Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  Have you told Bouchardon everything? she said.

  Jean Riquelme, that was his name, Mata Hari said. He lived in Bailly, who knows if he’s still there. Who knows if he still has a thing for feet.

  I know Bouchardon, Sister Leonide said. There was a woman here, she had stolen from a family. She had stolen great things, a Grecian urn weighing in the hundreds of kilos made of gold and a huge work of art off the wall with a gilt frame. It was impossible, Bouchardon had told her, that she had stolen these things by herself. Who had helped her? he wanted to know. She told him no one. For weeks she waited in her cell. He did not call for her. Then one day she wrote to him, she told him that yes, she did have an accomplice. Her son helped her. Bouchardon scheduled the trial shortly after that and she was sentenced to only five years. This past month she was set free. She is back home again.

  1 9 5

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  What about her son? Mata Hari said. Where is he?

  I don’t know. I’ve never been to the men’s side of the prison, Sister Leonide said. But there isn’t anyone else you would be incriminating, is there?

  No, said Mata Hari, laughing, only more of myself.

  Bouchardon hasn’t asked to see you in weeks because he

  knows you’re not telling him everything. Tell him, and he’ll speed up your trial. You’ll be that much closer to seeing Non again.

  Again, Mata Hari laughed. I have more of a chance of seeing my Non in here than out there, she said, motioning her head toward her barred window high off the ground. Maybe Bouchardon will call Non in for questioning and she’ll be standing in the same room with me and I’ll finally have a chance to see her. It’s a dream I sometimes have, she said. I reach out to her and she runs to me and we embrace, and from that embrace I know she still loves me.

  That could still happen, outside these prison walls, Sister Leonide said, and she brought Mata Hari ink and pen and paper, and Mata Hari wrote to Bouchardon.

  Yes, I have some very serious things to say to you. I desire to inform you that I have never attempted the least espionage and I do not have on my conscience the death of any soldier, French or otherwise. I hope that this time I will have the courage to tell you what I have to tell you.

  Perhaps the moment had not yet come, until now, and you wouldn’t have wanted to believe me, or even admit the possibility of the things which I will tell you now.

  1 9 6

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  Mata Hari sealed the letter and gave it to Sister Leonide. It was only two hours later that Charles then came for Mata Hari and said that Bouchardon would like to see her.

  It was still hot. The smell of garbage seemed to come in through the window of Bouchardon’s office. She thought she could smell the leaves of rotting lettuce and curdled milk, and maybe the smell kept the pigeons away, because not one was standing on the sill. They were at the Tuileries, she thought. They are flying over the Jardin du Luxembourg. They’re on the sill of the Louvre now, staring in at pastels, at the gleaming white marble of a body’s perfect form. They’re at the Notre Dame, eye to eye with a flying buttress, a gargoyle’s chiseled wing.

  You have something to tell me? Bouchardon asked her. And she began her story.

  In May 1916, late one night, when Anna Lintjens, my maid, was in bed, there was a knock at the door. It was a German consul named Kramer. He said he had once come to one of my performances and thought that because I was fluent in German and French that he could offer me twenty thousand francs to spy for him. I told him I would do it. I had lawyer bills to pay. So Kramer gave me three small flasks. They were numbered one, two, and three. The first and third were white, the second a bluish green.

  Kramer showed me how the first would be used to dampen the paper, the second to write, the third to efface the text. He told me my code name would be H21. Even as he gave me the inks, I knew I would never use them and I knew I would never spy for him.

  Two days later, as my ship sailed through the channel between the port of Amsterdam and the sea, I threw the flasks over-1 9 7

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  board. I kept the money, though. I felt it was what the Germans owed me for the furs they had kept the time my luggage was de-layed on a train trip through the Alps. When I met Von Kalle in Spain, he must have known I had kept the money without keeping my promise to Kramer to spy for Germany. That’s probably why he set me up and told me information about the submarines from Morocco, but it was old information and I did not know it. That’s why he sent all those messages to Germany in a code he knew the Allies had already broken. The messages said that Agent H21 was receiving money, because he wanted you to believe that I was their agent, I was Agent H21, and he wanted you to believe that I was their spy and that I was to be arrested.

  Von Kalle wanted me to be punished for accepting the twenty thousand francs from Kramer in Amsterdam and not spying for him in return. I was set up. But I am telling you the truth, I never used those invisible inks. I never spied for Germany. I have told you everything I know now, and now you know why there were messages sent from Von Kalle in a code you could break regarding me, regarding H21. I was afraid to tell you this information earlier. I was afraid it would incriminate me. But I am telling you now, because I realize you are intelligent and that you will be able to see what it is the Germans have done to me.

  She stood up then, after she was finished telling Bouchardon her story. Bouchardon wrote some notes on a paper.

  I have a request, she said. I’d like to see my daughter, I’d like to see Non, she said.

  That’s impossible, Bouchardon said.

  Why is it impossible?

