Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  When the Armonds reach home and everyone’s seated at the table for lunch, Virginie, unusually talkative, thinks aloud about the soldiers in town. “I felt like a ball on a billiard table,” she says, but if it’s amusement she’s feeling, she’s misunderstood, as usual. Jean Armond reprimands Michel for not taking proper care of his sister. Idette scolds Bena, for why should Michel take the flak when there’s another competent child to blame? Mignon soothes Virgie, although Virgie’s not distraught, while Michel fumes at everyone’s unfailing inability to understand Virgie. He’s most upset with Idette, though, for her unconscionable, relentless cruelty to Bena. And this—Michel’s anger on her behalf—might be the greatest kindness Bena knows.

  WHEN KARL PERLMUTTER finishes his lunch at Chez Sylvie—jambon, fromage, tarte Tatin—he lays some marks on the table, bids his friends “Guten Tag,” and walks to rue des Brebis. Not the most central location, but if you’re the only tailor in town . . . The German army has indeed found the Tailleur Armond. Peering in from the street, Karl sees soldiers pressing their bundled, soiled clothes—the shop must smell rank as a bathhouse—over the counter to Jean, who’s gladhanding away, obsequious and inefficient. But Karl doesn’t see Mignon. The sun on his back is unpleasantly hot, and he quits rue des Brebis for a smaller, perpendicular lane, which he follows, alert for a chance to cut over, maybe approach the Armonds’ from the back. Sticking close to the buildings, he catches sight of a depression in the wall, a shallow arched alcove that contains a door, narrow as a broom closet’s. He shouldn’t be surprised when the handle turns; the Germans have yet to discover a door locked to them in all of France. Slipping through, he finds himself in a tight, shaded alley, but it soon opens into a grassy lane, and there, up ahead, is the Armond barn. He strides on with casual assurance, as if he walks this path every day.

  The barn isn’t so decrepit from this angle, causing Karl a pang of fear, imagining the trouble he’ll face should the wrong person discover he’s billeted himself and Diederick in a house with a perfectly good horse barn while several higher-ups are sleeping half a mile from their own mounts. The property is fenced and further fortified by overgrown shrubs; there’s no way into the yard but through the house in front or the barn in back. But to get into the barn, Karl sees only one hayloft window, twenty feet up. Above that, the roof’s ridgepole extends out a good meter, but there’s no hay pulley, just a single rope looped far from Karl’s reach. He notices a low corner of the barn where the land has eroded from the foundation posts and left an opening where he might squeeze through. He stretches out on the ground and works his head up to the barn floor, crab-scuffling himself in. His eyes adjust: Fiji and Michel’s makeshift bed of quilts thrown over old hay bales.

  There are any number of tactical, militarily defensible reasons for Karl Perlmutter to inspect the Armonds’ hayloft. None apply here. He goes partly out of curiosity: Mignon said the boys would sleep up in the loft, but they’ve made their bed on the lower level, and Karl wonders why. Mostly, though, he wonders if there might be a private spot up there, on a pile of soft, sweet-musty straw, where he might lie with Mignon Armond and draw her body to his own.

  Karl mounts the hayloft ladder, the temperature rising with every rung. At the top, the air’s almost too pulpy to breathe. It’s not for laziness that the boys are sleeping downstairs; the hayloft is unbearably hot. On the far wall is a painting—a trompe l’oeil of a window, Karl thinks, until he realizes it is a window, the one he saw from below, its frame curtained in dusty spider webs. Back at home in Bavaria, the attic has windows at either end, for cross-ventilation, so Karl crosses the loft and finds the hidden window, but it’s stuck shut. He’ll need a crowbar.

  Recalling a spigot he’d seen by the house, Karl descends and goes to it, splashing his face with an abandon probably unbecoming a Nazi soldier. Then he enters the house through the back door. Mignon is there, busily attending to customers, arguing in a jumble of French and German, but she sees Karl and says, “Excusez-moi,” turns her back on the crowd, and leaves the shop to Jean and Fiji.

  Karl needs a crowbar, but does not have the words. “J’ai besoin d’un . . . Brecheisen?” He mimes its use, though he could well be shoveling coal or spearfishing. “To lift? A tool, for lift?”

