Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

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  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  It was Anna Lintjens who suggested I should dance Salome, that there would be no better dancer who should dance in the Russian ballet.

  You’ve never even seen me dance onstage, I said to Anna.

  But I know you would be the best, Anna said while at chores, and she whipped and snapped my blanket in the air before letting it billow and fall perfectly into place on my bed.

  Salome, hmm, I said. I looked at myself in the mirror on the dresser, after having to move aside the big box of jewels that was in the way of seeing my reflection. I have walked across the sea, I thought, so why not, I too could play Salome, couldn’t I? Anna nodded, as if in response, but then I thought she was probably nodding along with the counting she was doing in her head of the days that had passed since she had last moved the sofa and swept the floor beneath it or ran a damp cloth over the sills of the windows or made a lamb stew.

  Now, I said, after Anna asked, Now? Right this moment you want to write to him?

  Anna was down on her knees on the carpet looking under

  the sofa, pulling down a cobweb that spanned from one leg to the next, a hammock of lace, she said, and then I said, “I’ll ask Diaghilev himself if I could have the role.” So Anna fetched the ink, the pen, the paper, while the sofa sat at a strange angle in the room, still pulled from the wall as it was.

  Diaghilev wrote back. The letter was waiting for me on the mantel one day. I opened it before taking off my hat or my coat and still wearing a white rabbit stole strung about my neck. I read the reply, then threw the letter into the flames of the fire that Anna had started earlier, expecting me to be cold when I walked in the door.

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  ... A T A H A R I

  He wants me to audition, I said. Me! I said. By now I had performed all over Europe, everyone knew who I was. It was hard to believe he wanted me to dance in front of him in order to give me the role. Anna looked at me. What did she see? My rabbit-fur stole in need of a cleaning, the edges darkened, the fur slightly soiled and in places stuck together, matted by wet weather, a storm spitting drops of ice. My face not yet old but on its way to aging, the lines by my eyes showing white, like tracks formed by branches being dragged across the snow.

  It was Anna who noticed I had not slept that night but paced in my room and then came down and stoked the fire in my red silk robe. When the fire was stoked, it glowed brightly like the cloth itself, a burning ember, revived by a flush of air delivered by a poker’s iron tip.

  Outside the wet weather continued and the drops of ice came in on a slanted wind and hit the window glass with a tick-tick-ticking that sounded as if the house were in the first stages of breaking apart, and soon a rush of creaking timber would be heard and the ceiling joists and corner posts would crack and splinter, bending, the weight of something huge and unseen causing the collapse of my home.

  It was Anna who brought me a duvet filled with eiderdown to lay over my lap and a cup of chamomile tea and talked of her life as a child at play in a field full of corn the farmer cut into the shape of a maze she would run through. The corn silk would stick to her hair and her ankles, she said, and there was the sound of other children she could not see, but she heard them navigating through the shaking stalks, the paper talk of the field.

  Anna smiled, she said she’d like to thank that farmer for his cleverness. It was a gift to her to run carefree like that through a 1 8 5

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  maze made of corn. But of course, she said, that farmer is probably no longer alive.

  I told Anna I would do it, if that’s what Diaghilev wanted. I would audition after all. By the light of the fire I replied to his reply, and in the morning Anna went to the post office to mail it for me. I waited at home for her to return and I sat drinking coffee and imagining how I would dance Salome, but then my thoughts were interrupted, I kept picturing Non. When we were in Java she had hugged me too hard once, and then she had lifted up her head under my chin. She was little then, maybe only three, and she thought it was funny, but it hurt. I could feel my esophagus becoming bruised, being pushed so hard that I had trouble breathing. I told her to stop, but she continued, so I took her arms off me and I tore her away and threw her down. She fell on the bamboo mat, her elbows hitting hard and scraping on the rough surface. She cried, holding up one of her elbows to show me where it had scraped on an errant piece of bamboo improperly woven into the mat so that it poked sharply through the surface. There were a few drops of blood and more drops of tears falling down her cheeks and then onto the mat, staining it in places. I told her I was sorry, but she wouldn’t let me comfort her, she ran through the house calling for her father and when she found him he picked her up and held her and she showed him where she was bleeding on her elbow and he kissed it, his lips turning red from her blood. I wondered then, while drinking my coffee in front of the fire, if Non remembered that incident.

