It’s said that prisoners must keep busy in order to avoid going mad. Using crumbs and shreds of apple peel, soft voices and never a sudden move, they spend months luring mice into friendship. The Birdman of Alcatraz devoted his solitude to the study of birds and became famous in the process. I’ve no idea what the Man in the Iron Mask did to keep himself from running mad – oil his jaw, perhaps. In the early 1980s, imprisoned in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, sentenced to an academic year by having signed a one-year contract to teach women students at King Saud University in Riyadh, I found myself in a similar situation, though my prison was a four-room apartment in a modern complex, and thus no mice, and no birds.
In the absence of these transient friends and with no need to oil my jaw, time weighed heavily upon me, as it did upon friends who lived in the same fenced compound. There was no alcohol (that existed only in the homes of Saudis or in the distilleries run in the compounds of foreign companies) and the use of drugs (in which I’ve never taken any interest, anyway) was punishable by death. There was squash, there was swimming, there was the gold bazaar: befriending a mouse seemed a more interesting option.
I no longer remember where the idea originated, nor whose it was, but one day three of us teachers decided that it might be amusing, and diverting, to create a board game with which to while away our long hours of non-working time. I know I was responsible for the invention of the name, $audiopoly, and I remain, decades later, wildly proud of that moment of inspiration, as I am of the subtitle I added to the outside of the playing board: ‘A Bored Game’.
As the title shows, we were inspired – though Colin was English and Karen from New Zealand – by that monument to American capitalism, that four-cornered hymn to buying and selling and owning and amassing: Monopoly. In our separate countries, using games where the prime pieces of property bore different names, we had nonetheless learned that the blue places were best, and all of us knew in our bones that the best protection life would ever offer us was a Get Out of Jail Free card.
The entire project, if memory serves, took us about three months: we were university professors, after all, and had our professional duties to attend to. As time passed and the creation of the game became our compelling obsession, teaching became an ever more irritating obstacle, at least until we discovered various ways of disguising work on $audiopoly as the teaching of English literature or medicine. Working at the photocopier, sitting for long periods of time gazing off into space, suddenly exclaiming at the discovery of the absolutely correct phrase: surely, all of these were necessary parts of the teaching process, were they not?
But before all of that, we needed an overall goal for the game; one might even call it a philosophy. What desire could possibly be so strong as to compel adults to spend hours pushing little figures back and forth along the four sides of a board? What holy grail would unite these three crusaders, what common goal would inspire anyone and everyone who played $audiopoly? What is it that any foreigner who spends time in Saudi Arabia most wants, desires, lusts after? The answer to that was revealed on Square 40, the space upon which one had to land in order to win the game, assuming, that is, that the person had accumulated sufficient wealth and had eluded the snares and dangers built into the game. To land on Square 40 was to attain that ultimate of desires, for to land on Square 40 was to ‘Clear Saudi Airspace’.
Now let me tell you how we got there. The board was easy: one needed only to transpose Boardwalk and Park Place to corresponding places in Riyadh. The utilities quickly became Al Rajhi, the money-changing office, and Euromarché and Panda, the two main supermarkets.
Jail? What could be the equivalent of Jail? By then, we had been sufficiently mauled by the cogs and wheels of the university administration to have developed a healthy contempt for it, and for them. Thus Jail had to be ‘Administration’, the office that had confiscated our passports upon our arrival and proved resistant to all our efforts to have them back; the office that routinely made errors in our pay cheques; the office that continually changed the rules governing our employment. Thus to go to Administration was to languish unseen, unaided, and unheard.
None of us, alas, had thought to bring a game of Monopoly with us to the Kingdom, nor were we able to find a copy of the game, neither among friends nor in any of the stores in Riyadh. Thus we were forced to construct ours from memory. Wasn’t there something about Good Luck cards? And Chance cards? A friend of ours who spoke Arabic told us that there were at least two forms of luck in Arab culture, haz and karam, one of them good luck and one of them blind luck, but I now forget which is which. The Karam and Haz cards I still have suggest that it’s haz that will always bless you, while karam tosses you up in the air, a victim of the winds of chance.
The absence of a Monopoly board to copy was but the first obstacle to our desire to use more actual place names on the board; the other, and more compelling, was the realization that, were we to own property in Riyadh – however imaginary that ownership or that property might be – we might slip into the delusion that we had some stake in the place, might grow attached to it. Further, since the purpose of the game was to ‘Clear Saudi Airspace’, the last thing the game should provide was the ownership of property.
