Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  Just when I thought I could not take the pain much longer, I thought of my walk across the sea to Ameland. I was there again, the dark sand beneath my feet and the cool ocean mist blowing across like white dust in the breeze.

  Kidul cleaned and washed the baby I named Non and wrapped her in a cloth and took her out of the room to show MacLeod his new daughter. I watched through the open door and before MacLeod sat up from the couch to see the baby, he asked, Boy or girl? And when Kidul said, Girl, MacLeod stood but did not walk toward Kidul to see the girl. Instead he walked out of the house to go for a drink at the officers’ club. I imagined the other men asking, Can you handle two women in the house, MacLeod?

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  while buying him drinks. And MacLeod shaking his head, saying, I can’t even handle the one.

  But MacLeod was back that night, and again he helped take care of his new baby and he worried about the small animal sounds Non made in her sleep and when she woke crying with hunger he was the one who picked her up and made sure she was nursing properly from my breast and while I nursed he placed his hand on Non’s sheet in her crib so that her bed would be warm when she was put back down. When I fastened the diaper, MacLeod said, Let me do it, you’re pricking the poor thing, and I left and went to sit on the balcony and listen to the thrum of the insects in the forest, thinking that this too was the beginning of my daughter being taken away from me.

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  OV E R T H E WA L L

  IN THE PRISON YARD she noticed a hair again clinging to the same rock it had the day before, and the day before that. Each time she took the hair and let it sail away, over the wall of the prison. It was a blond hair, and when the sun was bright she could not follow the hair and she could not see if it was sailing away up over the prison wall, or if it was merely falling to the ground.

  Sister Leonide said she had a visitor. Clunet was her lawyer, he also at one time had been her lover, but he was now so old that his eyes were always wet and seemed to float in his head and it was difficult to tell if he was looking at her or at something to the left or right of her. He had no news from the Dutch consulate. He was not allowed to write many letters either, he explained to her, because it was a military trial, an espionage case to make matters worse. He was not allowed to come with her to see Bouchardon, and neither did he have the power to speak with any witnesses who may be able to help her.

  No one knows you are in prison, he said.

  No one? said Sister Leonide.

  Mata Hari was relieved. She did not want Non to know what had happened to her.

  The next day another blond hair was clinging to the same 6 2

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  stone in the prison yard. She took it off and again let it fly in the breeze. She became convinced that another prisoner was putting her hairs there so she could, bit by bit, set herself free. In days to follow, Mata Hari imagined that after all the hairs of the woman were set free, then what would follow would be bits of the woman’s skin, her nails, shavings even of her bone, which Mata Hari herself would dutifully pick from the stone and send up over the prison wall.

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  N OT H I N G TO D O W I T H M ATA H A R I

  WITH M ACL EOD STROKING Non’s head and smiling while she nursed from me, I thought for a moment that his smile was for both of us, but it wasn’t. When he looked at me, his smile disappeared. I wondered if my hair looked untidy, if my dressing gown was soiled with my leaking milk or even if it smelled faintly sour from milk that had stained it earlier in the day. He left the room and I could hear him in the kitchen telling Kidul that the satay she cooked was too hot, and that the spices made the baby’s belly ache. From now on, he told Kidul, Margaretha is to eat plain white rice.

  I ate the white rice in front of him, and when he was not there I feasted on the nasi goreng or the tender babi satay or cap cai with spicy sauce as if I had craved them and had not eaten them for years, when it had been only yesterday.

  Your boyfriend’s been sent back home, MacLeod said to me one day. Who will fuck you now?

  WHEN N ON started to teethe, MacLeod curled his finger and gave it to her to chew on, sweetened with some gula or susu. When it 6 4

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  was time for bed, he took his finger and stroked the bridge of her nose so that her eyes would keep closing, until they finally stayed closed and she slept.

  He cut Norman’s hair in the garden and the hair fell in half-moon shapes next to jasmine leaves and later MacLeod picked up one of the half-moons and put it in an envelope. Norm’s hair, 3 years old, he wrote on the envelope and he kept it in his top dresser drawer.

  MacLeod answered his own question for me. At night he came to me and he tore off my stained dressing gown and he buried his head in my swollen breasts, where my milk spurted onto his hair, and he forced himself into me, while with one hand I reached across the bed in the dark, searching for a towel to press upon my breasts and stop the flow.

  If I hated him it was never at these times. At these times I could forgive him because I knew it was the liquor making him rough. I could forgive him because the act seemed as if it had nothing to do with me.

  I felt more hatred for him when he told me that I was, for example, clipping Norman’s or Non’s nails the wrong way. He said I should use two angled cuts on each little nail, instead of one cut across the nail, which bent the nail, he said, and it was painful to the children. And I felt terrible thinking I had hurt them in any way at all and so I kissed each one of their small fingertips and told them how sorry I was and that I loved them and I would never hurt them again.

