Excerpt from The Neighbour by Roope Lipasti

Original title: Rajanaapuri ( Atena 2012, 200pp.)

Translated from the Finnish by Bethany Fox

1. pp. 1-6

There are all kinds of stupid things in this world. They’re packed into the mountains, the valleys, the boulders, the little pebbles and the beds of streams, but the richest variety of all can be found between my neighbour’s ears. Don’t get me wrong, now—I really like my neighbour, since he’s difficult not to like. He just happens to be a very unusual man, which means he’s also completely unbearable. The fact of the matter is that if the world was divided into two groups, people that aren’t interested in junk and people that hoard it, my neighbour would be one of the latter.

When he comes back from a trip to the dump, he has almost as much stuff as he did when he left—he doesn’t actually take rubbish there so much as go and exchange it for new rubbish. In itself, that’s not any of my business, of course, but I do live next door to him, after all, so it makes me wonder. I wouldn’t stoop to that kind of thing, myself.

Once, an old firewood box (empty) found its way from the dump into his trailer. Another time there were a couple of doors, unbelievably old-fashioned and in terrible condition. Once, he brought back some gleaming new empty metal barrels (for engine oil). And after his most recent trip I actually had to go out and investigate, because it looked like the trailer was empty. It wasn’t: in the bottom was a set of old window frames, neatly wrapped in a blanket. In wretched condition they were, too, with the paint flaking off and the wood wrinkled like an old man’s face.

“These’ll go in the outdoor sauna,” my neighbour enthused.

In the sauna, is it? I thought. My neighbour didn’t have an outdoor sauna.

I didn’t say anything. Since I was standing there like that, not speaking and looking at the window-frames, my neighbour decided I was interested.

“It wasn’t easy to get this.”

I pursed my lips even more tightly.

“You can’t just walk into the dump like you own the place,” my neighbour continued. “No-oo,” (at this point he leaned towards me and lowered his voice to a whisper in an attempt to enlist me as a partner in crime), “you have to sign in and tell them what you’re bringing.”

He had lied and said that he had rubbish in his car (there was an evening paper and a bit of cardboard in there) so that they would let him in.

“That’s when the trickiest bit starts,” my neighbour said, and looked very pleased with himself. “I hit the brakes next to a pile of junk, opened the side door, grabbed the window-frames from the top of a mound of wood-chips and floored it.”

He regarded the frames with glee. I looked at him pityingly, trying thus to convey how much I respected his industry.

My neighbour interpreted my expression correctly and started to defend himself:

“At heart, I’m a man of order,” he said, and thumped his fist against his ribcage. “My stuff has its own internal logical organisation. Gradually, as the years go by, things find their place, they make their way to where they belong. It’s like they’re following a law of nature.”

I looked around me at my neighbour’s yard and noticed that a lot of objects and bits of equipment did seem to be on their way somewhere. My neighbour’s yard is large, like everyone’s around here. Along with the actual house there’s an eight-horse stable, which was serving as a warehouse for junk. Behind that is an old wood-sauna converted into some kind of shed, which produces a fearful racket whenever one of my neighbour’s six children is playing the drums. Then there are still more structures, but these are so shapeless that you can’t really tell from their appearance whether they were built by my neighbour or his children. Everywhere there are various piles of planks, stacks of firewood, building supplies, sheets of metal, and the miscellaneous objects that come attached to a large family, like sledges and skis, even though it’s summer.

It was hard for me to believe that all these ugly, out-of-place things would ever get to where they were going.

I said as much to my neighbour, who looked around himself in some surprise, turning his head in search of a place in the large plot that was neat and well cared for and where there was nothing superfluous. He didn’t find one.

“Well, of course, things do get under your feet in the meantime, but what can you do?” my neighbour admitted. “For example, I’ll need that scaffolding next summer and that’s why it’s been there for three years.”

I looked where my neighbour was pointing. Next to the wall was a three-metre-tall object that looked like something out of a horror movie. Maybe it actually was scaffolding. My neighbour regarded the monstrosity with magnanimous approval. He was a broad-minded man. Then he sat down at the edge of a pile of planks and started telling me about his wife. Apparently, she didn’t understand the logic of his system.

“Women are like that,” I said, because women really are like that.

