A Well-Fed Litani River

On the Border

            Last weekend we drove around the south of Lebanon to see what we could see.  At this time of year and after an unusually wet winter the countryside, where you find it, is velvet green.

            The ruin of a Crusaders’ fort tops a hill not far from M’s ancestral village.  It desperately needs funding and fixing up: protection for the remaining structure so no more stones are pinched by locals to repair a wall or to clad a fancy villa, as well as some large, brightly-painted signs to mark the well shafts which appear suddenly in the overgrown grass under your feet.  As ill-tended, plundered and seemly forgotten the fort is, it’s still stunning.  You feel like you’re on top of the world when you stand on its walls. There is nothing between you and the hazy blue sea to the west and the snow-capped mountains to the east. You try to imagine what it was like a thousand years ago for the men who stayed in the fort but you fail to produce any reasonable guesses because you never did get through that book about the Crusades you bought and still keep on your bookshelf. "Well," you eventually tell yourself, "there are a lot of fair-skinned, blue-eyed Lebanese people in the village that surrounds the base of this fort so presumably the Crusaders didn’t spend all their Friday nights in playing cards."

            We’ve been to the fort a few times so decided to give it a pass this time in favour of new adventures.  Last time we were there was with my brother and his wife and we ate gooey-ripe figs off a big tree growing right inside the fort.  There was  a monstrous, mother-ship of a cactus growing near the entrance, so dense and heavy-looking you could almost feel the weight of it pressing into the earth.  It was loaded with red fruit sticking up amongst the thorns like cartoon thumbs but nobody dared attempt a pick.

            When I’m in the south I am in constant awareness of The Border just a few miles away.  I’m not exactly scared but a peppery little worry gnaws at a corner of my subconscious. I know that even if there is trouble it’s not likely to single us out but still, you wouldn’t want to be lying around on a hammock eating grapes when bombs start falling. 

            I’d seen the border a couple of times before, but from two or three miles across a shallow valley.  Even then it gave me a tingle of apprehension.  When we crested a low hill and saw across the valley, just like I remembered from last time, a suspiciously orderly looking bunch of farms I knew we were not looking at Lebanon.  There were so many robustly fluffy trees, and such a tidy, prosperous look to the farm buildings and distant town there could be no mistake. 

            “Ohhh…” I breathed.  “Is that the border?”

            I knew it was, of course.  I just say things like that in order to get M to speak.  Otherwise it’s just silence from the driver’s seat.

            “Yes,” he said.

            “Wow.  By the way I’m going to have to find a toilet soon.”

            M’s eye flicked to me and back to the road.  Without changing expression he said, “How much tea did you have this morning?”

            “None,” I cried. “Not one little drop.  I just had that one glass of water you saw me drinking at breakfast.  I purposely denied myself any tea consumption whatever so that I would be able to sustain the long hours in the car.”

            “Well, your bladder must be the size of a ball-point pen tip.”

            “I can assure you that my bladder is a perfectly normal size,” I said, “and anyway bladder volume is not the point at all. The problem is the lack of toilets in the world and in Lebanon particularly.  It’s a reflection of our male-dominated society.  They expect you to be able to get out of your car and stand in front of a wall or bush to relieve yourself.  Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.  I’m going to invent a Ladies’ Pee-on-the-Go Total Solution:  a portable, miniature toilet with a self-erecting tent surrounding it.  Instant privacy, instant relief.”

            “You just let me know when that patent comes through so I can give notice at work.”

            We had entered another village and for a minute our view was limited to ugly concrete buildings crowding on to the edge of the road, shopkeepers sitting on plastic chairs with their feet practically sticking out into traffic; people walking, driving, piled two or three deep on tiny mopeds with worn-out tires.

             When we popped out of the village and back into countryside the border was right below us.  M pulled over to the side of the road and we got out.

            The day was warm and bright.  A bumblebee buzzed from flower to flower in a bush beside us. The gently sloping hill on which we stood was part of a large, dish-shaped valley so we had an expansive view in all directions.  Our side of the border hummed with life: cars hurried along roads, baby goats gamboled at the fringes of a large herd, a farmer bumped along a red-dirt path on his way to an olive grove. On the other side of the border all was still.  I mean literally nothing moved.  I stared and stared at the closest farm, a cluster of tidy buildings and neatly planted trees not more than 200 metres from the border, but I couldn’t see a single animate thing: not a person, not an animal, not a distant metallic glint of sunlight off a car bonnet.

