Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  “I know what’ll warm her up!” shouts another.

  “There is no coffee,” Bena retorts, “only chicory tea, and I’d rather suck a twig.”

  “Suck my twig, Mademoiselle!”

  “That’s all you’ve got, a twig. Come to my forest, Miss Armond. I’ll show you a tree!”

  Beneath the movie theater marquee, Bena faces the boys with cutting rectitude. “If one of you got me a real coffee, you never know what might happen.” She pushes into the schoolhouse.

  When she leaves again, hours later, to go home for lunch, she makes sure to pass the window at Chez Sylvie slowly enough that some German will have time to jump from his table, run to the door, and shout out into the cold: “Hey, cutie! Schnuckiputzi, come share a bite with a soldier.” He’s speaking German, but what’s not to understand? “There, that’s not so bad, eh? I’m a good guy. What’s your name? Bernadette? Pretty. Sylvie, something for Miss Bernadette!”

  Sylvie’s got teenage daughters herself and, in French the Kraut can’t understand, asks Bena, “He bothering you, sweetie?” But Bena’s been picked on by Idette far too long to fathom kindness from a woman that age and only shakes her head, says, “I’ll have soup.”

  Sipping Sylvie’s watery potato broth—the German marveling so, you’d think he’s never seen a girl eat soup—Bena senses something outside the window, someone else watching, and lifts her head from the soup bowl to see a woman wrapped in shawls, a tattered blanket around her shoulders, face nearly hidden in scarves. Then the woman lifts her chin, and she is Idette, and when she commences shouting, Bena lifts the bowl with two hands, drains it, and—cheeks ballooned with broth—grabs her coat. Swallowing, pulling on mittens, she joins Idette on the sidewalk. Embarrassing, but better than sitting with a chatty Kraut. Bena thanks her maman.

  “Don’t be smart, you. Don’t even talk to me!”

  “I wasn’t . . . He made me sit with him, Maman. What should I have done? I was hungry.”

  “Made you! There’s lunch at home. Don’t make excuses.” Idette drags Bena by the sleeve, saying, “I won’t lose another child to the Germans.” But when they’re halfway down the block Bena asks, “Maman, quelle heure? I’m due back at school. The others can eat a bit more today.” Idette drops Bena’s arm and walks on. Bena ducks back into the theater, where she’ll sit in a creaking seat, shut her eyes, and hope that if the bombers come they won’t aim for the ciné.

  ALLIES LAND AT NORMANDY; INVASION BEGINS ON FRENCH COAST. When word reaches V——bourg, celebrations don’t quite break out in the streets, and there’s no dancing down rue de la Ville, but there are private gatherings, toasts—To the Allies! Vive la France! Though Sylvie’s still waiting on Nazis at the café, and they continue to occupy the Armonds’ shop, at a farmhouse on the outskirts of town, in a near-empty root cellar, young people go and rejoice, drinking and dancing deep into the June night. Bena sneaks out—a boy she knows has a bicycle, and lets her ride the handlebars out to the party in the countryside, where they drink to freedom, and Bena and the boy—or another boy, any boy—climb from the cellar, wander off to a barn, where they’ll kiss and tease, Bena and this boy she hardly knows. But Bena swears she won’t be like Mignon, copulating in a barn like an animal. She’ll do it proper, in a bed. And she won’t give it away for free. Her maidenhood is currency she plans to use to escape.

  After D Day, liberation takes three long months to reach V——bourg. June and July are a stalemate in Normandy, Germans holding off the Allies’ advance. Finally, in August, defense lines break and rapid progress through France begins, field by bridge by village, road by town by farm. It’s all very confusing, too: the French aren’t sure if they’re still enemy occupied or if they’re a nation liberated, and they’re not sure who’s in charge. Supply channels thwarted, these post-liberation months are the war’s hardest yet in V——bourg. The only thing getting through dependably is bad news, nothing stanching its flow at all. News of purges, “épuration sauvage.” The French government will at some point institute official means of adjudication to hear cases of alleged French-Nazi collaboration, but until tribunals are established it’s all happening village by village. A witch-hunt is on. Disenfranchised so long, the French take up the mantle of their pride again, letting loose the anger that’s been fermenting four long years. Looking around, they lay eyes on those neighbors who don’t seem to have suffered quite so much: shopkeepers who turned profits, women—adolescent and middle-aged, married and widowed, the lovely and the homely, all—who’ve consorted with the enemy. “Horizontal collaboration,” it’s called. And depending on how “collaborative” they’ve been, and with whom, and how often, the women are beaten, flogged, or stoned in the town square. There’s talk of public head-shavings. Also executions. Something’s needed to lift public morale! The French haven’t won anything. Sure they’re relieved to be rescued, but there’s no national victory in which to take pride. Hardly a wonder that they create an enemy within. These women, someone cries, these harlots, turning their tricks against France, traitors to the country, trading on their beauty. Let’s see how they feel when we shave off their hair. See how they fare when they aren’t so fair . . .

