Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

That was how Abel was to Cain: wild, restless, childlike, and almost frighteningly open, as if he didn’t even know he existed. That was how he’d been the previous midsummer, and how he’d been up in the mountains, but not how he was now.

For the first time Cain realized that he missed what they’d shared in the mountains. That there was something in those awful events that he yearned for. Never had they behaved in a more brotherly way than then. Their talk had been unconstrained, and they had acted according to their impulses, and this had allowed the natural order between them to reestablish itself for a few hours. Not in what they thought, but in what they did. All admiration, all tenderness, all feelings of inferiority, and all envy had been melted away in his rage, which once and for all had drawn a line between them.

This was what he’d thought. And this was how it should have been. But in some strange way Abel had taken up a new position outside the ambit of this obvious consequence. He was already somewhere else, that boyish eagerness and rapture, which only a few months ago had been Abel, was now a purely physical phenomenon, preserved in the shape of gestures and expressions, and no longer visible in the light of his eyes, which were warmer, milder, more remote.

Cain got up and walked in among the trees. He had to pee, but wanted to do so unseen, so he walked a little distance into the forest. Above him the foliage shimmered like silver, here and there a birch trunk glowed, and when the noises from the festivities became so remote that they seemed to mingle with the tinkle of the stream and the soughing of the wind in the trees, as if they were a part of the forest themselves, the thought suddenly came to him that he was happy.

The feeling was so overpowering that he had to stop.

What could be the cause of it? he thought.

And because there’s nothing happiness abhors more than analysis, the very next moment it deserted him. He could feel that as well, the tiny dent it left in his soul.

“Well, well,” he said to himself, and went on a bit farther before going up to a tree and unbuttoning. Just then he caught sight of two figures a bit deeper in the forest. Although they were half-hidden by the three-foot-high root of a fallen tree, he could see that one was a girl, and the other a boy, and that the girl was leaning forward with her hands on the tree root and her head lowered. Her hair was fair and hung over her shoulders. She was naked, and he was naked, and he was pressing at her from behind.

Did she suddenly begin to cry out?

Yes, suddenly she began to cry out. They must have thought they were so far away from people that they needn’t exercise any restraint. Appalled and ashamed, Cain turned away, finished as fast as he could, buttoned his fly, and tried to think about something else as he walked back, but the picture of them stayed with him, all the time he could see her flapping breasts and her swelling rump, his quick thrusts, and he thought almost with fury that that wasn’t how it ought to be, not like that . It should be as it was in the dance below, where the different worlds barely touched one another, and the one glimpsed just enough of the other to want to learn more about it. The boys’ world happy and arrogant or silent and determined, the girls’ shy or impish, sensitive or strapping, with secretive minds and a laughter you could let yourself be completely filled with, and then dream about: their faces then! These sudden flashes of a girl’s lovely features that come while working or before going to sleep, the lightness you’re suffused with, the happiness that doesn’t stop there, at the frontiers of the face, but goes on spreading, and at last envelops everything there is. A pair of worn clogs standing on the doorstep, the rain that begins to fall on them, this is her, both the shoes and the rain are her, and you hurry over, pick up the shoes with sudden tenderness, put them in the hall, and run out into the rain, face turned up to the sky, for she is falling on you, and on the grass and the trees, and on the river and the hills. The green caterpillar crawling over the stone wall that isn’t even aware of your finger, but crawls up it, makes you happy because it reminds you that she exists, just as smoke from a chimney that’s whipped by the wind and dissolves in the gray air reminds you that she exists, and the brown water in the ruts of a cart track when the sun shines on it, and the green grass beside it, and the squirrel that each day hops along the same branches of the same trees at the same time of day, this, too, reminds you she exists, as it runs across the road with its bushy tail in the air, climbs a tree on the other side, and is gone. Everything reminds you of her, everything makes you happy, and the only thing you really want is to see her again. Perhaps she’ll come walking along the road at dusk? Perhaps you’ll push your plate aside, walk into the hall, put on your boots, and go out to meet her there? If so, it will be with a trembling heart. And perhaps the sun will shine on the pine barren on the other side of the river, while the sky above the meadow is gray and the air filled with soft rain, and perhaps she’ll stop when she catches sight of you, because maybe she feels the same, maybe she’s been thinking of you during these days and weeks, too. So it won’t really matter if you haven’t anything to say to each other, because you’ll both be feeling the same and wanting the same: silently you’ll walk side by side down the road, the grass making your shoes wet, she glancing at you now and then, you glancing at her now and then, you both smile, you both know, this is you.

It should be like this and only like this, thought Cain, and halted at the top of the meadow.

That’s how it was down there. The fact that he wasn’t there, but up here, wasn’t important. His time would come.

He thought the thought.

My time will come .

It came with such certainty that the joy rose within him again. This kind of thought, which he had no hand in himself but which almost seemed to think itself, he relied upon more than his own.

As he went over to his place and sat down, Abel turned and glanced up at him. He said something to the people sitting on the bank above him, turned away from them in the instant before the laughter broke out, and began to walk up. The laughter he’d caused seemed to turn more uncertain without him, its lord and master, and quickly subsided.

At first Cain thought that he’d told some joke about him, but when he saw his brother’s face approaching, smiling and friendly, he realized this wasn’t the case.

“Cain,” he said. “There you are!”

Something in his friendliness aroused Cain’s suspicions. Had he chosen this particular moment? The warmth, the happiness, the dancing — anything further from the horror in the mountains was almost impossible to imagine. But Abel had never been calculating, and presumably still wasn’t, thought Cain — he was the one who planned, calculated, gauged, not Abel.

Cain hoped he would sit down, but when he stopped in front of him, it was just to bend forward with his hands on his knees.

“Can’t you come down and sit with us?” he asked.

So, he’d been sitting there feeling sorry for him, thought Cain. What right had he?

He made up his mind to meet pity with contempt, took a swig from his bottle and stared down at the fire below them.

“I’m comfortable where I am,” he said.

He felt his brother’s gaze on him, and fought the temptation to meet it. “Well,” said Abel. “It’s up to you.”

He straightened up, looked out. Only then did Cain look at him. The light from the fire made his eyes shine. The skin of his face glowed softly, and in the bluish gray twilight darkness beneath the foliage, which blurred every outline of the body and turned all surfaces colorless, the light seemed to be coming from the face itself.