Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  so that Hijau could not get to the buttons. I have to look at you, Dr. VanVoort said, to know what’s wrong.

  You’re not to look at my breasts, Mata Hari said. They’re a sight, you know, my husband tore off the nipples with his teeth, call it passion or rage, it didn’t seem to matter at the time and it still doesn’t.

  You don’t know what you’re saying, you’ve got such a

  high fever, I can feel your heat from where I’m standing, Dr.

  VanVoort said, and Mata Hari then said, You can start down here, and she slowly lifted up her dressing gown at the ankles until it reached above the first few sets of her ribs. Dr. VanVoort stood next to her and stared from up above at her shapely dark legs and her vagina whose clitoris was not hidden low toward her anus but was positioned up high, so that its orientation was dorsal, and its effect almost ocular, he thought, some sort of slitted eye like that of a snake’s pupil, set high like a jewel in a ring that looked as though it could easily be pried off with the right kind of tool.

  He had to sit down on the edge of the bed. Do you see it? she asked. Had she meant the eye? He pulled his look from her body to her face to see what she meant. The night bloom, she said. She pointed to a section a few millimeters in width on her skin in the sunken arch formed by her rib cage that was covered with small red spots. He felt relief knowing what those were because he had seen them before, he himself had even had the disease before, whereas he had never seen anything like the body of Mata Hari before.

  Typhoid! he said almost gaily.

  Hijau had brought in a glass of water for Mata Hari, but Dr.

  VanVoort took it from her instead and drank it all in one gulp, 1 0 4

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  not realizing the extent of his thirst, and feeling calmer afterward, because of the way in which he drank it like a shot of whisky, so that it had the same effect as a drink of alcohol. He was sure that if the old islander woman who served them could lift her gaze higher and look up rather than down at her bun-ioned and deformed feet, then she too would be amazed at the vision of Mata Hari naked and it was the old islander woman’s severe scoliosis that had kept her mistress’s beauty a secret and probably why, Dr. VanVoort thought, her husband was such a wreck, a textbook case of hypertension, what with having to come home to that every night. What man could sleep? What man could get into bed beside her every night and not seek out the hidden glint in her third eye?

  He left the house shaking his head, patting his breast pocket for the feel of a possible remaining cigarette inside a packet.

  When he found one, he thought better of smoking it, the smell of Mata Hari’s sex seemed to be on him. He sniffed the sleeve of his shirt and was sure it was there. He felt as if he’d gone to some party as a boy and this was his party favor, his prize to take home. The lingering smell of her sex on his sleeve. He was excited, thinking how easily MacLeod had agreed she must be quarantined, kept away especially from her girl and from him, and Dr. VanVoort felt he had done a smooth job, a very smooth job of suggesting ever so offhandedly that because he could not get the disease again himself that she let her illness run its course at his own coffee plantation, where she could stay at his house and naturally be under his constant medical supervision. Besides, MacLeod, the old bastard, looked as if he could use a rest from his wife’s body.

  But Dr. VanVoort, on the other hand, was feeling fine and 1 0 5

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  strong, up to the task. Walking, he breathed in deeply, before he even came to the blooms of the bunga melati and only caught sight of them, knowing already how sweet the small white flowers would smell when he came upon them on the side of the road.

  1 0 6

  ...

  T H E I M AG I N I N G S O F

  B O U C H A R D O N

  SHE ASKED S ISTER LEONIDE to bring her an inkpot, a pen, and some paper. Another letter to your lover? Sister Leonide asked.

  Mata Hari shook her head. She wrote to Bouchardon. She asked him to stop making her suffer in prison. She told him her cell was driving her mad. She told him again that she was not the German agent H21 and that she had gone to see Von Kalle in Spain because Ladoux wanted her to do intelligence work for the French and she thought she could get information from Von Kalle while she was being held there in Madrid. In the letter she begged Bouchardon to let her go. Then she handed Sister Leonide the letter to give to him.

  That’s it? That’s all you will write for today? Sister Leonide asked. Mata Hari nodded.

  Sister Leonide turned to go, and then she turned around to face Mata Hari again.

  One thing I learned about people while working as a maid and cleaning up their rooms was that if there were something they were hiding, whether it be money, an expensive ring, or just some writing on a paper, they never hid it as well as they could have, she said. It was as if they didn’t want it to be completely hidden, even to them, and that too good a hiding place wasn’t always 1 0 7

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  the best hiding place, because even they may forget where it was and it would be as if it never existed at all, which wasn’t true.

  Eventually, I always found it.

  I knew if I waited long enough, if I went back to the room every day and looked here and there while they were out, then I would find something. Sometimes it wasn’t much that I found, a scarf or a hair comb, but when I found it I could imagine whatever I wanted about the person. He was a murderer and this was the scarf he used to strangle his victims, she was a spy and she dipped the teeth of the comb into invisible ink to write secret messages. You see, it could have been just a kerchief and just a comb, but because the owners chose to hide them, then they were anything I imagined them to be. What you’re not telling Bouchardon, Bouchardon is imagining you to be.

