Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  4

  * * *

  TO THINK THIS COULD HAPPEN ON RUE DES BREBIS

  But it wasn’t a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you . . . and you were there. But you couldn’t have been, could you?

  —The Wizard of Oz

  IT DOESN’T LOOK all that different from Prairie, but I know it’s not Iowa in that way you just know things in dreams. It’s a French town—unnameable, the location too tactically critical to reveal—known cryptically only as V——bourg, as if this were a Victorian novel, though what it looks like is a black-and-white film. Is it true that we dream only in black and white? Not for Dorothy . . . But this is like Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, or something by Truffaut: beautiful grayscale, crisp as a gelatin silver print, the cobbled road glinting with flecks of mica. A sign mounted on a corner building—white letters, dark background—says rue des Brebis. This is Sheep Street. And here come the Germans.

  On foot, apparently. No tanks or armored vehicles like in the newsreels—the streets are too narrow for marching formations—so the Nazis saunter casually into V——bourg like soldiers on furlough. A few officers ride horseback, but most come as pedestrians. And above, on balconies and terraces, children peer over rickety wooden railings to watch the Nazi arrival. It’s less like an invasion than a parade—smiling Germans tossing sweets to the crowds, boys and girls jumping from their mothers’ laps to catch the prizes. It’s like New Orleans at Mardi Gras! It’s the German invasion of France! In black and white! With candy!

  As the march dwindles, soldiers break off in twos or threes to assess the town’s billeting options. Where will the officers sleep? The enlisted men? Where to set up a communications center? At the library, perhaps. Or the dance hall. Or here, in this tailor’s shop, on rue des Brebis.

  Three Germans wait on the stoop for the proprietor to answer their knock. “Bonjour, Monsieur,” says the lead soldier. “Je vous demand pardon . . .” And Jean Armond, tailleur of V——bourg, steps aside to welcome the enemy with a sweeping gesture: Come in! Polite, mannerly, they wipe their feet, careful not to track mud. The officer in charge is handsome, like a young Ed Harris—pre–Right Stuff, the Ed Harris of Borderline, or even Coma—already losing his hair, but he’s so handsome it seems only right to clear away anything that might distract from that beauty. He begs pardon of the tailor, regrets bothering him and his family on such a fine spring day. Would Monsieur care for a cigarette? Some sweets for the children?

  All smiles and generosity, the Germans offer chocolates and marzipan fruits to Armond’s children as their spokesman introduces himself: he is Karl Perlmutter. Just then, the shop cat slips down from its perch in the window, and Jean Armond introduces him, too. “This little fellow,” he tells the soldiers, “is Chou-Chou.” The cat, in turn, stretches, plants his front paws on one man’s tall black boot, and tries to use it as a scratching post. At this there’s a chirp of laughter from the back of the shop, and Karl Perlmutter looks up to see, in the arch dividing the tailor shop from the Armonds’ kitchen, the only woman besides his mutti he will ever love.

  Flustered, Karl stiffens, shuts his eyes, tries to remember his place, what he’s there for. He tugs at his tunic, straightens himself in that high-cinched belt. His decorations shiver like spangles. When he speaks, it’s loudly, as if to make up in volume what he’s just lost of his heart. “We must inspect the barn,” he declares. And then, by a miracle, Armond offers up this lovely girl, his eldest daughter: “Mignon, ici! Show these gentlemen the barn.”

  Whatever Mignon’s reaction, Karl can’t see it, for the girl’s mother has stepped in and placed her own body (short, but imposingly bosomed) in the kitchen arch directly between her daughter and the Germans to block passage. But Perlmutter is undeterred. In brusque German the Armonds cannot understand, he takes charge, orders one soldier to stay and keep watch, and tells the other, “Follow, but not too close.” And Madame Armond, cowed by this foreign exchange, simply recedes as the Nazis step forward to claim her lovely daughter.

  Mignon ushers the men through the dark, oniony kitchen and out into the streaming sunshine of the yard. It’s long and narrow, both sides fenced, and lined with rhododendron, peonies, forsythia—you can almost see the yellow in the black-and-white buds, as if they’ve been hand-painted by Georges Méliès, tiny dots against the plush dogwoods. The young couple strolls this flowering walk; the other soldier—Diederick Auslander, a buddy of Karl’s from back home—keeps his distance behind. And behind them all, from the back door of the house, Idette Armond watches her daughter take that blooming lane as if she’s walking a flower-strewn wedding aisle. Mignon, a bride. But the bride of a Nazi. A Nazi who’s just invaded France.

  “Mignon,” Karl says, “this is your name? Mignon?”

  “Oh!” she replies. “Yes, it’s what I’m called.”

  “Then I shall call you Mignon. And you must . . . you must talk to me as Karl.”

