On Being a Good Neighbor

By Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur

The concept of being near is quite magical. Closeness can be felt on both a micro and macro scale. I am neighbors with the girl upstairs whose joyful running is echoing down through my ceiling. There’s also the brave Ukrainian, close in age to my little neighbor, who just recently got back on her feet, on prosthetic legs, after a Russian bomb violently took her own in Kramatorsk. I cannot hear her footsteps: I am too far, but she is right there, across the border, still near. She already took up a tiny corner of my mind and her face looks familiar. The distances are continuously stretching, shrinking, expanding, redefining our relationships with those around us, next to us, within range. They make us understand more, expect more, perhaps put more pressure on that inevitable connection. Neighborship is a complex web of entangled threads that often require our immediate attention.

It all starts with the space we carve out for ourselves, a spot that belongs to you and makes you feel as if you belong—in a wider sense, a starting point for all the connections you are about to make. One of the places I call home is located on the first floor of a 100-year old villa in southwestern Poland. The two-floored house is the work of German hands. The sturdy walls protect the heat well in the winter, and stay cold in the summer, bringing much needed relief. It was built long before the grounds on which it sits were renamed the “Recovered Territories” and became part of the country I call my own. Shifting borders brought a series of unforeseen ramifications. What purportedly was “recovered” wasn’t properly “ours”: this claim was as flimsy and confusing as the murky past to which it was referring. Relocations, expulsions, abandoned objects left behind, and the shared anguish of migration turned this corner of the world into an eclectic space where narratives of belonging were open-ended. We were learning about the history of the town, as if it only began in 1945, silencing much of what happened before that. Simultaneously we constructed a dreamlike timeline that allowed the city to celebrate its 900-year anniversary, pointing to its foundation in 1108. Erasures, adaptations, it all took quite an effort to make this place and its history familiar and ours. The goal was to establish a commonality that belonged to us and separated us from our neighbors who used to be here, but currently reside just sixty kilometers to the west. As neighbors, did we have a responsibility to acknowledge their bygone presence or did we have the right to silence it? What kind of burden does neighborship bring?

At present, the house I call home is divided into three apartments owned by three very different people. So I have neighbors, but we don’t really get along; in fact we don’t even deserve the adjective “neighborly” considering that to be neighborly means being helpful and friendly and that’s often the last thing we are to each other. As we all try to navigate the nebulous spaces that were once designed to be a single-family house, we fight over centimeters of the hallway, corners of the attic, rooms of the basement and fragments of the backyard. The terms of ownership, written firmly in the documents that sketch the details of who-takes-what, don’t really hold ground in practice. So we continue this tug-of-war, trying to sway our point along the lines of words or often even, despite them.

Thus the territories of the house we occupy become tiny trenches from which we defend our narratives. The walls are sturdy borders but we are inevitably aware of the daily routines and life changing events of those who live nearby. Like that time when our neighbor’s partner had enough of their yelling match, opened the balcony door and left the house, two floors down, falling straight into the backyard. The squabbles we’d had didn’t matter in the moment when the neighbors were in distress. We waited for the ambulance together, waited for the heartache to pass, together. Empathy is able to pervade the most resilient walls and turn previous conflicts into triviality.

Walls and borders have the capacity to estrange the other, turning neighbors into total strangers despite the closeness. Devoid of easily-accessible and discernible lives, they live on as placeholders of an idea, meager images of someone belonging to a given place, until their lives burst into ours and suddenly we have no choice but to co-experience. That is, in fact, the thing about empathy. It works best while in close proximity. And so we are close and usually ready to co-experience when the doors to our neighbors’ houses are dramatically swung open. But for the most part we are all tiny universes, little countries hesitantly sharing borders with each other.

I know something about borders. I grew up close to a couple of them in the heart of Europe, in a country that touches seven different countries. And yes, that heart of Europe I think about lies a little bit to the east; it is very much congruent with human physiology. Is Eastern Europe even Europe? One might ask and doubt but I don’t anymore—lately I feel that this heart beats even stronger than ever. Similarly, over the centuries, a place called “Poland” contracted and expanded like a beating heart. It even disappeared for a period longer than a hundred years after the partitions, and then it appeared again. “It came back to the map after 123 years of absence,” they taught us in school, and I imagined Polish people disappearing, erased and then brought back to life again, as with the power of an enchanted pencil. So then maybe I don’t know much about borders, apart from the fact they can be relative, fixed, mutable, sacred, but most of all—shared.

This intimate act of sharing brings a complexity to the notion of neighborship. Can I trust you, should I always be suspicious of you? How much do we have in common and what is it, a shared history of cooperation or of mutual hatred? The continuous balancing act between separateness and community requires good faith. I share some history with you and I could share even more than that, perhaps. More…but you might want more, or impose more, you might want to take more of what I call my home, should I risk it all and trust this is not your intention? It’s an endless act of inner negotiation.

