Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  Send me all of my calling cards from the top drawer in my bureau, I wrote . While I’m here in Paris I can contact a number of gentlemen. Send Ambassador Jules Cambon’s card. Remember Monseigneur Messimy, the ministry of war? Be sure to send his address as well. He was always generous, especially when his wife was out of town. Let’s hope she’s taken a respite from this war and gone to visit relatives elsewhere.

  Here the streets seem to be filled with the smell of shoe polish coming from the shoe-polish stands, they are working hard these days, the men who polish shoes, because everywhere you look there are men in uniforms whose boots are so well shined they could serve as mirrors and I can see the hems of my skirts reflected in them. The smell of polish even overwhelms sometimes the sweet smell coming from 2 0 8

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  the patisseries and I am not experiencing my usual love of Paris at the moment, but I am finding it a grayer place to be, as if the smoke from all the guns at the front has formed a cloud and drifted here and settled itself between the cobblestones and the sky.

  Then I also received a letter from Vadime from a hospital at the front.

  The same mud we curse all the time, he wrote, the same mud we stagger in and slip in and that yanks off our boots every time we take a step is the mud that saved me.

  The Germans had been firing down shells that landed on corpses already torn to shreds and the shells kept shredding the rotting flesh into even smaller bits, over and over again, and then a shell exploded near me. Shrapnel flew into my eyes, and I sank down to hide in one gaping shell hole of this corpse-filled mud. I thought I would drown and I could not see. I swallowed, I could not help it, mouthfuls of water putrid with rotten flesh and scraps of men’s bodies, and I tried to scream. Then I was saved, I was pulled out of the wretched mess, but one eye is damaged and I may lose sight in the other one. Dear Mata, can’t you find a way to come see me? I need you here. Will you still love me if I become completely blind?

  The moment I finished reading his letter, a darkness fell over the city. A second ago it had been daylight, the next moment it was dark, and I could only imagine that it was really from some giant plane flying overhead whose tremendous size no one had 2 0 9

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  seen before and whose vast underbelly created a shadow over the entire city. But that was not the case, it was only a sudden shift in light.

  I could not sleep that night but held Vadime’s letter in my hand while I sat in a chair, looking out my hotel window at the star-less sky and praying that he would be safe. I wasn’t sure whom I prayed to, was it to Siva or to God? I remember I named the names of saints I hadn’t named since I was a girl and a rosary spilled from my lips as if it were an uncontrollable tremble that seemed to have been held there all these years for some sort of safekeeping and was now finally allowed to break forth and it did with the force and urgency of water held behind a broken flood wall.

  After that is when I went to the French police and found Captain Ladoux. I asked him for a week’s pass to go and visit Vadime and he took me by surprise and he asked me to spy for France in return. The payment I would receive from France, I learned, could be as high as 1 million francs. With that kind of money I dreamed of being able to marry Vadime properly and to support both him and Non. The courts would allow her to come and live with me because I would have created such a secure and lovely home for her to live in with a stepfather who would care for her and a well-tended house. Most importantly, she would be with me, her mother, and couldn’t the courts see that was all that could possibly matter?

  In Vittel, I rented a room for Vadime and myself. I closed the shutters. I kept out the sunlight and left the lamp low. It was all for his eyes. Our meals were brought to us. He looked at himself in the silver lid of the tray that covered our dinner. He wanted to see how he looked. The swelling’s gone down, I said.

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  I wonder if I’ll lose sight in this eye too, he said, and he touched his fingertip to one of his eyebrows to show me which eye he meant. Then he said, Sit here, and I sat next to him on the bed and he looked at me for what could have been almost an hour.

  He said he wanted to be able to remember exactly the way that I looked just in case he did go totally blind in both eyes. I laughed, I said we might make a good couple after all considering that if he were blind he wouldn’t be able to see me age into a wrinkled old woman and maybe, just maybe, he would never leave me for a younger woman.

  That night we made love. At first he lay on his back, to lessen the pain of injury to his eyes, but then his eyes didn’t seem to matter to him, he did not mind the pain, he said, and he lay on top of me and covered me completely. By this I mean he stretched out my arms and his arms covered mine, right to my fingertips being covered by his and his legs covered my legs and he clung to me like a shadow, and I thought how if someone were to see us from up above, then all that one could see would be him. I was no longer visible.

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  T H E G I R L

  ANNA L INTJENS was dusting. She feather-dusted the lampshade by Mata Hari’s bed. She dusted the jewelry box on Mata Hari’s chest of drawers. The jewelry box was almost as long and wide as the top of the chest of drawers was. It was a box Mata Hari had brought back from a trip she had taken to Egypt. She had gone for ideas. She needed ideas for new dances that might re-kindle her fame. All that she brought back was the box. Its cover was bordered with sanded bone and its center inlaid with bits of mother-of-pearl. Anna thought how it would probably be the last box. There would be no gifts of jewels now. There would be no reason to find a bigger box now that Mata Hari was going to marry a man who served at the front and who was not rich and whose gifts would be his endearments and his outpourings of love. Anna thought to herself how she might like this young man. She wondered what he liked to eat, what was his favorite meal, and she made a note to herself to ask the neighbor down the way whose parents had been Russian if she knew of any recipes from her village that she could cook for the young man that he might like. She pictured holidays with him, laying out a plate of caviar and crackers on the mantel and a decanter of vodka while they ate and drank and watched candle flames flicker on 2 1 2

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  the Christmas tree he had helped to carry through the streets to their home.