  I was sorry for days afterward and tried to make it up to her in foolish ways, by taking her for a slice of cake in a bakery in town, by buying her a toy, a doll from England with red hair and a velvet coat. She immediately took off the velvet coat and the plaid 1 8 6

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  skirt and white shirt and bloomers that the doll also wore and she replaced them with a sarong, saying that the doll would be cooler now, in the high, hot sun. The velvet coat and plaid skirt were thrown into Non’s bottom dresser drawer, which did not properly close, and months later we found a pile of green bits of shredded cloth inside the drawer where the rats had decided to build their nest out of the velvet coat. Non was happy in Java. It was her home for as long as she could remember and I was the one to blame for taking her away from there and bringing her back to Europe. MacLeod never let her forget that I was the one to blame, and so I reasoned that was why the letters came back unopened. All that I knew was that I wanted to see Non again more than anything. I was lying to myself when I thought that what I wanted more than anything was the role of Salome.

  When I auditioned for Diaghilev I think he sensed that. He turned me down and I returned to my home and to Anna and I cried in her arms and she held me and smoothed down my hair and told me Diaghilev was a fool and what did he know. I laughed through my tears when she said it, Diaghilev being as famous as he was and Anna calling him a fool while her hair was swept up in a bun and I could see in it the brightly colored balls that served as heads for the pins she kept there for her sewing.

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  T H E C R E A M S M U ST G O

  ONE MORNING, on my breakfast plate, there was an advertise-ment cut out from the newspaper that Anna Lintjens had placed there. It was for a cream that you spread on yourself morning and night. You worked it into the skin and it promised to turn back time and change skin that resembled the peel of an orange into skin that resembled the peel of a peach.

  The next day I gave Anna some francs. Anna took the money and said she walked in and out of beauty shops, holding the ad, asking for the miracle product. She came home with six jars of the cream and put them on the shelf in the bathroom. That night Anna helped me apply the cream to the folds of skin beneath my shoulder blades.

  Anna said she did not know my gentleman friends by name.

  She did not want to know their names either, she did not know how many there were. She wanted to know only when I would be gone from the house in Holland so that she would not cook more than was needed because she hated to see things go to waste. She did not care to know how the money came into the household.

  She would deposit the men’s checks into the bank and she would keep a record of the balance and handle the checks that needed to be written to my lawyers or, should there be the need, she 1 8 8

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  would take an item of jewelry that one of
the men had given to me as a gift and sell it on the spot to the jewelers.

  Once, though, a gift from one of my gentlemen did not come in the form of money or jewelry. It came in the form of a horse.

  I named him Radjah. Anna said that when I returned from one of my rides with him that in my eyes and in Radjah’s eyes there was a look that made her think that there was a way to ride to the edge of the world and that Radjah and I had both been there.

  And Anna said she wished she could go there too someday, and Anna would reach up and place her hand on Radjah’s neck, leaving it there a long time and closing her eyes, saying how she had never felt anything so smooth before. Then Anna would gather up my clothes, my shirt and my jodhpurs and my jacket, in her arms and head for the wash, where she would smell them, saying they did not smell to her of men or lilies the way I smelled when I came back from a performance, but that they smelled of Radjah.

  How I love that horse, she would say. And Anna said she had a confession to make, that sometimes she added no soap flakes at all to the wash bucket so as not to wash off the smell of something she preferred to lilies and men.

  Anna did not keep the naked photos of me in the album. There was no reason to keep them, they had brought me only trouble, Anna said, especially the one that my lawyer had showed me once. The courts would deem me an unfit mother without hesitation, the lawyer had said. I would have to spend all my money simply trying to erase those photos from existence if I wanted my Non back.

