TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Birke (excerpt) Ben Sloan

I

In the moment that she looked out from the bridge, the stone bridge , and caught sight of the tip of a wooden chalet, which was only barely visible from the thicket of birch trees that engulfed it, she knew that this was the home that Hans Grabner had built. Then, she asked herself what she really knew . The stone bridge: built in 1534, which she knew because this same date was carved into a decaying plaque of stone lodged into the bridge itself. The birch tree: otherwise known as Betulus pendula , typically grows to become between fifteen and twenty-five meters high, however in some cases can reach heights of more than thirty meters. She knew this from a book on tree species of Austria she had read as a child, which at the moment lie on the bottom shelf of her bookcase in her apartment in the 5th district of Vienna. Hans Grabner: her great-great grandfather, who had married Franza Horvat in 1914, who then became Franza Grabner, who then gave birth to four children, one of whom ended up being her grandmother, who would then give birth to her mother in 1960, all of which she knew due to a family tree that Onkel Georg 197