Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  They had no voices, after all, there was no way for me to know.

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  A B E A R O F A G O D

  SHE CLUNG to Sister Leonide’s skirts. Don’t cry, my dear child, Sister Leonide said. Take strength in God. She asked Mata Hari to get on her knees and pray, to place her clasped hands over the thin, sagging mattress ridden with lice and bedbugs.

  Mata Hari would not pray. I have tried praying before, Mata Hari said. I prayed that Bouchardon would set me free, but you see, as well as I can, that I am still here, in this cell, my gray hairs sprouting from the roots, lines beneath my eyes, hanging jowls, the rotten smell of my breath where decay has taken hold of yellowed molars making me sick. The folds of loose skin around my neck create a ring, the jewelry of the aged.

  Sister Leonide said she would pray for her if Mata Hari would not pray for herself. Sister Leonide went to her knees, held her clasped hands over the thin mattress. I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mata Hari said, and then she held out her hands and her arms so Sister Leonide could see how bites from bedbugs had left red welts all over her skin. They were grouped in clumps, and then a stray welt could be seen farther away, like a constellation of red stars, mirroring a constellation up above whose name one isn’t quite sure of. I never learned them, I don’t know, Mata Hari said, all the things in a night sky with names watching over us 1 7 1

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  and I have no idea what they are. Maybe we should pray to them.

  Isn’t there a bear? I could pray to him. To his huge paws, his musky smell, his silver-tipped fur. Isn’t he the one really watching over me?

  Sister Leonide wondered, before she left, if she could take the silver cross off her neck and give it to Mata Hari, but she knew she couldn’t. It was not allowed. A prisoner digging at the stone wall to sharpen the part of the cross where Christ’s feet hung nailed through the flesh to the wood could use the cross to slice through the bracelet of bites on her wrists to have the blood spurt and spray the walls, darken the army green blanket with stains in shapes of mountain pools and meadow ponds. God be with you, she said instead, and left Mata Hari alone.

  It had been six weeks since Bouchardon had asked to see her.

  She knew it was a tactic. She thought he wanted her to believe her case had been closed, that there was no more to discuss, unless, of course, she had something to tell him she hadn’t already told him and break her silence. Break what? She thought. Stone? Iron bars? She laughed and sat back down on her cot. It bounced with her weight. She made it bounce again. Then again. She laughed.

  She tried to bounce hard enough to make the cot scrape its bottom springs on the stone floor. Up and down she went. And then she did. She hit bottom.

  The force of hitting the stone floor so hard came up and took her breath away. She felt it in her rib cage. It pushed air out of her lungs. She grabbed her chest. Dr. Bizard! She yelled through the bars, holding onto them, curling her fingers around them, feeling how the coolness of the iron felt good against her swollen joints bent on a course to gnarl with age.

  Dr. Bizard explained the workings of the heart. There were 1 7 2

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  valves and chambers she did not care to know. Am I dying? she asked, and wondered if maybe Non would be brought to her.

  She would lay in the prison hospital, her daughter finally by her side where she could see her and hold her.

  You’re fine. You’re strong, the doctor said.

  Yes, that’s right. I have walked across the sea, she said to him and told him about Ameland.

  He put away his stethoscope. He said he had to leave. She nodded. Yes, of course you are busy. I understand, she said. She stood and walked him the few steps to the door of her cell. Thank you for coming, she said. I feel much better now, she said. Thank you for telling me about blood, about chambers and valves.

  It was time for her walk in the courtyard. Charles came to get her. Has Bouchardon asked for me today? she said. Charles shook his head.

  There were no more hairs left clinging to the stone walls in the courtyard. There had not been any for weeks now. Whoever the prisoner was must have been freed, she thought. She walked in circles in the hot sun. She thought of the story of how the Indian boy made the tigers run in circles around the tree and they ran so fast and for so long that they turned themselves into butter.

  I will turn into butter, she thought. Why not? There are already Mata Hari cigarettes and Mata Hari biscuits sold in a tin box, why not Mata Hari butter to spread thickly on toast along with sweet jam? She thought of Non looking down at her in her casket. Her daughter would see not a corpse, but a swimmy gush of liquid lapping up the wooden sides as the pallbearers placed Mata Hari in the ground. Oh, Non, my girl, she thought, Where are you now?

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  T H E B I S C U I T T I N

  THE M ATA H ARI BISCUIT TIN had a pretty picture of Mata Hari’s face painted on it. Non liked the tin and when the biscuits were finished, she asked Louise if she could have her lunch packed in the tin for school. Louise said she’d rather toss the tin in the trash, but Non begged her and so every day, on the trolley, Non sat with the tin on her lap and looked down at her mother’s face. She had no pictures of her mother, and this, besides the pack of Mata Hari cigarettes she was too young to buy, were the only images she had of her. Her father had told Non that since her mother had left the family, he’d had no contact with her, and she had never bothered to write to her daughter or to come see her. Once, though, when Non was younger a woman Non did not know came to pick Non

  up from school. The woman said she had a gift for Non. It was a beautiful gold watch. Come with me to the train station, and I’ll give you the watch, the woman said. But that day MacLeod had decided he would come early to pick his daughter up and he saw the woman.

