Yesterday over coffee, when
a friend described how she fallen on cockroaches on her way to the café, it
struck me how many peculiar ways there are to hurt yourself in Lebanon.
For my friend it happened
on one of the steep streets in Clemenceau. As she picked her way carefully down
the sidewalk she came across a patch of dark objects scattered over the
concrete. Normally a wearer of eyeglasses, she had only non-prescription
sunglasses on at the time and mistook the spots for small fruits fallen from an
overhanging tree. She took care not to step directly on any of them but
nonetheless suddenly found her foot coming down on something which rolled, and
she fell to her knees. From her position near the ground, she now saw that the
fruits were moving, and that they weren’t so much fruits as cockroaches. They
covered the sidewalk, skittering about in their peculiarly revolting fashion,
and the sight enabled my friend to leap rather youthfully back to her feet and
disappear around a bend in the road before she had taken in what had happened.
And just this morning, when
Dude got his finger stuck in one of the decorative holes cut into the backs of
our kitchen chairs, I was reminded of the time he got his head lodged between
the stone balusters of a balcony. That was when he was just five and we were
living in one of the poorly planned but over-sized apartments so cherished by
the Lebanese. The ‘salon’ of this apartment was the classic bowling alley
design, meant for hosting guests or local track meets, and we hardly ever went
in there. One day Dude, carried along by some private whim, went out through
the salon to its balcony and put his head through the curved balusters. Once
through it wouldn’t come out again and he had to wait there until we noticed
him missing. His head didn’t come out easily, as I recall, and involved a good
deal of pulling, vegetable oil and debate as to whether or not ears could be
sewn back on again, but in the end we got it out and he retired to his bedroom
with red, swollen ears for a evening of quiet reflection.
This spring, when we were
still in our old apartment, M and Dude and I left the house to go watch Noonie
in a play at the school one evening. When we came out of our building we found
the back glass of our car completely shattered but still in place, with a
bullet hole in the middle of it. So recently had it happened that the glass was
still making crackling, settling sounds. A lady sitting on a nearby first-floor
balcony called out to us that she had heard gunshots just a few minutes before.
As it turned out, that was all we were to ever learn about it. M secured the
glass with many criss-crosses of Gorilla tape and we went off to watch the
play.
Another time, during one of
those nights of fighting in our neighbourhood I talked about in a previous
blog, Dude’s friend who lives not far from us was woken by a bullet coming
through the window and shattering his computer screen.
My cleaning lady, who comes
once a week to do the floors and bathrooms, has been trying to kill me for some
months now but doesn’t realise it yet. Her favourite weapon is a puddle of
water left on the tiles while she’s finishing washing one room and about to
start another. I’ve asked her repeatedly to cease this perilous practice and
use a mop but she cannot. For a Lebanese woman like her, the only proper way to
clean a floor is to tip a pail of water onto it and push that water around with
a giant squeegee before directing it all down a drain set into the tiles.
My ancient Croc sandals are
partly to blame. They’re old and ugly and I should retire them but can’t find
anything else so spongy and comfortable to wear on stone flooring. I’ve bought
several newer models but they don’t fit as comfortably as the old ones.
Unfortunately, old Crocs are absolutely deadly on smooth, wet surfaces. As soon
as that bumpy tread is worn off the bottom, you really should toss them out
because if you hit a patch of water on a slippery surface you may end up with
the back of your head caved in all the way to your nose. I have already
sustained permanent brain damage and the reason I know this is I have fallen
twice in my old Crocs but am too stupid to stop wearing them.
The first fall wasn’t too
bad because my head remained upright that time. It didn’t happen in Lebanon,
which might at first seem to render it ineligible for inclusion in this blog
post, but it was a Lebanese accident all the same. It was in Newfoundland one
summer when I barrelled through the front door of our cottage, unaware that my
mother-in-law had just washed the floor with a large quantity of water (you
see, this is why it counts as a Lebanese accident, because Canadians don’t
clean floors that way). My leading leg shot straight out in front of me, the
other rocketed backwards, and if anybody tries to tell you that an out-of-shape
forty-year-old can’t do the splits, you can tell them they are wrong.
You already know that it
was Selma’s floor cleaning that got me the second time. But that time was much,
much worse. First of all, I wasn’t in Canada with its wooden houses and
forgiving, force-absorbing floors. This time I was in Lebanon and I went over
backwards, head first. My skull struck the ceramic tiles with such force I distinctly
remember thinking it could be curtains for me. But I soon realised that I had
to be conscious to be able to form such a thought and, immediately cheering,
began to focus on how I would kill Selma as soon as I was back on my feet. She
was in the same room when it happened and flapped over, hyperventilating with
well-meaning, brainless concern, genuinely sorry and fully prepared to leave
more water puddled on the floor even before she went home that day.
