南京理工大学教务系统-高中学习计划
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Book 4-Unit 5
Text A
The Telephone
Anwar F.
Accawi
1.
When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the
terraced,
rocky
mountains
east
of
Sidon,
time
didn't
mean
much
to
anybody, except maybe to those who
were dying. In those days, there was no
real need for a calendar or a
watch to
keep track of the hours, days, months, and years.
We knew
what to do and when to do it,
just as the Iraqi geese knew when to fly
north, driven by the hot wind that blew
in from the desert. The only
timepiece
we had need of then was the sun. It rose and set,
and the
seasons rolled by and we sowed
seed and harvested and ate and played
and married our cousins and had babies
who got whooping cough and
chickenpox
—
and those children who survived grew up and married
their cousins and had babies who got
whooping cough and chickenpox.
We lived
and loved and toiled and died without ever needing
to know
what year it was, or even the time
of day.
2.
It wasn't that we had no system for keeping track of time and of the important
events in our
lives. But ours was a natural or,
rather, a divine
—
calendar, because it
was framed by acts of God:
earthquakes and droughts and floods and
locusts and pestilences. Simple as our
calendar was, it worked just fine
for us.
3.
Take, for example, the birth date of Teta Im Khalil, the oldest
woman in
Magdaluna and all the surrounding villages. When I
asked Grandma,
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4.
Grandma had to think for a moment; then she said,
that Teta
was born shortly after the big snow that caused
the roof on
the mayor's house to cave
in.
5.
6.
room.
7.
Well, that was enough for me. You couldn't be more accurate than that, now,
could
you?
8.
And that's the way it was in our little village for as far back as anybody
could remember. One of the
most unusual of the dates was when a
whirlwind struck during which fish and
oranges fell from the sky.
Incredible
as it may sound, the story of the fish and oranges
was true,
because men who would not lie
even to save their own souls told and
retold that story until
it was incorporated into Magdaluna's
calendar.
9.
The year of the fish-bearing whirlpool was not the last remarkable year.
Many others followed
in which strange and wonderful things happened.
There was, for instance,
the year
of the drought, when the
heavens were shut for months and the spring
from which the entire village got its
drinking water slowed to a trickle.
The
spring was about a mile from the village, in a
ravine that opened at
one end into a
small, flat clearing covered with fine gray dust
and hard,
marble-sized goat droppings.
In the year of the drought, that little
clearing
was
always packed full of noisy kids with big brown
eyes and sticky
hands, and their
mothers
—
sinewy, overworked young women with
cracked, brown heels. The
children ran around playing tag or hide-
and-
seek while the women talked, shooed
flies, and awaited their turns to fill
up their jars with drinking water to
bring home to their napping men
and wet
babies. There were days when we had to wait from
sunup until
late afternoon just to fill
a small clay jar with precious, cool water.
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10.
S
ometimes, amid the long wait and the heat and the flies and the smell
of goat dung, tempers flared,
and the younger women, anxious about
their babies, argued over whose turn
it was to fill up her jar. And
sometimes the arguments escalated into
full-blown, knockdown-dragout fights;
the women would grab each
other by the
hair and curse and scream and spit and call each
other
names that made my ears tingle.
We little brown boys who went with
our
mothers to fetch water loved these fights, because
we got to see the
women's legs and
their colored panties as they grappled and rolled
around in the dust. Once
in a while, we got lucky and saw much
more, because some of the
women wore
nothing at all under their long dresses. God, how
I used
to look forward to those fights.
I remember the rush, the excitement,
the sun dancing on the dust clouds as a
dress ripped and a young
white breast
was revealed, then quickly hidden. In my calendar,
that
year of drought will
always be one of the best years of my childhood.
11.
B
ut, in another way, the year of the drought was also one of the worst
of my life, because that
was the year that Abu Raja, the retired cook,
decided it was time Magdaluna got its
own telephone. Every civilized
village
needed a telephone, he said, and Magdaluna was not
going to
get anywhere until it had one.
A telephone would link us with the
outside world. A few
men
—
like the retired Turkish-army drill sergeant, and the vineyard keeper
—
did all they could
to talk Abu Raja out of having a
telephone brought to the village. But they were
outshouted
and ignored and
finally shunned by the other villagers for
resisting progress
and trying to
keep a good thing from coming to
Magdaluna.
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