  What do you want? he said.

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  I have this gift for your daughter, the woman said. It’s a gift from the girl’s mother.

  MacLeod took the watch from the woman’s hand and he

  threw it into the street, where it was smashed under the wheels of an oncoming motorcar. The woman was Anna Lintjens.

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  T H E P L A N

  IF YOU WANT to be a kidnapper, don’t do the kidnapping yourself but send an accomplice instead. A dear woman who has been your maid in Holland for years, a woman who had heard you crying in the night in your bed as she tiptoed past with clean folded towels stacked in her arms. A woman who washed silk scarves you used in your dances with only a pinch of soap flakes because she knew that anything harsher would fade the bright dyes. A woman who painstakingly sewed small glass beads back onto your costumes after they’d fallen off after a performance and a woman who declared every time you dressed for a performance that you looked beautiful. A woman whose arms you cried in when your letters to your daughter came back unopened, returned by her father. A woman who made you stay in bed when you were sick and who watered the flowers in the garden and who agreed with you that other dancers, Isadora Duncan, for example, did not pass muster or could hold a candle to you. A woman who was tall and thin, with a nose that was as sharp as a blade, and her nostrils such thin slits that you wondered how the air she breathed managed to enter through them and travel the passage to her lungs. A woman who wore her steel gray hair in a 1 7 6

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  bun on the top of her head and used it as a pincushion while sewing back the hem on your costume, which she had just sewn the night before. But you had writhed and slid across the marble of the dance floor more than usual, you explained to her, you had undone the hem, yes, but the roaring applause was well worth the cost. She nods her head, pulls a pin from her bun, and weaves it through the folded cloth.

  I can sme
ll lilies on this, she says. She lifts the costume up and gently breathes it in.

  Yes, you tell her, there were strewn lilies and rare flowers all over the stage and great urns filled with burning incense and can-dlelight and a great bronze statue of the god Siva.

  Anna Lintjens shakes her head, the pins staying put, and she smiles. What a life you lead, she says. So different from mine.

  But you’re like me, you tell her. You remind her how you’re both unmarried. She cannot marry because no one wants to marry a woman whose father never came forth to say he was her father, and you can’t marry because your lawyers advise you against it. The courts would deem it improper for you to take back Non when you were married to a man other than her father.

  No, they told you, best you stay single, better yet, too, they say, that you give up this dancing career of yours, and you ask them, If I gave it up, then how would you get paid? How would I have the money to pay for anything? I’d be left for dead on the streets, isn’t that right? you say. And they don’t answer, they kiss you on the cheeks and leave, patting their breast pockets as they walk out the door, feeling the payment you made them secure on their person.

  You show Anna Lintjens pictures of Non. The pictures are 1 7 7

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  old, from your time in Java. Anna Lintjens puts down her knit-ting. She puts on her glasses. She sits up straight at a table she’s just cleared in order to look. She exclaims.

  How lovely, she looks just like you.

  You apologize for the photos, for the tattered edges, the fading sepia tone, how even the cheeks of Non are worn where you have touched the face of your girl so many times that her cheeks now look like some sort of white apples no one’s ever seen growing from a branch before.

  Anna Lintjens, your maid, your accomplice, is the one who has the idea for the watch. She suggests the after-school encounter. The two of you never use the word kidnapping, even though you know that’s what others would call it. You call it the plan.

  I will be the one to carry out the plan, she says. You start to tell her no, but she interrupts you.

  I’m the person to go, she says. If you went you’d be recognized right away. Someone would contact MacLeod before you could even get a word in edgewise with your daughter, before you had the chance to hustle and bustle her back.

  You might be right, you say.

  She takes out a pin placed in the bun on the top of her head and inserts it again. Of course I’m right, she says while she does this.

  She says she needs to think. She says she will bake a pie, because rolling out dough and crimping a crust is the best way she knows of hatching a plan. The pie is apple. The two of you eat it not after a midday meal or after supper, but you eat it when the light of the day is not yet dark. You eat it when the sun has just gone down, but its light still remains on the earth before darkness falls and you have not yet lit the lamps inside your house.

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  The apples, with every bite, release a cinnamon syrup that warms your throats, and each bite of the crust crumbles and fills your mouths with the flavor of sweet butter. The pie is a success. You tell her the plan will be also. You both agree, you nod your heads over the crumbs on your dessert plates, scraping with small forks set on their sides the last bits of crust and apple pie filling.

  When the plan fails and she comes home crying, the smashed watch held out in her hand to show you, you tell her it’s all right.

  You tell her that you know Non is being well taken care of. You hold up one of your costumes, a halter made of metal to cover your breasts, and you show it to her and you ask her what kind of life you could give Non anyway. Look who I am, you tell her. You shake the metal halter and a jangling sound fills the room. You tell her that MacLeod, despite everything, was always a good father. Then you ask Anna Lintjens how your Non looked.

