Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Then Cain is standing on the top, reaching down to him and hauling him up. This time his stare is fixed on the valley.

The mountain they have just climbed is like a wall in the landscape, many hundreds of feet high. Seen from the fields below it seems as if more mountains rise up just behind it, but this isn’t so, directly behind this bare plateau there is forest, several miles deep, and only after that do the high mountains begin.

When he’s up, Abel positions himself next to Cain and stares out. The sun is now so low in the western sky that the forest on the other side of the valley is in shadow. But the fields are shining in its ruddy light, and the conifer boughs of the woods behind them take on an almost lustrous sheen.

He peers over toward the landscape bordering Eden, with its many rivers, wide-open plains, and rolling wooded uplands. Although darkness still cannot be seen but only sensed in the landscape’s many small preparations — the cooling in the air; the desolate loneliness about the birdsong; the shadows’ lean, geriatric expansion — he has no difficulty making out the cherubim’s flames from the surrounding daylight. Their heat makes the air quiver above the wooded hills, and over the plains that lie behind, where his parents came from, the colors melt into one another like a mirage.

“One day soon I’ll go there,” he says.

“Where?” asks Cain.

“To Eden.”

“You know you can’t,” says Cain. “We’ve been forbidden.”

“ Been forbidden? ”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t you at least put your strictures into your own words?” says Abel, and looks at Cain, who is still staring into the valley. But there is something fixed about his gaze and Abel realizes that his attention is focused elsewhere.

Perhaps he also keeps his thoughts under lock and key. Cage after cage of snarling thoughts he hardly dares pass, let alone take out, harness, and arrange into a team, which, with heavy hand and cracking whip, he can get to pull him at breakneck speed through his own consciousness.

Or perhaps there aren’t any more thoughts in there? Only a great barren landscape through which he travels alone.

“Shall we get going?” Cain says.

Abel nods and begins to walk toward the forest. The pastures the animals graze during the summer lie at the foot of the mountains on the other side. It takes a good half hour to get there, so if they hurry, thinks Abel, they may possibly get back before dark.

Unless Jared is seriously hurt. And they must carry him down.

Suddenly he imagines Jared lying at the bottom of a cleft. His clothes are wet. . there’s water there. . he’s lying half in a stream, he can’t manage to pull himself out. . he’s broken a bone in his leg?. . and his head. . his head is bloody.

“I’ve got a feeling something serious has happened to him,” he says.

“Really?” says Cain.

“That he’s down with a broken leg somewhere.”

“I doubt it,” says Cain, stepping aside to let Abel go down the path first. “He must have forgotten that he was supposed to come down today.”

“We’ll see,” says Abel.

Cain follows Abel’s back along the path, which is really nothing more than an animal track that at first wends its way through the great spruce trees whose branches, almost as thick as a pelt, block out the light and wave ponderously up and down as they push past them. Then the forest opens into a thicket, and on the other side of it the path disappears entirely for a while over rocky ground, but they know where to find it again, and pick it up after a few hundred yards where it travels like a corridor through an area of rushes that grow around the small tarn. From there they can see the mountains towering in the east, the snowcapped summits that reflect the sun’s rays with such precision that they seem to pull the far-off mountains closer.

Some ducks rise with flapping wings at their approach. Cain looks at the water lilies floating on the surface, lazy as if they’ve just awoken. The way their stalks run straight down into the depths and vanish in the blackness like thoughts trying to recall a dream.

On the other side of the tarn there is the rapid, rolling rattle of a woodpecker.

“Can you see it?” Abel asks without turning.

“No.”

“It’s up there.”

He points toward the trees on the slope above the water. Cain searches for movement but everything is still, and he has to quicken his pace to close in on his brother, who’s suddenly no more than a ripple in the rushes far ahead.

Half an hour later they reach the forest brow on the other side, and see the mountain farm hut on the slope before them.

Cain sits down on a stone wall and rests his head in his hands.

“I’ve got to take a breather,” he says.

“Do you remember the way we used to make pipes in the spring?” Abel asks.

“Of course I do,” says Cain, following his brother with his eyes as, knife in hand, Abel bends down to cut the branch off a small tree. Then he looks up at the hut again. Not a movement to be seen up there, not of man or beast.

“What do you think’s happened?” he says.

Abel, who’s knocking the butt of the knife on the bark of the branch, shrugs his shoulders.

“He’s just forgotten, like you said.”

“Then we should at least see some sheep,” says Cain.

“Well, in any case we’re not going to get home before dark,” says Abel. “What do you think, should we spend the night up here?”

He strips the bark off the branch and puts the small stem in, raises it to his lips and blows. The sound reminds Cain of the highest notes the wind can make when it blows its hardest in the mountains. He rises and begins to walk uphill. Abel puts the knife in its sheath, pockets the pipe, and follows.

Outside the hut there is still no sign of Jared or the animals.

“Jared?” Abel calls. “Are you here?”

Absolute silence.

Cain opens the door and goes in. He sees immediately that the place is empty.

“So, what now?” he says, turning to Abel in the doorway.

“We must search for him while it’s light,” says Abel. “If we can’t find him, we’ll have to sleep here the night and continue early tomorrow morning.”

They climb a prominence from where they have a panorama of the entire mountainside. When they can’t see anything of Jared or the sheep from there either, they decide to go back down to the forest’s edge and follow it to the river, which marks the pasture’s northern limit. If they don’t find him there, they plan to search the ground up by the waterfall as long as the light permits.

Cain walks a short way up the mountainside and is approaching the waterfall when he catches sight of the sheep. They are huddled in a circle far up the slope, hidden from the hut by a buttress. Even though they’ve seen him and are following every movement he makes with their eyes, they do not move.

From down in the forest comes Abel’s voice.

“Down here, Cain!”

He turns and looks down, but can’t see him. Darkness has already begun to gather between the trunks of the thickly grown spruce forest. There is something impatient about its presence, Cain feels, as if only a strong will keeps it from making an advance into the open before night’s main force arrives. But the sun will hold sway for a while yet. Its rich evening light falls obliquely on the landscape and makes everything about him glow. The moss glows, the grass glows, the leaves glow, the bare rock of the peaks glows. And ridge after ridge of the undulating roof formed by the spruce trees down the valley shines as if it were made of gold.

He goes down the slope and into the trees where Abel is bending over a dead lamb. It is covered in blood, the whole of one side has been torn open.