  Unfit, hah, Anna had said. The only un- that my employer is in that picture is undressed. That’s a crime? Anna said to the lawyer, who did not answer her, but instead looked at the door 1 8 9

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  as if its wood and its hinges and its brightly polished knob might answer her question instead.

  One day I took Radjah to where I thought Non and MacLeod now lived. It was a long ride on the cobblestone streets, and Radjah’s step did not falter once and he held his head high. I waited on the corner. Radjah’s breath swirled up around me as we stood in the cold and often I leaned over him, my arms around his neck, feeling his warmth. It was a blond woman I didn’t know who came out first, followed by MacLeod, who immediately put on his cap to cover his head, which now seemed more bald than ever, and even the remaining hair that he once had on the sides of his head was thinner now and patchy, like a chicken who had had its feathers poorly plucked. On the street, MacLeod walked in front of the woman, and she walked a few steps behind. I was expecting Non to come next out of the building. I was praying for it. If she did, I thought I would gallop toward her and then, what next, I didn’t know. Would I be strong enough to lift her up in my arms and set her in front of me on the saddle? How much had she grown? I still pictured her as a young girl and then sometimes the picture of her changed. She was just a baby, running toward me, burying her head in my sarong, moving her head from side to side, saying she could smell sandalwood, her head reaching no higher than my knees.

  She did not come out of the building that day. She went in.

  I didn’t even know it, but she must have walked up behind Radjah. Had she, even in passing, touched his glossy hide without me knowing it? It wasn’t until she walked up to the stoop that I noticed her. She started up the steps, and her black hair was spread out across her shoulders and it shone even though there was only a weak winter sun. I jumped when I saw her, and 1 9 0

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  Radjah felt it. He reared as if spooked by a passing motorcar and in the middle of his rearing I spurred him forward and we took off toward her. I was so afraid she would disappear inside and never come out again. She heard Radjah’s iron shoes clack-ing on the cobblestone, sounding more like a team of horses instead of just one. I saw her look at me then, not knowing of course who I was because I was wearing my riding outfit and my helmet. I drew Radjah to a halt in front of her. I was about to speak. I was about to tell her who I was, when from out of the corner of my eye I saw MacLeod. He ran up and opened the front door and shoved Non inside. Then he reached up behind Radjah and landed a slap on his haunch that was so loud it sounded like a clap of thunder and I first looked up at the sky, thinking for an instant that a winter’s cold day had turned into a summer’s stormy day. Radjah was off on the sidewalk, he didn’t know where he was going. He jumped over a baby pram, his heels grazing the covered top. The mother started to scream, but I did not hear her scream for long, I was off around a corner, trying to slow Radjah down. We were long gone in no time. Back at the stable, I realized that Radjah had lost two shoes.

  The frogs of his hooves were bloody and the end of my riding skirt was speckled like a robin’s egg, only the color wasn’t blue but red with Radjah’s blood, which had spurted up when he galloped across the cobblestones. Anna stayed by his side and lifted his hooves and set them in the lap of her skirt to see how badly he had injured them. Anna, I said, your skirt, and I pointed to show her how Radjah’s hooves had left great crumbles of dirt on her skirt, and she shrugged and said how it did not matter to her, what mattered was that Radjah heal, and she brought him buckets filled with ice that she had collected by knocking on the 1 9 1

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  neighbors’ doors up and down our street, asking if they had a few chips of ice they could spare.

  That evening Anna and I were cleaning out my closet. Anna pulled out the leather wayang kulit puppet that used to belong to Norman. We stopped our cleaning and I showed Anna how to work it, and still, after all these years, even though the leather was curled and brittle with age, I was able to make the puppet jerkily lift its arms and legs and I pointed, showing Anna how the puppet’s strange shadow was able to walk up and down the white plaster walls.