  Still, the bombs keep falling. Then there’s this news: Fiji is dead. He’s been as good as dead since ’41, for all they’ve known, but now it’s official. Word comes via the Nazis, in whose uniform he died. Return of a body’s unlikely: with the German army in retreat, fighting is fierce, and no one’s going back to claim the dead. The Armonds are lucky they’ve been notified at all.

  By late summer of 1944, V——bourg is teeming with Germans. Haven’t been this many in town since ’40, only now they’re headed east, not staying long enough to so much as launder a shirt. The Nazis are sprinting home to defend their last line at the Western Wall. Months upon months of virtual standstill, and now everything’s accelerated, everyone flying backward, like a movie of the past four years on high-speed rewind, V——bourg in a frenzy, all zip and zing, and a bizarre, surreal, collective sense that the war’s being taken back, retracting itself, every lost yard regained, each seized bridgehead liberated, every dead soldier resurrected. In a newsreel in reverse, the dead who stand again aren’t zombies. They reanimate, reassemble, lost heads recapitating, severed limbs zooming at bodies to reattach. A foot flies from a tree, sails through the air, sweeping up a trail of debris—bone fragments, spattered tissue—and vacuums up its own insides, aims straight for its rightful spot on the end of that leg, pieces slapping together like wet clay, skin smoothed seamless. The man leaps to his feet to test the leg in a backward stride. Good as new! It’s the ultimate dream: the do-over, second chance. What’s hard to grasp is why they think they’ll get it right this time. If you rewind past the mistakes, how do you learn from them? How do you not make the same ones over and over, in repertory, for eternity?

  ONE DAY IN AUGUST, Bena’s standing by the shop window when she spots a man she recognizes on the street, and something about the familiar face makes her yelp with uncharacteristic glee. It’s Karl Perlmutter’s Bavarian buddy, Diederick Auslander. The war has not been unkind to him—nothing a hot bath and a good meal won’t fix, though the chance of either is slim. Bena cries, “Diederick!” and it’s only Mignon’s gasp that awakens her to what his arrival might mean.

  It’s been more than four years since Diederick and Karl billeted here, and he’s perhaps worried, as he approaches, that the Armonds’ allegiance has shifted over the course of the war. Plenty of French have changed their minds about Germany. Outside, Diederick removes his hat, and Mignon lets out a cry, sinks her head in her hands. She already knows.

  He steps inside. At a table, a soldier trimming his nails lets the clippings fall to the floor. In the shop, it’s just the two girls. He nods to the young one, identifies himself: “Diederick.”

  She returns his nod. “Bernadette,” she says.

  “Bernadette,” he repeats. Her countenance unsettles him—a defiance in the eyes, both inviting
and dismissive—and he feels an urge to command her, like a Jew. But that can wait. He approaches Mignon, sitting limp in her chair, and she lifts her head in a vain rush of hope: he’s here for something else! Needs a shirt ironed, a knee patched, was passing and remembered they were tailors. But Diederick flinches under Mignon’s gaze and averts his own. He pats absently at his lapel as if to recall where he put what he’s brought for her, as if it’s not burning there like an open wound. He sets before Mignon a letter wrapped around the photo of three little girls.

  My Mignon, If you read this letter, I have not kept alive to return to you. I am sorry. You are the world to me. I wish a swift end to war—whoever the winner—so you and your family may return to your peaceful lives from before we came. I am sorry the strife I brought, and most sorry I cannot make amends. I wish I could had made you my wife and we might could grown old together. I wish my mutti could know the girl I love. I wish so much things. If my wish had came true, you would not read this, but you are a wish that came true. I am your forever—your Karl.

