Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Why had he done it?

Oh, why, why?

In his misery and boundless sorrow, he didn’t notice that the light around him was getting weaker and weaker, and finally vanished altogether. On his knees at his brother’s side he stroked his hair, kissed his cheeks, his brow, his lips. Lovely little Abel , he said, my lovely little brother , he said it over and over again, until he had no more tears, and rose trembling to his feet. Only then did he see that it was dark around him. And that a light now shone out over the field.

There was something alluring about the light, all willpower seemed to disappear from him, without thinking he began to walk toward it.

Out there Cain actually saw God and fell to his knees.

“What have you done?” God said to him. “Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the earth. From now on you shall be cursed from this earth that opened its mouth and received your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the soil, it will no longer give you its bounty, you will be a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth.”

“My crime is greater than I can bear,” said Cain. “You have driven me from the land, and I must hide from your sight; and I will wander homeless over the earth, and so anyone who finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him:

“No! For if anyone kills Cain, he shall suffer a sevenfold revenge.”

And the Lord set a mark on Cain, so that nobody he met should kill him. That same night Cain left the valley for good. For a while he stayed up in the mountains, but when winter came he crossed them and wandered eastward until he came to the land of Nod, where he settled, without ever finding peace, for that was the retribution for the crime he’d committed. Sentenced to life, that was his punishment.

The finding of the body the very next day indicates that Cain’s final action before he left was to drag it out into the field again, presumably to spare his parents the hope they otherwise would have cherished of finding their younger son alive. It lay out in the field with its throat gaping like a mouth, the skin washed white and clean by the rain. They carried him home, that same day his father made him a coffin in which he lay on the living room table until the funeral three days later, while all the men of the district were out hunting Cain, whom they took to be the murderer. His disappearance at the time of his brother’s killing couldn’t be a coincidence. And when they saw the two offerings on the mound, they could immediately reconstruct the chain of events, and explain why Cain had attacked Abel, his own brother. They had each brought their sacrifices to the Lord: Abel his firstborn lambs, Cain his produce from the fields. When the Lord had accepted Abel’s offering but not Cain’s, he’d become mad with jealousy, lured his brother out into the field, and killed him, and then headed for the mountains.

Cain’s envy was common knowledge. Everyone had seen how his look would darken when Abel eclipsed him, no one was surprised at what had happened, not even the brothers’ father. At night he kept vigil over Abel, he sat on a chair by the wall in the dark and stared out in front of him, without ever looking at him or touching him, until the crack of dawn, when he’d go up into the mountains hunting for Cain. Later the story went that he’d seen him, that on the second afternoon he came out of the forest on the mountain above the waterfall and saw Cain on the other side. It was said that they stood staring at one another like two animals with the thundering mass of water between them until, after a few minutes, Cain turned and disappeared into the forest again.

Because Cain was never found and tried for what he had done, the sorrow over the loss of Abel was fused with hate and bitterness, so that it became stronger and lasted longer than it otherwise might have. The boy their mother bore next summer grew up in the shadow of his brothers, in the sense that everything he did was secretly compared to Cain and Abel. But Seth, as he was called, proved strong, and gradually made his way in the world. Before he was even sixteen, it was he on whom his father based his judgments of Cain and Abel, and these in any case became less and less frequent. While he’d had these sons round him, he’d considered only how different they were, as had everyone, but now, with the passing of the years and with a new son standing at his side, he could see their similarities more clearly. Both went as far as they could in the directions their characters had mapped out for them. Cain’s inward, Abel’s outward. Neither of them knew any bounds. But Seth was just like his father. The pair understood each other. And what greater joy is there for a father than to possess a son who understands him? Seth brought happier times to the farm. After a while he married and had children, he called his eldest son Enos, and he had a son called Cainan, who in turn had a son called Mahalaleel, who again had a son Jared, generation after generation, century after century, in a world where man was the measure and moderation of all things: not higher, not faster, not more.

APART FROM a list of Adam’s firstborn descendants and their ages, nothing from this period is mentioned in scripture. From the list it’s possible to calculate that it lasted for sixteen hundred years. Of all lacunae in the Bible, this is incomparably the greatest. If we imagine that women had their first child at about the age of fifteen, and that each of them had three children that survived to adulthood, there must, even by the beginning of the third century, have been several hundred thousand people. Despite this, not a word is breathed about them in the Bible. As the Bible is the story of the relationship between the divine and the mortal, from creation to the death of Jesus, it might well be that God kept aloof from humanity during this period, and that nothing of this stretch is related in the Bible simply because nothing of relevance to the relationship occurred. At the same time we know that the whole of this first realm was brought to an end as a direct result of God’s anger. Genesis 6:5 says: When the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth and that his thoughts and inclinations were always evil. . This is the only explanation the Bible gives for the great flood. But mankind lived there for sixteen hundred years — was its evil constant during all that time? In that case, why hadn’t God stepped in and destroyed it long before? And if it wasn’t evil all that time, how can it be that the transition from good to evil — assuming it was a transition, of course, and not a sudden and unexpected change — how can it be that that transition or change isn’t described?

And what is really meant by When the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth ? How were they evil? Cain killed his own brother — is there anything more evil than that? No, there isn’t, and so the question arises: If man was capable, right from the start, of killing his own brother, why was it that God waited sixteen hundred long years before exterminating them?

A sudden wickedness flaring up is hardly likely, it goes against everything we know about human nature, which in all probability is unchanging. This leaves the following possibilities: either these first human beings were eradicated because their evil deeds, big and small, slowly accumulated in God’s consciousness, until they’d reached such proportions that he was finally forced to act. Or, something terrible happened that didn’t have its root in mankind, but came from somewhere else. The words of When the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth point to the first alternative being the correct one, but do not exclude the second: perhaps what happened was the kind of thing that might cause damage if human beings got to know about it, and so it had to be kept hidden from them, which scripture’s reference to human wickedness would have achieved. The people of the valley themselves had no inkling of what lay in store. When Seth got up with the sun in the morning and stood on his doorstep and looked out across his fields, bathed in light, his thoughts turned to the future. Today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. When he watched his small son Enos toddling around the farmyard, trying with delighted cries to catch one of the many hens that pecked there, and thought that Enos would live long after he himself was dead, here, on the same farm, he didn’t do so with sorrow in his heart, but with joy. Enos was his emissary to the future. When his body lay rotting in the earth up on the mound, his son, his own flesh and blood, would walk the land for many years more, and when he died, his son would do the same after him. And thus it would continue. So it’s not surprising that for Seth it was a matter of honor to leave the farm to his son in better heart than when he’d taken it over. With such an attitude, which applied not only to Seth, but to the whole rapidly expanding community, one might have expected things to improve with each generation, and ultimately to have reached perfection, that inert state in which all problems have been solved and everything is perfect. But this wasn’t what happened. Seth did his utmost, Enos did his utmost, Cainan did his utmost, but every advance they made was always counterbalanced by reversals in other areas. There were forces they couldn’t control, which ceaselessly strove and struggled within them. Their efforts left them standing still, no more, no less. The importance of this could be seen the moment this battle ceased. The result of four generations of hard work could be squandered in the course of the fifth. It wasn’t a rare occurrence. Families that had slowly risen in prosperity and esteem could fall back into the most abject poverty and ruin.