At that moment it occurred to him that there was something chickenlike about the way he was moving. And hardly had the thought struck him than he caught sight of Abel. He lay on the bottom some feet away regarding him. He was grasping a fissure in the rock with one hand. Cain saw how his shoulders shook with laughter, and air bubbles poured from his mouth.
They stood up and broke the surface simultaneously, right in front of the curious eyes of the people sitting on the bank. Presumably they had followed Abel with their eyes, at first captivated by his dive through the air and down into the water, then by what was to them his unnatural glide over the bottom, and they must have suspected that something was afoot for him to be down there so long, and so close to Cain, too.
Abel was laughing as he waded ashore.
“Do you know what Cain does underwater?” he shouted.
Cain saw how infectious his humor was. Some of them were laughing already, even though nothing funny had been said or done.
“Well, you know how he looks like a fish on land?” said Abel, drooping his shoulders forward, pushing out his jaw, and starting to gape like a fish. At the same time he somehow contrived to empty his eyes of life, vacuously staring in front of him and for a second becoming Cain’s living double. But the laughter he’d elicited egged him on to go further than he’d possibly intended. It’s him to a tee! somebody shouted, and Abel raised his hand and scratched his head with languorous movements. That done, he stood there with his arms hanging by his sides, suddenly they seemed grotesquely long, and then, as he started to walk, he let out several gruff, inarticulate sounds, and went from being his brother’s living image to a simpleton.
“UGHHHH,” he went, “UGHHHHH, UGHHHHHH.”
Cain realized that the two caricatures weren’t all that far apart, as everyone could see, and suddenly felt tears pricking at his eyes and stared down at the ground in front of him, glad that he was so wet after his bathing that nobody could see the state he was in.
“But underwater!” said Abel, “he looks like this!”
He crouched down on the grass, forced his elbows to his sides and began to flap his wrists, advancing, while he did so, with tiny steps, nor did he omit small dips of his head, too, and a thin call of po-o-o-k, po-o-o-k, pokk, pokk, pokk! Po-o-o-k, po-o-o-k, pokk, pokk, pokk!
Everybody laughed.
“He’s a fish on land and a chicken underwater!” said Abel.
Normally Cain would have flown at him, simply knocked him over and hit him in the face a few times with a clenched fist until his father or someone else stepped in and separated them. But not today. For some reason he was completely defenseless against what he saw. He wasn’t angry, just miserable.
Without a word he bent down and picked up his clothes. When he turned to go over to the field, he met Abel’s gaze. At first it was smiling, perhaps teasing as well, but then it suddenly seemed to take him in, his tear-filled eyes, the small twitchings at the corners of his mouth, for the next moment Abel’s face opened as if struck by terror.
Cain looked down without understanding what that glance meant and he’d got several paces out into the field before it began to sink in.
At the same time he heard Abel’s voice behind him.
“Cain,” it shouted, “Cain, I didn’t mean. . oh, Cain!”
At first he just went on walking. But when the voice came again, even more pleading, he stopped and turned.
Abel stood where he’d left him, in the middle the prostrate figures on the grassy bank by the river. He stood with his arms by his sides and Cain could see he was crying.
Why was he crying?
Slowly he came walking toward Cain. Above him the treetops were rent by another gust of wind and the sunbeams that struck through the patchwork of leaves around him shone with that almost wild fervor that light takes on in the proximity of a storm. He walked with his head down and raised it only when he stood in front of Cain. His face was wet with tears and completely contorted by the sobs that came out of it.
“What is it, Abel?” said Cain.
The whole of his torso shook, he tried to say something but not a sound came from his lips.
Cain took a step toward him.
“What is it, Abel?” he asked again. “Why are you crying?”
“I. . I didn’t. . mean it!” he sobbed.
Cain looked inquiringly into his brother’s tear-wet eyes.
“Didn’t mean what?”
“To hurt you. Oh Cain I didn’t. .”
A great wave of tenderness swept over Cain. He went right up to his brother and put his arms around him. The feeling of that slender, smooth body against his own almost made him cry himself.
“It was nothing at all!” he said. With one hand he caressed his brother’s back, with the other the hair at the nape of his neck, again and again.
“Lovely little Abel,” he said. “It was nothing, don’t you understand? It was nothing!”
But Abel was inconsolable. He pressed his body into Cain’s and wept and wept.
From somewhere behind them Cain heard a sudden crackling, soft at first and then louder, and his first thought was that an enormous bonfire must have flared up on the other side of the field. But when he turned he saw that it was the storm that had reached the forest. Raindrops large as acorns struck the leaves of the trees. Then the wind rose across the field and he could see the rain approaching. In the course of a few seconds it had covered the five hundred yards between forest and river.
“Come along, Abel,” he said as the first raindrops reached them. “We’ll go inside.”
He took his hand, and leading each other like two little children, they began to walk toward the houses. They were soaking wet when they got home, he recalls. Abel had been silent all evening, but during the night, lying awake, Cain had wondered about what had happened during the day, what exactly his brother had shown him, even as his father’s words, You’re not to go anywhere without Abel, churned inside him. When those words had been pronounced, he’d felt bitter, interpreting them as meaning that he should act as some kind of servant to his brother, but gradually he had begun to see that his father’s words didn’t necessarily imply any kind of ranking. What his father had really done, Cain thought as he lay there looking at his sleeping brother, was to make Cain part of them. You are one of us, Cain, he’d said, but Abel isn’t. Now we want you to look after him for us. And even though in subsequent years he has often doubted his interpretation of the role he was given — in dark moments he felt he was being far too gullible — he has remained true to it and almost never leaves his brother’s side. He has stopped measuring himself against him, and never tries to be like him anymore. If he still isn’t wholly content with what he is, and not uncommonly finds himself longing for another life far away from this plodding back and forth across the fields, all these hours silently bent over the soil that stifle even thought and that never lead to anything other than himself, he no longer measures his own life, with its heavy earnestness, by the yardstick of Abel’s.
He coughs up a little mucus from his throat, draws breath a few times, and begins on the final leg up to the ledge where Abel is still standing with his eyes closed. The sun’s rays, penetrating the thin skin of his eyelids, are filling his skull with a ruddy, quivering light. Sometimes when there’s deep silence around him, which there can be high up in the mountains on the rare occasions when the wind isn’t blowing, or in the forest in winter, Abel thinks he can hear it. A muffled, persistent roar of something just burning and burning far up there. But this time the wind is blowing through the forest on the plateau above him, the birds are squawking, and his brother, in his usual fashion, has taken several minutes to prepare for the final steep slope, wheezing, hawking, and spitting below him.