  We don’t allow minors in the prison. We never have. You can 1 9 8

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  understand why, can’t you? Do you really want your daughter to see you now, as you are? You should have put your energies into trying to see her instead of spying for the Germans if she was so important to you. By the way, here is your trial date. Bouchardon then held up his legal pad to show her the date he had written there.

  1 9 9

  ...

  T I LT A N D A D J U ST

  IF YOU ARE a mourner, you are on the threshold between one phase of life and the next. You must keep your balance as you cross troubled waters. While you hold your head high, experience teaches you that to restore your equilibrium and get through tumultuous days, you need to tilt and adjust, tilt and adjust, that is how you get to firm ground. These are the teachings of Siva.

  2 0 0

  ...

  VA D I M E

  IN P ARIS, WHEN I got off the train from Berlin, I contacted Anna Lintjens. I wanted her to wire me money in Paris so I could pay for a hotel while I searched for another performance to dance in. I even went and found Molière. He was with his horses in the ring. There was a lovely woman doing cartwheels across the backs of three horses while she held their reins in her teeth. I could do that, I said to Molière.

  No, ma cherie, he said, you could not. This girl is twenty years old, he said while we watched the ends of her hair slap against the bare backs of the horses as she flipped over them and they circled the ring, matching one another’s gait stride for stride.

  Let me know if you hear of any performances I can dance in, I said to Molière.

  Bien sûr, he said, and then he said, Allez, allez, to the twenty-year-old cart-wheeling horse girl and he called her over to him and she came with all three of her horses and they stopped in front of Molière and he raised his hand and motioned for her to bend down close to him and then he reached up and rolled the neckline of her costume down so that more of her breast was revealed.

  2 0 1

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  Okay, he then said, and with a wave he sent her off again to keep circling the ring.

  I left and went for coffee down
the street, smelling my shirt-sleeve while waiting to be served, breathing in deeply the smell of the horses and thinking of Radjah and missing him because I had had to sell him because I was always short on money, and thinking how it was the one time I could remember Anna Lintjens ever being angry with me, the day I sold that horse she too had loved so much.

  There was a young gentleman in the café who was dressed in a Russian uniform. He looked at me. His eyes were brown like the soft fur coat of a beaver or a bear, and my eyes, as if they were hands, seemed to be able to feel the softness of his eyes when I looked back at him. They were eyes to fall into, I thought.

  His name was Vadime Masloff. He was twenty-one years old.

  Our conversation was about coffee. Nowhere in France could he find a cup that tasted like what he was used to, and what he was used to was thick grinds layering the bottom of the cup after he had drunk all the liquid and he liked to read shapes in the grinds and imagine that they told the future. If the grinds were thick and piled high, he would have a good day, and if the grinds were loose and spread about like stars in the sky, then he would not have the kind of day he wanted to have. Here, in this country, he said, every last sip of coffee only reveals emptiness, a porcelain reflection of myself.

  I smiled at him and laughed because it sounded like what a twenty-one-year-old might sound like and he said he was glad that he could make me smile, because if I hadn’t smiled at that moment he wouldn’t have known how beautiful I was.

  But it’s my smile that I like least about my face, I told him, be-2 0 2

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  cause when I smile my cheeks rise and close my eyes to near slits.

  He agreed with me but said that it did not matter, one could still see the beauty of the shape of my eyes with the lids nearly closed and that it added much more to my beauty than it took away. I laughed again, thinking again how young he was, and then he said out loud what I was thinking.

  You think I’m a boy, don’t you?

  I nodded.

  I believe, he said, that some people age faster than others. I have aged enough in this one year so that it equals ten years.

  Everyone with me at the Russian front has experienced this too. We are some kind of mortals with a different clock running inside of us. Sure, our skin is smooth, our muscles quick and strong, but our minds, he said . . . and he did not finish. He turned his head and looked out the window, at the street, the cars and carriages passing by. It was then that I noticed his nose. It was straight and long and fine. Like the bow of a ship, I thought, it could slice through waters and leave a wake on either side. I wanted to know this boy, this man.

  It was not like other love affairs of mine. He had no money.

  There was none to leave on my dresser afterward. There was none to fold and tuck into my brassiere. None to be directly sent to my bank account. There were no expensive gifts. No costume jewelry to be added to my giant jewelry box already stuffed with the jewels of others. There were simple gifts. A yellow rose he surely had picked from someone’s street-facing garden. The end of the stem torn and not cut by a florist’s exacting pair of scissors. There was no other woman, no wife at home, no mistress, no mother still alive to endlessly extol her virtues. There were, however, feverish dreams, and I watched his head on the pillow 2 0 3

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  turning from side to side, and then he would wake and, dripping with sweat that fell onto my chest, onto my breasts and my cheeks and even into my mouth, he would position himself on top of me and hold me down. I wasn’t going to go anywhere, but still he held my arms down while he kissed me and while he let his lips touch my breasts, using sometimes just his slight breath to excite me, to raise a nipple to a heightened state in expectation of what was to come next, the entirety of his mouth upon me, the swirling warm wetness of his tongue whose effect I swore was like a cord whose sensation ran from my nipple, through my ribs, all the way down to my groin. It was like an ache, and the only thing that seemed to relieve it was when he finally entered me.

