Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The heart is still beating.

“Well done, Jared!” he whispers.

He twists his head and looks down the meadow, but can see no sign of his brother. When he turns back, he tries to imagine what it must feel like to be inside a body that can’t move and can’t see, and that suddenly senses pains in the most unexpected places. All is black and silent. Black and silent. Black and silent. Then a sudden pain cuts through the darkness. It’s from your eye, someone’s cutting at your eye with a knife. . Someone’s whispering a question in your ear. . Someone’s stuck a hand in your stomach, someone squeezing a gut. .

Or perhaps feelings have long since departed.

What’s left of him, in that case?

A beating heart, lungs that breathe, thoughts that revolve.

This is Jared: a place in the forest that thinks and aches.

Then the heart stops beating, then the lungs stop breathing, then the thoughts stop revolving. Because they have a limit, and an exact point when that is reached, and it is that exact point Abel longs to witness. Not from the outside, as he would if he’d stuck the knife into the brain or the heart, but from the inside, as he will if only he can get hold of the heart with his hands. That has to be the way to “help” him, he thinks. Grip the heart so hard that it stops. Feel the heart stop. Feel Jared’s heart stop and the life cease between his fingers.

“Are you alive, Jared?” he whispers again. Although he’s assisted in the slaughter of many animals, he can’t tell the internal organs apart, everything becomes confused, and even though he forces his hand in with all his might, he can’t get it even near the heart.

Perhaps it would be easier if he used his knife. Could he coax it through the lower intestines and then cut his way up to the heart?

He pulls his hand out and is just about to reach for his knife to try out this new plan when he senses a movement behind him. He turns his head and sees his brother with a boulder in his raised hands.

Cain roars like a madman as he drops the stone on Jared’s head, which is crushed.

Without looking at Abel, he says:

“Throw the knife away. It’s unclean. And never breathe a word of this to anyone.”

When Abel hesitates, he shouts.

“THROW THE KNIFE AWAY!”

Abel picks up the knife and hurls it into the forest.

“I’m taking Jared down,” says Cain. “I don’t want to see you there. You can sleep in the hut tonight. And when you come down, don’t say a word about this to a soul. Do you understand?”

Abel nods, and Cain bends down, lifts the dead body, rests it on his back, walks down the meadow, and disappears into the forest on the other side.

He is so incensed that he neither notices the weight of the corpse nor the branches that strike him. Blindly he bends his steps toward the sound of the river. He walks as fast as he can, and fifteen minutes later arrives at the lip of the precipice above the waterfall, where the sound of the mass of water surging to the bottom fills the valley with a roar. So far he has almost dragged the body along, its head close to his own, the body in line with his back, and its arms, by which he’s held it, down his chest, but for the difficult terrain ahead he knows he must find a better and less demanding lift, and lays the body gently down on the mountainside.

In the sky above him the first stars have begun to shine, dimly, as if from the bottom of a sea.

He stretches his arms in the air, rolls his shoulders a few times as he looks up the pass. A little farther up, the mountain bridges the foaming water, which almost runs in a tunnel beneath it, before heading down the incline with terrific force and falling straight into the gorge. The air that rises along the mountainside is raw and damp, and he rubs his forearms quickly before stooping and picking up the corpse again. This time he places it across his shoulders, with his arms over it, rather like a yoke, and shifts his torso about a bit to find out how stable the load is before starting off down the side of the valley.

Darkness is falling rapidly, but the foaming rapids he’s following give off enough light for him to see the shape of the mountain in front of him the whole way, and when, a few hours later, he gets down into the valley, the moon above the treetops is almost full, so that even the last leg, through the forest beneath the mountain that he and Abel climbed earlier in the day, is accomplished without serious difficulties.

He notices just how heavy his load has been only when he enters the field and is able to put it down. He stretches out and looks over at the houses. Or over at where he knows the houses to lie, because the lights are out and everything is dark.

He hauls the corpse up onto the little knoll in the middle of the field where they usually bury their dead. Then he goes over to the houses, creeps into the toolshed, and fetches a spade. When the grave is finished, he sits with his back against a tree planning what he’ll say as he waits for the sun to rise. They’ll want answers to two questions: why he buried Jared alone, and in the middle of the night, too, and why he left Abel alone up there.

What a nightmare it has been.

Now, enveloped in the tranquility of night, it’s hard to believe. At the same time it is as if the significance of the events is waning. Perhaps what Abel did wasn’t so terrible. Perhaps his own anger was the worse sin.

Cain fell asleep under the tree and awoke the next morning to the sound of voices moving across the field below. He knew at once that they were going out to search for them, and cursed himself: this was precisely what he’d tried to avoid. The idea had been that he’d sit in the kitchen and wait for them as they came down, give a brief account of what had happened, and then go out and work as normal. But now he found himself faced with a problem already.

He got up and descended to the field where he saw the men, fifty yards or so away, walking side by side heading toward the pass.

“I’m here!” he called out.

They stopped and turned. He waved with one hand and hurried over.

The explanation he’d worked out seemed to have melted away as he stopped in front of them.

“Where’s Abel?” his father asked.

“At the summer farm,” said Cain panting. “Jared is dead, he was killed by a bear, and Abel stayed up there to look after the sheep.”

“You left him up there alone?”

“Yes, I brought Jared down with me.”

“Is Jared here? ”

“On the knoll. I buried him during the night.”

His father looked at him for a long while. Then he gave orders to two of the men to bring Abel down, turned his back on Cain, and began to walk over to the newly cleared ground. They worked all morning without exchanging a word. During the lunch break they saw Abel and one of the men come climbing down through the pass, and Cain could sense his father’s relief; something almost merry showed in his eyes. Work was abandoned for the day; Abel must have food, Abel must have rest, Abel must relate what had happened. He was received like a hero, and responded to the accolade by telling a hero’s tale. He knew that Cain neither could nor would correct him, and each time he said something that deviated considerably from the actual chain of events, he would glance smilingly over at his brother. But Cain looked down. Also, when Abel asked his father if he mightn’t step into Jared’s shoes, and his father not only gave him permission to do that but also gave him all the animals as well, as if in passing, as if he hadn’t been thinking about it for a long time, Cain looked down. Everyone present noticed the darkness that settled on him, and everyone assumed he was envious of his brother. But he wasn’t. On the contrary, he wished Abel well with the animals, and the life they would bring him, for it suited his brother, in this way he could roam about freely, as he’d always wanted. At the same time he knew that everyone suspected him of the opposite, and this suspicion, which bombarded him from every corner, gave him an exaggerated awareness of himself, it felt as if he were already guilty, and this feeling of guilt eclipsed his radiance. Without wishing it, something dark and heavy came into his countenance, which confirmed the others’ notions of his character. That this blackness wasn’t his, but arose in answer to their expectations of him, was naturally unknown to them. All the others shared Abel’s joy, except him, he who was perhaps the only one who was really pleased. Because he sat there brooding, and for this he was despised.