TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Ben Sloan

She did not know.

She would not understand the game until years later. Still, Birke sensed the adults playing at something. The na-ja’s and the ja ja’s and the jooo’s , and thekissesonthecheeksand the Widerschauens und have a nice days’s! and the folding of the silverware and the smoking of the meat were all elements of the game. Sometimes the adults broke the rules of the game (whatever the game was!). Sometimes they responded sharply or forgot to fold their silverware or said ciao without a smile. Except the one person who almost never broke character, and who played the game to such painstaking perfection that he left Birke with a feeling of unease, was Onkel Georg . He reminded her of the tweety bird clock that hung above her bed that went tik tok tik tok tik tok all day long. His limp and his voice and his kisses all followed this pattern, this tik tok . She would look at him and count off the rhythm of him tik-toking . Birke sensed something hiding deep underneath all of this—a secret, or something similar, which led her to watch her uncle; to wait; and then, to listen to his stories. She also now knew that he was her mother’s brother. Underneath all his tik-toking lie some information on the protagonist of her plays, who had no face and whose name was sometimes stained in bird poop, and whose attention was always being stolen away by the sad man bleeding on the cross. And for that reason, when she watched her Uncle and heard him mention that he lived between Feldkirchen and Villach, in a village that you wouldn’t even consider a village , she 212 Sometimes people cheat at games.