  He filled me, drove into me while his sweat, which now fell upon me, was not the sweat from some nightmare at the battlefront but was the sweat of our lovemaking.

  I told myself he was just a boy, but even my own voice sounded false to me. He was not just a boy, especially not while he had his nightmares.

  He was measured during the day. He would rise calmly from my hotel bed, he would place both feet on the floor first and then stand. He would go to the window and pull back the curtain, looking at first at the sky and then down below to whomever was passing on the street. Then he would turn to see if I was awake and he would walk over to kiss me on the forehead, the way a father would. The way my father did in fact when I was a girl.

  This is no boy, I would say to myself.

  You must come look at this sunrise, he might say, and he would help me from the bed and together we would look at the pink dawn stretching in between the tops of buildings and the spires of churches. He would stand behind me while we watched, his 2 0 4

  S I G N E D , M

  ... A T A H A R I

  hands on my shoulders as if to hold me back from jumping out the window if that were ever an impulse to overtake me.

  It was actually my lawyers who advised it and who encouraged it. A marriage, at this time, they said, might help my position. A marriage, in the eyes of the courts, might just be the ticket, the deciding factor, the linchpin of sorts that would get my daughter back for me. How? I asked.

  Let’s face it, they said, you’re getting older. How much longer can you keep up this dancing and this life of being a mistress to other men? A husband now would make you seem stable and respectable. He’s asked to marry you, while none of the others have, because they were older and already married. You might jump at this chance.

  Will it bring back Non? I asked.

  We’re not fortune-tellers, they said, we’re lawyers. We just hold your fate in our hands, they said, smiling.

  Vadime was not the same as MacLeod, I told myself. There would be no drunken nights and then the days where I would find MacLeod baking in the sun, still wearing his uniform but open now, the wobbly brass buttons hanging by a thread, dulled with scratches from scraping on the rocks after falling facedown in the road. There would be no explaining to Non that her father was sick, had taken ill, a fever, a flu, and that he needed rest and quiet. She would come to his bedside and sing for him a song she knew to sleep by, but MacLeod, hungover, with a splitting head that felt as if it had been cut in half with the cleaver that stooped-over Hijau had kept in the kitchen and used for cutting the heads off chickens, did not want to hear singing. Get her out, get her the goddamned hell out of the room! he would say. I would take Non by the shoulders then 2 0 5

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  and steer her out of the room and into the living room and out to the garden.

  She would sit in my lap and play a clapping game and she showed me one where you start the game by first clapping your own chest, your arms crossed, and then you clap each other’s hands and Non said, That is the way they put Norman in the box when he died, with his arms crossed, and so she called it the Norm game and I tried to teach her other clapping games because Non was right, it was the way they had laid my boy in the coffin and I could not bear to see Non with her own slender arms crossed over her chest in the same position, but Non did not want to play another game. And so, while MacLeod snored above me, reeking in our bed, the sweat pouring out of him ran-cid with sweet alcohol on the eyelet sheets, we played the dead Norm game over and over again.

  2 0 6

  ...

  F R O ST E D L E AV E S

  WHILE IN BED with Vadime in the morning I heard the gentle thud of the hotel maid leaving the paper outside the door. I knew it lay there with the news of the western front, how the Germans behind the Hindenburg Line were destroying towns, villages, and me
ans of communication. They were cutting down forests and poisoning water supplies. I stroked Vadime where on his forehead a jagged stretch of vein pulsed regularly. Oh, God, I prayed, protect this one.

  When he woke he said he must go back to the front, his leave was now over. He put on his khaki uniform while I watched him from bed. He put on his papakha, his sheepskin winter hat with the oval cockade in the Romanov colors stitched in the center.

  When he bent down to kiss me he did not stop and it turned into him stretching out on top of me and unbuttoning his trousers and releasing himself from them. He entered me that way, without even taking off his trousers but just unbuttoning them.

  Neither did he unbuckle his engraved brass belt. While he was inside of me I noticed the smell of some kind of lanolin or oil worked into the sheepskin of his papakha. It was mixed in with the smell of the sweat from his smooth, unlined brow. Later, when he left, he called me his bride, even though we would not 2 0 7

  Y a n n i c k

  ... M u r p h y

  be married for weeks. He closed the door and I looked down at myself and noticed how the buckle of his engraved brass belt had gouged my skin, leaving a mark, as if I’d been branded.

  I received a letter from Anna Lintjens at my hotel. Van der Capellen, one of my Dutch gentlemen, had sent Anna his usual modest monthly check to help pay for my expenses. Did I want to use part of the money to hire painters to paint the trim? It was becoming cracked, Anna wrote, and flecks of it fell into the garden and peppered the frosted leaves of the plants. I wrote her back, saying not to spend the money on the house. I was to get married to Vadime and we would need the money for the wedding and I would need money, of course, to keep paying my lawyers. We would need all the money I could make between now and then, in fact.