Arriving home from errands one morning in June just as my neighbor was locking up his house and leaving, I waylaid him. He and his wife live in an apartment a few blocks away, but the house next to mine—and with which I share a wall—is the old family home, and my neighbor walks over every day to air out the rooms and water the potted flowers that he keeps in memory of his mother. He’s about my age, in his early 60s.
“Buenos días!” I said. Then I asked about his brother-in-law, who was still in the hospital after an operation two weeks earlier to remove some of his colon. Better, though recovery was slow, my neighbor answered, echoing what I’d already learned from his sister, the sick man’s wife, in inquiries I’d been making every few days—often enough to show concern, I hoped, but not too often to be a bother. Sometimes you want to talk about a thing, and sometimes you’d rather not. I was trying to read the signs and apply my concern judiciously, like a salve.
“And your sister?” I asked.
“Anxious,” he told me with a shake of his head. “Just as you see.”
I did see. Earlier that morning, I had been surprised when my neighbor arrived by car with his sister; while he’d tended to the house, she had hurried about, checking on the sheep that she and her husband keep on the family farmstead across the lane, feeding the dogs that guard the flock, then locking the gate behind her while my neighbor locked up the house again. Then they had driven off together. Until that morning, her son had been ferrying her on the rounds she had previously made with her husband.
A couple of days earlier, my neighbor had told me that although she accepted the food he left for her at the house, she had refused his offers to drive her here or to the hospital 20 minutes away for fear her husband would get wind of it. All the transportation responsibilities had fallen on her son.
“Let him find out!” my neighbor had exclaimed to me. “I said so to her. Better yet, tell him and let him deal with it! Who else would you turn to at times like these but family?”
“At least she’s accepting more help,” I said. “Naturally she’s anxious with all this going on.” I was thinking not only of her sick husband and all the extra work but also of her being caught in the middle of a decades-old war between her husband and her brother. With their different claims on her and in their different manners, they would each appeal to her. I could almost picture her standing between the two men, arms out to keep them from each other’s throats, slowly being crushed by their animosity.
“She’s anxious by nature,” corrected my neighbor.
We chatted for another few minutes. Despite his personal enmity for his brother-in-law, my neighbor expressed concern and sympathized with what the sick man was going through. The patient had been told that in addition to a colostomy bag for solid waste, he would need a urostomy pouch for urine. He had blown up at that. The doctors had agreed to try to use only the former. He would be instructed that day on how to place and remove the bag, and the family, meaning my neighbor’s sister and her son, would attend too, so they could step in if needed. “He’s the one who has to do it, though,” said my neighbor. Recognition of the plight of the afflicted man was in my neighbor’s tone, but something else was there, too: something like satisfaction, and I understood he was thinking that this was one trial his brother-in-law had to suffer himself and could not transfer to his wife. The sick man couldn’t bully or berate her into being the one with cancer.
Though I did not know the sick man or my neighbor’s sister very well, both had always exchanged friendly greetings with me in the lane. Still, all my sympathy in the feud between the two men was for my neighbor, and not only because I knew him best of the three, or even because he had been unfailingly friendly and helpful to me; it was also because I had overheard the husband tearing into his wife on several occasions, and I had taken note of her mousy manner, easy to attribute to emotional abuse. Thinking about what the proud, impatient husband was suffering, I believed he would find it impossible not to take it out on his wife. A lifetime of habit is hard to throw off. What’s more, none of his neighbors seemed to frown upon him for his abusive ways. A Czech proverb has it that misfortunes always come in through the door that has been left open for them, and if no one slammed the door on the man’s bullying, he would continue doing it. “Let’s hope the doctors can make it work with one bag,” I said, thinking principally of the wife. My neighbor agreed, as of course he had to. But even more, as he really would, being a kind man and loving brother even more than a person with a grudge.