“They don’t understand,” my neighbour nodded.

“Men are logical,” I said.

“Right, right,” my neighbour said. Then we were quiet for a moment. We were coming to the heart of the matter: the differences between women and men. They were much greater than one might imagine just on the basis of trouser content. They were so large that they took your breath away. And nonetheless, with just a little effort women could at least improve some of their methods:

“It’s possible to practice masculine logic and organisation, and the easiest way to start is at the supermarket checkout,” I said.

My neighbour looked at me quizzically. I chewed a blade of grass with some gravity. A little green insect was crawling along the end. I flicked it away. It flew about a metre and fell to the ground. In relative terms, this was as if a human being had fallen from a height of a hundred metres. The insect was fine, and yet even so humans consider themselves the highest form of life on the planet. I spat the grass out of my mouth.

“There’s only one correct way to pack shopping bags, and it goes like this: dry goods should be in one bag, juice and other drinks in another, chilled stuff in a third. That way, it’s easier to unpack the food when you get home, because the things are logically arranged in the bags. It’s exactly that kind of little detail that makes the difference in this world between order and the slide into chaos.”

My neighbour listened to me, and I felt like on some level he understood, even though he didn’t have an engineering background. My own father was an engineer, so that’s how I know these things. My neighbour had picked up the same insect from before from the ground and was watching it struggle to escape. He nodded and said:

“It’s utterly vital that sausages should be in the cold bag in a logical arrangement, because otherwise they take offence, and if worst comes to worst they’ll go off before the sell-by date out of sheer spite.”

We were quiet for a moment, and then my neighbour continued:

“Women pack shopping bags so that they all weigh more or less the same.”

He flicked the insect high into a tree. An eventful day for such a tiny creature.

“That’s the sort of thing that shakes the foundations of the natural order and threatens to overwhelm the world with chaos,” I said, and adjusted the highest plank on the pile so that it pointed in the same direction as the ones underneath. I examined the result: thus is the world made stronger! The thought put me into such a good mood that I decided to be polite. “Are you really building a sauna?”

“A beach sauna,” my neighbour confirmed.

He looked out of the yard at the edge of the forest and pointed to a small meadow between the yard and the trees.

“I’m digging a pond out there.”

I didn’t say anything. The megalomania left me speechless.

 

2. (—)

 

3. pp. 17- 22

 

(—)

 

We continued on our way towards the house. My neighbour’s house is pretty—if you like old things, anyway. It was originally a typical post-war house, but it’s been extended five metres in both directions, so that these days it looks more like something out of Ostrobothnia. So it’s large and well looked-after. Red walls, white windowsills, black roof. There’s a couple of dozen rooms inside. Renovated. Renovated personally by my neighbour, it’s true, but that’s still a little better than nothing.

We walked through the porch into the hall. The scent of chicken gravy wafted to my nostrils. My neighbour’s wife called out a greeting from the kitchen. She’s an agreeable person, and has an eye for beauty. Except, of course, when it comes to husbands.

In the hall, I watched my neighbour throw his clothes on the coat rack. If you didn’t known better, you’d have thought a tramp had wandered into the house. In the summer heat he was wearing size 46 boots, ripped denim shorts covered in mud and sludge, a paint-stained shirt adorned with a picture of our seventh president, and a shrieking yellow baseball cap which was far too small and bore the legend I’m number one. He was a natural phenomenon, a thing of beauty for bees, at least, though only because they would think he was a flower.

The table was temptingly laid. My neighbour’s wife smiled at me. She’s been very helpful and pleasant since I was left alone. Thoughtful, but in a refined way, not obtrusive. Sometimes a person needs that.

She called her children for lunch. A rumbling and rattling began to sound from various parts of the house, as though a herd of badgers had been called into existence. The youngest ran in first and inquired what was for lunch. Then the older siblings arrived, each in turn asking what was for lunch. After that, everyone started talking at once. It was hard to follow the conversation. I was afraid I was going to get a headache.

None of this bothered my neighbour: he added his voice to the general chorus, saying guess what happened this morning. He was obviously talking to me. I couldn’t guess.

“There was a mouse in the cat’s bowl!” my neighbour said, and a couple of grains of rice flew out of his mouth.