  Just like you, Anna Lintjens answers.

  You hold onto the bedpost when she says it, you catch yourself from falling.

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  T H E S AC R E D T E M P L E

  THE DAY AFTER I pulled Louise’s tulips from her garden, I saw the ankle lawyer again. This time not in his office but in a hotel I had chosen, whose rooms had gilt-framed mirrors and velvet canopies over the beds. The linens were silk and the beds were so high up off the ground that beneath them, at easy reach, stood velvet-tufted stools to step on when you were getting up or down. I named the price too, and the ankle lawyer paid handsomely.

  It was enough for the train fare to Paris and then some. Before I left, I wrote Non a letter, telling her where I had gone, that I would send for her when I could, when I had money. I remembered how Norman used to play with his wayang kulit puppets and imagined how, like one of his puppets, the good puppet, a lawyer working for me would ride on horseback, wielding a kris dagger against MacLeod, driving him away, and still galloping he would sweep Non safely off her feet and carry her back to me. I told Non, in the letter, that I thought that the only place a woman alone could make any money was in Paris. I had high hopes. I would make enough money to pay for an army of lawyers who could bring my daughter back to me.

  In Paris there was a series of undressings. I stood in cold gar-1 8 0

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  rets, was offered wine in paint-stained metal cups that smelled of turpentine and naked I drank from them. The artist studied.

  He dabbed, he smeared. I could hear his brush across the canvas.

  Sometimes he would stop.

  The chattering of your teeth is disconcerting, he would say.

  I-I-I’m s-s-s-sorry, I would stutter.

  Oh, get dressed, he would say.

  I was drawn to the smell of horses while passing a riding school one day and I thought I could get a job. I stood beneath a gray stallion whose exhaled breath, like a shaft of light, fell on me and warmed me, and then I sat on his dappled back and rode him in circles in the ring, showing the director, named Molière, all the tricks I had learned as a child, long before Java, long before my mother had died. Molière was impressed.

  Get down off that horse, he said. It’s your body I like, not your equitation. He told me I had a dancer’s body. He made me move on the straw ring, lifting my legs, pointing my toes. Upstaged, the gray stallion was led back to his stall and I had free rein.

  After I showed Molière what Javanese women do, dancing the way I had seen them dance at the temple, he said people would pay to see me. In my head I heard the notes of the gamelan orchestra, and Molière said that when I danced I was a body constructed around the articulation of joints, in relation to one another and in terms of alignment and medians.

  Do it naked, he said. Yes, he said, while watching me dance naked one day, people would pay through the nose for this, they’d cut off their right arms for this, they’d sell the shirts off their backs for this. You’ll be famous, he said. Reinvent yourself, he said, and I did.

  I was born in India. My mother was a temple dancer who died 1 8 1

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  at my birth. I was raised in the temple of a god and consecrated to his service.

  Yes, yes, that’s it, Molière said. Perfect, he said. Tell me more, he said.

  I went on. My dance is a sacred poem, I said. In each movement is a word, and the word is underlined by my music. The temple in which I dance is with me at all times. For I am the temple. All true temple dancers are religious in nature and all explain, in gestures and poses, the rules of the sacred texts.

  Molière clapped his hands together. A horse in his stall stomped, banging loose the slats of wood. Bravo! Molière cried, and sent me off. I was ready then for ten years of dancing on stages all over Europe. I was ready for the flowers and the men who sent them and I was ready for the married men who came to me after my performances kneeling on the ground in front of
me, their faces pressed against the body stocking I wore, holding my buttocks through the mesh of the cloth, begging for a piece of temple, a bit of religion, a thorough read of my sacred text. What I wasn’t ready for was all the years I was not allowed to see Non. The more I worked and danced, the more money I earned to try and get her back, but the more I worked, the more MacLeod’s lawyers came with photographs of me wearing my see-through costumes, my breastplates, my navel on display, my pubic hair a matted area of smoky dark behind an opaque bit of silk, reminding me that no judge would ever let me have Non back.

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  L I L I E S A N D M E N

  AFTERWARD, wh e n I returned from my performances and went to my house in Holland, it was Anna Lintjens who washed the mesh stocking, noticing before she soaked it in the water how it smelled of lilies and men. The sudsy water quickly lost its bubbles, the dirt from the floor of the stage and the dirt from cigar-stained groping fingers took their places, showing darkly like the brackish water in a tidal pool at sea.

  It was Anna Lintjens who noticed that the rings and necklaces given as gifts by men did not fit in the jewelry box anymore, and she transferred the new jewels into another box, a larger box.

  Then even more gems went into another box, and then another, and she wondered at what stage it would stop, what would the last box look like? How large would it be?

  It was Anna Lintjens who noticed the newspaper reviews

  and clipped them and placed them on my breakfast plate in the morning so that when I came down the stairs I could read all the wonderful things said about me, about my beauty and my dancing, before I started my day. It was Anna Lintjens who, after I read the reviews, took down the glue pot and pasted them into an album before she started on the dishes and the dusting and the changing of linens.