The overriding purpose of the game, anyway, was motion, not stability. One had to keep moving around the board, going forward and back, according to what Chance decreed, always in hopes of landing on that elusive, that lucky, that heavenly Square 40.
The way to Square 40 was as fraught with difficulty and impediments as the soul’s path to Paradise. As all of us were in the Kingdom for that most base of motives, greed – there is no other reason to go – it was imperative that the person passing through Square 40 and off to freedom take with them an adequate supply of money. Since we had been in the Kingdom for at least four months by the time we began working on the game, we all knew there was no ‘adequate’ compensation for our time spent there, so at the very least the sum had to be enormous. Wealth was available to players in the form of Saudi riyals or gold, the price of which fluctuated wildly during the length of the game.
Play began for all players at the Riyadh Airport, and each player was given 4,000 riyals at the beginning of the game. Every time a player passed through the airport, they received another 4,000 riyals, equal to a month’s salary. Regardless of how much money or gold a player had accumulated during play, he or she was obliged to pay a bribe of 10,000 riyals to the customs authorities in order to leave the country. Well worth it.
Gold, that shining symbol of avarice, played an important function in the game, for as well as the 10,000 riyals that had to be paid to get out of the place, it was also necessary to pay five ounces of gold (equally well spent). To mirror the precarious nature of fortune, the price of gold, which began the game at 2,400 riyals an ounce, rose and fell 400 riyals an ounce, depending upon which squares players landed on. Thus a person who spent much of the game amassing a fortune in gold could be beggared in the twinkling of an eye, just as easily as he or she could be catapulted to sudden wealth by a more favorable roll of the dice. Round and round the board the players were propelled by the dice.
Perhaps it is time to talk of the tiny pieces available to the players. There was the whisky truck, the hazardous-waste truck, the earth-moving machine, the racing car, and the gold transportation truck used to bring the bars to and from the bank. All of these tiny pieces, I boast proudly, were the result of my genius; I spent hours at my desk at the university, transforming erasers, matchboxes, and bottles of Wite-Out into vehicles, their wheels made of buttons and garment snaps.
In order to test their board worthiness, I spent hours running them back and forth on the top of my desk, much to the consternation of my colleagues and students. Since women were then not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, this was as close as I came to exercising control over a vehicle for nine months.
When questioned about the cars and trucks, I smilingly explained that it was a form of therapy to keep me from becoming violent and killing someone. It had early become law to us that no one – and that meant no one – was to learn about $audiopoly, for to have been discovered at it would probably have led to our arrest, certainly to our deportation.
The reason for that lies in the content. So far, I have not mentioned the texts of the squares other than Blessed 40, nor have I quoted the texts of the Haz and Karam cards. Perhaps it is best to do so, if only for a few, so as to make it clear why we worked only at home and only behind locked doors.
Chosen at random, some of the Haz cards read: ‘Inadvertently give failing grade to member of Royal Family. Lose one week’s salary.’ It was not done to give failing grades to students. They might be lazy, they might be stupid, they might be both, but it was made sufficiently clear that no one was to fail. Even less possible was the idea that a member of any one of a number of wealthy or well-connected families might be shown to be the idiot he or she was.
While I was there, the story circulated of the British professor of surgery at the medical school of Abdulaziz Hospital who, finding himself teaching students with less skill than a butcher, failed all of them save two Palestinians, who he said ‘probably wouldn’t kill anyone’. He was called, we were told, into the office of the dean of the medical school and told to change the grades because Saudi students, all of whom the failed students were, could not fail a class.
One thinks here of the triumphant final chorus of Thomas Arne’s opera Alfred: ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves, Britons never, never, shall be slaves.’
Citing the Hippocratic oath he had taken upon becoming a doctor, the professor refused. He left the country that evening. The Saudi students all received passing grades in their surgery class.
Or this card: ‘Caught asking for ham and cheese sandwich at Mövenpick. Fined 600 riyals.’ Some of the larger companies, all of which had stills and breweries within their compounds, were also rumoured to fly in pork and bacon for their personnel. As a vegetarian, I was not privy to further details.
