Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  I breathed in deeply.

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  DR. R OELFSOEMME was kneeling beside me. I brushed away the vial of smelling salts he had before I realized what was going on.

  I don’t need those, I said. I shook my head. I was still smelling the violet-headed sea lavender.

  Over his casket, MacLeod placed the envelope containing Norman’s lock of hair, which had curled into the shape of a half-moon. I did not wear black to my boy’s funeral. I wore my brightest sarong. The colors were saffron and gold. MacLeod had yelled at me before we gathered at the gravesite. It’s all your fault, he yelled. For a second I saw the world as he saw it. I saw the wife he hated that made him go to other women to spend his passion. I saw the servant who deserved what she got, walking around with flowers in her hair and breasts whose brown nipples poked through the silk of cream-colored blouses as she softly carried in a tray or reached with a ladle to serve some sambal.

  The first shovel of dirt fell on the envelope, the crumbled bits and small rocks rolled off the white paper and so did the next shovelful and the next and I wondered if the soul of my son did not want his body to be buried at all. If I had had it my way, I would have celebrated his death.

  I would have had the gamelan orchestra playing and the

  wayang kulit puppets acting out his favorite play. I would have laid out brightly colored batik cloths on the ground and placed carved wooden bowls down on them filled with buah and babi and ayam and daging sapi and ikan and sayar, and mie goreng would sit steaming in bowls, the noodles made especially long so that he would have a long life in his next life. He wouldn’t be in a box, but on a funeral pyre, where I could still see him. I wanted to still see him, even though he was dead. I stepped down into 9 1

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  the grave and put my hand on the casket, thinking I could lift up the lid.

  She’s fallen in! someone gasped, and then I looked up and there were hands all over me, pulling me up under my arms and taking me away from my boy.

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  I N TOX I C AT I O N

  THINNED ONCE and thinned twice, those were the soups she was served in her cell. In the thinned-once soup she could see a pea floating here and there and a string of muscle from a cheap cut of meat. In the thinned-twice soup, there was never the occasional pea or meat, there was only a liquid a little darker than water, a little browner. At times her hands shook too much for her to hold the soup spoon without spilling the soup and instead she held the sides of the bowl and lifted it up to her mouth.

  I wished they had served me hot water instead because its taste would have been easier to swallow, she said to Sister Leonide.

  Sister Leonide said she would hold the spoon for her.

  I don’t mind holding the bowl like an islander sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, sipping his soto and watching off in the distance a herd of banteng down at the river, their hides glowing red in a setting sun and their ankles black and stained with rich mud, she said.

  Clunet always sounded hopeful when he came to visit her in her cell. We’ll get you out of here soon, ma cherie, he would say, but because he was old and his eyes were always watery, it looked as though he were crying. Sometimes she felt she should comfort him. She patted his arm.

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  I’m all right. I’m okay, she said to him. He would nod his head.

  He would stand in the middle of the room and look around, when there was nothing to look at but the stone walls.

  BOUCHARDON WAS tapping his pencil and did not look up when she first entered his office. He finally looked up at her after she was seated in a chair. The message I have here states that the Germans knew you were to receive funds from them via your maid, Anna Lintjens.

  The Germans could have gone into my hotel room in Spain, they could have opened my letters, they could have easily found the names of people I knew and sent messages that looked like I was working for them. Isn’t it called intoxication? Isn’t that the term used when you want the enemy to believe that one of their spies is also one of yours and so you create evidence that incriminates the spy? she said.

  Bouchardon went to the window. He tapped his fingertips on the windowpane. Even the pigeons were used to it and did not fly away startled. Instead they continued cooing and strutting back and forth on the ledge.

  Why would they want to do that? he said, stopping his finger tapping to bite off a nail and chew it.

  Ladoux asked me to go spy for the French. We decided that I would go to Belgium and renew contacts I had there with German officers, but on the voyage I was stopped at Falmouth.

  The British took me off the boat, they thought I was a German spy named Clara Benedict. They showed me a photo of her. She wore a Spanish dance costume. She was short and plump. She didn’t look like me at all and finally they realized I wasn’t her.

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  But I was not allowed to go on. I had to go to Spain, until further notice that it was all right to go back to France.

  You know all this already, she said to Bouchardon. He turned around and looked at her, but he did not nod his head as if he understood. She went on.

  In Spain I contacted a German officer named Von Kalle. I’d never met him before, but I had heard about. I thought, If I can’t get to Belgium, I will do my work for Ladoux in Spain. I went to Von Kalle’s room. I showed a bit of leg. It did not take him long to realize my line of work. He was talkative. He told me about the submarines they were planning to bring into Morocco. We kissed. He told me how he knew the French were parachuting men in behind enemy lines.