  Then Sister Leonide nodded to the guard who opened the

  cell and Sister Leonide left and Mata Hari heard her soft footsteps and the swish of her habit as she turned the corner in the corridor.

  1 0 8

  ...

  A N AC T TO

  C L E A N S E T H E S O U L

  THE THING YOU KNOW about invisible ink is that it can be anything. It can be milk, lemon juice even. Write with it and later heat the paper and the words will appear. It’s magic. Even sperm can be used as secret ink and is said to be a good one.

  What you have in your possession when the French arrest you in your hotel is your bagful of tricks, or so they think. Really it is face powder and lip rouge and hair pomade and Mata Hari cigarettes (yes, that’s really what they are called and they are quite aromatic and you have taken to smoking them for their flavor), and also, in your bagful of tricks, you have a Javanese perfume for throwing on the fire and making the room smell like lotus blossoms and an item you had learned about only after your marriage to MacLeod and that was oxycyanide of mercury, which you use as an injection after each coitus to prevent pregnancy. You are in possession of it, along with thousands of other prostitutes and courtesans in Europe, and does it make you all spies?

  Guilty, you suppose, of listening before and after and sometimes, yes, even during, to their confessions, their weaknesses, their ills, their complaints about their superiors, their hopes and their dreams and their lies and the lies their wives told, and 1 0 9

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  how they failed their parents and how their parents failed them, and you listen to stories about women they should have loved, but didn’t, or women who should have loved them, but didn’t, and the listening is always harder than the act of coitus itself and makes you feel more tired afterward, and later, in prison, you smile thinking about it, how it reminds you of what Sister Leonide said, that being a nun was easier than cleaning rooms, and you know what she means, the act of coitus being prefer-able, being easier than having to
listen to what any man has to say and you never understood why the profession was considered dirty, when what it really did was cleanse a man’s soul. And who would have thought that in one breath parallels would be drawn between the act of coitus and the profession of being a nun?

  You laugh in your cell and for once it is a laugh loud enough to drown out the cries of the prisoners you hear escaping through the spaces in between the stones in the walls and it is loud enough to make the flame of the gaslight flicker and it is not a flicker caused by some miserable draft of cold air barreling through the corridors of the prison, but it is a flicker caused by your laugh, by your breath and your breath alone, and it is a laugh loud enough to keep back the return of the tidewater to the sandbanks of the sea that reached the shores of Ameland.

  1 1 0

  ...

  W H AT A WO M A N C A N D O

  HORNBILLS AND MONKEYS screeched down from overhead as Mata Hari slept and Dr. VanVoort drank coffee from beans ground from his own plantation’s crop. If he could turn and take his eyes off Mata Hari, then he could see the coffee plants out his glassless window, spanning up toward the side of a hill where the slow loris and the binturong moved through the branches and flower-ing orchids stirred in quiet breezes as if stroked by the wispy fingers of the spirits who lived in the forest.

  As it was, he could not take his eyes off Mata Hari and had not been able to for two whole days and he had sat in a rattan woven chair in the guest room of his house just watching her and occasionally getting up to wipe her forehead with a cloth, or to relieve himself, or to pour himself some more of his coffee.

  He had first carried her into the room two days ago and was loathe to set her down on the bed, and wondered if he could not just keep holding her in his arms forever, because while he held her he could feel the skin of her soft arms and the warmth of her fever radiating through her dressing gown and throughout his own body. When he finally did lay her down on the mattress and he was separated from her heat, he felt cold, even though the day had been so hot that the sun felt as if it had been striking his 1 1 1

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  skull, trying to break it open just to quench its insatiable thirst with the viscous fluid from his brain.

  He would often go for a few days without food, and so it was not unusual for him to live just by his coffee that he always drank hot and never cold, even on the hottest days, because he believed that heating the coffee released its true flavor from the bean and that cold coffee was something that had never been given a chance to reach its full potential. Which is how he thought of Mata Hari as she lay on his guest bed, her wedding ring misted by her raging fever and bouts of sweating and her body glistening, he knew, because occasionally he would get up from his rattan chair and lift back her dressing gown, placing his palm on the inside of her leg, between her thigh and pubis, checking for, he told himself, her femoral pulse. He was a doctor, after all.

  While he held his hand there, he would be aware of her vagina, its wavy folds surrounding her eye-like clitoris, staring up at him on the high perch of her pubic bone. He had to stop himself then from the desire to bend over her and take her in his mouth and feel the warm folds of her on the end of his tongue that he knew he could use to slide between her labia and lick the head of her clitoris and coax out of her tremor upon tremor as her body arched up toward him, positioning and working itself so that the hardness of his mouth pressed against her. He almost wished the typhoid away so that he could take her like that on the bed, but then he feared the day when the symptoms of her illness would fade and finally disappear and he would no longer be able to say that she needed to be quarantined and she would return to MacLeod. He brought her dressing gown back down the length of her body until it rested over her long, thin ankles, 1 1 2

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  whose veins he could see pulsing and in turn quivering the fine threaded weave of her gown’s scallop-edged hem.