  “Ah!” Mignon cries. “Une pince à levier!” Delighted, she pivots Karl around and takes his arm. “And it is for . . . ?” she asks, as if he might have sly and sexy plans for this crowbar.

  Embarrassed by his undeniably sexy plans, he admits, “To open the hayloft window.”

  “Oh, you’re sweet,” she exclaims, “thinking of the boys.”

  Karl doesn’t understand, and then he does. “Well, we have displaced them, so . . .” But lying to her is awful, and he vows: never again.

  No crowbar, but they do unearth a screwdriver, a hammer, and a file. “I’ll go try it, then,” Karl says, expecting Mignon will return to the shop. But she makes no move to leave, and when he starts for the ladder, she follows. He takes a few rungs, then glances back: she’s slipping off her shoes, steadying herself with one hand to unclip and unroll her stockings. She mounts the ladder. The sight of her nakedly vulnerable feet on the rough floor of the loft dizzies Karl. “Attention,” he warns, but doesn’t know “splinter” in French, and she only smiles, saying, “We walked all over here as children. I’m tough,” though her feet look anything but tough. They look terribly tender, little plumps of his mutti’s doughy spaetzle, yet she walks about, clearing cobwebs while Karl wrestles the window. With much prying and levering, it opens, letting in a paltry breeze.

  Mignon says, “I should get back,” but her reluctance to leave him is plain.

  “May I see you again?” Karl asks. “Soon?”

  “Tonight,” she offers eagerly. “We could go to the movies tonight.”

  He clenches in regret. “We have a . . . there’s . . . I don’t know what time I’ll be free.”

  But she’s got it figured. “I’ll wait here, in the hayloft, just before eight. Come, if you can.”

  He agrees, then remembers what it took to get into the barn. “But how will I . . . ?” He doesn’t need to finish; she’s already got this answer, too, is treading those sweet bare feet toward the open window. “There used to be . . .” She braces against the frame, cranes up. “Aha!” Fetching a stick of wood, Mignon pokes at something, then snags it—the rope he saw from below! She corrals it in, checks its integrity. “We used it to sneak out as kids.” It’s knotted with loops—footholds. It is, he can see now, a ladder.

  “Where did you sneak?” Karl asks hesitantly.

  Mignon laughs. “Nowhere! Just plotting escapes, how we’d run away. You must have . . .”

  Karl shakes his head. “It was just me and my mutti. I couldn’t run away.”

  “Just you and your mother?”

  “My father died before I was born. We own an inn, in Bavaria. We run it. I help her.”

  Mignon’s forehead creases in sad sympathy. “She must miss you so.”

  Karl thinks his mutti’s sanity may well depend on pretending she never had a son in the first place, but for now he keeps this to himself.

  WHEN THE CHILDREN return to school after lunch, Monsieur le Proviseur turns them away. The Germans have discovered the building’s strategic perch: the high school is going to be Nazi HQ! Of course, it wouldn’t be proper to toss schoolkids into the street, so the Feldkommandant dispatches men to find a new lycée, and this is how the children of V——bourg come to be educated in the cinema. Relocation begins that day, Nazis scurrying like worker ants with books, papers, chalkboards, and it’s not until everything’s moved, spilling from the concession stand onto the street, that anyone thinks to ask where the school offices will go. The students themselves need about every inch of the ciné, so where will they put the principal, the rec-ords? Chez Sylvie is out of the question—the Germans need a place to eat and drink, don’t they? And the boucherie, the crèmerie, they can’t be moved just like that—you can’t
just string up a ham anywhere. Scouts take off around a corner and find a bookshop. The proprietor’s name is spelled in peeling letters beneath an old iron knocker; eyebrows are raised, glances exchanged. A young soldier from Munich takes hold of the knocker and raps with authority, and a warbling elderly voice calls out as if from deep in a cave, “Oui? Qui est là?”

  The Münchner tries the door—locked—and another soldier tries the window. It, too, is fastened from inside. “Either of you have any French?” They shake their heads no: Why the hell would we want to speak French? The Münchner bangs again, angry now: Jewish name on the plaque, locked doors and windows. Why must they make things difficult? In German he says, “This is the authorities. You must open the door.”