After some days with a sore
head I made a full recovery, but privately I was disappointed not to have
undergone any interesting personality changes. I thought such a knock on the
head would cause me to start cursing uncontrollably in public, for instance
(but it turned out that I did so only at home, and then only in regards to
Selma). Similarly, I wondered if some untapped cerebral synapses had been
shaken into alertness which would allow me to effortlessly solve Rubik’s Cube,
thirty years after stamping one to bits on my bedroom floor. (Not only was I
unable to solve it, I could no longer get even part-way along, as I had used to
do.)
Selma didn’t learn her
lesson about leaving water puddled on the floor, nor I about worn-out Crocs. I
do wear one of my new pairs when she is here now, though. They aren’t as
comfortable as the old ones but they grip the floor a whole lot better.
New Crocs won’t protect you
from poisoning, however, and, worryingly, I don’t have any idea of what could.
When at home I am never far from my teacup. I have used the same set of teacups
for years. They’re vividly floral and unmistakable. The point is, Selma knows I
sip tea continuously throughout the day. She’s watched me do it one afternoon a
week for two years. She knows which cups I use.
When she was here cleaning
last week she took it upon herself, with no word to me, to remove the tea
stains from my cup. The problem was, it was the cup I was currently using. I
left it sitting on the kitchen counter while I went to fold some laundry and
when I came back it was more or less where I had left it, but full to the brim
with slightly-tinted water. That was perfectly normal. I always fill it up with
water on top of the bit of tea left in the bottom because it makes the water
taste better. I did note that I hadn’t filled it up to the brim with water
before going off to fold my laundry but, alas, that thought didn’t detain me. I
assumed that Selma, in pouring out the last of the water from one of the
5-gallon bottles, had looked for somewhere to put the last drops and so topped
up my cup.
I guess you can see where
this is going. The cup wasn’t filled with water but with bleach solution.
Bizarrely, I didn’t smell it. Maybe it was because the air in the kitchen was
already choked with the smell of Selma’s beloved Dettol or maybe I’m missing
some olfactory connections as a result of the fall on the tiles. I don’t know
but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, not even my own imminent
death. I just scooped the cup up for a quick sip on my way past and the next
thing I knew I was spitting into the sink and splashing handfuls of water into
my mouth, swishing and spitting again, as fast as I could.
Except for an hour of mild
burning sensation in my mouth, I emerged from that attempt on my life
unscathed. Certainly it wasn’t easy to overcome the urge to push Selma off the
balcony, but I was getting used to having to deal with such feelings.
Last year I was cleaning
the floor of a built-in closet in our bedroom when the most ridiculous of my
situations arose. The closet was a strangely-shaped thing, built into a cleft
in the wall, and rather deep. M’s instructions to the carpenter at the time of
the commission had been to put only a very thin doorsill on the floor between
the inside of the closet and the outside, but the man who would later become
known in our house as The Idiot instead built a huge, step-like sill, six
inches high and three or four wide. It was annoying but, compared to the
mistakes being made elsewhere around the apartment, something we decided we
could live with.
For cleaning I had removed
the big tote bins I kept in the bottom of the closet, as well as the laundry
hamper and M’s travel bag, and then stepped inside with a wet rag. The shelves
of the closet were deep, so the spaces under the lowest shelves at the back of
the closet were very hard to reach. I had to get down nearly onto my face to
run the rag around at the very back and that’s when trouble struck. When I
tried to extract myself from beneath the shelf I found that I had somehow
become wedged, with my legs against the stupid giant doorsill and my back
jammed up against the underside of the shelf.
I think I might have
panicked a little. Afterwards, over a calming cup of tea, I reflected that I
could probably have eased my way out comfortably if I’d just been patient and
wriggled myself one way and then another. I know that’s what M would have done.
Probably he would have calculated the angle between his back and the shelf and
done a quick bit of math involving Newtons and counter forces. But not me. It
was dark and stuffy in there, and I was in as undignified a position as a woman
who once sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door could find herself in. As soon as it
became evident that I had tried all possible directions and couldn’t move in
any of them, any chance of reasoning my way out of the closet fled. I began to
push with my legs as hard as I could. One of the them found a bit of an
opening at the top of the sill so I rammed it as hard as I could. The leg went
over, but at great cost, and I more or less mangled it in my desperate bid for
freedom.
These are just some of the
many strange ways in which you can come to harm in Lebanon. There are many more. I didn’t
talk about chunks of concrete falling off buildings and crashing to the
sidewalk at your feet, or the “slow motion hit-and-run”, whereby you bounce off
the bonnet of a car travelling at low speed while you are trying to cross a
busy, traffic-clogged road. Nor did I mention the absence of safety tape or
barricades around holes in the ground, some of them immense. You have to be on
your toes to make it here. I don’t really, as you can see.