I suggested that they could bring the cat before an employment tribunal if it was doing such a bad job. My neighbour’s wife smiled. The cat walked past and we watched its stomach sway from side to side.

“Perhaps it’s lost track of its place in the natural order and thinks it’s lord of the manor,” I said. “This stuck-up behaviour would seem to suggest that.”

My neighbour supposed that could be the case, since everyone else in the house was busy figuring out their own place in the natural order. I looked around me, but I didn’t understand what my neighbour was talking about, since they all looked pretty uncivilised to me. My neighbour told me that when they moved to the country he’d thought that they would all somehow spontaneously start to know the names of the trees and flowers. That was the only way to understand the cycle of nature, to live it from one year to the next.

“But it didn’t work out that way,” my neighbour said.

I remember when my neighbour moved here. The house had been more or less empty for a long time, and it was rotting away like nobody’s business, so it was no wonder that potential buyers generally made their escape shortly after pulling into the yard. Not my neighbour. He looked around, took note of the decaying, half-collapsed outbuildings, the ugly, poorly-kept house, and the unkempt garden, and all he saw in them was an ocean of possibilities.

That was ten years ago; that summer I turned forty. My neighbour had had two small children and a beautiful wife; we introduced ourselves, and my neighbour predicted apologetically that we might be disturbed by the sound of him hammering from time to time. I examined his spindly form and decided that there was no chance in the world he’d be able to keep a hammer in his hand. My neighbour told me he wanted to move to the country because life in the country was more authentic than in town. It was such a nonsensical claim that only an alienated city-dweller could have come up with it.

He got his children mixed up in his project, too: in the country, they would apparently grow up healthier, since they would go to a small school and move in restricted circles. Because we had just met, I didn’t dare to point out that children with restricted circles grow up into adults who’ve grown up with restricted circles.

I returned to the present as my neighbour continued his soliloquy on his children’s attempts to find their non-existent places in the natural order.

“We’re no closer to nature here in the country than anywhere else,” my neighbour said, and put a piece of chicken on his plate.

I raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Yesterday, we played Noah’s Ark. The five year old had to come up with animals beginning with C. When he’d got through cat and cow, we decided to help him, and we asked him what it was that he liked with pasta.”

I looked at my plate and guessed what animal my neighbour meant.

“The kid thought for a second, looked at me indignantly, and said huh, chicken. Chicken isn’t an animal. It’s food.”

I looked at this youngest scion of the race, who would have to pay for my pension and feed me when I was old. His plate was swimming in ketchup. I worried.

Dessert was a cup of coffee, and at that point the kids disappeared to their own pursuits, which was a relief. I wouldn’t have been able to bear one more sentence that began with the word mum. Can’t the government do something about that, if the parents can’t manage it? Finland could close down its nuclear power stations if all the energy that goes into the repetition of the word mum could be transferred to the national grid.

I mentioned the issue. My neighbour nodded. He knew exactly what I was talking about. He had once even done the numbers.

“The little ones get up at five,” he told me. “By seven at the latest, they’ve already yelled mum a few dozen times. Mum, where are my trousers? Mum, guess what I want for my birthday! Mum, you’ve really got to hear this. Mum, when am I getting my cocoa? Mum, where are you anyway? Mum, you’ve got to come and watch this trailer for Batman.”

At the time he’d done the calculations, there had been four children. My neighbour estimated that the m-word made an average of twenty appearances per hour. On a good night, they went eight hours without hearing it once. In a twenty-four hour period, the kids let fly with the m-word 320 times. That made 2,240 m-words per week, 8,960 per month and 116,800 per year.

When my neighbour’s oldest turned 12, the family could have celebrated an m-word milestone at the same time, since at that point it had been used a round 1.4 million times—or in fact more, since by then there were more than four children.

My neighbour’s wife listened to our calculations distractedly, as if she wasn’t really in the room. I glanced at her, trying to gauge her reaction, but in vain. My neighbour said that his wife had developed a mental block that meant that if she heard the m-word more than five times in a row, her brain simply wouldn’t take it in, and would shut down, even though her mouth was saying yes, yes.

“It’s a kind of degeneration,” my neighbour said.

I looked at my neighbour’s wife and nodded. She came back to reality and started to clear the table. We helped. The youngest children were sitting in the middle of the floor, forcing us to hop over them. They were talking about what they would want if they could wish for anything at all.