  Perhaps the bookseller does understand and simply does not do as he’s ordered. “Je ne peux pas bouger!” he calls feebly—but is it true frailty or affectation? “Je suis un inferme!” And he may be an invalid for all they know, but the language gap only makes them shout louder: “Aufmachen!” They hammer the door. “Aufmachen, alter Jude!” Is he an “old Jew”? He sells books, reads books, keeps to himself . . . Perhaps the Germans eject him simply because he’s old and sick and they need a place to put the school secretary and the spare chalk. Who’ll miss him? Who buys books during an invasion? This is how war goes: one day there’s a bookstore, the next a principal’s office. Wasn’t there once a bookshop here? What happened to that old man? You don’t think he was . . . ? A Jew? You think he fled? Did the Germans send him packing? To the next town, or the next life? Maybe he had family nearby. I don’t think he had family. Everyone has family. Maybe he’ll come back . . . They can’t stay forever, can they?

  JUST BEFORE EIGHT that evening, Mignon hurries up the hayloft ladder to find Karl below the window, testing the rope. They speak at the same time—“The cinema’s closed”—and then laugh. Karl assures her it will reopen soon; Mignon will believe that when she sees it. “It will,” Karl says. “Our Feldkommandant likes his flickers.” Maybe it’s the way they’re positioned—Mignon at the hay window like Juliet on her balcony—but she feels like a character in a play when she says, “I will see you whenever I am able,” her words flowing involuntarily, as if she’s powerless against this truth. “Since we met, it’s all I want.” She draws back, arms crossed protectively at her chest, but all fear evaporates when Karl says, “You’ve changed everything.” He reaches for her, and she for him, but their fingers are nowhere near touching.

  AS HE’S LEAVING rue des Brebis, Karl runs into Fiji, who invites him to the bar. Steamy with anger, Fiji wants to talk: the problem is his mother. “She thinks this will all blow over, that we’ll look back and say, Remember we thought there’d be a war?” He snorts at her ignorance.

  At the pub, the two meet Diederick, and when they return to chez Armond that night, all three are blotto. But there’s no scene, no drunken fracas or slapstick tripping over chairs, none of that. The billeted Germans collapse in their beds, and Fiji drags himself to the barn, where he falls to the hay beside Michel to sleep it off.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING at eight, the movie house not yet reopened, Karl climbs the knotted rope to the hayloft and, like a miracle, not a minute later, Mignon rushes up the ladder, and they fall together: a pince à levier couldn’t pry them apart. He’s trembling, she is too, and also crying. His hands rise to her face, tilt it up to his own. “Oh, mein Liebling,” he whispers. “Meine Süße, meine Liebe.” He kisses her tears—“Oh, meine Liebe”—then his mouth is at her mouth, lips to her wet lips, trembling, quivering there together.

  A sob catches in Mignon’s throat. “My mother is furious . . . all day . . . so very angry!”

  “What, what, meine Liebe? What—why? Why is she angry?”

  “Fiji. That Fiji . . . that he went . . . with you, drinking.”

  But Karl can only think: If she’s furious with her son for drinking with Germans, what of her daughter, here, in a German’s arms?

  “It’s the drinking,” Mignon says. “I think”—oh, it’s too preposterous!—“she likes you. But Fiji’s quit school.” And while Idette thinks well of Karl, and a week ago might even have thrilled at his attentions to Mignon, now things have changed. Karl is the enemy.

  The Germans occupy V——bourg for another week, then move on—Diederick’s so eager to take Paris, he can barely keep his pants up. Karl, though, would rather turn in his uniform, forget the army, stay in V——bourg the rest of his life with Mignon. There’s a grueling goodbye; the men get little warning, just an order to move out. Minutes before departure, he finds Mignon, promises to write, to return, and then he’s gone, a heartsick Nazi off to seize Paris.

  They take the city streets without a fight; the citizens simply evacuate. Another prime minister has already resigned; France is running through leaders like undershirts, the government decamping and relocating like a band of wayward gypsies when Philippe Pétain assumes the helm. Eighty-four years old and a hero of the Great War, Pétain’s a trusty anti-Semite with a fascistic bent that endears him to the Nazis. He’s also a comfort to the French: in V——bourg, they’re relieved to be in the hands of an honored father figure. So what if he’s ancient and senile. As the Americans will one day love Reagan, the French love Pétain like a grandfather, love him for the swaggering bigot he is. Oh, will humans ever tire of paternal, self-righteous leadership by dilettante pricks?

