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.
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