  MIGNON CANNOT SPEAK. She cannot look at Diederick Auslander, nor can she breathe. She runs from the shop, through the kitchen, past the table of Germans, and out the back door, down the path, where she walked with Karl that glorious day of the invasion four years ago when the world was so very alive. In the barn, she climbs to the loft and throws herself on the hay, into the crumpled quilt that was theirs together, presses her face in it, grabs up fistfuls and shoves them in her mouth as if to choke herself to death right there. Gagging on cotton and straw, dust filling her eyes and lungs, she retches into that quilt, retches and heaves and screams.

  Back at the shop, Bena thinks to offer something to Diederick, but what’s left to offer? Herself? “Some tea?” He declines, and removes a flask from a pocket. He sips, then offers it to Bena, who drinks so fast she can’t tell what it is. They stand awkwardly: he’s tall, Bena squat beside him. He offers again, and she accepts, and drinks in a way she hopes might be suggestive.

  He says, “It’s been difficult,” and she doesn’t know if it’s a question or a statement, so nods noncommittally, then lifts her eyes to ask, “How—” But his voice is rageful: “How?” He’ll give her a bloody earful on the difficulty he’s endured! Then he understands: she’s asking how Karl died, so he drops his head low, but in the time it takes him to lift it to reply, Bena’s decided she doesn’t want to know. If she doesn’t know, she won’t have to decide whether to tell Mignon or not. In this moment, Bena’s vision narrows drastically: all that matters is that which furthers her escape. This singularity of purpose will be her salvation. And doom her to live out her life.

  Diederick takes Bena to lunch. Sylvie does what she can with paltry garden vegetables, a rabbit, an occasional tough rooster. There’s wine, if you can afford it, and Diederick orders a bottle as though there’s something to celebrate. Bena doesn’t refuse. She’ll refuse nothing; she’ll take what’s offered and use it somehow to her advantage. And so they are drinking when suddenly Bernadette leaps up, jostling the table—Diederick steadies the wine—and dashes at someone she’s seen: the third sister, Diederick realizes, looking like a beggar-urchin, destitute and pathetic. Observing their gestures, Diederick assumes Bernadette is furious, scolding and ordering her sister away. But before she goes, the wraith lifts her wasted arms and wraps them around Bernadette, who tolerates the embrace, though doesn’t hug her sister in return. The girl takes off, tearing past Diederick, her skin pulled taut over her bones as if she were straining through a fierce headwind. With a measure of revulsion Diederick notes how much she looks like a Jew running from a firing squad. He’s saddened to imagine any of those Jew women having once been as beautiful as Virginie used to be. Beauty is, he decides, a shameful thing to waste, and the thought makes him feel cultured, more refined. It’s this Diederick, urbane and sophisticated, who greets Bena when she returns to the table apologizing for herself: she’d neglected to see to Mignon before they left, to make sure she was all right. It’s also this mature, genteel Diederick who says, “Of course, of course,” as if in understanding, and this Diederick who assures her that Virginie will tend to Mignon, for he’d like very much if Miss Bernadette will accept his invitation to join him in the room he’s let at the Fourniers’, around the corner. He’s not afraid to stay the night; the Allies are nearing, but they’re not so close that he’ll show fear. This V——bourg stop is good for his men’s morale. They’ll be at the Western Wall in another day, and for now it’s important to show that Nazis do not run scared. They calculate, lure the enemy to the lair, and then eat them alive. At the Siegfried Line, the Allies will fall.

  Just inside the door to Diederick’s garret room are three small steps up, and he holds the door for Bernadette to mount before him. When she’s perched above him, he pulls and latches the door with one hand and slides the other between Bernadette’s buttocks. Her skirt pulls taut as he cups the mound of her pubis in his hand. It’s the way he’d hold a chicken back on the farm in Bavaria: cradle the belly and breast, then cover the eyes so she’ll stop her struggle and let you hold her close to breathe in the warm, dusty sweetness of her feathers just before you snap her neck.

