Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  Karl laughs softly, face shiny with sweat in the moonlight. “And Fiji? He’s been cold . . .”

  “He has been different since you’re here,” Mignon admits. “I think it’s jealousy. He’s a kid, living with his parents. You’re the soldier he wants to be.”

  “Well, I’m jealous of him, too,” Karl says. “To have spent a whole life with you . . .”

  They gaze up in the dark, old barn, moonlight shining in the roof cracks like stars. Then Mignon begins to speak. “Some years ago, we had a hole in the roof. In the house, in the girls’ room. It was just mice, but Virgie was terrified. Of the hole, not the mice. She was scared to sleep. Papa said ridiculous, but Virgie couldn’t sleep until he fixed it. The hole wasn’t big, but Virgie stayed awake guarding it. She thought it would suck her away. The earth is so tiny, floating in nothing, she said, eternal nothing.” Mignon’s quiet, and Karl waits for her to go on. “When Maman saw Virgie, gaunt, dark under her eyes, she told Papa, Fix it, so he patched the hole. I know I only fool myself, Virgie said, but the roof—it’s all there is keeping us here. And Michel, I think. Michel binds her to this life, holds her here.”

  Karl takes Mignon in his arms and, sweat-slick, they cling to each other, Karl whispering, “I will hold you here,” and there they stay until Mignon must go back to the shop to work.

  EARLIER THAT SUMMER, and with great enthusiasm, Jean Armond joined La Légion Française des Combattants, Pétain’s coalition of veterans. Pétain says France’s 1940 defeat was the result of bourgeois egotism; the French have grown soft, vulnerable to Bolshevism. His answer? National revolution! Jean pledges fealty to the Victor of Verdun, takes Pétain’s oaths—self-sacrifice before pleasure, country over self—and swears to follow blindly and unconditionally wherever the Marshal shall lead. Such is apparently a Frenchman’s duty. A new European order is coming—led by Germany, yes, but Jean Armond won’t see France left behind. Idette accuses him of Nazism. Jean parrots Vichy’s slogans in reply: “Neither right nor left, straight ahead with the Marshal.” This evening he’s brought home a framed photo of Pétain for the mantel, and as Mignon’s reentering the house from her assignation in the barn, she hears her parents arguing. It seems Idette has caught Jean talking to the photo—“With the Légion, for France”—and saluting his leader, and Mignon hears Idette scoff, “Why not add a Heil Hitler for good measure?” so she slips upstairs, out of her parents’ fray. There’s something she wants to find up there. It’s not like she can’t hear the whole fight anyway.

  If Jean Armond ever had a sense of humor, he’s surrendered it. “I’m not German and do not hail their Führer. My wife should watch her tongue. What if Karl heard you speak like this?”

  Idette says nothing. Bena’s listening silently from the kitchen sink. But Fiji, at the table drinking coffee, can keep quiet no longer. He should’ve been off fighting six months ago, but under the armistice France can no longer keep a standing army of any size. There’s no place for him. “Hitler will be everyone’s leader soon enough,” he says now, and what emerges in response from Idette is a hiss so feral it sounds like it’s come from Chou-Chou. Fiji looks at her with pity and loathing, his tone as patronizing as his father’s but with the force of a young man’s grievous self-righteousness. He spits words like automatic gunfire: “You stupid, blind, ignorant cow.”

  For this, apparently, Jean will not stand. “Never speak to your mother that way.”

  Fiji, a machine gun on trigger lock, turns on his father. “You,” he growls. “You think your Marshal’s going to save the day with his revolution? He’s no better than the ones who handed France over. Go on with your ‘We must all think and act French,’ just like the Marshal says. You will die in the hole our pitiful leaders have dug. Pledging allegiance to fools—you’re worse than she is!” Fiji can’t look at Idette. “Even she knows the Marshal’s a joke. Hitler’s played Vichy. He will be Europe’s leader. You think he cares for your Victor of Verdun?” Fiji pauses to breathe, but then gives up. What’s left to argue? They won’t be moved, and he’s got more important battles to fight—on the side of the real victor. He turns and storms out of the shop.

  As it happens, Karl’s just come down from the hayloft when Fiji charges out the back door. “My parents are fools, clinging to shreds of a dying France!” He pushes Karl back to the barn, slumps to the wall, and sinks, forehead to palm, beleaguered-Hollywood-cowboy style. “I have to get away from this place—and don’t tell me to go work in Germany. I’m not a slave!”

