and being aware of his discontent at the slowness of the pace, thinks Cain. In addition, he can’t bear the sensation of being seen without being able to see himself.