  Then we made love. It was, perhaps, too easy. But some men are like that, they will tell you things because they are relieved they can at last tell someone to whom it doesn’t matter. I have heard stories from men, during the act of coitus, that would make your blood curdle, but I never told those stories to anyone else. That would be bad for business. Then, back at the hotel in Madrid, I told Danvignes, the French colonel, what I had learned from my German, and I told him to wire Ladoux and let him know too. It was a trap, I see now. Von Kalle was just waiting to see how long it took before the news he told me spread. Danvignes even said himself it was old news that Von Kalle had given me. At any rate, it was enough to make Von Kalle suspicious and devise a trap so that you, the French, would think I was really working for the Germans. You would be the ones to do the dirty work and arrest me, they would have to do nothing but send a few messages with false information, and I would be out of their hair.

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  She stopped talking. She folded her hands in her lap. She thought that surely Bouchardon would see the situation clearly now. It all made sense. The room was delightfully warm again.

  Bouchardon was silent for so long that she had time to let her mind wander. Was there a way to harness the heat? Could she open up her dress pockets and let the warm air in and then later release it in the cold of her cell? Would just the memory of her being warm be enough to keep her warm when she was sent back with nothing to do but once again sit alone on her sagging cot?

  Or maybe, this was it, maybe Bouchardon was being silent for so long because he finally understood what she was saying. Maybe she was free to go.

  Bouchardon spun on his heel just as she had this thought. He leaned over her and put his hands on the armrest of her chair as if he were about to pick up the chair with her in it. For a moment she thought she was free and he was going to carry her outside.

  The old leather chair with the armrests was some sort of chariot.

  She would be held high over the streets. She would breathe in the air of Paris, the petrol from a motorcar’s exhaust, the warm sweat of a carriage horse trotting, the per
fume of an old woman, the smell of Bouchardon himself, his brilliantine carried up to her in a breeze as he lifted her. Would he call out to all of Paris that she was innocent?

  Bouchardon put his face so close to hers that she could see where the bit of nail that he had chewed off lay white and ragged on his lip. But he said nothing to her. He opened the door and told the guard to come and take her back to her cell. She did not rise from her chair right away. What if I didn’t? she thought.

  What if I stayed where I was and refused to go? She closed her eyes for a second and thought of Ameland. What if the water had 9 6

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  returned before she finished walking across the sea? She knew the answer. When she finally stood up from the leather chair, her dress felt as heavy as her skirt did that day she walked across the sea. It felt heavy with black silt, deposited over the ages with the never-ending ebb and flow of the tide, only it wasn’t the tide that had ebbed and flowed over the seat of the leather chair or the worn wooden boards on Bouchardon’s office floor, but the constant ebb and flow of prisoners’ answers, washing over the room, lapping up the sides of the walls, clinging to the hem of her skirt and dragging her down. She heard all their answers all at once, prisoners who had been questioned years before by Bouchardon and by whomever had Bouchardon’s position before Bouchardon had it. The sound was as loud as a crashing wave. She ran from it. The guard had to run to catch up to her. The rats in the hallway on the way back to her cell were surprised; they did not expect to have someone coming so quickly. They squeaked and crisscrossed in front of her, not sure which way to run with so little time to think about the danger.

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  T E A R S O F E X H AU ST I O N

  BY THE LIGHT of the full moon I went to watch the turtles crawling up from the sea. They came to dig their nests and bury their soft white eggs deep in the sand. Shining in their eyes in the moonlight I could see tears of exhaustion as they dug, and then, when they were finished, they walked back into the waves. I stayed watching them until morning, when the sun rose and I could see the white sandy beaches crumbling down from the cliffsides and the sea that sparkled like crystal and I could see fish in every crashing wave tip as if the water were window glass and the fish caught behind it.

  Non was with the new servant when I got back to the house.

  The new servant looked like a mangrove root. She was gnarled and old and her back had a hump in it that made her stoop and made her always look down at the ground. Even when she was talking to you, she looked down at her feet, not brown but ashen with age, and her toes twisted one over the other and the nails were yellow and long and curving, sharp enough to cut down tall grass in the rice field with one swipe. Her name was Hijau.

  Non was short enough that when she looked up she must have been able to see Hijau’s face, but I was never able to. I only ever saw the top of her head, the white hair always parted into two 9 8

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  long braids that hung down and swung at her sides like white cords of rope.

  She was making Non some hot milk and before she handed

  the cup to Non she went to the living room where MacLeod was seated and she handed it to him to drink. From now on, that’s what MacLeod did, he always ate or drank first whatever was given to his daughter. If he wasn’t there, I was to drink it first.

  It’s pointless, I told MacLeod, some poisons could take hours before they killed you. But MacLeod wasn’t answering. He hadn’t been answering for days now. He would sleep at night by Norman’s grave and come back in the morning and drink some coffee and then he would leave again. If I talked to him, or asked him a question, he didn’t answer me. Sometimes, though, if he came back early and I was still sleeping, he would come to me and wake me by standing next to me. He would be talking then.

  He would be saying it was all my fault. He would be cursing.

  Spittle sometimes shot out from his mouth and landed on my arm or my shoulder or my face.

