Cain crouches down and touches the neck. He feels a faint fluttering at his fingertips.
The heart is beating.
“Can you hear me, Jared?” he whispers. “Can you hear me?”
He looks into his eyes. They are as empty as before. But then the eyeballs roll slowly to the side as if they’re blindly seeking the source of the voice.
“Can you hear me?” Cain repeats. “Jared, can you hear me?”
A gurgling sound passes from his lips. Cain bends down close to them. It’s as if he’s whispering something.
“What’s he saying?” asks Abel.
Cain lifts his hand in a dismissive gesture to his brother as he stares intently at the lips, as if he might be able to see what they say.
Again Jared whispers something.
Who are you? is what he thinks it sounds like.
“Cain,” he replies. “Jared, this is Cain. Can you hear me?”
The eyes roll back and forth a few times. Then he opens his mouth again.
I’m cold.
“Oh, dear Jared,” says Cain, and he removes his shirt and spreads it over his chest. Abel does the same with his.
Cain stands up, puts his hand on Abel’s shoulder, and takes him aside, so that Jared can’t hear them.
“What’ll we do?” Cain asks. “He’s dying.”
“There’s nothing to do but wait here until it’s over,” says Abel.
“But how long will that take? For all we know he may live for several hours, perhaps right through the night.”
“Do you mean we should kill him?”
“He’s suffering, Abel. We must help him.”
“Help him?” says Abel.
Cain nods.
They stand for a long while looking into each other’s eyes. Then Abel drops his glance.
“I can do it,” he says.
He pulls his knife out of its sheath, conceals it on the inside of his hand, and goes over to Jared again. Cain follows.
“Do it quickly,” he whispers. Abel nods and kneels by the side of the motionless body, takes out the knife, and places the point carefully on one eye. The membrane is pressed down but doesn’t burst, and he gradually increases the pressure until it suddenly gives and the knife blade goes slowly into the eye.
Jared groans.
The split made by the knife increases as the blade is pushed in, and in a few seconds has divided the eye in two.
“What are you doing!” says Cain. “Push HARD, for God’s sake, HARD!”
Abel looks up at him and pulls out the knife again, wipes the blade on his trouser leg, and presses it with equal care against the other eye. Filled with anger, Cain rushes at him to get him off. But this time Abel is ready. He rises quickly, grabs his charging brother by the chest, and throws him to the ground. Then he squares up with his knife pointing toward him.
“What’s up with you?” he says. “He’ll be dead in a few minutes anyway.”
Cain, who’s lying on his back, sits up, supporting himself with his arms.
“He’s suffering,” he says. “Please, Abel. Put him out of his misery.”
“You’re right, he is suffering, but what happens to that suffering when he’s dead? It vanishes. All gone. Suffering is there,” he says pointing to Jared. “And then suffering is there no more. I will kill him. But what difference can it make if that happens quickly or slowly?”
“Abel,” says Cain, getting right up. “Please.”
“Keep away. Let me do it the way I want.”
Cain turns without a word and begins to walk downhill. When he’s a safe distance away, Abel bends over Jared again. He lifts up the eyelid with one hand and cuts it out with his knife. Then he runs the knife along the edges of the eye socket, presses the eye down with the blade while cutting through the sinews that hold it in place. When he’s done this all the way round, he levers the blade up and down a few times and partly pries, partly pokes, the eye out.
The head twists this way and that a few times while he’s doing it, but becomes still again once the eye is out.
He lays his knife down in the grass and examines the eye in the palm of his hand.
The back part is bloody, and a little has also run into the clear front part, but not enough to prevent him seeing the various parts clearly: the brown rods radiating from the pupil and toward the eye’s outer edge, the flecks of yellow between them, the dark ring around the iris, the thin tracery of red in the white sphere outside it.
Although the eye is no longer associated with the face, it seems to him that it still retains just as much of a definite expression. Not exactly censorious but. . more suspicious, or skeptical, he thinks, and lowers his head right down to the mouth.
“Can you hear me, Jared?” he whispers. “Are you alive?”
The lips move, but not a sound comes from them.
Abel gets up, pulls a leaf from the bough above him, wraps it round the eye and places the little parcel in his pocket. Then he squats again and puts his hand into the wound in Jared’s side, feels the bowels sliding against his fingers, and tries to push them upward, to try, if possible, to get hold of the heart, while with his other hand he feels the pulse in the neck.
The heart is still beating.
“Well done, Jared!” he whispers.
He twists his head and looks down the meadow, but can see no sign of his brother. When he turns back, he tries to imagine what it must feel like to be inside a body that can’t move and can’t see, and that suddenly senses pains in the most unexpected places. All is black and silent. Black and silent. Black and silent. Then a sudden pain cuts through the darkness. It’s from your eye, someone’s cutting at your eye with a knife. . Someone’s whispering a question in your ear. . Someone’s stuck a hand in your stomach, someone squeezing a gut. .
Or perhaps feelings have long since departed.
What’s left of him, in that case?
A beating heart, lungs that breathe, thoughts that revolve.
This is Jared: a place in the forest that thinks and aches.
Then the heart stops beating, then the lungs stop breathing, then the thoughts stop revolving. Because they have a limit, and an exact point when that is reached, and it is that exact point Abel longs to witness. Not from the outside, as he would if he’d stuck the knife into the brain or the heart, but from the inside, as he will if only he can get hold of the heart with his hands. That has to be the way to “help” him, he thinks. Grip the heart so hard that it stops. Feel the heart stop. Feel Jared’s heart stop and the life cease between his fingers.
“Are you alive, Jared?” he whispers again. Although he’s assisted in the slaughter of many animals, he can’t tell the internal organs apart, everything becomes confused, and even though he forces his hand in with all his might, he can’t get it even near the heart.
Perhaps it would be easier if he used his knife. Could he coax it through the lower intestines and then cut his way up to the heart?
He pulls his hand out and is just about to reach for his knife to try out this new plan when he senses a movement behind him. He turns his head and sees his brother with a boulder in his raised hands.
Cain roars like a madman as he drops the stone on Jared’s head, which is crushed.
Without looking at Abel, he says:
“Throw the knife away. It’s unclean. And never breathe a word of this to anyone.”
When Abel hesitates, he shouts.
“THROW THE KNIFE AWAY!”
Abel picks up the knife and hurls it into the forest.
“I’m taking Jared down,” says Cain. “I don’t want to see you there. You can sleep in the hut tonight. And when you come down, don’t say a word about this to a soul. Do you understand?”