Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

When it was over, he wiped the sweat from Abel’s forehead, and the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, which must have been the result of a bitten tongue, and then went over to his own bed and lay down. The last thing he pictured before falling asleep was his own loathsome face hanging over his brother’s beautiful one, his grotesque hands fumbling with him, his hysterical tenderness shining in his eyes.

He woke in the grayness of dawn. At first he didn’t know where he was, and sat up in bed, looking round the room.

“Is that you, Cain?” said Abel.

Still drowsy with sleep, he stared at his brother. Then he remembered what had happened.

“Have you woken up?” he said, and got to his feet. “Have you woken up, Abel?”

Abel made no reply. When Cain got to his bedside, he was lying with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. His face was completely relaxed, but not his eyes. When they turned toward him, it was as if they both saw him and didn’t see him. It was like being fixed by an animal’s gaze.

But the voice was his old one.

“Why have you tied me up?”

“It wasn’t me. It was Father. You’ve been having fits of some sort.”

“Can you untie me?”

“Yes, of course, of course,” said Cain.

Abel lay quite still as his hands and feet were loosened. Then he sat up, rubbed his wrists, eased his head backward and forward several times.

“What day is it?”

“It’s harvest festival tonight,” said Cain. “What’s been happening exactly? What have you done? I saw your back. .”

Abel turned his gaze on him once more. His eyes shone with a kind of feverish glow, at once both dull and intense.

Without saying a word he got up and went out of the room. Cain heard his footsteps on the stairs, his parents’ voices, the front door slamming, and was at the window just in time to see him pass along the field outside.

His parents were still in the hall when he got downstairs.

“What’s happened?” asked his mother. “Did you speak to him?”

“Only a little,” said Cain. “He woke up as if nothing had happened. Asked why he was tied up, and what day it was. Then he just went.”

“But did you speak to him?” his father asked.

Cain shook his head.

“I tried to. But he didn’t listen. He’s being driven by something or other,” said Cain, lowering his eyes, he didn’t want them to start talking about that .

“Maybe he’s just confused after what he’s been through,” he said, taking his hat and jacket from the peg. “I’m going after him anyway.”

It had begun to rain outside, but a thin layer of snow still covered the field, and he had no difficulty making out which way his brother had gone. He put his jacket on, pulled his hat down to his eyes, and began to follow the tracks down. For some reason it put him in mind of the time they’d gone up into the mountains to search for Jared. When Abel had stood in the field beneath the mountain and pounded with his sledgehammer, and he had gone the way he was going now, not without looking forward to what lay in store.

It was almost unbelievable that it was only six months ago. It felt like another age.

He stopped at the edge of the field and looked across it, but could see nothing of Abel. He must already have reached the brow of the forest on the other side, he thought, and increased his speed. In several places the snow had completely melted, but he still had no trouble tracking him, the ground was so soft.

The mist hung heavily over the valley. Bare and glimmering gray, the mountainside before him hardly reflected the feeble, rainy light. He knew that the tracks would disappear on the other side, and stopped several times to try, if possible, to catch a glimpse of him between the trees, in the hope of perhaps cutting him off.

When he got to the edge of the forest, where the tracks did indeed vanish, he got the feeling that Abel was somewhere close by. He walked in among the trees and peered around. But no. Nothing but trees, rocks, grass, moss, all made somber by the rain. He tilted his head back and looked up. In the tree right above him sat a crow. Even though it must have noticed him a long time ago, it made no move to fly away, just sat there with its claws clamped to the branch, gazing into the distance. The black eyes were as shiny and immobile as two stones. He was so close that he could see the light reflected in them.

It struck him how still things were. The field was still, the sky was still, the forest was still.

Even so, the voice that suddenly spoke behind him wasn’t unexpected.

“Why are you following me?”

Cain turned. His brother was standing in the clearing looking at him.

“I’m afraid for you,” he said.

“You’ve no need to be. I can take care of myself.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up to fetch the lambs. Didn’t you say it was the day of offering?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. You’re going to let me go?” said Abel, smiling.

Cain stood waiting for him when he came down at dusk. He was leading five of his lambs on a rope. They capered clumsily around his legs, bleating and butting one another. It was still raining. Cain was wet to the skin, he’d been standing there for hours, but he didn’t get so much as a greeting from his brother. He walked straight past him, nor did he say anything on the way to the little mound in the middle of the field, where offerings had been made for as long as they could remember.

Cain had transported his offering by cart earlier in the day, lugged the sacks under the branches of the biggest spruce, and afterward left the cart some way away in the field, there was something irreverent in the thought of it standing by the place of sacrifice during the ritual itself.

When they got there, Abel tied the lambs up to the trunk, cut one loose, got it by the neck, and led it to the center of the triangle formed by the three spruce trees. He changed hands, twisted its head back and cut its throat open with his knife. The blood flooded out onto the field. Then he threw it away from him. Cain stood silently watching the kicking legs of its death throes, the steam rising from its blood, the uneasiness spreading to the other animals, his brother cutting loose the next one, and in the same careless way pulling it to the middle of the three trees, bending the head back and cutting its throat. His hands were already crimson with blood. From the even pulsing that pumped the blood out, Cain could see that the first lamb was still alive when the second one was hurled on top of it.

The three remaining lambs bleated loudly and piercingly but stood quite still, and Abel cut loose the third and led it out, cut its throat, and shoved it away. The fourth, too, stood motionless as he bent over it. The flashing knife sliced through the thin skin of its throat, severed its jugular vein, and the blood was pumped out onto the field again, and again, and again.

When he’d thrown it up onto the three others, he turned and glanced at Cain, who still stood under the spruce tree watching.

The pouring rain, the mist that drifted between the green trees, the puddle of blood in the yellow grass, Abel’s face, which, for the first time in a long while, opened up to him in a smile.

“I’ve seen the cherubim,” he said.

A twitch went through the lone lamb behind him. Its legs beat against the ground faster than any will could make them.

Abel wiped the hand that wasn’t holding the knife against the breast of his shirt and came a few steps closer.

“It’s not right, what we’ve heard, that they guard the tree of life,” he said. “They guard the way to the tree of life. And that’s rather different.”

Cain said nothing. He was thinking that he loved him. That a smile like the one he suddenly received now, in which the eyes, too, were happy, filled him with joy.