In the 19th century, when greedy empires sliced up the continent, some called for a Europe made of nations so that everyone could be satisfied. Sharing common space in heterogeneity was challenging. Let’s have separate states, they said, national places to call home. Like the key to everlasting harmony, nation-states were supposed to fix it all, smooth out the rough edges. The need to dissociate and assert a piece of land, to each their own, drew the lines of boundaries with an imaginary hand. Those dividing lines, however, were unable to carve out the exact shapes of belonging. There was always someone left out beyond the borders; a reason to yearn for more, a window for neighborly covetousness.

The mid-20th century faced a post-ethnic cleansing, post-Holocaust reality, and states were more homogenous than ever. I often think of Jewish neighbors that lived here, next door, for a thousand years. They are gone now, uprooted or annihilated. I search through the ashes and the dust sometimes, trying to uncover their bygone traces. I walk down their paths, visit their cemeteries and look for their presence that is barely there. I feel like a terrible, awful neighbor who didn’t fight hard enough, who didn’t manage to lift the burden of neighborship.

I unfold a map in my mind and spread its crumpled edges wide. I know all my neighbors by heart, and I can say a lot about them. This storytelling is much like sitting down at a spinning wheel and beginning to work with a ball of yarn. You draw out long fibers: some made of stereotypes, followed by the histories you’ve been taught, others from accounts of your loved ones, and, finally, some you’ve experienced yourself. The longer you spin, the less able you are to tell them apart. The final product, your yarn, is then made of multicolored fibers—they melt together, sometimes seamlessly and sometimes they tangle up into a Gordian knot. The stories that we shared, light-hearted anecdotes, inappropriate jokes, histories that leave a heavy grudge somewhere in our throats… everything is there, it twists, coils and glares back at us. Those intertwined threads are impossible to untangle.

I look West and dive into a freezing-cold river of memories, resentment and peculiar interrelations. I hear an echo of German phrases my grandma learned and rehearsed like a script meant to save her from being killed by Nazi soldiers passing through her village. Hundreds of little interactions that grounded our mutual relations, lives lost, destroyed and lives saved—memories of those who came before us are like tinnitus we can barely alleviate. And yet I call home the very place German architects designed years back, I think fondly of their timeless technological advances of which I currently take advantage. They lived in this part of the world before us and like specters of neighbors, they continue to remind us of their existence, in traces of German store signs, emerging from underneath the old paint peeling off the walls. It took almost a century and now, slowly but surely, we’re moving on.

***

“Why do Czechs not like Poles?” asked my American friend once, years ago. The question baffled me because I didn’t know about that resentment then. In fact, I realized that I didn’t know much about Czechs, being slightly infected by our strange national indifference. At that time I hadn’t heard of Polish tanks which, on Soviet orders, rolled through Czechoslovakian streets back in 1968, crushing our neighbors’ dreams of freedom. Not only dreams were squashed then: we’d failed the test of neighborship. Those tanks plowed through our mutual neighborly relations, leaving scars that are still healing. I was on the privileged side of this story then, my associations with the Czechs like colorful chocolate Lentilky melting happily in my palms while being driven back home from my first trip to our southwest neighbors. Dazzling and dizzying were those trips through the border that later vanished—twists, turns, hypnotizing coniferous trees. We have a lot in common. There are peaks that we share but there are also unique neighborly pleasures some of us get to enjoy, like the pleasant taste of Kofola upon arrival in the quiet, dreamy towns of the borderlands.

In the southeastern end of our border, we seem to be kindred spirits with fellow Slovaks. We even share and revere the same legendary hero: Janosik, a highlander Robinhood with a rather unsettled sense of belonging. Using yet another range of mountains as our platform for communication, we communicate quite well, speaking two different languages and yet managing to understand one another. However, it all grew out of a problematic and difficult neighborship. Similarly to the claims to Jánošík, the beginning of the 20th century abounded in counter claims and territorial disagreements. The neighbors must have deemed us imperious, yanking on whatever piece of land we could get our hands on while in 1939 it was us who felt betrayed by neighbors, seeing how fellow Slovaks turned their space into Hitler’s puppet state. Little of that past matters today, sometimes I feel like the Tatra mountains are looking at us, tender-heartedly, their cordial laugh echoing down the ridges.

I then look towards Ukraine and ponder the gnarly threads of our bond. Zoom in on those filaments and you’ll see they are stained with the blood of both nations. Past traumas on both sides of the border made neighbors into negative vectors going in two opposite directions. Yes, there were things in common but people seemed to prefer to turn away from one another; a relationship spiced with animosities. But then there was something no neighbor would be able to overlook or ignore, even if they wanted to. From this side of the border you could always hear the rumbling drum of steadfast Ukrainian resilience. The very first phrase I learned in my neighbors’ language was “Razom nas bahato, nas ne podolaty,” when during Orange Revolution of 2004 Polish rappers remixed this then-popular Ukrainian song; “together we are strong, you will not defeat us,” a phrase that instinctively made me label Ukrainians as invincible. Years later, observing the struggle of Maidan, I already knew more about our neighbors than before, I cared much more as well. It was the hoarse voice of Okean Elzy’s singer that accompanied my teenage heartbreak, and the soothing coolness of kvass in Lviv that quenched my thirst during one impossible summer. But only recently I started looking at my neighbors really closely, retaining the shapes of their country’s borders, etching the placement of its cities in my memory. The border crossings we share became emergency exits to which, as has been our imperative, we guided civilians to safety. How cruel, a seemingly random line on the map deciding who is secure and who is at risk.

