The Neighbors' Wall

The wall between number 14 and number 16 Kowhai Street had stood for longer than anyone on the street could remember: a low, gray barrier of concrete blocks that held up the Restrepos' garden, which sat a meter higher than the Leotas', and that nobody had thought about for decades. Then, one night in the winter, a moderate earthquake rolled through Wellington, rattled a few windows and put a long diagonal crack through the middle of it. By the end of the summer, the two households were no longer speaking.

Ruth Walker had volunteered at the community mediation service for six years, and she had learned to read a dispute the way a doctor reads an X-ray: the visible fracture was rarely where the real pain was. The file on her desk made it look simple. Sione and Mele Leota, who had four children and a large extended family, wanted the cracked wall knocked down and replaced with a fence. Hernan and Gloria Restrepo, retired and originally from Medellin, refused. Letters had been exchanged. The council had been called, twice. Someone had used the word lawyer.

She met them on a Tuesday evening in the hall behind a church in Newtown, with a pot of tea, a plate of biscuits and four chairs arranged around a table in a way that was carefully designed to look accidental. She began, as she always did, by laying out the rules: each side would speak without interruption, nobody was there to win, and nobody would be asked to agree to anything they did not want. "I'm not a judge," she said. "I don't have any power at all, which is rather the point."

Sione went first. He was a big, soft-spoken man who drove buses for the city and chose his words as if they cost money. The wall, he said, was dangerous. His youngest, Lani, was five, and played right next to it. After the quake he had watched the crack grow wider every week. He had asked politely, more than once, and been told that the wall was not his problem. Ruth noticed that he did not once mention the Restrepos by name.

Gloria spoke next, and at length. The wall, she said, had been perfectly fine for forty years. The Leotas made noise every Sunday, singing and cooking until all hours, and now they wanted to destroy her garden as well. Along the top of the wall grew a passionfruit vine, thick with leaves and purple fruit, which she had planted with her own hands. "Fences are ugly," she finished. "And they are for people who do not trust each other." Hernan, beside her, looked at the floor.

Ruth let the silence settle. Then she began the part of the job that she privately thought of as taking the sharp edges off the furniture. "Can I check I've understood?" she said. "Sione, it sounds as though your main concern is Lani's safety, rather than the wall as such. Would that be fair?" He nodded. "And Gloria, I wonder whether the vine might matter to you more than the wall does. I may be wrong." Gloria opened her mouth to object, and then, unexpectedly, closed it.

It was Hernan who answered. The vine, he said quietly, had been planted the spring their son left for Australia, nine years ago. He had not been home since. Gloria watered it every morning and talked to it, in Spanish, the way she talked to him on the phone on Sundays. When the Leotas sang in the afternoons, it was not really the noise that hurt. It was hearing a big family together, three generations at one table, from the other side of a wall.

Nobody said anything for a while. Mele Leota, who had been silent all evening, reached across and refilled Gloria's cup without asking. Ruth had seen this moment before, in other halls with other biscuits, and she knew better than to fill it with words. A mediator's most useful skill, she sometimes told trainees, was knowing when to stop mediating.

The solution, once the real problem was on the table, took less than an hour. An engineer, whom the two families agreed to pay for jointly, would rebuild the wall at a safer height. The vine would be cut back carefully, not removed, and trained along a new wooden trellis on top, so that it would grow over both gardens. Sione, who it emerged was a good carpenter, offered to build the trellis himself. There would be a small gate in the middle. Whose idea the gate was, nobody could later agree.

Ruth closed the file a month later, after a short follow-up call. The wall was rebuilt by the autumn. The passionfruit, offended at being moved, sulked for a season and then grew back twice as thick on the Leota side, which Gloria pretended to find outrageous. And on Sundays, according to Mele, there were now two extra chairs at the long table under the tree: one for Gloria, who corrected everyone's cooking, and one for Hernan, who had turned out to have a surprisingly good singing voice.