  Out of the gate, Pétain surrenders to Hitler, veritably leaping to autograph an armistice that lops France in half: the north and the western Atlantic coast will be German-occupied; the south, unoccupied, will be governed by Pétain and his crony cabinet from a new seat in the resort town of Vichy. In the south, the Germans will mostly leave the French alone, but up north, by German-annexed Alsace-Lorraine, Nazi resistance and collaboration will walk hand in hand.

  In V——bourg, on rue des Brebis, thanks to Jean’s enthusiastic cooperation, the Armonds will run a tailor shop/laundry/canteen/boardinghouse/information center/café, and the Nazi occupation will treat his family very nicely indeed. For a time. It seems that Jean is modeling his gracious hospitality on Pétain’s back-bending acquiescence to the Germans, but complicity can’t go on without consequences, whether immediate or eventual. Great Britain, for one, severs diplomatic ties with Pétain and refuses to recognize him as the leader of France, but the Armonds’ comeuppance won’t come until later. These early months of occupation are in fact ones the Armonds will look back on somewhat fondly. There’s a war on, yes, and they’re running a Nazi hostel, but nothing’s that bad. Supply and commerce routes are interrupted, and local farmers can’t export their goods, but there’s plenty to eat in V——bourg: cream, butter, meat. Even when Pétain enacts his anti-Semitic laws there’s no real alarm, since there aren’t any Jews in V——bourg, are there? Whatever did happen to that old bookseller? Was he a Jew? Really? When the radio trumpets Vichy’s slogans—France is strong! Vive la France!—in the announcer’s confident baritone it sounds like good news.

  Good news? Great Britain begs to differ. Like those less obliging to the Germans, Britain clings to one great hope for Nazi resistance in France: General Charles de Gaulle, de facto leader of the Free French. De Gaulle sees through Pétain’s congenial façade, recognizes Pétain’s government for the Nazi pawn it is. The Armonds must know of de Gaulle, right? The man’s in charge of a government in exile, commander of the resistance. He’s got fugitive cells scattered throughout the country in both the unoccupied, French-governed south and the Nazi-occupied north. There may well be Gaullists in V——bourg for all the Armonds know. If they’re listening to the radio or watching newsreels at the cinema, they’re getting all propaganda, all the time. But there are dissenters, French men and women who are mortified on their country’s behalf. In 1940, France has two governments, each convinced of the other’s illegitimacy. Even if the people of V——bourg know of de Gaulle, should they pledge him their allegiance? For ordinary French citizens just trying to survive the war, the right choic
e—that’s to say the left choice, to oppose the Nazis and their puppet, Pétain; the “right” choice as seen from the bird’s eye of retrospect—is not an easy choice. The right choice will not keep their children fed, their families alive. The right choice is dangerous. France’s seemingly irrepressible national pride is already crippled by national humiliation. Shame and terror: that’s France, circa 1940.

  NOW, LIKE IN an old movie, it’s the old flying-calendar-pages trope. Watch the calendar nailed to the wall of the Tailleur Armond. A fierce wind blows through the shop, tearing off pages, day by day until the wind dies and we understand that it’s now the summer of 1941. More than a year after Karl Perlmutter left to take Paris, he’s welcomed back at the Armonds’. Just him this time, and he refuses to take the boys’ room; he will stay in the barn. Idette prepares linens for a hay pallet, as good as making the bed for her Mignon’s deflowering. In the stifling heat of the hayloft, Karl and Mignon make love, and once they’re past the first-time fear and pain and awkwardness, nothing can stop them. They’ve been apart a year, and God knows when they’ll meet again. Propriety’s irrelevant. Pétain’s decrees be damned. They have just a few days.

  Lying on the quilt, entwined despite the heat, they talk not of war, but of Mignon’s family, the deepening discord between Jean and Idette. Michel is yet angrier, Virginie more muddled, more dependent on her twin. Bena’s ever petulant, taking everything personally: I don’t like how that soldier looked at me. The butcher skimped on our ration.