            The long, snaking border road was strikingly deserted, too. It was two lanes wide, but only one lane was paved.  On both sides of the road was identical, serious fencing.  Outermost was rolled barbed wire, and inside of that a ten-foot high electric fence.  There were posts with what looked like cameras mounted on them here and there on the opposite side of the road.

            The contrast between the quiet laziness of the spring day and my knowledge of the violence that happens here – most recently just six years ago – made what I knew irreconcilable with what I saw.  It seemed to me that it could only have happened in a movie.

            “Where is everybody?” I asked M, inclining my head toward the border. “Over there, I mean.”

            “Oh, don’t worry; even if you can’t see anybody, they’re there,” he said.  “Probably watching us right now on camera.”

            I recoiled. “What? Really? Those are actually cameras mounted on those posts? Oh dear me, that is not a pleasant thought. Let’s get going.”

        We got back in the car and stopped at a kind of public garden which had little individual-family picnic shelters, each with a barbecue stand and sink with water supply.  Several families had taken advantage of the fine day to pack lamb or chicken kabobs and tupperware bowls of tabooli and were busily lighting coals and arguing with their sweating children about whether or not it was sufficiently warm enough to safely remove their woollen sweaters. While M bought a lemonade and found a shady frond to sit under I rushed to find the toilets.

            When I came back M said, “Were the toilets pretty bad?” 

            “Oh yes,” I said.  “Right on par with my expectations.  God-awful stink and an inch of water on the floor.  At least I always hope it is water in these cases.”

            “Want some lemonade?”

            “No. I’ve sworn off liquids until July.”

            We got back in the car and drove more or less beside the border for a few miles.  I don’t know why M chose to do this.  He doesn’t tend to explain his navigational decisions. But I found the border irresistibly fascinating and could hardly take my eyes off it. The history of it -- the wars and the fighting and the lives lost -- only seemed possible to me when I considered them in the abstract.  Here in the warm spring sunshine with the shouts of children playing soccer behind us and carefully tended young apple trees blossoming sweetly on the other side of the border, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

            We came upon an UN tank with a couple of brown-skinned young men standing in front of it dressed up like GI Joes.  We strolled over and said hello.  They were Indonesian, and quite friendly.  I thought we’d have lots of things to say to them and it would be a really poignant, international, we’re-all-brothers moment but nothing sprang to mind when it came to the point.

            So we got back in the car and drove some more.  We passed a children’s playground which had been built right beside the border and it was hopping with kids.  They paid no notice to the menacing fence a couple of meters away.  I wondered if the little boys dared one another to pee on the fence, the way some farm kids back in Alberta do with electric cattle fences.

            Soon we veered away from the border to head back into the interior of the country.  We passed through beautiful valleys and lunched beside a fatly rushing Litani River, ready to burst its banks with the abundance of melting snow this year.

         I saw a lot of wonderful things, and a few of the usual-for-Lebanon depressing things, but my mind kept going back to the border.  What must it be like for children to grow up in its shadow?  In a sense, every child in Lebanon grows up in its shadow, but I was thinking of the ones who lived in towns right beside it. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know you were being watched all the time.

         There is a knothole in the pine footboard of our bed that looks just like an eye with an eyebrow above it.  Sometimes at night when I’m reading by lamplight I sense, out of the corner of my eye, that I’m being watched.  I look up from my book and meet the gaze of the knothole eye, peeping at me over the duvet. Frankly, it’s a little creepy.  The eye always looks a bit too alert.  But it’s fine, I know it’s a knothole in a piece of wood.  I don’t think I’d be so fine with a real eye watching me all the time.   

 

One Marble's Journey

        A couple of years ago at a dinner with M's colleagues a very funny man not really named Tom told us that his sister had recently rung him up from the States to tell him that she had pooped out a marble he’d dared her to swallow when they were children more than thirty years before. She’d had a foot massage that day which had apparently stimulated her bowel to move with an energy hitherto unimagined. Her intestines had had themselves some kind of spring cleaning and with all the shuffling and shifting around the marble was loosed from the intestinal fold into which it had settled all those years ago.

