Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Cain took a step toward him.

“What is it, Abel?” he asked again. “Why are you crying?”

“I. . I didn’t. . mean it!” he sobbed.

Cain looked inquiringly into his brother’s tear-wet eyes.

“Didn’t mean what?”

“To hurt you. Oh Cain I didn’t. .”

A great wave of tenderness swept over Cain. He went right up to his brother and put his arms around him. The feeling of that slender, smooth body against his own almost made him cry himself.

“It was nothing at all!” he said. With one hand he caressed his brother’s back, with the other the hair at the nape of his neck, again and again.

“Lovely little Abel,” he said. “It was nothing, don’t you understand? It was nothing!”

But Abel was inconsolable. He pressed his body into Cain’s and wept and wept.

From somewhere behind them Cain heard a sudden crackling, soft at first and then louder, and his first thought was that an enormous bonfire must have flared up on the other side of the field. But when he turned he saw that it was the storm that had reached the forest. Raindrops large as acorns struck the leaves of the trees. Then the wind rose across the field and he could see the rain approaching. In the course of a few seconds it had covered the five hundred yards between forest and river.

“Come along, Abel,” he said as the first raindrops reached them. “We’ll go inside.”

He took his hand, and leading each other like two little children, they began to walk toward the houses. They were soaking wet when they got home, he recalls. Abel had been silent all evening, but during the night, lying awake, Cain had wondered about what had happened during the day, what exactly his brother had shown him, even as his father’s words, You’re not to go anywhere without Abel , churned inside him. When those words had been pronounced, he’d felt bitter, interpreting them as meaning that he should act as some kind of servant to his brother, but gradually he had begun to see that his father’s words didn’t necessarily imply any kind of ranking. What his father had really done, Cain thought as he lay there looking at his sleeping brother, was to make Cain part of them. You are one of us, Cain , he’d said, but Abel isn’t. Now we want you to look after him for us . And even though in subsequent years he has often doubted his interpretation of the role he was given — in dark moments he felt he was being far too gullible — he has remained true to it and almost never leaves his brother’s side. He has stopped measuring himself against him, and never tries to be like him anymore. If he still isn’t wholly content with what he is, and not uncommonly finds himself longing for another life far away from this plodding back and forth across the fields, all these hours silently bent over the soil that stifle even thought and that never lead to anything other than himself, he no longer measures his own life, with its heavy earnestness, by the yardstick of Abel’s.

He coughs up a little mucus from his throat, draws breath a few times, and begins on the final leg up to the ledge where Abel is still standing with his eyes closed. The sun’s rays, penetrating the thin skin of his eyelids, are filling his skull with a ruddy, quivering light. Sometimes when there’s deep silence around him, which there can be high up in the mountains on the rare occasions when the wind isn’t blowing, or in the forest in winter, Abel thinks he can hear it. A muffled, persistent roar of something just burning and burning far up there. But this time the wind is blowing through the forest on the plateau above him, the birds are squawking, and his brother, in his usual fashion, has taken several minutes to prepare for the final steep slope, wheezing, hawking, and spitting below him.

When he hears Cain starting to climb once more, he opens his eyes and peers down at him.

“Are you coming today or tomorrow?” he calls. It is meant as a joke, but Cain, who can’t see his smiling face, takes it seriously, stops, and slowly raises his head to look at him.

“Don’t be so impatient,” is all he says.

Abel wipes the scrunched up shirt he’s clutching distractedly over his sweating chest and turns to face the mountain. Not only is it smooth and without handholds, it is slightly overhanging. But its lip is within reach if he stands on tiptoe. It’s almost unbelievable that this mountain once seemed unconquerable to them. But it did. How young they must have been!

The first time they’d climbed it, almost exactly six years ago, he remembers how they’d stood wondering how to tackle this final obstacle. Cain wanted to turn back, Abel to go on. Because there was a way. If he stood with his back to the wall and Cain climbed onto his shoulders, he’d be able to grasp the lip, haul himself up, and pull Abel up after him.

But Cain didn’t want to. If he didn’t get hold of it immediately as he was straightening up, the angle would cause him to fall backward. All it needed was a slight unsteadiness. And he’d be killed.

“If we were down there,” said Abel, meaning the fields below them, “you’d do it without giving it a second thought. You won’t fall! Why should you fall?”

“We’ll go back down.”

“Can I try then? So you’ll see how easy it is?”

Cain shook his head.

“What on earth do you think they’d say if I went home and said you’d been killed?”

“But I’m not going to get killed. Lend me a hand.”

Cain sighed and stoically followed Abel’s instructions. With his back to the mountain he formed his hands into a kind of stirrup, on which Abel placed his foot while at the same time laying his hands on Cain’s shoulders. Then he put his weight on it, rose up, placed first one and then the other foot on Cain’s shoulders, straightened up, and grasped the edge as easy as pie.

“See how easy it was?” he said, looking down at Cain. “If you’d been standing here, you could have lifted me up.”

“I will,” said Cain. “Come down.”

Abel had been ten at the time, and Cain twelve. Now they are sixteen and eighteen. But even though they could easily have got up the mountain on their own, for some reason they choose to do it the same way as they used to. It isn’t something they discuss, it just happens. When Cain finally reaches the ledge, he sends the briefest of glances to Abel, who, without thinking about it, automatically positions himself with his back to the rock wall and knits his hands in front of him. A spark of wonder appears in Cain’s eyes. But he says nothing, just puts his hand on Abel’s shoulder, places his foot in the cupped hands, and mounts. Normally they carefully avoid touching one another, just as they also carefully avoid looking each other in the eye more than absolutely necessary, and then never more than for a few seconds at a time. Even though it was Cain who first began to follow these unwritten rules, and seemed to establish a zone of untouchability around his brother, zealously guarded, as if something between them might shatter if they got too close to each other, Abel, too, has been influenced by them, in the sense that the touches and looks have gradually become so rare that when they do occur they have something almost shockingly intimate about them.

As they do now. Cain puts one hand on Abel’s shoulder and the other on the side of his chest to support himself. His hands are coarse and unsteady against Abel’s smooth skin, his body so close that he can feel the warmth from it. He hears Abel’s hoarse breath and sees the pulse beating in his neck, his dark eyes. For some reason he feels the desire to embrace him. But there is something in Cain that makes this impossible. He’s staring fixedly at the rock wall, as if Abel’s eyes don’t exist, rests his foot on the palms of his hands and pushes up. With that the situation changes from unpleasantly intimate to near grotesque. For their movements belong to their childhood, and in the light of this there is something overgrown and almost monstrous about their bodies, Abel manages to discern. Gigantic heads, long limbs, enormous hands and feet.