“I’d want donuts,” the older one thought.

The younger one wanted to be a superhero, “maybe that Good Shepherd guy.”

I thought it best to return home.

 

4. pp. 23-26

 

As a history teacher, I enjoy making connections between the modern day and ancient events. It’s sort of like a hobby, although history doesn’t actually repeat itself in the strictest sense. With that in mind, I interpret what’s been happening in my neighbour’s yard in the last few days as a reconstruction of the Napoleonic Wars and Nazi Germany’s campaign on the Eastern Front. They, too, revolved around the basic idea of taking heavy vehicles to places with no metalled roads and getting them stuck in the mud.

Now, I’ve mostly been following all this from my window. My neighbour himself doesn’t own anything larger than a cement mixer, so he’s called in another neighbour who has as many tractors as fingers. His tractors are perfect for getting stuck in the mud, and South-West Finland is an excellent location for that kind of thing, since mud is really the only thing we have a lot of around here.

From the window, I saw the tractor driving into my neighbour’s yard, pulling a trailer behind it. The trailer was full of large rocks. The driver reversed into the spot my neighbour indicated, but the ground turned out to be treacherous. The load was so heavy that, when the tractor started to tip the rocks out, both tractor and trailer sank half a metre into the kingdom of the moles. The tractor wasn’t going anywhere, and there was no way to tip the load out, either. A substantial uproar ensued. The only way they could haul the first tractor out was by fetching more. It’s a good thing tractors are more common around here than mosquitoes.

I watched with fascination as the rescue operation proceeded. They piled rocks into the ruts made by the tractor and the trailer, so that the ground wouldn’t give way further when they were hauled out. The earth swallowed quite a few of the rocks before they could retrieve the tractor and trailer and get rid of the cargo, though. By that point, my neighbour was completely caked in mud and slime and was panting like he’d dragged the sunken farm vehicles back to the surface of the earth with his bare hands.

When the situation seemed to be resolved and there was no immediate danger of being pressed into manual labour, I went to see what was going on. There my neighbour stood in the middle of a great pile of stones, looking pleased with himself in spite of everything. Personally, I wouldn’t have been quite that satisfied if someone had gone and dumped a pile of granite boulders the size of a small house in my yard.

I kicked a few boulders to check how heavy they were. They were heavy. I sat down on one, but I didn’t ask any questions.

“Let’s get these moving,” my neighbour said.

“Oh, they’re going to move, are they?” I said doubtfully.

“They’re going to be a stone wall. You’ll walk along it to get to the sauna.”

I looked at my neighbour and the pile of rocks incredulously. The smallest of these red granite boulders must have weighed over a hundred kilos, and let’s not even mention the largest. Why couldn’t a man just build a beach sauna, why was it necessary to have a stone wall to shade the path?

“Do you mind if I watch?” I asked.

My neighbour had no problem with that, so I sat myself down comfortably at the base of the mountain of stones and settled in to watch events proceed.

My neighbour fetched a crowbar, a spade, and a pair of thick wooden posts, two metres long, to use as levers. Then he started levering. First he used the crowbar to slightly increase the gap between the rocks, so that he could insert the long, thick wooden post. Using the post as a lever, he got some of the rocks to roll half a revolution forward and land with a solid thud in the soft earth. There was a slurp as the clay engulfed them like a suction cup, and the next revolution was more difficult. Sweat poured down my neighbour’s forehead until he couldn’t see anything through his glasses. He tried to wipe the sweat off with his filthy hand, and soon his face was just as muddy as the ground. If it was going well, the stone would move, but often it went in the wrong direction, causing great peril to his fingers and toes.

The job looked troublesome, so I tried my best to give advice. It was hot, so I fetched some drinks. On my way back from the fridge, I grabbed the newspaper. I returned to the scene of my neighbour’s stonemasonry and noticed that he’d almost managed to roll the first rock to the place where he wanted it. There must have been another hundred in the pile. The last ones had to be moved quite a lot further than the first.

I sat down and opened my can and the newspaper. Obituaries. No-one I knew had died. That was always good. I asked my neighbour whether he read the obituaries. He said he did. He paused for a breather, and started pondering why the chronological development of newspaper-reading was generally the reverse of the actual order of items in the paper itself.

