Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  She fanned herself with her hand.

  Bouchardon wasn’t sweating. He was freshly shaven and his brilliantine liberally applied. She felt sweat sliding down the backs of her knees, and to wipe it away she crossed and recrossed her legs a few times, hoping it wouldn’t soak through her skirts 1 5 8

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  and reveal a stain when she finally was told it was time to stand up to leave.

  It’s cooler in my cell than in here, she said.

  Bouchardon smiled. How lucky for you! he said, and then he said, You told Von Kalle information about our men landing behind their lines, did you not?

  That was in the paper, everyone knew that, she said. I’ve told you this already.

  Tell me again, Bouchardon said. Tell me why you gave Von Kalle classified Allied information?

  It was in the paper. Is information in the paper considered to be classified? Is the weather forecast now classified information?

  Is the For Sale section considered classified? Is the —

  Answer the question.

  Because I needed Von Kalle to believe that I was loyal to Germany, not to France. It was the only way he would trust me and it worked. He told me about the submarines in Morocco.

  He told you old news.

  I did not know it at the time, she said. I hadn’t been reading the paper every day, and if I had, it wasn’t always the war news I turned to. Besides, when I went to Monsieur Danvignes and told him about the submarines landing in Morocco, he was very excited. It was news to him. That’s quite an interesting piece of intelligence you’ve acquired for France, he said to me.

  Congratulations, he even said.

  No, Bouchardon said, you were trying to trick Danvignes.

  You purposefully gave him old information because you thought Danvignes would think it was new information, but really it was useless information that all of France already knew about. From 1 5 9

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  the very beginning you were working for the Germans, and therefore you would not divulge any information to Danvignes that was of any military importance or that could weaken Germany’s position.

  Bouchardon then called for Charles, and Charles escorted her out the door. As they walked down the corridor, she turned to look at Charles, and she caught him just as he was swallowing, and she thought, There, a breeze comes from that Adam’s apple of his, that tomahawk moving up and down in his throat. If I had been closer to his neck, she thought, I would have felt it.

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  T U L I P S

  THERE IS A TIME when you are traveling on a ship when you wish that you could do so for the rest of your life and you don’t want to get off. You just want to be able to stand on deck and feel the wind and be able to always smell the fresh smell of the sea. Then that time passes, and you feel you need to get off the ship right away. You will die if you don’t reach down and grab some dirt in your hands soon. You can feel the craving start under your nails, your nails longing for a bit of what could pack beneath them, what could later still be seen when you hold your hands out in front of you. Black moons.

  On the ship, MacLeod is sick and Non is playing nurse. She wets a cloth and wipes the vomit from his mouth and then from the ship’s rail and the wooden deck. She brings him another coat to wear. She holds the soiled one heaped in a bundle in her arms and heads to the ship’s laundry, barely seeing over the bundle in front of her to walk or make her way down steps.

  You had tried to help him walk back, but he had flung you aside with one arm and you did not persist and you fell back into a deck chair. Once in the chair, you folded the bottom wings of your coat over the pleated skirts of your dress. You had to keep out the cold.

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  Later, when you go below to your cabin, you see that Non is sleeping next to MacLeod on your berth. She has her small arm around him and his large hand is covering hers. The other berth in the cabin is Non’s, and it is too small for you to sleep in, so you gather up Non’s child-size blankets and head back up to the deck. You lie down in the deck chair and cover yourself with Non’s blankets that smell of her and the bromeliads you had placed in her hair while at port, waiting to board the ship in Java. You breathe in deeply, not only with your nose but your mouth open, and you think to yourself how what you are really doing is drinking in her smell and you hope you can remember it for the rest of your life.

  You watch the moon, wondering if you are sailing by it or it is sailing by you. Maybe, you think, we are in the middle of the sea going nowhere. That is when you feel the longing again beneath the nails of your fingers, the longing for the feel of packed earth and the smell of soil and clay and the feel of grass beneath your feet and the solid feel of the trunk of a tree to lean your back into instead of the dip in the canvas deck chair you lay in where the cloth is sagged and thin, it being a thing to fall into and never be able to heft yourself out of instead of a thing to keep you straight and tall.

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  T H E H A I R C U T

  SISTER-IN-LAW, Louise said, what are these? They look like curtains in a bordello. I told her sarongs. I had pulled them out of my trunk. They smelled of the rain and they smelled of bamboo.

  You’ll need wool here, she said. The canals have been choked with ice. You didn’t really wear these, did you? she said. Margaretha?

  she said.

  That’s all I wore, I said. Louise shook her head.

  One morning I walked into the living room and Non was in a chair with a bowl turned upside down on top of her head. There was newspaper spread out on the floor under the chair and Louise was holding a pair of scissors and cutting Non’s beautiful, thick long hair short, cutting evenly, right below the lip of the bowl, so that when Louise was finished it looked as if Non’s hair was now in the shape of the bowl.

  This is much better, Louise said. All that hair was a problem, a nuisance. Riddled with tangles. A chore to wash and rinse. She’ll be happier now, said Louise. This is how I wore my hair when I was a girl, she said.

