When he hears Cain starting to climb once more, he opens his eyes and peers down at him.
“Are you coming today or tomorrow?” he calls. It is meant as a joke, but Cain, who can’t see his smiling face, takes it seriously, stops, and slowly raises his head to look at him.
“Don’t be so impatient,” is all he says.
Abel wipes the scrunched up shirt he’s clutching distractedly over his sweating chest and turns to face the mountain. Not only is it smooth and without handholds, it is slightly overhanging. But its lip is within reach if he stands on tiptoe. It’s almost unbelievable that this mountain once seemed unconquerable to them. But it did. How young they must have been!
The first time they’d climbed it, almost exactly six years ago, he remembers how they’d stood wondering how to tackle this final obstacle. Cain wanted to turn back, Abel to go on. Because there was a way. If he stood with his back to the wall and Cain climbed onto his shoulders, he’d be able to grasp the lip, haul himself up, and pull Abel up after him.
But Cain didn’t want to. If he didn’t get hold of it immediately as he was straightening up, the angle would cause him to fall backward. All it needed was a slight unsteadiness. And he’d be killed.
“If we were down there,” said Abel, meaning the fields below them, “you’d do it without giving it a second thought. You won’t fall! Why should you fall?”
“We’ll go back down.”
“Can I try then? So you’ll see how easy it is?”
Cain shook his head.
“What on earth do you think they’d say if I went home and said you’d been killed?”
“But I’m not going to get killed. Lend me a hand.”
Cain sighed and stoically followed Abel’s instructions. With his back to the mountain he formed his hands into a kind of stirrup, on which Abel placed his foot while at the same time laying his hands on Cain’s shoulders. Then he put his weight on it, rose up, placed first one and then the other foot on Cain’s shoulders, straightened up, and grasped the edge as easy as pie.
“See how easy it was?” he said, looking down at Cain. “If you’d been standing here, you could have lifted me up.”
“I will,” said Cain. “Come down.”
Abel had been ten at the time, and Cain twelve. Now they are sixteen and eighteen. But even though they could easily have got up the mountain on their own, for some reason they choose to do it the same way as they used to. It isn’t something they discuss, it just happens. When Cain finally reaches the ledge, he sends the briefest of glances to Abel, who, without thinking about it, automatically positions himself with his back to the rock wall and knits his hands in front of him. A spark of wonder appears in Cain’s eyes. But he says nothing, just puts his hand on Abel’s shoulder, places his foot in the cupped hands, and mounts. Normally they carefully avoid touching one another, just as they also carefully avoid looking each other in the eye more than absolutely necessary, and then never more than for a few seconds at a time. Even though it was Cain who first began to follow these unwritten rules, and seemed to establish a zone of untouchability around his brother, zealously guarded, as if something between them might shatter if they got too close to each other, Abel, too, has been influenced by them, in the sense that the touches and looks have gradually become so rare that when they do occur they have something almost shockingly intimate about them.
As they do now. Cain puts one hand on Abel’s shoulder and the other on the side of his chest to support himself. His hands are coarse and unsteady against Abel’s smooth skin, his body so close that he can feel the warmth from it. He hears Abel’s hoarse breath and sees the pulse beating in his neck, his dark eyes. For some reason he feels the desire to embrace him. But there is something in Cain that makes this impossible. He’s staring fixedly at the rock wall, as if Abel’s eyes don’t exist, rests his foot on the palms of his hands and pushes up. With that the situation changes from unpleasantly intimate to near grotesque. For their movements belong to their childhood, and in the light of this there is something overgrown and almost monstrous about their bodies, Abel manages to discern. Gigantic heads, long limbs, enormous hands and feet.
Then Cain is standing on the top, reaching down to him and hauling him up. This time his stare is fixed on the valley.
The mountain they have just climbed is like a wall in the landscape, many hundreds of feet high. Seen from the fields below it seems as if more mountains rise up just behind it, but this isn’t so, directly behind this bare plateau there is forest, several miles deep, and only after that do the high mountains begin.
When he’s up, Abel positions himself next to Cain and stares out. The sun is now so low in the western sky that the forest on the other side of the valley is in shadow. But the fields are shining in its ruddy light, and the conifer boughs of the woods behind them take on an almost lustrous sheen.
He peers over toward the landscape bordering Eden, with its many rivers, wide-open plains, and rolling wooded uplands. Although darkness still cannot be seen but only sensed in the landscape’s many small preparations — the cooling in the air; the desolate loneliness about the birdsong; the shadows’ lean, geriatric expansion — he has no difficulty making out the cherubim’s flames from the surrounding daylight. Their heat makes the air quiver above the wooded hills, and over the plains that lie behind, where his parents came from, the colors melt into one another like a mirage.
“One day soon I’ll go there,” he says.
“Where?” asks Cain.
“To Eden.”
“You know you can’t,” says Cain. “We’ve been forbidden.”
“Been forbidden?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you at least put your strictures into your own words?” says Abel, and looks at Cain, who is still staring into the valley. But there is something fixed about his gaze and Abel realizes that his attention is focused elsewhere.
Perhaps he also keeps his thoughts under lock and key. Cage after cage of snarling thoughts he hardly dares pass, let alone take out, harness, and arrange into a team, which, with heavy hand and cracking whip, he can get to pull him at breakneck speed through his own consciousness.
Or perhaps there aren’t any more thoughts in there? Only a great barren landscape through which he travels alone.
“Shall we get going?” Cain says.
Abel nods and begins to walk toward the forest. The pastures the animals graze during the summer lie at the foot of the mountains on the other side. It takes a good half hour to get there, so if they hurry, thinks Abel, they may possibly get back before dark.
Unless Jared is seriously hurt. And they must carry him down.
Suddenly he imagines Jared lying at the bottom of a cleft. His clothes are wet. . there’s water there. . he’s lying half in a stream, he can’t manage to pull himself out. . he’s broken a bone in his leg?. . and his head. . his head is bloody.
“I’ve got a feeling something serious has happened to him,” he says.
“Really?” says Cain.
“That he’s down with a broken leg somewhere.”