天津理工大学机械学院-现场会主持词
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,
4.
Grandma
had
to
think
for
a
moment;
then
she
said,
been
told
that
Teta
was
born
shortly
after
the
big
snow
that
caused
the
roof
on the mayor's house to cave
in.
5.
6.
wall in the east
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.
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