Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“But I’ve found another way,” said Abel. “And tonight I’m going there.”

Cain lowered his eyes. His first impulse had been to beg him not to. But he no longer wished to be the anxious one, the abject one, and he kept his admonitions to himself. He felt that his brother was still looking at him, as if he expected something more. When it didn’t come, he went over to the lambs again, cut the last lamb loose from the tree, and led it by the rope end. After a few yards he stopped, turned, and once more fixed his eyes on Cain.

Or was it really his brother he was looking at?

Cain felt that he was staring past him, and turned round. But he saw nothing. Just the heavy branches, dark green, almost black in the dusk, the grayish light over the field between them, the contours of the mountain ridges against the sky.

He turned back. Abel was staring just as intently past him. Only when Cain bent down and picked up one of his sacks of corn did Abel snap to again, lead the last lamb out into the clearing, slaughter it. Cain carried his sack up, opened it, and poured the corn out over the field. He had three sacks of corn altogether. And also a sack of potatoes, a sack of carrots, and a sack of onions. He emptied all six onto the field.

“God is here,” Abel said.

Cain looked up but saw nothing but the gray, rain-filled sky. He turned and looked between the trees, but he saw nothing there either.

No one had seen God in his lifetime. The tale that he had once walked among the trees in the Garden of Eden and spoken to mankind belonged to another age: to them God was everywhere and nowhere. God was in animals’ eyes, in the flames of the fire, in the earth’s darkness. God was in the wind that blew, in the rain that fell, in the heart that beat, in the blood that ran, in the grass that grew.

That must have been what he meant, thought Cain. That time was almost contracting around them, endowing the present moment with an unknown richness and making it holy.

He looked at his brother. He stood before the heap of animal carcasses with his eyes turned up to the sky in front of him. The rain trickled down his forehead and cheeks, his clothes were dark with moisture and covered in flecks of blood, his hands gory. But his eyes were seemingly unaffected by all this, the luster in them was pure and clear.

What was it he saw?

Suddenly a great flame shot up from the carcasses on the ground before him. At the same moment Abel opened his mouth and cried out. This time the cry was not one of despair, or of fear, but of pain. Never had Cain heard such pain, never would he hear it again. Petrified he stood staring at his brother, who in the next instant fell and lay motionless on the ground.

God was here. He was in the flames that were leaping high into the air, he was in his brother’s horrible scream, he was in his brother’s still body.

But he wasn’t in Cain.

Cain was filled with concern for his brother, and all he thought about was what he should do. He took a step toward him at first, he wanted to drag him away from the place of sacrifice and get him home, until it struck him that this would be profane, and that he must wait until the flames had devoured the sacrifice.

He turned his gaze from the burning lamb carcasses and his brother’s still body to his own offering. The bundles of carrots had been washed almost completely clean by the rain, and glowed bright green and orange against the brown earth. Next to them lay the heaps of potatoes and onions and against them a pile of corn.

How small and pathetic his offering was!

Had he really thought that God would accept a few bunches of carrots? A bit of onion and some potatoes?

A few minutes later the fire went out as suddenly as it had begun. All that remained of the five lamb carcasses were a few black, coal-like cinders, and the smoke that rose slowly up to a rainy sky. When he knelt by Abel’s side, he attempted to pull off his sweater, because he had a suspicion about what had happened, but this proved difficult; where the material hadn’t been burned into the skin of his back, it stuck fast to the weeping wound under it, and each time he pulled a little, Abel moaned.

“Wait a moment,” he said to him as he got up. “I’ll run and fetch the cart, and then we’ll get you home.”

When he came back, he wrapped his arms around Abel’s chest and dragged him down to the field, laid him gently face downward in the cart, took hold of the shafts, and set off homeward as he pondered what he’d actually witnessed. The fact that God had accepted Abel’s offering could only mean that Abel was chosen and elected by God. At the same time there was another connection, that between the brand he must have gotten from the cherubim, and the same sacrifice.

If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would have thought that these two links were mutually exclusive. But they weren’t. God’s reward was also a punishment.

He turned and looked at Abel. He’d shifted onto his side and was holding on to the side of the cart with one hand and looking out toward the forest at the far end of the field with an expression that had something of a child’s apathy in it.

Cain thought he’d have to carry Abel inside and pulled the cart right up to the doorstep when they arrived, but his brother held up a dismissive hand, stood up by himself, steadied himself on the door frame, and staggered into the living room.

“Wait here,” said Cain. “I’ll just go and get some dry clothes.”

He hurried upstairs, took out the piles of clothes from the cupboard, and put them on the bed, selected a pair of trousers, a shirt and a sweater, two pairs of socks, one thick and one thin, a sheet and a towel, and carried them all down into the living room.

Abel had lain down on his stomach on the floor. He was resting his cheek against one arm and stared up at Cain when he stopped in front of him.

“We’ll have to get your sweater off,” said Cain. “Are you comfortable there?”

Abel said nothing. Cain took this as a yes, placed the pile of clothes on the table, fetched a pair of scissors from the drawer, bent over him, cut round the arms of the sweater at the shoulder and pulled them off. Then he cut along the seam from the shoulder to the neck and the one from the waist to the arms, so that the front loosened. Only the back remained.

“This is going to hurt,” he said.

Abel said nothing.

Cain got hold of the lower edge of the sweater with both hands. With a jerk he pulled the whole thing off. The barely congealed matter on the surface of the wounds was torn off, together with large pieces of skin. Abel screamed, and then he was silent.

Losing consciousness wasn’t such a bad idea, Cain thought. He lit a candle and placed it next to him on the floor, kindled a fire in the hearth, and put a pan of water on the plate, before he set about getting rid of the remaining material in the wound. Some of the fibers were completely covered by the soft matter, and had presumably been there ever since his back had been burned the first time.

When he’d got rid of the worst of it, he moistened a cloth in the warm water and began to wash the wound. He cleaned off all the scabs and all the discolored material until the wound was as clean as he could get it. Then he cut up the sheet into narrow strips and bound them, strip by strip, around Abel’s torso.

To do this he had to lift him into a sitting position, and the change of postures causing his head to nod forward, brought him back to consciousness. It didn’t seem that he was as struck by the intimacy of the situation as was Cain, holding his brother’s naked body with one hand and bandaging with the other, but considering the pain from the wound and the events of the past few hours, there was nothing odd in this.