If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner Page A

the like.
    By the time Sophia was a year and a half old, she no longer pulled her hearing aids out; they were part of her. When she woke up, she pointed to her ears and then to the Dri Aid container where her hearing aids were stored over
night. She wanted to hear, to be plugged into the sounds of the day. She knew nothing of our anxieties over whether her hearing loss was progressive —always a looming possibility that the audiologists monitored in the testing booth. We fretted, too, over Sophia’s hearing aid settings. Three separate brainstem tests yielded three different audiograms, and we engaged in endless debates with the audiologists over how Sophia’s hearing aids should be digitally programmed, given the discrepancies.
    Despite our worries, Sophia’s language capacities exploded. Our joy over her strides, her first words and expanded babbles, hit a high when Sophia muttered the word “shit” under her breath. With hearing aids, “SHIT” is hard to reproduce accurately; yet Sophia managed it with perfect diction one day when she spilled cranberry juice all over the blue living room rug—her utterance pre-empting my own. And I felt assured of Sophia’s linguistic competence the day that, upon my yelling “Oh God!” (as I watched a bowl of chocolate pudding splatter the kitchen wall), Sophia exclaimed “Jesus!” with just the right intonation.

    Galicia, 1876
     
     
     
    IF PEARL CAN BE SURE OF ANYTHING, it is that God — blessed be He — works in mysterious ways.
    Swathed by the girls in the day, Pearl is caught off guard when Moshe comes to her bed one night. His body feels heavy and his mouth is rough. He touches her hair, searches her face. His eyes beg her to see him but Pearl is unsure if she wants to look. Maybe it’s better that they cannot read each other’s faces. As she feels him enter her, she blurts out her fears. He wraps his arms around her, whispers words of faith. Words she is not sure either of them believe.
    Night after night, Moshe reaches for her. Within a few months, she knows she has conceived again. Her breasts swell, her belly rounds. Everywhere Pearl goes, people talk and she bristles. “May this one be a boy, yes? A hearing boy!” No matter that Nellie and Bayla are standing right by her side, reading their lips, their faces. Pearl begins to stay at home, keeping the girls there with her whenever she can. When Nellie and Bayla
get restless, she sends them outside. At five and three, they chase the chickens or pet the goats in the shade of a tree.
    Late one afternoon, Pearl stands in the open doorway, the dusky air a relief from the heat of the day. She breathes in the scents of wood, apricot, and straw. A shriek jolts Pearl’s body a few steps out the door. A rock flies past her in the direction of the ridge, its arc cutting the thick air. Then another rock, aired from the opposite direction. A volley of thuds, then high-pitched yowlings, like pained cats. “Where? Where are you? Nellie!” Pearl chastises herself as she runs: she shouldn’t have let the girls alone, she should have been watching them. The rocks are still flying, one landing now near her foot. Pearl tops the hill, and sees five or six boys scattering. She strains to recognize them — are they the peasant boys who sell grain at the market?
    A soft whimper forces her eyes away from the boys to a clutched heap just steps away from her now. Her girls lie in the grass, their arms bent over their heads, their fingers intertwined. So many rocks, aimed at their ears. They yelp violently when Pearl first kneels down to comfort them, then they bury their streaming faces in the folds of her skirts.
    Pearl lifts her daughters and carries them crumpled, one in each arm, over the hill and into the house. She slams the door behind her with new fear, new hatred. She couldn’t be sure those boys were from the market, the ones she saw running
away. Who, then? As she cleans her girls’ scrapes, dries their blood, she