  I felt more hatred for MacLeod when he came home and I was sitting with Norman in my lap, putting on a show for him with his leather wayang kulit puppet, and Norman broke away from 6 5

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  our game and ran to him, yelling, Papa, Papa! I felt hatred for him when Non fell and scraped her knee and I went to pick her up, and Non cried even more when I picked her up and held out both her arms in the direction of her father, so that he would be the one to kiss her knee and hold her tight instead.

  What was easier than hating MacLeod was leaving it up

  to him to cut their nails. But I missed having them sit on me when I cut their nails and I missed holding their small hands in mine, my face close to them, breathing in the sweetness of their soft skin and hair, storing up the scent of them inside me, trying to fill up my lungs and body with it as much as possible so that their smells became a part of me and could last me a lifetime.

  What was easier than hating him was not to run and pick up Non when she fell, but to let MacLeod do it. I would leave the hut and take a walk instead. When I returned, he would be with the children in the garden, they would be fighting a battle with toy guns, and Norman would be wearing his father’s hat, and Non would be yelling, Bam, bam, as she fired off imaginary artillery, and no one would notice I was home after I’d walked silently up the bamboo steps and across the straw mat in my bare feet, dusty and brown from walking on the ground.

  And when night came I lay awake thinking and wondering

  what I would do if something were to take my Norm and my Non away from me. I wondered what I could do to keep them with me and so, before sleep, I imagined our hut had doors made of thick steel. Nothing could enter through them, not fire or flood or thieves or sickness, and I shut those doors in succession from all directions, north, south, west, east, and it was not until 6 6

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  I had pictured these doors all shut and locked that I was able to fall asleep. But at times I wondered if someone already living inside the house was more dangerous than anything else that could possibly enter it.

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  S I ST E R L E
O N I D E

  SISTER L EONIDE SAID she had become a nun late in life. For years she had cleaned hotel rooms and she said you learn a lot about people by cleaning up after them. You learn how they wake up in the morning, if they jump out of bed or if they slide out of it or if, when they do get up, they sit on the edge of the bed first before gathering some kind of strength to stand all the way up.

  If they left both slippers next to the bed after they put on their clothes, or if one slipper was in the bathroom and the other by the dresser, then she felt she knew who they were, without ever having met them or talked to them. If the mirror needed cleaning in their room, because there were fingerprint marks on it from them leaning against it, looking closely at themselves, then she felt she knew what kind of person was renting the room.

  When she walked into some rooms she could feel the pain of the person’s mind as if the person were still in the room.

  She would immediately notice a drawer shut too tight, slammed so that it recessed more than the other drawers, and when she pulled the drawer out so that it was flush with the others she could see the dovetail joinery of the drawer looking looser than before, jarred as it was. She would notice multiple rings on the 6 8

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  table where a glass had been picked up and been set down again so many times that she knew the drinker must have been frantic with worry or overcome by anger. She noticed where the pile of the carpet had been pressed down in a spot by the window, where the person’s feet had stood for hours at a time, looking outside, waiting for someone to come or to leave or for something to happen.

  It was cleaning rooms that made her realize she wanted to help people. She knew the only way she could help people was if she had something to give them. She didn’t have anything, at the time. So she went and married God. After she had God, she knew she now had something to give. It was very easy, she said.

  Cleaning rooms was harder, she said.

  Mata Hari asked Sister Leonide what she noticed about her cell. Did it cry out that she was a traitorous spy?

  I can tell by the way your pillow is pressed down all over when you wake in the morning that you have had head-tossing dreams, because in your sleep you thought turning over would make the bad dreams end, and let a good dream in, Sister Leonide said.

  Mata Hari knelt down in front of her. Sister Leonide’s silver cross was cold at her cheek. She looked into the blackness of her habit.

  I have walked across the sea, she whispered.

  I know you are brave, she said, because you do not finish the food on your plate and you think you will go on living and that you do not need the food, because you think you will be freed someday and there will be better food to eat. Then she stroked her head. You should finish your food, she whispered.

  I have walked across the sea, Mata Hari told her, and she did not finish her food. The velvet horn tangled in my feet, wet blad-6 9

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  der wrack and hen pen leaves brushed against my silk skirt and felt like slender fingers of the sea reaching up from the ground, ready to pull me under the gray flats, riven with channels and mud gullies where up above ringed plovers flew and herring gulls cried out to warn the sea to let go its weedy hold on me.

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  A S H OT AT N OT H I N G

  KIDUL SAID Non looked like me. Same hair, same eyes, Kidul said.

  Nonsense, said MacLeod, she’s a MacLeod through and

  through, he said. She already runs this house better than you, MacLeod said.

  Perhaps it was true. Non never had to be told to put away her toys after she was done with them, I sometimes thought she enjoyed putting things away more than she enjoyed playing with them. What seemed to please her was seeing her toys up on a shelf, where she could not even reach them.