  “It’s not so bad.” But Karl has no idea how it is in the labor camps, though he can guess.

  “I want to fight,” Fiji says. “I want to be a soldier.”

  “It’s not impossible, you know. There’s the Légion des Volontaires Français . . .”

  Fiji scowls. “My father’s in it. You’ve got to be a veteran.”

  “You’re mistaken,” Karl tells him. “The LVF is for young men. Very selective. Elite.” The boy perks up at this, like Chou-Chou leaping at a dangled string. “Boys can sign up in Paris.”

  And Fiji’s on his feet, headed fifteen directions at once. “But I have to get to Paris!”

  He could let Fiji stew—make him scamper to find a ride or set out on foot—but he sees Mignon coming down the moonlit path from the house, and Karl wants him gone. “We’re headed there,” he says, as if offhandedly. “When we leave here, in a few days. You might tag along.” Fiji’s visible lust is discomfiting, but Karl goes on. “Talk to our Feldkommandant at the old school. Tell him I sent you.” Gaining a recruit will speak well of Karl. “And I’d go quickly.” Karl knows any young man left in V——bourg’s going to want to leave with the Germans. At this point, who wouldn’t want to join the LVF? Better than a work camp, which is where everyone else is going. Except Mignon: Karl’s determined to see her spared. And her sisters, too, if he can.

  Fiji takes off as Mignon approaches bearing the thing she was searching for upstairs, a photograph she’s handing now to Karl. “So you can know the little girl . . .” She points: “Me, and Virgie there, and little scowling Bena.” Karl shakes his head, smiling: of course he knows who’s who! Three girls in ruffles and ribbons, but he can already see the adults they’ll become, peering up at the photographer, Mignon invitingly, Virginie lost, Bena with absolute disdain.

  “There’s a photo studio in V——bourg?” Karl asks, full of sudden hope.

  “No,” Mignon says, “a photographer came through once. But you take this. You keep it.”

  “But surely your mother—?”

  “Couldn’t care less. She’d say, You’re right here, what do I need with a photograph?”

  Karl squints, seeming not to understand. But he does, terribly well: not one photo exists of his own father. His mutti burned them all, but Karl’s always thought this a unique perversity.

  Mignon’s still speaking: “And if she were to lose one of us, she’d act as if we’d never been born at all. When I was a little girl,” she tells Karl, “a woman came to see us, someone Maman grew up with here—she’d moved away, returned to visit. We were introduced, and the woman said, Of course, named for Idette’s poor, dear sister. And I thought, Maman had a sister? I never knew this! Maman became churlish, as good as sent the woman away. I was four, maybe. My parents called me Mignon as a pet name, but after that day I was only Mignon. Papa told me Maman’s sister had died as a child. I was named Hazelle, for her, but we would never use that name again. I think now she’s forgotten I wasn’t always Mignon. Zzzzp. Gone.”

  If Mignon expects Karl to show surprise, it’s she who’s made curious by his broad, brimming smile and the wonder in his eyes as he asks, “How have I found you? How am I so lucky to have found you?” He will tell her, then, about his dead, willfully unremembered father, his emotionally spectral mutti, his lonely childhood in the ever-clean inn among revolving guests and strangers. When visitors came with their children, his mutti had him wait on them, and this alone seemed to make her proud: to see her Karl
as butler to these young masters, charming as a display of precious miniatures. Otherwise, her son felt he was only a burden, a reminder of her dead husband she could not simply burn. She loved Karl with more reproach than affection.

  Now, in the barn, Karl throws his arms around Mignon, kissing her face, her hair, whispering, “I am so lucky, so very lucky, how am I so lucky to have found you?” And as she’s kissing him back, she takes his face in her hands, making him focus on her eyes as she says, “We,” her mouth forming the word, “we.” She says, “We are so lucky to have found each other.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Karl sends a boy with a note for Mignon. Virgie and Bena are ironing, their faces swollen, gray as boiled turnips. Michel and Idette fold sheets; Fiji’s fixing a sewing machine, sweat dripping in its guts. Mignon is darning socks when the boy enters. “From Perlmutter,” he says, and she sets down her work to fetch him a few sous for his trouble. Such an adult gesture, dropping coins in the lad’s palm, and Mignon feels acutely aware of herself as an adult, a relish for which she’ll berate herself later: if she’d been humbler, perhaps the note might have contained some frivolity, but she thought, How lovely to be a woman, to receive a note this way, and it said: “We leave tomorrow. Tell Fiji, please. Come to the barn tonight.”

