Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

When they’d crossed the bridge and his father still hadn’t spoken, Cain ventured a question.

“How long has Abel been at home?”

“He came down off the mountain three days ago,” said his father. “Since then he hasn’t slept a wink. And early today he began having. . well, sort of fits .”

After that he was silent. Cain said nothing, he knew how slowly his father thought, and knew well that he would soon pick up where he’d left off. The time in-between had never been anything his father bothered about.

After a while glimpses of the lit windows came into view between the forest trees. The sight must have stimulated his father, because he began to speak once more.

“It’s been impossible to talk to him,” he said. “Not a word of sense has passed his lips since he got down. And then these fits. .”

He halted and looked at Cain.

“You know him best of all perhaps. We thought that. . If he could see you. . perhaps you . .”

Cain gave him no help, just stood staring at him there in the darkness under the trees.

“Do you know what I mean?” said his father.

“No,” said Cain. “He’s not sleeping, you say. And then he has fits of some sort?”

“Yes,” said his father. “That’s it. We think. . Well, I might as well come right out with it. We think he’s lost his wits.”

His father’s words aroused no emotion in him. The only thing he managed to think about was what an appropriate reaction would be.

He lowered his head.

“How terrible,” he said, but could hear the lack of feeling in his words himself, and tried to increase their intensity by repeating them.

“Terrible, terrible,” he said.

But it wasn’t good enough. His father had always entertained a suspicion that Cain didn’t have his brother’s good at heart. If he couldn’t manage to appear more shaken than that, he wouldn’t suspect any longer, he’d know.

Just then a cry rent the air. It was muffled and Cain realized that it was coming from inside the house in front of them, but it was clear and it got clearer and clearer as it gradually grew in strength until, perhaps a minute later, it suddenly stopped and again there was silence around them.

It was the same cry he’d heard earlier in the evening. Even though he now knew it must come from Abel, it was almost impossible to believe that this voice, that lay somewhere between the animal and the human, could emanate from his brother’s throat.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.”

His father laid a hand on his arm.

“That was Abel,” he said. “Come along.”

They pushed on through the trees. When they got to the house, they found his mother on the steps. Her eyes sought his, and Cain saw that she’d been crying.

“It’s good you’ve come,” she said.

Cain hung his jacket on the peg in the hall, and followed his parents up the stairs to their childhood bedroom in the attic. His father stopped outside the door, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked it. Then he stood aside to let Cain go in first.

Abel lay motionless on the bed beneath the window, faintly illuminated by a lamp on the opposite wall. At first Cain thought he was sleeping, but when he drew closer he saw that he was lying with his eyes open. And that he was bound tightly. His wrists were tied to the bedposts behind him, his ankles to those at the foot of the bed.

“You’ve bound him?” said Cain, turning to his parents.

“Yes,” said his father. “You’ll soon see why.”

He went over to the bed and beckoned Cain to follow.

Only the whites of Abel’s eyes were showing. His eyeballs must be turned up into his head, thought Cain, and shuddered: even though he knew this face better than anyone, the white stare alienated it. Not just from his brother, but from everything else. As if it weren’t a human being lying there, but something else.

Without saying anything, his father moved his hand from side to side over Abel’s eyes a few times. Then he slapped his cheek hard, not just once but two, three, four times.

The face was completely unresponsive. He might have been dead, thought Cain, apart from the blush that slowly spread into his cheek.

“You see?” said his father. “It’s as if he isn’t here.”

“Could you sit with him tonight, Cain,” said his mother, “and talk to him now and then? He might recognize your voice, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Cain. “But I can try.”

“You can have your old bed,” she said. “I’ve just made it up.”

“But first we should give the lad something to eat, don’t you think?” said his father.

They occupied their usual places at the table. Cain at the head, where he’d sat all through his childhood, his mother and father on opposite sides. They didn’t look at each other, nobody spoke, all were occupied with their small tasks. His father scraped his potatoes and left the skins on the side of his plate, where they lay throughout the meal, until by the end they’d shriveled up, while his mother, on her side of the table, put the skins on the scrapings plate as soon as they’d come off the potato. His father flipped the fish skin back with the tip of his knife, stuck his fork into the white flesh, loosened a piece from the bone, brushed it through the yellow, liquid butter before bringing it to his mouth; his mother skinned the entire fish from head to tail before she started eating.

Usually Cain didn’t like seeing them like this, imprisoned in their habits, but this evening it was as if they came into their own. There was a comfort in repetition, and he thought he could perceive that they thought so too. Their movements were calmer, and the silence around the table — which usually was neutral, bordering on the hostile — seemed to him, if not actually warm, at least reconciling.

For a while he sat wondering if the atmosphere between them really had changed character, or if the alteration was something solely within himself. In that case, the thought, the dislike he had sensed here during all those years must have had its source inside him, and not in them.

Had this been so?

He looked furtively at his father. The vein standing out on his temple, his shiny pate, his yellow teeth chewing up fish and potato so heartily. How he always gave himself up completely to whatever he was doing, whether it was eating, walking, digging, sowing, reaping, cutting, felling, singing, or dancing.

Obviously it was from his father that these various atmospheres radiated.

Now he was scared. In his fear he had, for the first time, turned to Cain; suddenly Cain had something he needed, and thus the harmony.

“Would you like some more water, Cain?” said his mother. He nodded and she half stood, poured, handed the jug to his father, and had just sat down again when there was a knocking on the ceiling above them. Cain realized that it was his brother tugging at the ropes up there.

His parents attempted to eat on as if nothing had happened. His father took a pinch of salt and sprinkled it over his fish, his mother raised a hand to her mouth and pulled out a fish bone, which she placed on the side of her plate, went on chewing, swallowed, put a new piece on her fork.

Then the cry came again.

It began softly, like some sort of fretting, but quickly grew in strength, seemingly driven by its own terror and despair. His mother put her knife and fork down on her plate and stared at the table in front of her until it was over. His father went on eating, but he, too, dropped his gaze, his eyes desolate.

When the cry at last stopped, his mother pushed her half-full plate away from her. The sound cut through the silence the cry left behind it, and made both of them look at her. But it was his father’s look she returned. For a long while they stared into each other’s eyes. His father’s face opened to her, Cain had never witnessed anything like it, it seemed to turn softer, more childlike, and his eyes filled with tears.