中国医科大学八年制-浮力练习题
Book 4-Unit 5
Text A
The Telephone
1.
Anwar F. Accawi
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.
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.
Take, for
example, the birth date of Teta Im Khalil, the
oldest woman in Magdaluna and all
the
surrounding villages. When I asked Grandma,
Grandma had to think for a moment; then
she said,
after the big snow that
caused the roof on the mayor's house to cave
in.
Well, that was
enough for me. You couldn't be more accurate than
that, now, could you?
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.
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.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Sometimes,
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.
But, 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.
12.
One warm day in early fall, many of the villagers were out in their
fields repairing walls or
gathering wood for the winter when the
shout went out that the telephone-company truck
had arrived at Abu Raja's dikkan, or
country store. When the truck came into view,
everybody
dropped what they were doing
and ran to Abu Raja's house to see what was
happening.
13.
It did not take long for the whole village to assemble at Abu Raja's dikkan. Some of the rich
villagers walked right into the store
and stood at the elbows of the two important-
looking
men
from
the
telephone
company,
who
proceeded
with
utmost
gravity,
like
priests
at
Communion,
to
wire
up
the
telephone.
The
poorer
villagers
stood
outside
and
listened
carefully to the
details relayed to them by the not-so-poor people
who stood in the doorway
and could see
inside.
14.
15.
16.
the
ends together,
17.
Because I was small, I wriggled my way through the dense forest of legs to get a firsthand
look
at the action. Breathless, I watched as the men in
blue put together a black machine
that
supposedly
would
make
it
possible
to
talk
with
uncles,
aunts,
and
cousins
who
lived
more than two days' ride away.
18.
It was shortly after sunset when the man with the mustache announced that the telephone
was
ready
to
use.
He
explained
that
all
Abu
Raja
had
to
do
was
lift
the
receiver,
turn
the
crank
on
the
black
box
a
few
times,
and
wait
for
an
operator
to
take
his
call.
Abu
Raja
grabbed the receiver and
turned the crank forcefully. Within moments, he
was talking with
his brother in Beirut.
He didn't even have to raise his voice or shout to
be heard.
19.
And the telephone, as it turned out, was bad news. With its coming, the face of the village