  Bena, her pubic bone against Diederick’s firm hand, can’t go ahead and can’t turn back, can only wait for whatever comes next. He withdraws ever so slightly, then presses a finger into her. She fears she’ll lose her bladder—piss herself, and him. But she holds it, and the urge changes. It becomes a desire, the desire to push herself into his finger and then come away. Press toward, and release, rock to, draw back, movements so small they seem to happen inside, press and release, like a foot, softly, on the sewing machine treadle, press and release, press, release. And then Diederick lifts her up by the crotch and deposits her in his room, on the bed, facedown on a cover of mothballed brocade. He hikes up her dress from behind and drags down her underthings. Then he’s rubbing her haunch, sliding his palm over her flank, circling and kneading the flesh. When he lifts it away, she feels loss, wishes fleetingly for it to return—and then it does, but not as before. It comes as a slap, stinging and sharp, so surprising she can’t cry out. The blow reverberates in her body. When he strikes her again the skin is already charged and buzzing with current that flares anew with each crash of his hand. Again and again, and she’s shocked by the relentlessness; each blow, she thinks, must be the last, until the next, and another. And again. She only winces, doesn’t cry. Surely she can say no, can’t she? Surely she can say stop? But she holds off—how long can it possibly last? Once more, she thinks, and I’ll cry out. The next time, I’ll shout. The next . . .

  She thinks she’s gone numb, for what surprises her next is not a blow, but its lack, no impact, only an intake of breath. And then, in what seems like all one sweep, he’s yanked down his pants and lowered himself onto Bena from behind, pushing himself between her thighs to find where he can part her, like curtains stuck closed at the cinema, and wedge himself inside, like he’s pushing his fist into a full balloon, and she fears that she, the balloon, will explode. And then she does—bursts—with a pop like a silenced gun. She yelps in horror; Diederick pushes her face into the sharp-stinking bedcover. Deep inside there’s pain, and pressure diffusing into a low, spreading warmth, a sensation impossible to describe, for she’s never felt or imagined it before. Facedown on the bed in the Fournier guest house on rue de la Réformation, Bena feels herself pulse and spread, expand and blur. And then there’s a jolt, and another stretch follows, a slow horror before Diederick sinks onto her, and shrinks out of her, and all she can think is how full she was just then, hadn’t felt so full in years.

  WHEN BENA RETURNS home that day she’s met by a sewage stench that turns her stomach, and her first thought is that she’s pregnant. Can you feel a baby so soon? She doesn’t know, and whom can she ask? Maybe it’s only the wine. When Idette turns, Bena’s sure she knows: Bena’s been with a Nazi; she’s pregnant with his Nazi child.

  “Karl.” Idette spits hi
s name like a curse. “Karl’s dead. And Mignon’s gone mad!” She throws up her hands, shuddering, dishtowel flailing like a limp pompom. She looks mad herself. One fool daughter after another losing her goddamn mind! Idette storms across the kitchen, rag raised like a whip. Flinging it down, she grabs Bena, who cries out, the foul soup-stench coming off her mother like the rot of disease. Idette’s nose flinches, like she’s awakening to the reek herself, but then Bena seizes in fear that what Idette smells is the sex on her, smells Diederick, and the wine, and the mothballed bed onto which Bena’s virtue has been discarded like a dirty sock.

  But Idette is too far out of her mind to be so aware. She wrenches Bena’s arm, her eyes flaming, voice a terrible whisper. “You’re all that’s left.” It’s a curse as much as it’s truth. “I can’t run this shop alone.” Then her tone’s shifts from manic to businesslike, as if she’s discussing employees, not her own children. “Two crazies now, and the commanders need—”

  “The Germans won’t be here long, Maman. The Allies are coming.”

  “And if they get here”—Idette is dubious—“they’ll have dirty shirts to be washed as well.” Idette thrusts her stirring spoon at Bena. “Tend the soup. I’ll see to the madwomen.”

  Mignon stays in the barn for two days, Virgie by her side, stroking her hair, except when she must get up to fetch a rabbit from the hutch, lift it by its scruff, and hold it to her bony breast to stroke its soft, soft fur, nuzzle it a moment before she turns it over to Idette to stew for dinner. It’s weeks before Mignon’s back to work, assuming a kind of half-functional catatonia. She seems soothed by the regimen of laundry, so that’s what she does: wash, rinse, dry, iron, fold, repeat.

  WHEN THE FIRST bombs fall on V——bourg, no one’s sure who’s dropping them. Allies pushing the Nazis east toward Germany? Germans shelling as they retreat? It’s terrifying, but the bombs mostly target the rail station, the grain store, bridges, though sometimes they miss. One bomb lands out beyond the Armonds’ barn, but close enough to the shop that Bena and Idette, both inside, find their ears ringing for days after, until the clang gives way to a hum they’ll know all their days. The bombs are terrifying, yes, but they’re nothing compared to the purges.