  Mignon smiles shyly. Karl thinks she seems eager, though for all he knows, at the end of the path, in the old sheep barn at the far end of the property, her eager-to-please father may have fugitive Jews hiding in his unused stalls, munitions cached in the hay. But what Karl fervently hopes is that there are no Jews or armed French defenders secreted in the barn. Since his knock at the tailor’s door, Karl’s vision of the war has changed. Leave the Jews to the generals! Karl wants only to billet himself here with Mignon. Never mind the invasion, the Führer, the war. It’s spring, and the ground is plush with young grass, and Karl is ready to give up his country, trade Germany for France, anything for the chance to lie down with this girl upon the achingly soft lawn. Maybe, thinks Karl—this newborn, reborn Karl—maybe France will surrender, and the rest of Europe, too, and there won’t be a war so much as a redistribution, a semantic business, really.

  The German troops won’t stay long in V——bourg anyway; they’ll have to push farther into France. Not much to accomplish here, just over the border, so close to Germany there’s little to differentiate one country from the other, one people from its enemy. Karl is nineteen. He’s never been away from Bavaria before, or from his mutti. When he left, she cried at the gate, “Mein kind, mein kind,” until he was down the road. He didn’t look back, but knows that before he was out of sight she’d have taken a breath, arranged her face, and fetched her broom to sweep the road in front of their house, to sweep away the footprints of her only child.

  INSIDE THE SHOP, Idette Armond whispers angrily to the obsequious toady who is her husband. “Tell me,” she hisses, “what do you gain, welcoming them?”

  Jean Armond is a sycophant, yes, and also a veteran of the Great War. He fought Germans in the trenches, and this current reversal in France’s fortunes evokes in him not so much anger but embarrassment. For his hereditary enemy Jean also harbors a kind of fraternal solidarity. It feels sometimes as if they were all in those wretched trenches together, not combatants, but brothers-in-arms. He can’t help but admire Hitler’s well-trained army and accord them due respect—it’s his way of contending with shame. And now, supercilious in response to his ignorant wife’s accusations, he replies, “There is everything to gain through the favor of those in power.”

  Idette gawks. “So they’ve won already? You give up on France just like that? Pffft.” She flicks her hands to show his callousness: brushing off his country like crumbs from the table.

  BACK OUT IN THE YARD, with the sort of bravado that so often accompanies falsity, Karl Perlmutter decrees the ramshackle Armond barn unsuitable, inadequate for the Germans’ use, the disrepair too great. It’s a lie; the barn is ideal: sheltered stalls for the officers’ mounts, proximity to town, a bit of grass on which to graze the horses. But Karl is no longer serving the German army. Karl has turned traitor, allied on the side of love. “But,” he tells Mignon, “the house will serve nicely.” He’s acting a part—it’s not war, it’s theater! “There are guest rooms, yes?”

  “Guest rooms?” Then she understands. “Oh, no.
You’ll have ours—you must!” But Karl is shaking his head, refusing to displace anyone in the gracious Armond household, so Mignon must lift her jaw and defiantly insist: “You will have my brothers’ room. Not another word about it. The weather’s warm—they’ll take the hayloft, where they slept as children. It’s settled.”

  So Karl and Diederick move into the boys’ room. The third German billets elsewhere, and the Armonds will never see him again. He’s the first of many nameless Nazis. The two Armond brothers are exiled to the creaky, cantilevered sheep barn, which is fine with Fiji, who’s nearly eighteen and more than ready to get out of his parents’ house. On his birthday he plans to join the French army. But sixteen-year-old Michel is annoyed. He doesn’t mind sleeping in the barn, but he’s angry that France’s defeat should also dictate his family’s humiliation. Michel would prefer to stand tall before the invaders and show himself worthy of respect. Karl and his buddy Diederick are just a few years older than he is, and so impeccably trained. They’re not admirable, these Nazis, nor enviable, but they are impressive.

  ON THE FIRST MORNING after the invasion, at the large farm table in the Armond kitchen, Michel laces his school shoes while his twin, Virginie, sips absently at a café. Virginie does everything absently. She is always elsewhere, but Michel serves as her earthly tether, grabbing on to her skirts or a hair ribbon, keeping his sister with him. The twins look young for sixteen, but especially Virgie. Known as delicate, touched, troublée, ethereally beautiful Virgie is not quite of this world. Think Gene Tierney in Tobacco Road—that kind of beauty.

  Bernadette, on the other hand—thirteen, the baby of the family, her chair at present pushed back from the table while Idette roughly plaits her hair—Bena looks like Idette: solid, short-waisted, scowling. No one could blame her just now—Idette would have done better dehorning goats or castrating cattle than braiding girls’ hair—but Bena’s scowl is perpetual, and an accurate representation of her general disposition. Gnawing bread as Idette braids, Bena looks like she has to restrain herself from taking a bite of her mother’s yanking hand.

