Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Light and effortless as an animal, Abel climbs upward, already far in front of his brother, who, now and then, stops to catch his breath. There is something wrong with his airways, in spring and summer they seem to swell up and make his breathing difficult at times. Strangely enough, he doesn’t get any of this in the autumn and winter. That is his time. That is his world. That is his life. For Cain, there’s nothing finer than walking through the snow-covered forest in the winter when there’s not a sound to be heard anywhere apart from his own steps and the chop of the ax against the tree trunk when he’s stopped at a tree and has begun working, the riverlike rush that fills the air as it topples — how strangely slow that fall always is! — the crunch when it hits the ground, the swirl of powder snow that’s stirred up and sometimes showers his face like small needles of cold, the silence afterward. Or sitting in front of a fire in the evening, the fire lapping its glow into the dark, the waves of warmth it gives out, the small embers that now and then are spat crackling up into the air. Even his sleep is different out there, sharper, clearer, whether he’s sleeping in the hut or in one of the brushwood lean-tos he habitually constructs. He sometimes thinks it’s as if the very night sky is flowing through him. Cold and black and glittering with starlight.

When he looks up, Abel is waiting on the summit ledge. He has removed his shirt and is leaning against the rock with his eyes shut against the sun.

My brother, Abel , thinks Cain, and is filled with sudden pride.

He’s so beautiful.

It’s almost unbelievable that they are brothers. Abel’s slim form, still boyishly fine-limbed, is as unlike his own coarse and peculiarly disproportional body as it’s possible to get. Cain is tall, but even though his chest is broad and his upper arms powerful, he still seems frail, it’s something to do with the long thin neck and long, ever-dangling arms and those enormous hands, which almost look as if they’d been sewn onto his slender forearms. Their faces, too, are different. Even though most of their features are similar — both have blue, deep-set eyes, both have high foreheads and straight noses, low cheekbones, and ears that stick out slightly — Abel’s jaw, if slightly hard, rounds off his face harmoniously, whereas Cain’s juts out, and this, as well as making him look perpetually sullen, annoying enough in itself, also gives his face a strikingly fishlike appearance.

The times he has cursed his maker for this! Without wanting to, Cain always gapes, and this unfailingly causes those he meets to think him slow-witted, but he doesn’t blame them: he knows only too well how stupid he looks and how the smile he often employs to counter this impression of dullness makes him look even more foolish.

But although the difference in the brothers’ physiognomy is great, that in their characters is even greater. Abel is someone you want to be near, Cain is someone you’d rather leave alone. Just what this attractiveness in his brother consists of and where this desire to be near him, which is felt by everyone around him, actually has its fount, Cain has never managed to work out. There is a sort of light surrounding Abel, something pure and strong radiates from him no matter where he is or what he’s doing. Sometimes Cain thinks he possesses a soul without shadows. That’s what people want to be close to. But if so, it’s not like a child’s, for a child’s soul is delicate, its flickering flame needs no more than the opening of a door onto the world to blow it out. Nothing can destroy Abel’s light. In his presence one never feels wicked, only foolish. That darkness which in solitude can seem so powerful, occasionally even intoxicating, seems risible in his company.

When they were younger this caused a lot of problems for Cain. That the younger brother outshone the elder wasn’t how things were supposed to be, a kind of natural order had been broken and the knowledge of it plagued Cain throughout the whole of his childhood. For many years he attempted to use his physical superiority to reestablish the balance without success, that wasn’t really what mattered. When he flew at his brother and pushed him up against a wall or pressed his face into the ground and his brother didn’t fight back but just took it, his body meek and accepting, it was Cain who looked inferior.

How furious this could make him sometimes! But the greater his fury, the more blows that rained, the more his standing fell.

He realized this eventually. Abel really was better than him. But what actually constituted the good in him? He was happy, wild, inquisitive, zealous, he talked unceasingly, he laughed often, he never sat still. When he did stupid things — and he did them quite often — it never mattered, he seemed to be set above himself in some way, he could say and do the most idiotic things without it signifying anything at all, it never really affected him .

Abel was like that.

And what prevented Cain from being similar?

Only himself.

He understood this the spring he began to mature. His voice became deeper, his skin coarser, his muscles bigger, and when he awoke at night with pains in his joints, he would often lie awake until dawn thinking about all sorts of things. Who he was, for example.

Why was he so taciturn? After all, his head was full of thoughts, they swirled around constantly in there and what was the real difference between thoughts and words? All he had to do was to speak his thoughts out loud. Because that was the difference between them: Cain only thought, Abel said what he thought.

And why was he so cautious? So slow and heavy?

One night, he edged his way to the end of the bed, where he could see over to Abel who was sleeping at the other end of the room, strangely pale from the weak glimmer of the moon outside.

Besides their chins, the shape of their eyes was different, Abel’s eyelids were more slanted, as if the bone above the eye socket were pressing the lid down at the outer edge and preventing it from opening right up, something that imbued his otherwise open face with a hint of something. . well, of what? Cryptic? Alien? Enigmatic? But now the eyes were closed, the enigmatic gone, and Cain saw how like his brother he really was. Apart, that was, from his chin.

His chin, his chin, his chin!

The thought of it sent a wave of despondency through him. But all the time he kept his glance fixed on his brother, and just as a word becomes meaningless if you repeat it often enough, the meaning of what he was looking at began to slip, the eyes were just eyes, the nose just a nose, the cheeks just cheeks, the hair just hair.

He was just a small boy! Could he be worse than him!

Cain got back into bed filled with a feeling reminiscent of joy. Tomorrow morning he would start talking more. He would start laughing more, he would start inquiring about everything. He would begin to run across the field when they asked him to fetch something, not just plod off as he had done up to now. He would run like the wind, he would be like the wind, light and happy and boisterous.

And he was genuinely happy when he awoke the next morning. He jumped out of bed, clambered quickly down the ladder, greeted his parents with a bright good morning , snatched up the bucket, and ran across the farmyard to the well. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Cain dropped the bucket into the well as he whistled to himself. When he had hauled it up brimful of water, he drank a little and rinsed his face before carrying it back into the kitchen. His mother was there with her back to him, occupied with some task or other, his father was sitting at the table eating with Jared, the shepherd, and the four men who worked for them.