I admitted that this was true. First, when you’re a child, you start reading the end of the paper for the comics. From there, you move gradually towards the beginning: classifieds, sport, entertainment news, the culture section and the international news. Finally, you reach the core of dullness of middle age and start reading the domestic political news. The next stage is to get interested in the obituaries.

“But the obituaries aren’t the terminal phase, either,” my neighbour said.

“What is, then?” I asked.

“The editorials.”

We differed on that. Personally, I read the editorials because they’re full of wisdom. Besides, that way you get more return on your investment. If you don’t read the whole newspaper, it’s a bit like buying a loaf of bread but only eating half and throwing the rest in the bin.

My neighbour went back to work. He tried to prise a rock free, but it didn’t budge an inch. He groaned and gave it another furious go, until at last the stone gave marginally. But his fury was so great that in his hurry he didn’t have time to pull his hand out of the way, and a nasty-looking wound formed in his thumb. He hopped up and down in agony, sucking his thumb to try and stop the blood from splashing about all over the place. A stain like that would never come out of the rock.

I’m a member of the Territorial Army, so I know exactly what to do in an emergency, plus I have first aid skills. I immediately jumped over the fence and grabbed a drink along with some medical supplies from the kitchen. I hurried back to my neighbour’s side, bandaged his thumb and sat back down in my place. The sun was pleasantly warm. The world was aglow with splashes of summer colour, and the scents carried on the warm air combined with the buzzing of the long grass to deliver one single message to my consciousness: it was good to be alive.

(—)

 

5. pp. 29-30

 

The digger arrived the next day. I watched from the window as it came grumbling along the road like a dinosaur: big, slow, stupid, but strong.

Watching a digger is the kind of mystical experience that no religion can offer, so I went to my neighbour’s yard to see how things were going. The main thing I was interested in was seeing what would happen when the digger got stuck in the mud.

That was exactly what happened, but the digger driver managed to drag himself and his machine out with the help of the bucket. It looked terrifying, and the whole time it seemed like the digger was going to tip over. It didn’t. I watched with my neighbour from a vantage point a little to one side, and we both felt like we were doing something urgent for the first time in our lives.

If my neighbour spent a couple of hours moving a couple of stones, the digger did the whole pile in the same amount of time. When it left, the stone wall had taken shape, but the ground around it looked like the Karabakh Mountains after a monsoon. Clods of mud were scattered all over the place, here and there were huge pits, and the whole thing had the appearance of clay porridge paved over with despair. The only way to get the yard level again was to grab a spade.

That would be tricky, as I helpfully remarked to my neighbour, because clay has a couple of unfortunate characteristics. When it’s dry, you can’t dig into it because it’s too hard. On the other hand, when it’s wet it’s too sticky for digging. My neighbour fetched a spade—or more accurately two, but I pretended not to notice the second one. I was on holiday, after all.

To my neighbour’s credit, I should say that he’s not afraid of work. He started in one corner and advanced towards the next. His toiling and sweating attracted so many horseflies that I decided to head home. After a couple of hours, I came back to see how the work was progressing. And it certainly was: my neighbour had managed to get one corner of the globe to recall the good old days before Copernicus, when the world was still a beautiful flat pancake.

My neighbour himself looked like he was about as old as Copernicus. He was leaning on his spade and exuding doubt.

“Why is the ground so solid?” he panted.

“It’ll be all right,” I answered. “Ten years from now it will look completely different.”

My neighbour looked around. His eyes filled with despair, as though he was staring down an endless dark tunnel.

“Ten years isn’t a long time,” I reminded him. “The older you get, the faster the years go. It’s most obvious with children, as I imagine you would know. One day they go to school, and the next you read about how they’ve got their PhD or ended up in prison—depending on their qualifications and upbringing. Aging means you don’t have to wait for Christmas any more, because most of the time it’s next week anyway.”

“I find it difficult to plan even a week ahead,” my neighbour complained.

I watched my neighbour’s wife, who was squatting in the distance weeding a flowerbed. She was attractive—blonde, petite, but with curves in proportion. In the summer she had freckles and her eyes glowed like there was some kind of light in them. My neighbour noticed my gaze, but he didn’t understand its meaning.

 

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