  THE DAY THE GERMANS leave V——bourg is obscenely sunny. Idette does not see the troops off; she learns they are gone from Mignon, who runs in, her hair frizzed to a corona and littered with straw. “You were out like this? Before the whole town?” She slaps Mignon’s head.

  “They’re gone,” she says, teary-eyed. “They’re gone.” Mignon’s eyes beg Idette to do something motherly, something to spare her child pain. But there’s too much pain; no one will be spared.

  Idette returns to her kneading—bread from good flour, from Karl—muttering, “About time our lives returned to normal.” But as Mignon weeps, Idette begins to rave: “What? Did you imagine he’d stay? Here, with you, in a sheep barn?” The dough’s a useful prop; she slams it down. “You think he loves you more than his motherland?” She sneers this—mother—a word forever corrupted. “You think a war just disappears? Poof?” But wasn’t it Idette who thought the war might just poof away? When Idette retreats to prayer, that old standby, who can judge her? Who can blame her for seeking comfort wherever she might find it?

  Karl takes two things of the Armonds’ with him when he leaves. In his breast pocket, near his heart, he keeps the photo from Mignon. He gets some lewd comments when he’s caught gazing at little girls in christening gowns, but he doesn’t care. He has one goal: return to Mignon.

  The second thing he takes isn’t a thing, it’s Fiji. In a borrowed uniform that’ll serve until he joins a battalion and gets his own, which’ll be a German uniform with an armband in the colors of the French flag. Really, he might as well be in the German army. Basically, Fiji’s a Nazi.

  And the war goes on. Jean’s “business” thrives. His new project is rabbits—a food and a commodity! Of course, it’s the children who tend them. Michel and Virgie take to it naturally, and Bena, naturally, sulks, adding “rabbit husbandry” to the list of things the twins share without her. The three of them go to some semblance of school at the ciné, but most of their classmates are off fighting—for the Germans, the resistance, who knows? Mignon and Idette run the shop, and Jean scampers about town, bringing home wine one day, wallpaper the next. For as long as there is thread to be gotten, Virginie stitches, maniacally, until her fingers blister and bleed, a Fate sewing as if the future depends on it. They hear nothing from Fiji. Maybe he’s a lousy letter writer or maybe he’s dead. Hard to know, since the mail is not what it was. Karl writes on occasion, hastily scribbled missives if he meets someone who will be passing V——bourg, but whenever the shop bell rings, Mignon’s sure it’s someone come to tell her Karl is dead. She cannot imagine what she will do if he dies. She plugs the hole of that possibility with mending, washing, cooking—she even joins her mother in prayer. At this point, why not?

  News flash: PEARL HARBOR ATTACKED! Its meaning for France is unclear. Will they be saved? Bombed? No one’s sure. French resistance grows, but so does the Gestapo. The Germans stiffen laws; so it goes. Then, in April 1942, the Franco-German ceasefire is repealed. All France is now occupied France. Frightening rumors circulate, about prisoners, about camps. June brings announcement of the Relève: French POWs will be released in exchange for French volunteers to work in Germany. But here’s the thing: no sane person will volunteer to board a German-bound train in the summer of ’42. They’ve heard about the Jews, rounded up, herded aboard like cattle, never seen again. A little chug-chug toot-toot off to Germany? Thank you, no.

  Then the terms of the Relève tighten further: all men aged eighteen to fifty and unmarried women from twenty-one to thirty-five will be shuttled off to Germany whether they “volunteer” or not, with the French police under orders to enforce the new laws. So, like everything else in this corrupt world, the Relève functions on exemptions and allowances. Those with money can fight or flee the edicts, but the poor, say, or the politically unconnected? Too bad. Off to Germany—that’s the law! Jean Armond appeals to the Feldkommandant, with whom he’s done much business and played plenty of cards these past two years. He requests exemption for himself, Mignon, and Michel. He comes home apoplectic with rage, spinning in circles, slamming the table. “I’ve welcomed them in my home! My son is in their army! And this is my thanks? These are their manners?”