  Norman, on the other hand, couldn’t stand to have his toys put away. When he stopped playing castle wars with his blocks and wandered off to play robber demon with his puppets I would tell him that if he was finished he should put his blocks away, but then he would say, I’m not finished with them! And he would run back to his blocks and start playing with them again and I would tell him to then put away his puppets and he would run back to his puppets and say, I’m not finished with them! And the afternoon would go this way, where he rotated from one group of toys to the next, caught in a balancing act of make-believe.

  After watching Norman at play, Tekul said to me, The boy is 7 1

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  more like you, and I nodded. MacLeod, though, turned to Tekul.

  Shut up, he said, don’t you have some work to do?! Tekul left, holding a mallet. The bamboo steps were becoming loose, and he had to hammer them gently back into place. The tapping of his mallet started off the gibbons in the trees and their shrieks made MacLeod grab his gun, and he stood on the balcony, shoot-ing again at what he could not see.

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  A LOT, O R N OT H I N G

  IF YOU WANT to be a spy for the French, you can go to 282 bou-levard Saint-Germain in Paris, but you must go first to tell the captain, a bearded man named Ladoux, that you are there because you need a pass to get into a war zone known as Vittel.

  You are going there because you want to take the waters, because your health is poor. Pat lightly at your chest, as you tell him this.

  When he says he knows you want to go to Vittel to visit your Russian lover, tell him, Yes, but the waters would also be a good idea. He will then tell you that the British know about you, that they think you are a German spy. Shake your head when he says this, tell him you thought something like that was going on, that you had noticed the British trailing you in and out of your hotel, that they peered in at you while you were seated in a coffee shop, that they had gone through your coat pockets while you were out of your room, that you noticed your coats hanging in the closet, the pockets turned inside out, looking like the ears of rabbits, and your closet some warren. He will shake his head. His black hair won’t sway as he does, though, as it is smeared with too much brilliantine, and he will say that he did not think you were a German spy and he will say that the British are as nervous as rabbits. He will then ask if you love France. Tell him the truth, 7 3

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  tell him you love France. Tell him you are a Francophile. He will ask if you are prepared to help the French war effort with great services. Act surprised, because you are. You hadn’t thought that simply going to him for a pass to see your Russian lover in a war zone would turn you into a spy.

  Would you do it? he asks.

  I’ve never thought about it, you say.

  You must be very expensive, he says.

  That’s for sure, you say.

  What do you think such work is worth? he says.

  A lot, or nothing, you say.

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  T H E G O D D E S S

  O F T H E S O U T H E R N S E A S

  I SAW W ILLEM again. Not in his hut, but in the thick bamboo forest. His green eyes glittered inside the head of a leopard. I remembered I was supposed to run, but I didn’t. I just looked into his eyes, amazed that they were the same as Willem’s. I thought for a moment that it was possible that MacLeod had changed Willem into a leopard and I even called out his name in the night, but there was no answer from the green-eyed leopard, only the sound of a ghost bird’s wings flapping above. For a second I looked up at the ghost bird, blocking out the light of the moon, and when I looked down, the leopard was gone.

  I was angry at MacLeod when I returned home. I felt that he was responsible for sending Willem away, across the sea. He wasn’t even at home for me to get angry at, though, and so I walked to town. I knew where the brothel was.

  He was in room 14. When I opened the door he was on top of a Javanese girl whose long braid hung off the edge of the bed,
its brushlike end painting the floor, back and forth, as he moved inside of her. She turned and looked at me and all I could see of her was one of her eyes. It was a strange eye, clouded like an old faithful dog’s eyes. Its cloudiness seemed almost white, as if light were trying to come through from the other side. I had planned 7 5

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  on stopping him and yelling at him and cursing at him, and who knows what else, throwing things at him, but I didn’t do any of it. I didn’t feel like having everyone in town knowing what was going on between us. Instead I closed the door, and as I did I realized that the room number, number 14, was probably the same as the girl’s age.

  I MADE SURE they weren’t wearing green. Norman’s suit for swimming was black, and Non’s was black and white stripes. We were at Pelabuhan Ratu, where the goddess of the southern seas was said to live in its waters. Grief-stricken, she once threw herself over the cliff and into the deep. She is said to live there still, calling lovers to the shore, enticing them with a sweet smell of lotus on warm nights and making them join her in her watery world.

  If anyone drowned in the strong current, it was said that she had lured them in, especially if he were wearing green, because that was her favorite color.

  I kept Norman and Non in the shallows and we watched her-ons flying overhead and walked where waves tumbled, covering the melted forms of lava flows. Tidal pools were filled with small fish and crabs and mussels, which Norman scooped up in his small hands and studied. Along the cliff walls were narrow caves where fossilized rocks and the remains of small animals and plants covered their surfaces and we touched them with our palms and the tips of our fingers. I put the children down for a nap on the sand and I stroked their hair away from their faces and kissed their warm cheeks and spent the entire time watching them sleep, because just the sight of their faces had the power to mesmerize me even more than the endless crashing waves.