If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner Page B

vows to help them. She speaks to them now in a steady stream and they watch her through their tears. For a long while, they lie folded in her embrace.
    That night, Pearl feeds Moshe dinner, then sits him in the living room chair.
    “I could kill those boys.” Pearl waits for her bottom lip to stop trembling. “There is a young woman, Rayzl. Chava told me about her — they met at the book bazaar. Her parents are deaf and so are several of her aunts. She used a hand language before she learned to speak. Moshe — maybe she can tutor the girls, help them. Who knows, maybe she can teach them to speak? She was just married. Why don’t you go talk to her husband. I can scrimp at the market to pay for lessons — please, Moshe.”
    Moshe considers this, then stands up. From the bedroom doorway, he looks in on Nellie and Bayla as they sleep. Even in the darkness, he can see that Nellie’s lips are dark red and swollen. Bayla’s arms are cut and bruised. How could this happen?
    Moshe pulls at his shirtsleeves, cuffing them close around his wrists. “All right, Pearl,” he mutters. “I will go.”

    The morning Rayzl begins her tutelage, Nellie and Bayla start out shyly, knitted close to Pearl’s sides. But as Rayzl gestures broadly to them, her face open and warm, the girls sidle nearer.
    Pearl watches her girls fluttering around their new teacher, and now unexpectedly she aches with regret. Jealousy. She should be teaching them about the world all around. She should know them — their thoughts, their fears, their wishes and dreams. Yet she does not. Not in their intricacies. Nellie and Bayla have grown together, bonded in their deafness, as if inside an unbroken circle. For someone else now — a stranger — to weave herself in! It’s what Pearl wanted for them, yes, so that they could learn and grow stronger. And yet . . .
    Rayzl walks through the village with Nellie and Bayla at her sides. She stops often to point at a familiar object. Then she signs its name. Inside the bakery: the mandel bread, the almond cakes, the babkes, the rugelach. Along the river path: the oaks and lindens, the grey mushrooms, the blackberry vines. At the market: the meats and fish, the buckwheat groats, the spices, the vinegars, the salves, the leathers. And hooked under everyone’s arm, the baskets for toting their finds and trades. Back at home: the tables and chairs, the beds and trunks, the books, the yarns, the Shabbat candles and candlesticks. In an excited daze, Nellie imitates Rayzl’s signs. She shows Rayzl their own homemade signs for things, some so alike; some so different
from hers. With each new name she learns from Rayzl, Nellie beams as if she has acquired the thing itself.
    Week after week, Nellie’s dictionary, and her universe, grows. “Apricot is rock,” Nellie signs at lunchtime, to convey her fruit’s hardness. Now Rayzl works, not just on the names of objects, but on descriptors, the qualities of things. The wax is hot; the bucket is empty; the table is thick; the wild strawberries are sweet. Bayla does not advance so quickly. She often breaks away in the middle of a lesson, settling herself in the barn until Nellie retrieves her.
    Most nights before bed, Nellie carries the oil lamp to her bedside, and she practices flattening, rounding, blowing, popping, and puffing her mouth the way Rayzl has showed her. On the eve of her seventh birthday, Nellie stares into the small, smoky looking-glass and studies her face—her eyes, the bridge of her nose, the angle of her cheeks, her ears. Her worthless ears. Nellie lowers the mirror slightly to her lips, and looks on as the pout in her lips becomes a sputter, itchy and tickly at the same time. Her new baby sister, Elish, laughs to see Nellie’s faces. Nellie cheers a little, and uses the mirror to play peek-a-boo.

    Chava, who knew Rayzl first, stops often at the house, delighting the girls with honey cakes and scraps of bright colored cloth
for dressing up their