He turns and sees that his brother will soon be halfway. When he turns back, a deer is standing on the edge of the forest, perhaps fifty yards away, staring at him. After a few seconds of complete immobility, it raises its head a few times to test the scents from the field. When it has assured itself that all is safe, or as safe as it can be, it begins to walk along the edge of the field. The next moment two more deer appear from the edge of the forest, and then two more.
How odd, he thinks. They never usually come out into the field before dusk. Could something have frightened them?
He follows them with his gaze until they are lost behind the rise. Then he peers up one last time at the glow from the flaming angels, far away, before he turns to go and meet his brother.
Just then, there is the sound of Cain’s shout across the field.
“Abel!”
He thinks the shout is born of impatience and tries to sound as jovial as possible when he answers. “I’m coming!” he calls, “Just wait there!”
“No,” returns his brother, “I’ll come, you wait there!”
Somewhat surprised, Abel does what he’s told. He’s beginning to feel cold and rubs his forearms with his hands a few times while he stares at the lean figure of his brother taking the path by the stream with long strides. Something must have happened. But his brother’s movements give nothing away, he’s walking as he always has, the top half of his body stooped and his gaze on the ground as if afraid that his connection with it will cease if he doesn’t watch out.
My brother, Cain, he thinks, and has to smile. Even when his brother is walking alone and thinks himself unobserved, his entire being radiates reluctance. As if everything he does, even something as simple as lifting one foot and placing it before the other, has been forced on him. Reluctance and suspicion. That’s Cain. If you smile at him, the smile isn’t infectious as it is with ordinary people, not at all, he’ll immediately look up and bore into you with his suspicion.
Oh, if only he’d let himself go occasionally! Stop guarding the boundaries of his being and open up to everything that went on outside it!
Abel can’t count the number of times he’s tried to get him to come out of himself, but he never budges. You’d think there was something of enormous value inside him, which he was protecting and wouldn’t exchange for all the world. But no matter how much Abel pondered the matter, he couldn’t work out what it could be.
His soul?
Maybe. Abel thought of Cain’s soul as a tree stump, it was the closest he could get. A rotten tree stump, deep in the forest somewhere next to a bog, beneath constantly drenching rain. Yellow grass, yellow leaves, gray sky, waterlogged ground and Cain’s soul just protruding from the scree.
His mind?
Just as deeply rooted, almost as unshakable, but not as stunted, the branches of Cain’s mind stretched stiffly up into the sky, where for the most part they remained motionless: even the wildest mental storm didn’t manage to do more than sway them gently.
My brother is a tree, Abel thinks, and begins to sing to himself:
My brother is a tree
And that’s a certainty
If he could have his will
He’d stand completely still
And let his two big boots
Grow down just like roots
So deep into the soil
Oh, so deep into the soil
He laughs at this little song of his, and as he lifts his head and meets Cain’s glance — he’s now only a few yards away — he decides that he’ll remember the words and sing them to the others when he gets home.
“Jared hasn’t come back,” Cain says, halting. “He should have come down early today. We’ll have to go up and search for him.”
“Just us two?” asks Abel.
Cain nods.
“It’ll be dark soon. Come on.”
They follow the pass up to the top of the mountain. Even though it’s in shadow for much of the day, the vegetation in the lower reaches is luxuriant. Between the moss-grown rocks that have rolled down in aeons past, thick clumps of foxgloves light up the green gloom with their small lamps. Everywhere, the bracken reaches out its greedy leaves, in places it covers the ground entirely and the brothers must test each footstep as if they’re wading in turbid water. But it soon becomes so steep and stony that all vegetation, apart from the smallest and most hardy species, ceases. The path they’re following zigzags upward, the distance between each twist becomes less and less until, a hundred yards from the top, it peters out completely. From here they must climb.
Cain, who doesn’t like having anyone behind him, lets Abel go first. There is no more unpleasant feeling than having him at his back all the time, and being aware of his discontent at the slowness of the pace, thinks Cain. In addition, he can’t bear the sensation of being seen without being able to see himself.
Light and effortless as an animal, Abel climbs upward, already far in front of his brother, who, now and then, stops to catch his breath. There is something wrong with his airways, in spring and summer they seem to swell up and make his breathing difficult at times. Strangely enough, he doesn’t get any of this in the autumn and winter. That is his time. That is his world. That is his life. For Cain, there’s nothing finer than walking through the snow-covered forest in the winter when there’s not a sound to be heard anywhere apart from his own steps and the chop of the ax against the tree trunk when he’s stopped at a tree and has begun working, the riverlike rush that fills the air as it topples — how strangely slow that fall always is! — the crunch when it hits the ground, the swirl of powder snow that’s stirred up and sometimes showers his face like small needles of cold, the silence afterward. Or sitting in front of a fire in the evening, the fire lapping its glow into the dark, the waves of warmth it gives out, the small embers that now and then are spat crackling up into the air. Even his sleep is different out there, sharper, clearer, whether he’s sleeping in the hut or in one of the brushwood lean-tos he habitually constructs. He sometimes thinks it’s as if the very night sky is flowing through him. Cold and black and glittering with starlight.
When he looks up, Abel is waiting on the summit ledge. He has removed his shirt and is leaning against the rock with his eyes shut against the sun.
My brother, Abel, thinks Cain, and is filled with sudden pride.
He’s so beautiful.
It’s almost unbelievable that they are brothers. Abel’s slim form, still boyishly fine-limbed, is as unlike his own coarse and peculiarly disproportional body as it’s possible to get. Cain is tall, but even though his chest is broad and his upper arms powerful, he still seems frail, it’s something to do with the long thin neck and long, ever-dangling arms and those enormous hands, which almost look as if they’d been sewn onto his slender forearms. Their faces, too, are different. Even though most of their features are similar — both have blue, deep-set eyes, both have high foreheads and straight noses, low cheekbones, and ears that stick out slightly — Abel’s jaw, if slightly hard, rounds off his face harmoniously, whereas Cain’s juts out, and this, as well as making him look perpetually sullen, annoying enough in itself, also gives his face a strikingly fishlike appearance.
The times he has cursed his maker for this! Without wanting to, Cain always gapes, and this unfailingly causes those he meets to think him slow-witted, but he doesn’t blame them: he knows only too well how stupid he looks and how the smile he often employs to counter this impression of dullness makes him look even more foolish.