  I took Non by the hand and helped her into her coat and we left and walked to the hairdresser. The hairdresser did what she could, she made the bowl shape disappear, but still Non’s hair 1 6 3

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  was very short. On the way home she complained of the cold and said she was not used to her hair being gone, that sitting about her neck it had kept her warm, like a scarf.

  MacLeod was angry about the money. Louise had already cut the child’s hair, why did you spend the money to do it again!

  You have no sense! he yelled. Louise stood next to her brother and nodded her head at everything he was saying. I told myself it wouldn’t be long, that we would be leaving Louise’s, that in a few weeks’ time we’d be going to Paris.

  I thought I could take Non on an excursion. I was the age Non was when I walked across the sea to Ameland. I could take her there. I could let her do it too. Walk across the bare gray flats riven with channels and mud gullies and through the brackish water. Let her see the flocks of terns and godwits wheeling down to feed as the tide retreats. Let her walk knee-deep through the pools of mud the way I did when I was her age. Let her worry when the tide began to rise. Let her think, Will I live? Then safely back on shore she too could say for the rest of her life, I have cheated death. It was a gift I could give her, I thought, a walk to Ameland across the sea.

  MacLeod said, No. We could not go. He would never allow it. It was too far for her to go. It was too dangerous a thing for a small girl to do. I did it, I wanted to tell him. But he was not listening. He was pouring himself a drink from a bottle he pulled down from Louise’s liquor cabinet. He was shaking his head.

  Then was not the time to ask him when we’d be going to Paris, but I did ask him.

  You fool, was his answe
r.

  Then he beat me, still holding his glass tumbler in his hand, he punched me with the tumbler, on the side of my face, on the bone 1 6 4

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  of my cheek. I fell back against the wall. A painting of Louise’s fell down, it was an oil of a windmill and cows grazing on a hillside rimmed with tulips. Tulips were Louise’s favorite flowers and she had even planted them in her garden beside the stoop that led to the front door. She had reasoned that if you did not love tulips then you had no business living in the Netherlands. You simply were not Dutch, then, she said, if they were not growing strong and proudly in early spring in front of your house from your garden bed. Then he hit me while I was trying to stand up and I blocked his blows with my arms, holding them above my head, and it was my own arms that I felt were being pounded into me, hurting me. Later Louise wanted an apology, the oil had been her favorite. How could I have been so careless?

  The next day MacLeod said he was going to mail a letter. He took Non with him. I gave her a scarf before she went out and draped it over her head and wrapped it around her neck to keep her warm. I’m only going to the post office, Mama, she said. Not Siberia, she said.

  That was the time I stood at the window all night waiting for them to come back. I waited with my hand holding the lace curtain aside. I waited even though Louise told me they would not return. It was a plan, some sort of an offensive. Forget it, Louise, your plan won’t work, I said.

  You were not meant to be a mother anyway, she said. Don’t you want what’s best for her? she said. You are not best for her.

  She’s happy with her father. She doesn’t need you, she said.

  Not another one, I thought. Not another child taken from me.

  I would not let it happen again.

  Maybe it was my fault. I should not have wrapped her so warmly. I wrapped her for a long journey, not a jaunt to the post 1 6 5

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  office. I wrapped her for another climate, another country, another life. Louise showed me where the oil was cracked through a cow’s loin, the windmill’s spinning blade, a tulip’s firm petals.

  Really, she said, if there were anything as valuable in the house as this painting was before you ruined it, I cannot think of it.

  I was standing when sunrise came in heavy and gray through the window. My hand was still holding back the lace curtain.

  While I had been watching the window all night, Louise had packed my trunk for me. Or, more accurately, she threw everything in it for me. My sarongs were all jumbled together, as if they had writhed and slithered over and under one another all night and now lay in a stealthy sort of slumber. Unpredictably they might rise up and strike, an attack of flowered silk and riot-ous batik dyes upon the grayness of the Dutch morning.

  I told you all I know, Louise said. She was strong enough to pull my trunk by its handles down her steps and out the front door. Like her brother, I thought, such strong arms. Before she shut the door on me while I stood outside she said that I owed her for the oil, of course, and that I would notice a pearl strand missing from my velvet pouch. It was a necklace my mother had given me before she died.

  All I wanted back was Non. There were lawyers involved.

  Slick men dressed in newly pressed suits who had time to sit with me in their offices as they sat back in their posh leather chairs and seemed as if they had just returned from holiday or were going on one. Some licked the pad of their thumbs and wiped dirt no one would spot off their shiny black shoes. Some offered me drinks of amber liquor from crystal decanters up on shelves, bordered by thick leather-bound books that looked as though the strength of two men would be needed to take them down.

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  Some peered over their desks, eyeing my ankles and looking at every part of me except my face when I spoke. Some had me talk to their backs while they looked out their windows at impressive views, swiveling only in their chairs to face me when it was time for me to leave and pay my consultation fee.

  I rented a small flat whose windows faced the brick wall of another building so close to mine I could reach out and touch the rough wall with my hand. That was an injustice, I thought, something I did not want to touch being so close to me, and the thing I wanted to reach out and touch, my Non, was so far away.