Or this: ‘Stage Israel in Egypt and Moses and Aaron for the Riyadh Opera Company. Fined 1,000 riyals.’ I suspect the inspiration for this one came from the firing and next-day deportation of a colleague who had, with a significant lack of forethought, asked the students in her English literature class to read parts of Paradise Lost.
There were more: ‘Day off to pray for rain. Collect one day’s salary.’ Yes, this happened. Or this: ‘Win a year’s supply of camel meat.’
‘Obtain patent for battery-powered Mecca finder. Earn 1,000 riyals.’ Some of the students had wristwatches that, even then, had a prototype GPS and would point to Mecca no matter where the owner happened to be.
I still remember the hoots of delight with which we greeted the arrival of these ideas, and I remember how, keeping pace with our daily encounters with abuse, dishonesty, and primitive incivility, the ideas expressed on the cards escalated ever closer to open attacks on our host nation. Our only form of defence was this covert, entirely passive offence.
The game was philosophically about the acquisition of wealth, but there came a time when theory had to give way to practice, and the actual playing board, money, and pieces had to be manufactured. Our colleagues saw the photocopying machine as a means to reproduce their non-demanding homework exercises and the exams everyone was guaranteed to pass. For us, however, the photocopying machine was a mint.
All we had to do was excise the label ‘Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency’ from a hundred-riyal bill and replace it with ‘$audiopoly’ and we were in business. There were a few times when hundred-riyal notes were left forgotten on the photocopying machine, but we were by then practised liars (how quickly one adopts local customs) and easily invented our way out of potentially dangerous situations.
For the rolling of the dice, we needed cups, and what better than the dear little ceramic cups, made in Japan, used for Arabic coffee and all bearing the crossed scimitars and stylized palm tree of the dear little Saud family?
We spent weeks designing prototype boards, alternating squares that allowed progress with those that condemned players to retreat. Inshallah, baby. Thus a person who landed on Square 12 – ‘Admiring prince drops 3,000 riyals into your pêche Melba at Mövenpick. Upon return from weekend in Bahrain, advance three spaces’ – would, upon moving ahead three spaces to Square 15, be greeted with, ‘Caught not paying for public bus. Fined 500 riyals. Go to Administration.’ Yes, there was a Get Out of Administration Free card, but there was only one; otherwise, the process of liberation was purest Kafka.
The player unfortunate enough to land on Square 21 was ‘Caught distributing Bibles on number 7 bus. Fined 700 riyals. Lose one turn.’ We had decided not to discuss flogging in the game. Square 30? ‘Attempted rape by yellow cab driver. You are fined 1,000 riyals.’ So much for the position of women in the Kingdom. Did I hear you ask about the general level of medical treatment in the Kingdom? How about Square 34? ‘Bus to souk involved in accident in Panda parking lot. Lose one turn or the extremity of your choice.’ Or perhaps 23: ‘Strange virus. Doctors dumbfounded. Go to Abdulaziz.’ Let me quell your fears and assure you that, yes, there was a Get Out of Abdulaziz Alive card, the most valuable in the game.
But it was not all bad luck: who knows, sometimes good things can happen, even in the Kingdom. Just have a look at Square 9: ‘Sell copy of final exam. Earn 2,000 riyals.’ This square was created in homage to a colleague of ours who had set up a cottage industry writing theses for students in the Department of English Literature in the men’s college: I have a clear memory of helping with one about The Great Gatsby, though I refused payment. More good luck awaited on Square 13: ‘Find two cases of ’64 Bordeaux mislabelled “Finest Non-Alcoholic Grape Juice”. Win six new friends. Take Karam card.’ The most enterprising players always longed to land on Square 36: ‘Establish Riyadh Escort Service – “No Taste is too Debased”.’
And so it went, for months. The unhealthy heat of winter turned into the unbearable heat of spring, and soon it was time for graduation. Just think, everyone passed their classes and everyone was promoted or graduated. Just like in America, ‘No student left behind.’ And then it was May and our contracts finished, and those who had not been in trouble with the morals police were invited to return to teach yet another year at King Saud University. Most of us fled. We three took with us our $audiopoly boards. I’ve always wondered if our choice to fly on three successive days, and all to different continents, was in any way related to the desire to be sure that at least one, even if only one, $audiopoly game made it out of the dear little Kingdom.