Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

He rinses his hands clean in the cold water, dries them on his trousers, and returns to Abel, who’s still hunched over the body. His back is turned, and Cain can’t see what he’s doing until he comes up to him.

He has thrust his entire hand into the corpse’s side and is moving it gently back and forth as if he’s searching for something in there.

“What are you doing!” says Cain.

“Keep calm,” says Abel. He stares concentratedly into the air as if listening for something. His movement stops for a few seconds, and then his hand slowly comes out. Out from between his bloody fingers slips the smooth surface of an intestine.

“He can’t feel anything,” Abel says, looking up at Cain as his hand pulls the intestine farther and farther out. “No more than earth does, or water.”

Cain bends down, grasps his brother’s wrist, and squeezes so tightly that he’s forced to let go.

Abel stares furiously up at him.

“We show the dead respect,” Cain says as calmly as he can. “Whether he feels anything or not has nothing to do with it. Tomorrow he’ll be buried. Do you think his guts should be hanging out of his stomach then?”

“Who d’you think you are?” says Abel. Without taking his eyes off him, he rises and stands so close that Cain can see how his pupils narrow when his head leaves the shadow of the tree and sunlight strikes his eyes.

“Is this to do with us, or him?” says Cain, nodding toward the dead, pleased to have an excuse to escape his brother’s gaze.

With its mouth open, the dead face lies there. Its blood is red and glistening against the pale green grass, its eyes completely empty.

“There’s something I don’t understand about you,” says Abel. “We’ve been forbidden, you said just a little while ago. Now you’ve said it again. But who’s doing the forbidding?”

Cain meets his brother’s glance once more. In the same instant he realizes something awful. The eyes were closed when they arrived .

Now they’re open. “Abel,” he says. “Weren’t his eyes closed just now?”

Abel looks at him with a mixture of scorn and surprise.

“Yes,” he says.

When the import of his brother’s question strikes home, Abel turns quickly and looks down at the dead body, kneels by it, and places his hand on its neck.

He holds it there for several seconds. Then he gets up, retreats a few steps, and says without looking at his brother:

“He’s alive.”

“But he’s ice-cold! And those injuries. .”

“His heart’s beating anyway.”

Cain clasps his hands impotently and stares up at the sky above him. No, no, no , he thinks. It can’t be true . Could this broken body be alive? With its stomach open. With its intestines spread over the grass?

Then he says: “I don’t believe you.”

“Feel for yourself,” says Abel.

Cain crouches down and touches the neck. He feels a faint fluttering at his fingertips.

The heart is beating.

“Can you hear me, Jared?” he whispers. “Can you hear me?”

He looks into his eyes. They are as empty as before. But then the eyeballs roll slowly to the side as if they’re blindly seeking the source of the voice.

“Can you hear me?” Cain repeats. “Jared, can you hear me?”

A gurgling sound passes from his lips. Cain bends down close to them. It’s as if he’s whispering something.

“What’s he saying?” asks Abel.

Cain lifts his hand in a dismissive gesture to his brother as he stares intently at the lips, as if he might be able to see what they say.

Again Jared whispers something.

Who are you? is what he thinks it sounds like.

“Cain,” he replies. “Jared, this is Cain. Can you hear me?”

The eyes roll back and forth a few times. Then he opens his mouth again.

I’m cold .

“Oh, dear Jared,” says Cain, and he removes his shirt and spreads it over his chest. Abel does the same with his.

Cain stands up, puts his hand on Abel’s shoulder, and takes him aside, so that Jared can’t hear them.

“What’ll we do?” Cain asks. “He’s dying.”

“There’s nothing to do but wait here until it’s over,” says Abel.

“But how long will that take? For all we know he may live for several hours, perhaps right through the night.”

“Do you mean we should kill him?”

“He’s suffering, Abel. We must help him.”

“ Help him?” says Abel.

Cain nods.

They stand for a long while looking into each other’s eyes. Then Abel drops his glance.

“I can do it,” he says.

He pulls his knife out of its sheath, conceals it on the inside of his hand, and goes over to Jared again. Cain follows.

“Do it quickly,” he whispers. Abel nods and kneels by the side of the motionless body, takes out the knife, and places the point carefully on one eye. The membrane is pressed down but doesn’t burst, and he gradually increases the pressure until it suddenly gives and the knife blade goes slowly into the eye.

Jared groans.

The split made by the knife increases as the blade is pushed in, and in a few seconds has divided the eye in two.

“What are you doing!” says Cain. “Push HARD, for God’s sake, HARD!”

Abel looks up at him and pulls out the knife again, wipes the blade on his trouser leg, and presses it with equal care against the other eye. Filled with anger, Cain rushes at him to get him off. But this time Abel is ready. He rises quickly, grabs his charging brother by the chest, and throws him to the ground. Then he squares up with his knife pointing toward him.

“What’s up with you?” he says. “He’ll be dead in a few minutes anyway.”

Cain, who’s lying on his back, sits up, supporting himself with his arms.

“He’s suffering,” he says. “Please, Abel. Put him out of his misery.”

“You’re right, he is suffering, but what happens to that suffering when he’s dead? It vanishes. All gone. Suffering is there ,” he says pointing to Jared. “And then suffering is there no more . I will kill him. But what difference can it make if that happens quickly or slowly?”

“Abel,” says Cain, getting right up. “Please.”

“Keep away. Let me do it the way I want.”

Cain turns without a word and begins to walk downhill. When he’s a safe distance away, Abel bends over Jared again. He lifts up the eyelid with one hand and cuts it out with his knife. Then he runs the knife along the edges of the eye socket, presses the eye down with the blade while cutting through the sinews that hold it in place. When he’s done this all the way round, he levers the blade up and down a few times and partly pries, partly pokes, the eye out.

The head twists this way and that a few times while he’s doing it, but becomes still again once the eye is out.

He lays his knife down in the grass and examines the eye in the palm of his hand.

The back part is bloody, and a little has also run into the clear front part, but not enough to prevent him seeing the various parts clearly: the brown rods radiating from the pupil and toward the eye’s outer edge, the flecks of yellow between them, the dark ring around the iris, the thin tracery of red in the white sphere outside it.

Although the eye is no longer associated with the face, it seems to him that it still retains just as much of a definite expression. Not exactly censorious but. . more suspicious, or skeptical, he thinks, and lowers his head right down to the mouth.

“Can you hear me, Jared?” he whispers. “Are you alive?”

The lips move, but not a sound comes from them.

Abel gets up, pulls a leaf from the bough above him, wraps it round the eye and places the little parcel in his pocket. Then he squats again and puts his hand into the wound in Jared’s side, feels the bowels sliding against his fingers, and tries to push them upward, to try, if possible, to get hold of the heart, while with his other hand he feels the pulse in the neck.