  The flat was cold. The room was damp. The wool blankets were as wet and heavy as sponges and I could not use them, they did not keep me warm. Instead I covered myself with my sarongs, because they did not hold the dampness, but neither were they warm, and I shivered in my bed while my teeth chattered. When I finally did fall asleep, I dreamed that Non was dying. There were lesions on her face. Her front teeth were rotten, with holes like windows so I could see through them and into the back of her throat. When I woke from the dream, I was scared to fall back to sleep, I did not want to have the same dream again, and it hovered above me, threatening to come back every time my mind started to drift.

  It was the lawyer who looked at my ankles who said he would take my case. I told the ankle lawyer the truth, that I had already sold all my jewelry and that I couldn’t pay him, that I had no money. He said there was always something a beautiful woman could use to pay him with. He set up a day and a time for me to return to his office. When that day arrived, I entered his office and he did not say anything to me, he simply took his arm and made a big show of brushing everything off his desk with a 1 6 7

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  grand sweeping motion. The glass lamp, his oversized folders, his papers and pens, crashed to the floor.

  He was on top of me and kissing me before I had time even to look up at the tin-tiled ceiling. All I saw was his lined forehead, the lines creasing the flesh deeply, making him look as if the creases were steps. If I wanted to, I imagined, I could just walk right up those steps and walk away from here, but the going would be slippery, the creases were filling with a greasy film of his sweat, but at least, I told myself, I could leave if I wanted to. I didn’t leave. When I thought of leaving, I thought how I wouldn’t be able to ever get Non back, and then the vision of her I had in the dream came back to me and I knew that I would stay with the ankle lawyer and finish the job. Beneath us, while he worked inside of me, I could hear his desk drawers rattling in their cas-ings and the wood of the desk creaked and moaned, a ship in an angry storm.

  When the desk’s sides cracked and its top split in two, I found myself inside of it, wedged in between two broken boards that had once been the top of the desk, while the ankle lawyer was still inside of me and a legal pad that had slipped out from one of the drawers was digging into the small of my back. He had to push and pry the broken boards apart as if we had been in a bombing and had to be extricated from the rubble and ruins.

  After I dressed myself, I asked for more than just my girl back. I asked for money too. I gestured to the caved-in desk. I risked my life for you, I said. I showed him the point of my elbow, which had bruised in the fall.

  He gave me money, but it wasn’t of much use. I went into the butcher and ordered some chops. Instead of reaching in his case and pulling out the chops to wrap in paper, he handed me the 1 6 8

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  newspaper to read. MacLeod had written a notice in it: I request all and sundry not to supply goods or services to my estranged wife, who has committed an evil act and deserted me. I laughed when I read it, because of course I hadn’t left him, he’d taken Non away from me instead and wasn’t that just like MacLeod to write something absurd, so opposite the truth. The butcher asked me what I thought was so funny and then he told me I could leave his shop. I wasn’t welcome. He took his hand and grabbed onto my arm and led me out the door. His hand was cold on my arm, I could feel the coldness even through my coat.

  There were bits of ground meat on his fingers, which clung
to the wool fibers of my sleeve. I noticed them as I stood on the street corner, under a lamp, wondering where to go next.

  Louise was home. She did not open the door for me, but she opened the window and spoke to me through it. Non isn’t here, and neither is my brother, she said.

  Where has he taken her? I asked.

  I’ll not tell you, Louise said.

  I leaned my head back. Non! Non! I yelled up at the windows of the house.

  All that yelling and I’ll have to call the police, Louise said.

  My yelling became a cry, I fell to my knees and I smelled it again. The sick smell of the room that day my boy, Norman, died. The smell was strong, I looked down at my clothes to see if it was coming from me, if my own spittle, my own tears, held the rank smell, but it was not me. I ran from the house, but I returned later that night. I did not knock on the door this time, instead I stayed outside on the plot of grass that was on one side of Louise’s stoop. I got down on my hands and knees. Louise’s precious tulip bulbs were planted there, they were ready to shoot 1 6 9

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  up their green stems when the frost had passed. I pulled up my sleeves, then I plunged my hands in, and I felt for them. I turned scoopfuls of the black dirt over next to the holes I had dug in my search.

  The smell of the black dirt was good. The nails of my fingers seemed to thank me. It was as if there was some kind of transfer of soil through my nails to my blood that was taking place while I dug, and it made me dig harder and deeper, and it fed me somehow. Somewhere inside of me there was a place that needed it. Each time I found a bulb I grabbed it and placed it in a pile. When I was done, when there were no more bulbs left for me to dig up, and Louise’s garden looked as if a legion of moles had tunneled through, I left the house holding the tulip bulbs in my skirt. Blocks away I let them roll from my skirt and into the canal water. It was coming on sunrise and I could see how the tulip bulbs at first sank, then later surfaced, and bobbed, cleaner now, a yellower shade, after having washed off in the water. They looked round, like the heads of children, as if the children were in a circle together playing some game I had never seen before.