  His coffee now cold, he threw it out the opening of his glassless window. He heard it land on the leaves of the giant hibiscus that bordered the walls of his house. He was going to heat himself another cup, but then he sat back down in his rattan chair and he spread his long legs out in front of him and slid down in the chair so that the back of his neck rested on the chair’s ladder-backed top rung and he closed his eyes and slept.

  In the morning ants were climbing up his bare ankle, forming a long chain from a gap between the floor and the wall that led to the outside. He brushed them away, so that when they slid off him, some turned on their backs, waving bent limbs. He then took off his thong sandal and got on all fours and with the sandal’s sole swatted the ants in a progressive fashion from the leg of his chair all the way to the gap in the floor and the wall where they had entered. Mata Hari propped herself up on the bed and lay on her side watching him and then, surprising him, she said, What are you doing here?

  I beg your pardon, he said, this is my home you’re in.

  No, she said, I meant, here, in Java. Is it for all those plants out there, she said, and she pointed to the rows of coffee plants that she could see from the glassless window.

  He stood and put his thong sandal back on his foot and looked out the window she was looking out and nodded his head and said, Yes, I guess it is.

  Will you go back someday? she said.

  He shook his head. No, he said. I don’t think so. I like it too much here, he said.

  But you don’t like the insects, she said, and she motioned 1 1 3

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  with her head in the direction of the ants that marched in a line through the gap in the wall and the floor.

  Oh, the damn insects, he said. If ever you hear one day that I have gone back, it was because the insects drove me there. They would be the only things to make a man suddenly up and leave a hugely profitable business.

  How about a woman, she wouldn’t make you leave?

  Are you always this talkative after having spent days with a fever that nearly killed you?

  I think a woman could make you leave and a woman could

  make you stay and a woman could take you away and a woman could bring you back. I think that you’re that way with women and you’ve been waiting a long time for a woman, thinking one day one might pop up from out between the leaves of your coffee fields and change your life.

  He shook his head and laughed, he rubbed the blond stubble on his chin and was about to say something, and then he stopped himself and laughed again.

  Do you like the sea? she asked him.

  Yes, he said, smiling.

  When I’m better, will you take me there?

  Yes, he said, still smiling.

  I like you, she said. But I’m so tired right now. I’d like to sleep.

  When I wake up again, do you think it would be all right if I had some nasi goreng? Can your servant prepare some for me?

  No, I have no servants in the house. The only workers are the workers who harvest the coffee beans. I can make you nasi goreng, though. I do all my own cooking.

  That’s wonderful, she said. Nasi goreng is my favorite dish.

  1 1 4

  ...

  STO P S O N A T R A I N

  SHE COULD, if she wanted to, imagine the insides of Bouchardon’s stomach—the calcic chips of his fingernails meshed with his noon meal—as he asked about Von Kalle. He kept the decoded messages sent by Von Kalle in a folder. When he held one up, she could see how there were perforations on the side of the slip of paper. It looked more like a train ticket. It probably read Gare du Nord, but he said it read that Agent H21 has been instructed on the use of invisible inks but has been reluctant to use them.

  Bouchardon wanted to know when the Germans gave her invisible ink. Bouchardon had small feet and small shoes and she was looking at them thinking how her shoes were larger than his and maybe this was why Bouchardon was so hard on her, because of t
he size of her shoes.

  I was never given invisible ink, she said.

  Bouchardon opened up the file again. There are more messages we intercepted, he said. They all refer to you, Agent H21.

  She now pictured the Eiffel Tower like a great strip of fly-paper, with messages floating through the air and becoming stuck to the structure and the decoders having to climb outside and unstick the papers, risking life and limb.

  The guard outside the door coughed. He sounded sick. She 1 1 5

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  wondered if it had something to do with the size of his Adam’s apple. It was huge and made his throat look as if the head of a tomahawk were wedged inside it.

  The pigeon out the window was the same one from last time.

  Its beady eyes looked at her and she looked back at it, and thought, Shoo, one interrogator is enough, get back to the park, get back to pecking crumbs off the curb.

  There were more messages. Bouchardon was a magician and they multiplied within his folder. He held them up and waved them. Just train tickets. Somme, Besançon, Sauternes, Cambrai—

  names of places, destinations on the tickets, she was sure.

  All proof, he said, that you worked for the Germans. But he could have said, Poof, he could have made the tickets disappear, he was a magician, after all, but he didn’t. He said, Proof, and put them back in the folder and snapped it shut.

  It was all for that day. Charles, the name of the guard with the tomahawk wedged in his throat, took her elbow as they walked back to her cell.

  Any news? she said. News of what? he said. Anything, she said. No, no news that I know of, he said.

  When she got back Clunet was in her cell, drowning from the inside out. His eyes were so watery that she handed him her handkerchief so he could dab at them. Instead he held the handkerchief and smelled it, liking the scent of the drops of perfume that still lingered from when she had poured some on it in a hotel months ago.

  You’re really something, she said, and she took back her handkerchief. Ma cherie, he said. He sat down on her cot.