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
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. \is sticking the wire into the hole in the bottom of the black
box,\
16. \telephone man with the mustache is connecting two pieces of
wire. Now he is twisting the ends together,\a third voice chimed in.
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
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