  Later I talked about Norman with Anna and I cried in her arms. Then I broke free, feeling silly for crying so hard after all these years and I said that by now you’d think I’d have finished all my hard crying. Then we smelled a certain smell in the room. We sniffed the air and I swore I could smell, now, here in the room, the smell of the vomit in Norman and Non’s room the day they were poisoned and the day Norman died. Anna and I hunted for it. Was it coming from the open window, a bothersome neighbor’s cooking concoction? Was it coming from a mouse under the furniture, played with to death by the cat, who batted it there one last time before becoming bored? Or was the smell coming from the new cream that promised the peach-smooth skin?

  Then the peach creams must go, Anna said, and she threw all of the peach creams into the garbage.

  At dinner, I talked about Norman. I could not stop talking about him. Eat your dinner, it’s getting cold, Anna said, but I did not eat. I wished out loud how I wanted so much just to hold Norman in my arms again, even dead, I said, I would hold his body again.

  I have no plans for kidnapping someone who is dead, Anna 1 9 2

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  said. There is no train I can take to go fetch him. There’s no gold watch I could offer to entice him. You need to go upstairs and get some rest, Anna then said, and she led me upstairs and helped me change.

  Weeks later there was a small dancing engagement at the Metropol in Berlin. I wondered if I should dance the Chundra in which I was a young priestess wearing Tamil braids and walking through the garden. Suddenly I notice a beautiful flower representing love. Should I pick the flower? I saw myself dancing, struggling with emotion, then picking the flower and dropping my veil, my body then revealed.

  While in Berlin, on the evening before my performance was to begin, I took a walk to the square. There were hundreds of people gathered there. I thought, How lovely, there must be a show of some sort or a concert about to take place. But I was wrong. I learned from someone in the crowd that the war had begun. Then the crowd started to sing Deutschland Über Alles.

  And the singing was so loud that it felt as if it were coming up through my body and vibrati
ng my blood. I ran away from the crowd, pushing myself past all of the singing people, who never seemed to notice me. Instead their eyes seemed to focus on something in the distance I could not see. For me there was to be no flower picking on the stage of the Metropol. The performance was canceled. War had been declared. On a train I undid my Tamil braids with my fingers as I headed for Paris.

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  T H E R O P E

  SISTER L EONIDE CAME IN with consommé. She stood by and watched Mata Hari drink it while Mata Hari sat on her cot.

  Isn’t there someone who needs saving? Mata Hari said.

  You, Sister Leonide said.

  Mata Hari shook her head. What I need is a good bath.

  When I get out of here I’m going to bathe for a week. I don’t care if I’m as shriveled as a peach pit when I towel off. Then afterward I’m going to have my hair dyed. What color do you think? Brown like a bear? Black like a raven? Then my nails, of course. A pedicure too. I’ve got calluses on my feet as hard as the crusts of bread that come from the kitchen here. I feel like I’m walking on stale loaves. Imagine, there was once a time a lover told me he was in love with my feet. He liked to lie head to toe with me in bed so his lip could graze my instep.

  He was definitely someone who needed saving. I only wish I could remember his name so I could give it to you. He said he’d leave his wife and marry me, but I had had enough of marriage, thanks to MacLeod, and I vowed for a long time never to marry again.

  Sister Leonide shook her head. What if you don’t get out of here? she asked.

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  Don’t you know, Sister, I will be released from here one way or another. Didn’t they teach you that in the convent? Isn’t that the whole point? I will be delivered, won’t I? Isn’t that what you people profess? The hereafter? The pearly gates?

  Sister Leonide wanted Mata Hari to fight for her life now. She did not want to have to convince Mata Hari that there was a hereafter, when she had never seen it herself, and she had a feeling Mata Hari would want her to describe it to her. She’d want to know things about it in order to be convinced. What were the flowers like? she imagined Mata Hari asking her, and Sister Leonide would not know the answer. Maybe she would answer instead, You’ll be close to God there, and she could see Mata Hari shrugging her shoulders and saying, Yes, but the flowers, tell me, are they like the ones in Indonesia?