Rememberment, Chapter XXXIII: Love Thy Neighbour

Matti's dad Eikka was a short, obese man with thick black eyebrows. His arms were massive from spending a lifetime doing hard manual labour and his strength was the stuff of legends; his party trick was to wrap some strong, braided fishing line around his hands and snap it without any effort. There was also a story that he was once challenged to an arm-wrestling match, and as his opponent was using his leg to support himself, Eikka slammed his arm into the table with such force that the other guy's ankle was broken.

A house painter by profession, he was also an avid hunter and fisher. He also kept bees; sometimes when I called Matti to ask if it's ok for me to come over, he warned me that there would be an "air hazard" - that the bees were angry because his dad had just collected their honey. And often I walked there anyway, and sometimes did get stung by a bee or two because of that choice.

Eikka was a familiar sight to us. Sometimes he stopped by just to make a social visit, sometimes to bring honey to my dad, and frequently to pick up one of his dogs that had run away to our property.

He was well liked by my dad and my brothers. (I'm not sure how Mom felt about him - she often spent time with his wife, and the two were best friends). Eikka was loud and always cracking jokes, and often helped if something in our home needed to be painted or fixed otherwise. But I saw him more often than anyone else in our family, and my opinion of him was different.

From a very young age, I learned to fear him.

The earliest incident I can remember was when Eikka was invited to have a sauna with us (possibly after the sauna was renovated, but this is a bit speculative). I was sitting in the sauna between him and my brother, but then my brother left to take a shower and left me alone with Eikka. He then proceeded to throw a lot of water into the stove, making the sauna scorching hot. As I tried to leave, he grabbed my arm and stopped me. "This will make you a man" he said, only letting me go after I started to cry and yell at him.

He was often cruel to his dogs. If any of them had made a mess in the house, he soon found the culprit (it wasn't hard, the guilty one was always hiding somewhere because they knew what was coming). Me and Matti then listened in another room to the dog's screams as it was being beaten without mercy.

One time when their cat had kittens, he wanted to have a little fun at us kids expense. As we were playing outside, Eikka showed up on the front door, holding a kitten. "Look at this" he said and threw the kitten high up in the air, then catching it on its way down. He did this repeatedly, visibly amused by our horror as we were begging for him to stop.

Matti had to always be available to help him with whatever work needed doing. Once when I went to visit Matti without prior notice, I saw the two on their small potato field. I could hear Eikka yelling at Matti. "Don't put the diseased ones in the box!" he said. I could see the two from the end of their road, and as I approached, Matti once again made the same mistake. "It's diseased!" Eikka yelled, starting to chase after Matti while wielding his potato hoe like a club. Mortified, I turned away and started to run. Behind me, I could hear Matti screaming and begging for his dad not to hit him.

One day when I was alone with my dad, the talk shifted to Eikka. Dad was saying something positive about him, perhaps commending him for some of the work he had recently done for us.

"I hate him" I said. Dad looked surprised and asked me for an explanation. "He's a complete asshole. He beats his dogs, he beats Matti, and he has hurt me too sometimes when I've been there".

Dad looked serious and sad. It was very unlike me to use such strong words to describe an adult, much less a valued family friend like Eikka. Finally, he quietly spoke. "It's not good to hate anyone. God tells us to love our neighbours, and to not bear a grudge against them".

But I did bear a grudge. Later I learned that Eikka had been orphaned at a young age, and the family who took him in treated him like a slave. It didn't change how I felt about him though; in my mind, it didn't make much difference whether he was born an asshole or made into one - the end result was still the same.