  Hijau and Non would spend hours in the kitchen. Non, because Hijau could not look up, would help Hijau take down the ceramic jars filled with spices and they would wash them and wipe them and dry them and then Non would stand on the chair and put them back up on the shelves. I tried to get Non out of the kitchen. I thought of how my mother had died in the kitchen.

  Non, let’s go down to the sea, I would say.

  No, Papa says the current is too strong, she would say.

  Non, let’s go into the forest and collect flowers for our hair, I would say.

  No, Papa says the leopards will come for me if I do, she would say.

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  I told MacLeod how I didn’t like Hijau always keeping Non in the kitchen. MacLeod answered me then. He said he felt safer when Non was with Hijau than when Non was with me and that if Hijau kept Non busy in the kitchen, then that was fine with him and I was not to take her away from Hijau’s side.

  ALONG WITH other officers’ wives I took a guided trip to a temple. We traveled on horseback up a narrow winding path slippery with scree where if we looked in one direction we could see the rice grass blowing in the wind, and in the other direction the patchwork of a coffee plantation. When we reached the top we could see white mist, the pale color of coconut milk, wrapped like a sash around the base of the mountain. Inside the temple, scenes of the Rama epic were carved into the walls and there were statues of four-armed Siva and his elephant-headed son, the god Ganesh.

  In the evening we watched a performance of the Rama ballet.

  I watched how the other wives watched the women dancers moving gracefully in their sarongs. The dancers’ bodies were supple, their long brown arms moved like snakes curling up poles, only there were no poles, just the fetid air coming from the crater where the ogre once threw himself inside and his hideous body continued to burn.

  The faces of the other wives grew flush while watching the dancers. None of us had seen women move in that way before.

  They moved in ways we could not name and in ways we hoped we could remember later, forever, and we were glad not to name the ways, knowing maybe that naming them would destroy them and, like a pillar of salt, the memory of them might crumble to a pile on the ground if we so much as tried to describe in whis-1 0 0

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  pers the ways in which they moved. It seemed as if another sense had been revealed to us that we had not known existed before.

  There was hearing, vision, smell, touch, taste, and now this, the dance.

  When we went back down the mountain in the glow of a pink sunset, our horses sometimes slipped on the scree and hawks above circled for prey below. Anyone observing us would say we, the wives, descended in silence, but really each one of our minds was filled with the notes of the gamelan orchestra and the move-ments of the dancers.

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  T H I R D E Y E

  HIJAU CAUGHT HER on her back as she fell off the horse. She had a fever that gave off so much heat that the saddle she used was burning hot, as if it had been left out in the noonday sun.

  MacLeod, seeing how well Hijau could carry his wife, told Hijau to continue into the house and take her to the bedroom, and he did not make a move to relieve Hijau of her heavy load.

  She lay on the bed, tossing her head back and forth, still wearing her riding clothes, which Hijau removed for her while Non peered in at the door, asking Hijau if she wanted help, and Hijau told her to stay back, it could be the work of a naga.

  She complained of a headache that was trying to tear her eyes out from the inside. Her fever soaked her sheets so they were as wet as if they had been submerged in water and placed back on the bed and she sat up, glassy-eyed, patting the bed in disbelief, saying the sea was coming to take her and that she could not escape the tide. She ripped off her dres
sing gown, saying that its hem was an anchor, and she stood naked on the bed looking behind her at the wall and trying to run from it. MacLeod caught her and made her lie back down and he told her to hush, that Non was sleeping, and she swallowed and nodded her head and called him Ganesh.

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  MacLeod left her with Hijau for the night and he went to the officers’ club and walked around the club holding a bottle of whisky and a glass and pouring himself a drink whenever he wanted and later he forgot where he left the glass and he just drank from the bottle instead. He wove in and out of the other officers who were standing in groups and talking and they moved out of his way when he veered toward them and they whispered to one another after he had stumbled past, saying, The poor man, did you know every night he sleeps by his son’s grave?

  In the morning she tried to peel off the red spots that appeared on her chest in the shape of a bloom that she had only ever seen at night. Hijau gave her milk but she would not drink it and asked for flour instead, thinking she could use it to sprinkle on her chest and make the red spots less red. She clutched at her throat, saying it hurt so much she knew a kris dagger had come for her and she looked for a place to stop the bleeding but there was none and her fingers left marks on her skin that made her look as if she’d been strangled.

  MacLeod returned late in the morning with his uniform unbuttoned and wrinkled and blades of grass pasted to his head, adhered by the sweat that had poured forth from his temples while he slept so long by his son’s grave in the hot morning sun.

  It wasn’t Dr. Roelfsoemme, the pediatrician, who trailed behind MacLeod but Dr. VanVoort, the doctor who treated the adults.

  Dr. VanVoort walked behind MacLeod while smoking a cigarette which he stubbed out in the potted palm beside Mata Hari’s bed before he examined her. MacLeod excused himself and went to lie on the couch and close his eyes. Dr. VanVoort told Hijau to undress Mata Hari, but Mata Hari grabbed at her dressing gown 1 0 3