  “Manners?” shrieks Idette. “A war, occupation, and you want manners?”

  Jean’s face vibrates like a cartoon character who’s swallowed TNT. “There is a right way and a wrong—” And just then, Chou-Chou, with keen comic timing, hacks a hairball at his feet.

  Idette rails: “And you expect the enemy to conduct their affairs in the right way?”

  “How dare you?” He’s speaking to Idette but looking to Pétain on the mantel. What can a woman know? She’s never seen combat, death. “You know as much of war as this cat!” he cries, then kicks Chou-Chou and stomps in the puddle of vomit. It sends him sprawling across the kitchen like a vaudevillian on a banana peel. Virginie soars to the cat’s rescue.

  “Papa,” Mignon pleads, “what happened? What did they say?”

  “ ‘Your cooperation will be rewarded. Your daughter may work for the cause in France.’”

  Trembling, clutching the cat like a live grenade, Virginie cries, “And Michel?”

  “They’ll send back a prisoner of war,” Jean offers lamely. At this, Virgie crumples, nearly smothering Chou-Chou, who struggles to free himself, claws tearing at Virgie’s arms and chest. She doesn’t even notice; Mignon will point out the raised welts later. But there’s more comeuppance yet to come: as payback for Jean’s impertinence to request Relève exemption at all, the Germans take over the business. Jean and Michel are deported to German work camps, and in V——bourg, Idette and the girls become unpaid employees in their own shop, servants in their own home, the kitchen occupied day and night by Nazis, eating, drinking, carousing, and flirting—shamelessly, viciously—with the Armond girls. One of whom wears an engagement ring she claims is a German officer’s, and another who’s young and sour, but comely, too, in a nasty-ish way. The third’s a beauty, indeed, but also crazy: woo-woo-batso as a syphilitic whore.

  SEATED ON CRATES they haven’t yet used for fuel, Mignon begs Virgie to eat something, but she pushes away the bread, instead reaches to stroke her sister’s face, as though it’s Mignon to whom the current situation must be explained. Virgie learned of the short rations allotted Relève workers in Germany and will not eat a crumb more herself until every worker is returned. She’s in slow-motion decay. No thread left for stitching, her bony fingers go now to her hair, feeling for a patch she’s clawed to stubble. She doesn’t know she’s doing it, but cannot stop from finding a strand to twist and wrap around a purpling fingertip until the hair breaks and she can roll it off and tuck it in her apron. It’s like she’s trying to collect enou
gh to weave hair socks for a POW.

  Wearily, Mignon rises to refill the Germans’ cups. Steeped toasted acorns, chicory, and twigs are what passes now for coffee. For a time the Nazis stocked the tailor shop, but no one can ensure supplies anymore. Trade is interminably slow; mail, too. Mignon still writes letters, but Michel has been relocated several times—separated from Jean early on, probably for the best, his chances better on his own—and who knows if the letters arrive. She also writes to Karl in hopes he might help return her father and brother to France. And to the German authorities, as “the fiancée of Officer Karl Perlmutter.” She’s even bartered herself an “engagement ring” to serve her story.

  If only to escape the stifling shop, Bena continues at school. Mornings, she escapes without a word, just the door’s clang-clang. The chime alerts Virginie, who trails Bena out, though she doesn’t go to school, just wanders, truant, twisting off her hair, while Bena is escorted to the lyceé by a rotating throng of Nazis. She doesn’t thrill at their attentions, but it’s bitter cold and the soldiers do make something of a wind block. She’s hardly out the door when a pasty one approaches to say, “I accompany you.” It’s a statement, not a question. Then another joins him, asking, by way of conversation, “Mademoiselle, what do you go to study in the school?”

  Though she’d rather hunch against the cold, Bena walks tall. “Oh,” she says, “navigation, riflery, bomb-making.” The boys laugh unconvincingly. Bena wishes she weren’t kidding. They round a corner, whipped by a staggering wind. Bena knows this route in any weather and turns to walk backward, calling, “If you can’t stand the wind, how will you fare against the Allies?”

  “By killing them!” They laugh, the wind pulling ghoulishly at their open mouths.

  “Mademoiselle,” calls a new boy, “may I get you a coffee? Something to warm you up?”