        “Reflexology can do that,” the host of the dinner told us in his Venezuelan accent as he walked by with a platter of barbequed fillet.  “They start rubbing your toes and you begin to fart.”

        Well, I was riveted. I just couldn’t believe someone could carry a marble around inside them for thirty-some years.  And I certainly hadn’t been aware of an ‘on’ switch for my bowel lurking on the deceptively blank-looking bottom of my foot.  I think a few of us standing there listening to Tom that day may have looked a bit sceptical because he added that his sister is a doctor and took a sharp clinical interest in the proceedings.  I wondered – literally couldn’t help wondering – if she had felt the marble coming out or had only been aware of its passing from the sound of it clinking gently against the side of the toilet bowl. 

        A few months after that when I was just starting this blog -- cobbling together the first entries -- I wanted to tell the story of Tom’s sister because, come on, literature doesn’t get more entertaining than that.  But as it happened, an Alexander McCall Smith book I was reading right around the same time had a character in it who mentioned hearing about a man who pooped out a marble after twenty years.  When I read that passage I put down the book in wonder. Well, for crying out loud, I thought.  So much for the amazing, one-of-a-kind marble story.

        So I didn’t write about it on my blog.  The startling singularity of the incident was clearly not as singular as I’d thought. Maybe a lot of people knew someone who had pooped out a marble.  The other thing was, what if someone thought I’d stolen Mr McCall Smith’s idea and was just making up the bit about someone named Tom and his sister?

        But I don’t care about any of that anymore.  The story is true (except Tom’s name) and too rich not to share.  I hope you got a laugh or even a tiny thrill of astonishment from it.  Sorry that it’s a bit of a gross subject.  I did warn you that toilets come up in my blogs quite often. 

Playing Monopoly (Or, A Sore Loser)

            I wonder if a game of Monopoly has ever ruined a marriage. 

            They say that the best test of compatibility between two people is to take a trip together, and I while I believe this to be a very useful exercise – why, just getting through airport security when one person is well organised and the other is not can be highly predictive of future harmony – I submit that playing a competitive board game such as Monopoly or Risk is the best test.

            I don’t  think I’ve played Risk since my twin best friends and I sat down to a game of it in their kitchen when we were fourteen. I remember that the game started companionably enough, with the crunching of potato chips and jokes about armies massing on borders etc. but the mood soon darkened.  Some kind of feverish greed for power began to steal over the three of us.  Polite, apologetic advances gave way to ruthless invasions.  We stopped talking and our faces got red. Things got uglier and nastier until finally one of the twins stood up, seized the board by the edges and flung it off the table.

            We never played it again or even talked about it but the incident has stayed in my mind as a reminder of how board games can turn ugly.

            So when Noonie appeared in the kitchen last Sunday with the Monopoly box in her arms and asked if we would all like to play, I hesitated.  Frankly, I have my reservations about Monopoly  -- the games last longer than all good sense and by the end the players always hate each other -- but somehow I always think this time is going to be better.  I mean, Monopoly is a paradigm of wholesome, family fun.

            I couldn’t say no. Dude declined to join us (with reservations, I believe, in line with my own) but M agreed so the three of us sat down at the table. As the banker, Noonie dealt out our starting cash and we rolled the dice.  I knew from the first round it wasn’t going to be my day.  I landed on one of those cheap properties along the first side and bought it with alacrity but after that ended up on one of the railroads (actually, since we have the French Disney version of Monopoly – don’t ask – it’s not a railroad but "Bateau Pirate Capitaine Crochet"), and then on Go to Jail (or "Allez En Prison", in our case).  While I sat in jail waiting for my next turn I watched Noonie make a solid purchase along the second side and M scoop up "Alice au pays des Herveilles" in the coveted yellow section.

            The really crummy thing about Monopoly (which, in all fairness, its name does suggest) is the snowball effect. Once you start getting ahead of the other players, you just keeping getting further ahead.  And when you fall behind, it’s a slow bleed till the ignominious moment you find yourself begging the person beside you to loan you three hundred bucks so you can stay in their hotel.

            After several trips around the board I still didn’t have more than one of any property in a series and M was already putting houses on a low-income neighbourhood near the jail.  I had managed to get one property in the second most valuable series, the green ones, which I clung on to in the hope that it would be a useful bargaining tool when I needed to make a private deal but nobody seemed very interested.