  Idette inventories the kitchen. “Où est Fiji?” she asks. Fiji, her eld-est, she named Jean, like his father—Père Jean and Fils Jean, Johns father and son—and over time “Fils Jean” has become “Fiji.” And it’s Fiji who’s conspicuously absent from the breakfast table this morning. Idette jerks Bena’s braid, repeats her question, “Où est ton frère?” And when Bena mumbles, “With the guests,” Idette slaps the girl’s head, snaps, “Don’t be smart,” as the shop door jangles open, although it’s not Fiji coming in but Père Jean Armond, up and out early, just returning now. Idette eyes him: he’s pleased, self-satisfied, waving a sheaf of papers.

  “Advertising!” is his answer to the question she’s not asked. His eyes are a-twinkle. He’s as jolly as Père Noël, casting about, saying, “Now, who’s got a café for old Papa?”

  Mignon obliges, tying on an apron over her frock, a smart, starched dress with a Peter Pan collar. It belongs to her mother. So do the shoes—a size 37, though Mignon takes a 39.

  “Si jolie,” Jean says, noticing her pumps and stockings. “What’s the occasion?”

  “We’ll be expecting new customers, won’t we?” Mignon sets to making coffee. The invasion’s brought out the adult in her: she feels like the woman of the house today.

  “Indeed!” Jean cries, snatching up his daughter’s hand to twirl her around. The invasion’s turned him into bloody Dick Van Dyke, the twinkle-toed tailor of rue des Brebis!

  So Mignon and Jean are dancing in the kitchen when Fiji and the Germans appear at the back door. Fiji pushes to the table to saw hefty slices off the bread loaf and Frisbee them to his buddies, and Karl and Diederick catch their breakfasts with the easy grace of natural sportsmen.

  “Du café?” Fiji calls, and his pals nod greedily.

  “Don’t forget your father!” calls Père Jean, and there’s the clang of the door again as he lets himself out, tub of paste in one hand, flyers in the other, a brush clenched in his teeth.

  For Idette, that’s it, she’s had quite enough of this mayhem. She wants everyone out of her kitchen, now. She wants silence. With one hand she hoists Bena up by the braid and shoos the twins with the other. “Off to school!” she cries, then turns on Fiji: “Look at you!” He’s in old work clothes, his hair flecked with straw. “Get dressed,” she orders him. “You’ll be late.”

  “I’m not going,” Fiji says, scrounging in a cupboard so he doesn’t have to face her.

  Idette’s voice pitches up: “Jean-Paul Armond!”

  “Maman,” he says, impertinent, “there are things more important than school right now.”

  At first Idette doesn’t understand. “Mignon’s here with us—you’ll help at the shop after school, as always.” She nearly apologizes; he was only being thoughtful.

  Except he wasn’t. “Maman, not the shop, the situation. In V——bourg.”

  She softens—such patriotism! “I think the gendarmes have this in hand, Fiji,” she chides, uncharacteristically playful for Idette, especially with Nazis in her kitchen.

  But to Fiji this is no playful matter. He’s furious with his mother, mortified to be treated like a schoolchild in front of the soldiers. Livid, feeling infantilized, Fiji storms from the house.

  When he’s gone, Idette turns to the Germans, palms up as if in surrender. “Children!” she cries, as if these two weren’t children themselves. All of them, children!

  Fiji doesn’t go to school that day, or any other, ever again. Truth be told, in the midst of an invasion, school’s a bit of a farce. Teachers duck out to whisper portentously in the hall. Students huddle in groups, sniffling like mourners at a wake. Some stand by the windows, just out of sight, to watch, for the school sits on a rise at the edge of town, and from the classroom window Michel can see the Nazis’ horses in V——bourg’s yards. He watches a soldier behind the Thibauts’ currying a chestnut mare, rubbing vigorously at the beast’s velvet flanks with a kind of maternal affection—not that Michel knows much of it. Idette’s smacks don’t count.

  Lycée pupils are sent home for lunch, and the three youngest Armond siblings make their usual way along the cobbled streets, past Chez Sylvie where the outdoor tables spill over with Nazis enjoying the midday sun and the swishing legs of young French girls. Of course it’s Virginie’s beauty that first excites the men’s desire, but when they find themselves invisible in her faraway gaze they turn to Bena, who’s not unattractive; she has Virgie’s golden-lit hair and peachy smooth skin. But Bena’s squat, barrel-bodied, a spark plug of a girl, though she’s becoming a busty little thing, an early bearer of breasts she’s still not wholly sure what to do with. Suffice it to say the German soldiers do not share her ambivalence. Her scowl isn’t pretty, but there’s a challenge in it these Nazis may enjoy. It’s what they expected from the French: resistance. The army didn’t put up any, but now here’s Bena, atoning for France’s supplication with that pouty glare of hers. However she intends it, whatever she may be feeling inside, it’s a look that reads one way to the German army. To them she’s saying, I bet you think you can fuck me, and they’re saying, You bet right. They’re saying, “Mademoiselles!” Calling out from their café tables, tripping over themselves to stand, to make room. “Bitte,” they shout, pulling out chairs, “nehmen Sie Platz!” “Ah-say-eh-vouz!” “Jolie, belle. Du bist sehr hübsch.”