Belarus has forests I’ve always dreamt of and never seen. I also have a good deal of memories of events that took place there but that I never experienced. They are sewn into the fibers of my being through the stories of my grandparents I took in and cherished like precious stones from faraway lands. In that very soil, the bones of my ancestors are buried in nameless graves. I think of those abandoned, overgrown cemeteries, and I yearn for this place from which the roots of my family grew. But all of this is inaccessible right now, the dictator effectively scares me away.

When in our early teens, we stood up, one by one, and walked on legs made of jelly towards the center of a classroom to recite Mickiewicz’s Invocation from memory—Lithuania! My homeland! You are health alone…—we rarely questioned why one of the most important Polish writers wrote his famous lines, having in mind a country that is not technically, you know, our own. Your worth can only ever be known by one who’s lost you. Mickiewicz longed for a country we didn’t understand. But we were losing it every time and with each reading we yearned for it more, as if that soil alone could turn the wheel of time. Meanwhile, transport my yearning soul back to those wooded hills, those meadows wide…These narratives put forth by early schooling without proper historical background built a confusing landscape of concepts that we accepted as being part of our belonging. A romantic vision of an appropriated Lithuania didn’t quite square with the fact that it now belonged to someone else. Maybe this is why Polish soldiers walked into Lithuania in 1920 as if entering someone's home without knocking nor taking their dirty shoes off but snatching one of the rooms as their own. Respecting the separateness of thy neighbor is a burdensome endeavor. Beyond those convoluted territorial narratives, the color green comes to mind when I think of Lithuania. It’s the color of astonishingly and meticulously cut grass of the local landscapes and forests that spread far and wide. Right in the center of Vilnius, there is a statue of Medeina, the pagan goddess of forests and trees, riding a bear. There is something so striking about it—a clear nod to the country’s pre-Christian beginnings, a gesture of reverence towards nature, of being at ease with one’s past. Serenity, that’s also what I feel, and I appreciate a neighbor like that.

Lastly, we share a border with terrorists. But they don’t deserve a full line in this text.

Being neighbors means living close, provided that someone doesn’t want you to cease living.

The moment your neighbors become ruthless murderers, you do everything to protect your home and the community you hold dearly. I lived in the same building as Mr. Z once. When I was a little girl he was a nice and respectful neighbor from downstairs, that’s what I thought, at least. Polite and quiet, he even showed me his aquarium and told me  about the kinds of fish he took care of. And then one day, passing next to his apartment, I noticed police tape on his door. The previous night he’d attempted to kill his wife, misfired and shot his daughter dead. Unknowingly, I said hello and smiled at him the very same day he took a person’s life, that young girl’s life. We were close in age. His act tore a gaping hole in the fabric of neighborship, the threads of trust were charred and the house was never the same. Ever since then, walking through that hallway, passing next to the border between me and the universe he built for himself, made me tremble in disgust. I would give anything to make sure he’d never come back to our building. Because no one wants to share their house with murderers or anyone who would allow those murderers thrive. Do you understand why people, neighbors, would like to institute a visa ban now? I hope you do.

***

The feeling of safety and trust are possibly the most desired values we expect from those who lead their lives in our vicinity. Neighborship is not a small thing: after all, it’s a relationship, often for life. With the European Union spreading its Schengen wings to my homeland and to the majority of the surrounding countries, we got to experience neighborship anew. Borderless co-existence, however, didn’t come without pangs of anxiety. When Poland joined the EU, one of our closest neighbors – Germany – was the most apprehensive of all, fearing a wave of my compatriots spilling through the borders to flood the German labor market. Suddenly there was more at stake, borders disappeared and we were closer than ever. What are those threads then, which connect international communities when strands of borders are no longer there and what does it take to keep them secure? Yes, it takes trust and respect. It takes faith and confidence that if my world explodes, there’s someone else nearby, close enough to pick up the pieces and help me put it back together. I have a neighbor like that. In fact, I have a neighbor who is protective of those close to him but also of the neighbors of those neighbors, shielding everyone from terrorists and explosions, taking the burden upon itself, bleeding for collective safety. It’s a neighbor made of unthinkable and unnamable courage which, for me at least, says more than any written lines on an EU application. If being a part of our community of neighbors requires some merit, then I am sure there is no greater merit than Ukraine’s neighborly sacrifice.