            See, M gets very serious and strategic when he plays board games.  He bought property which he knew I had my eye on, then offered to sell it to me at a scandalous price. He watched, hawk-eyed, every time I rolled the dice and made sure I moved my game piece the correct number of squares. When Noonie landed on one of M’s high-rent properties and couldn’t afford to pay him I helped her out. Then later, when I landed on one of his Las Vegas-type clusters of buildings and saw that the charge was more than my total sum of cash (and Noonie had no money to lend me) he watched impassively as I sat there pathetically re-counting my banknotes just in case a couple of fives had accidently stuck together.           

            “Look, I don’t have enough,” I said.  “Could you let me stay for a discounted rate this time?  Or maybe you want to buy my Aladdin property?”

            “I’ll buy Aladdin,” he said. “For 200 dollars.”

            “But that’s outrageous,” I spluttered. “That’s less than what I bought it for.”

            He shrugged. “I have no pressing need for it.  Take it or leave it.”

            I’m sorry to have to say that M never has the decency to look sorry for driving someone to bankruptcy, despair and nights slumped in dark alleyways behind Park Place swigging mouth wash.

            I glowered at him and, in a reckless indulgence of spleen, began to express my dissatisfaction with the core dynamics of Monopoly.  I said it was a stupid game. I blamed the dice for harbouring ill-will toward me, and accused M of being too serious.

            “Who’s being too serious?” he said. “You’re the one getting mad and whining about everything.  And you were pretty cheerful earlier on when you thought you might win.”

            I huffed and started to pack up my properties, plucking my Lady and the Tramp game piece off the board.

            “What are you doing?” said M. “You can’t quit just because you’re not winning.”

            “What’s the point of continuing?” I said. “You know there’s no chance for Noonie or I to recover our footing. From here on it’ll be like the lions starting to eat the gazelle who’s dying but not dead yet.”

            “What have gazelles got to do with anything? You can borrow from the bank.  There’s no need to have to declare bankruptcy yet.”

            “Borrow from the bank?” I scoffed. “And how will I ever pay them back – with interest – when I have almost no income?”

            “Well, you get your 200 dollars every time you pass Go.”

            “And a fat lot of good that does me when your 101 Dalmatians hotel costs me 450 dollars every time I land on it.”

            “Boy do you exaggerate.  You’ve only landed on it once.”

            “That’s right.  And now I’m broke.”

            I packed up my things, breathing heavily. I didn’t lift up the game board and fling it but I did shoot a withering glance at M’s little metal Pinocchio standing pertly on "Parc Gratuit", grinning inanely into space.

            Noonie and M didn’t have much choice after that. M wandered back to the sofa to see what was on tv while Noonie slowly packed the game back up.

            “I’m sorry, Noonie,” I told her later.  “I always forget how much I hate that game.  Plus, I mean, I kind of wish people wouldn’t try so hard to win.”

            “That’s okay,” she said. “Sometimes I hate Monopoly, too, but sometimes it’s fun.”

            “You mean like when you’re winning?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Some games are a love/hate relationship,” I sighed.

            “Yup.”

            “Some are always good, though.”

            “Yeah, like Uno.”

            “Yes!  Like Uno.  Now there’s a game I’m good at.”

            M, strolling through the room, said, “Uno?  You can’t say you’re good at a game that is based almost entirely on luck.  It makes no sense.  It’s like saying you’re good at winning door prizes.”

            “Actually, I know a couple of people who are good at winning door prizes,” I said.

            A pained looked passed over M’s face but he said nothing.

            “I just think games like Uno are better at keeping things light, you know?” I said. “Monopoly is no good for a marriage.”

            “Certainly not for husbands,” M agreed with enthusiasm. “I bet there have been a few men to lose body parts over it.”

            He suddenly eyed me suspiciously. “I think we should put away all the knives next time we play.  Just as a precaution.”

            “There won’t be a next time,” I said. “I’m not going to let Monopoly ruin our marriage.”

            “But if we never play again how will you ever pay me back the 450 dollars you owe me for staying in my 101 Dalmatians hotel?” he said with a evil grin. And exited the room with impressive speed.