Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“It looks like the work of a bear,” he says as Cain comes up. “And not long ago, either. Maybe a couple of hours.”

Cain cups his hands to his mouth and shouts as loudly as he can.

“JARED!”

But his only answer is the rush of the waterfall.

“There’s another one over there,” says Abel, pointing past Cain. Then, as he turns back, he raises his hand to run it through his hair.

“Don’t do that!” says Cain.

Abel’s hand stops halfway, and he looks inquiringly at Cain.

“You’ve got blood on it.”

He looks down at his hand, which is covered in blood up to the wrist, and smiles.

“I’d completely forgotten.”

He bends down and wipes the blood on a moss-covered stone. Somewhere close by there’s a rustling of leaves. The sound makes the pair of them stiffen. But then the rustling changes to the drier sound of wing beats, and Cain looks up just in time to see a pair of magpies disappearing over the treetops.

“He must be close by,” says Abel, and straightens up. “What about following the stream down to the river?”

Cain nods and they begin to walk through the forest. Sometimes they call, but their voices are without hope, and they no longer stop to wait for a reply but walk as fast as the rough terrain will allow. Under the cover of the spruce trees the ground is bare, the only thing that grows by the edges of the stream is moss. Green and black, these are the colors. Here and there windfalls lie across the path of the stream, some with their bark washed off and the seemingly ossified wood slimy with algae, remorselessly subjected to the laws that govern this low, dank world; others lie farther off the ground and are relatively intact, though desiccated, their cracked, gray branches pointing in all directions, festooned with skeins of strange species of moss, still fixed in the earth that was pulled up with the roots when the wind forced them to the ground.

As the roar of the waterfall grows in strength around them, the forest gradually thins. A steep, sparsely covered face of rock, perhaps a hundred feet high, appears through the trees in front of them, forcing them to descend a bit. As they round the foot of this slope, still following the stream, Cain looks up and sees a dead pine above him. With its red branches it almost looks as if it’s enveloped in flames.

On the other side, running with the mountainside, lies a meadow, it rolls away gently and is perhaps just over a hundred yards long. At their end it descends steeply to the forest below, and the stream, always naturally seeking the lowest point in the landscape by the quickest possible route, finally satisfies its suppressed longing a little farther on: it falls rushing from rock to rock down through the cleft.

Cain has never been here before, and feels entranced by the beauty and calm of the place. Without thinking of Jared he lets his gaze wander across the flower-filled meadow and toward the trees, just bursting into leaf, which stand along the opposite bank, when Abel lays a hand on his shoulder.

“He’s lying down there,” he says.

Cain looks in the direction he’s pointing. Perhaps twenty yards away a body is lying half in the stream. It’s on its back with one arm and one leg in the water. Fortunately the head is clear, Cain thinks. But when they get to the bank and see that it is indeed Jared who’s lying there, he realizes that’s not exactly relevant. The stomach and all one side of the body up to the shoulder are covered in blood. The face has been ripped open from the temple to the chin, where the jawbone and some teeth are exposed, brilliant white against the red of the flesh.

As Cain kneels down beside the body, a swarm of small insects takes to the air. At first he attempts to pull the ripped shirt free to see how serious it is, but the blood has begun to clot, the material is stuck fast, so instead he runs his fingers down the edge of the wound. To his dismay they meet no resistance but slip straight into the side of the body.

He removes his fingers and lays the flat of his hand against the body’s brow.

“He’s dead,” he says without turning. “His forehead is ice-cold.”

He stands up slowly. The two brothers have known Jared all their lives. Both lower their heads and stand completely quiet for a moment. Cain sees that a tear is running down Abel’s cheek. In the midst of the shock over Jared’s death, he feels his brother’s tears pleasing him. He’ll put a hand on his shoulder, he thinks, if any moment is right for such a gesture, it must be this one, and he half raises his hand, but then pulls back as a crow caws somewhere nearby and seems to shatter the moment. It’s as if they return to the world again.

Abel raises his head, brushes away his tears with a hand.

“We should pull him out of the water at least, shouldn’t we?” he says.

“I’ll do it,” says Cain. He goes into the stream, takes hold of the arms and pulls him up into a sitting position, clasps his hands around the chest, stands up, and gently pulls him out. He leans backward so that the corpse’s head won’t fall forward but will be supported on his breast, which is soon soaked in blood.

Safely out, he takes a rest and looks around for a suitable place to lay him. The grass by the stream seems unworthy, as if he were just some dead fish or other they’d slung away, he thinks, and settles for the three oak trees that form a small grove a little way into the meadow behind them.

“Was he groaning?” says Abel. “What kind of noise was that?”

“If you’re trying to be funny, you’re not succeeding,” says Cain.

“It wasn’t a joke. I heard something.”

“One side of his body’s open,” says Cain. “And his forehead is stone cold. He’s as dead as he can possibly be.”

Step-by-step he drags the corpse along. It’s not that heavy, but it’s difficult to handle all the same. The loose arms swing from side to side and knock against his thighs, while the legs, trailing with their heels on the ground, are pliable and yielding, and their lack of resistance almost causes him to lose his grip several times, and he is forced to heave the corpse up a bit to get a better hold. The intention of letting the head lie back on his breast is abandoned after a few yards, it falls forward unrelentingly and nods in time with his steps.

“It was just air you heard,” he says, looking back at Abel, who’s following a few steps behind. “There’s still air in his lungs, and in his intestines.”

Abel nods without speaking. Cain glances down at the face of the corpse again, it’s so close that he can see the fibers in the flesh and the smooth sinews that run through it. He forces his eyes away and out across the forest, only to look down at it again a moment later.

Then they reach the trees. Cain places the body carefully down on the ground, where it seems to be swathed in the soft light of the setting sun, whose fullness smoothes the contours of the injured face and gives it an almost peaceful expression.

He wipes his hands on the grass to get the blood off them, but they’re still sticky, and he decides to wash them clean in the stream.

Abel has knelt down by the side of the corpse. He’s running his hand over the gory side, poking his fingers tentatively into the wound.

“That was some killer blow!” he says.

“Treat him with respect, please,” says Cain, and starts walking away. The disc of the sun has now almost completely sunk beneath the wooded hills in the west. The valley below him lies in shadow, and almost all the valley sides as well. Like a sea, the darkness rises up the sides of the mountains. Soon it will cover them too, Cain thinks, and wonders what they should do. They won’t be able to bring a corpse down to the valley before nightfall. So they’ll have to spend the night at the hut and carry the corpse up there with them. That, too, might be difficult to do in time. The thought of carrying the dead body through the forest in the dark is repulsive, but if they must, they must.