  Anna went to the window. She feather-dusted the curtains.

  When she looked out the window she noticed a young girl walking on the street below. The girl had thick black hair, as thick as Mata Hari’s hair once was. The girl stopped and looked up at Mata Hari’s house and then the girl walked on. Anna was sure it was Non.

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  VO N K A L L E

  AFTER I RETURNED from seeing Vadime, I met with Ladoux again.

  We decided that I should set out for Belgium via Falmouth, so that I could renew contacts with enlisted Germans I had known in Belgium who were posted there. I thought there might be a chance that I could obtain information from them. However, I did not get far. When I had left France and was ready to depart for Falmouth, a British officer took me by the arm. At first I thought he might be helping me to board the ship, but then something about his grip on my arm, which I felt clear to the bone, and the way he steered me on the quay made me realize he was not trying to make my acquaintance or to aid a lady traveling alone.

  I was brought to the police station. Are you German Agent AF44? they asked me.

  Of course not, I said. Then an officer produced a picture of a dancer in a Spanish dress with a white mantilla. She was carrying a fan in her right hand and had her left hand on her hip.

  That’s you, the officer said. You are Clara Benedict.

  I shook my head. No, that is certainly not I.

  Yes, yes, the officer said. You are a dancer. She is a da
ncer.

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  You are German Agent AF44. He was a thin man, this officer.

  His fingers were also long and thin and pale, and I thought how they looked like a group of white snakes I had once seen writhing on the forest floor in Sindanglaja. He touched me with his hand and made me turn to look at the photograph again, and I quickly stood up and moved away from him. The mist had clung low to the forest floor the day I saw the white snakes and it was getting dark and I was afraid I would twist on a root and fall on top of the snakes as I tried to cross their path and I did not know what kind of white snakes they were. I could not remember Tekul ever telling me about white snakes, and they could only ever be evil, I thought, what with their eyes so red and their skin so pale and as they twisted and turned around one another I could see through to their organs, the blood blue in their veins as they offered up their underbellies to the oncoming night.

  I was sent to Scotland Yard, where a man named Sir Basil Thompson, assistant commissioner of police, took only a moment to realize I wasn’t AF44, a.k.a. Clara Benedict. No, certainly not, he said looking at the picture the officer with the white snake fingers showed him. This woman in the picture’s much shorter than you, he said. He turned to me with eyes that drooped as if when he was a child he had held the pockets of skin beneath his eyes down with his fingers making silly faces all day and they had sagged that way forever, and he said, My dear lady, who are you?

  I told him that I was working for Ladoux in Paris and that he should telegraph Ladoux who would confirm what I’d said.

  Thompson did telegraph Ladoux and Ladoux wrote back. His 2 1 5

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  message said: I understand nothing, send her to Spain. And so I was sent to Madrid, not knowing why I had been sent there and not knowing why Ladoux pretended not to understand.

  In Madrid, I wrote to Ladoux from my hotel. I asked him what was going on and why had the Brits taken me to Spain. I told him that I was anxiously awaiting further instructions from him — had he changed his mind and did he have new plans for me to try and extract information from a German in Spain, rather than a German in Belgium? I also asked him to send some more money, as my funds were getting rather low.

  There was nothing for me to do in my hotel room, so after I wrote to Ladoux I went outside and took a walk. I walked into a fortune-teller’s shop. Small yellow canaries and red finches were kept in cages all over the shop. They twittered and flew from the bars of their cage back to their swinging perches hanging from the center of their cages. The fortune-teller laid out her cards on a table, where the oil from the base of her palm had stained the wood dark from her holding the stack in her hand as her other hand did the work of flipping and placing the cards.

  The fortune-teller did just that in front of me. She flipped and placed, flipped and placed her cards. Will I be successful in my mission, will I receive the 1 million in francs? I asked the cards.

  Will I marry? Will Non finally come and live with me? The birds in their cages knew to be still while a fortune was read, and they watched the fortune-teller at work. Then the fortune-teller finally shook her head.

  No, she said. You will be shot before any of that could possibly happen.

  A bird then suddenly jumped from his perch to the side of the cage, and as he clung there, a shred of newspaper that had lined 2 1 6

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  the tray beneath him now hung from his claw like a flag and fluttered in a breeze that went through the room.

  Shot? I said.

  The session is over, I’ve told you all the cards know, she said.

  I paid with a ring from my finger. Van der Capellen had once given it to me. The stone set in the middle was made of cut glass, but the band was gold.

  When I went through the glass-beaded curtain that hung in the doorway, it reflected light from the sun on the floor in the shapes of thousands of cut diamonds, and only if they were real, I thought, would I then fall to the floor on my knees, turning my skirt into a bowl to grab fistfuls of the diamonds and haul them away? Had the fortune-teller thought the same thing many a time before as she too sat staring at the sparkling diamond shapes on her well-worn floor? I turned back to look at the fortune-teller, but she was gone. She had disappeared into another room of her shop and all that was left were the birds, chirping loudly, as if trying to call her back.

  IN THE DINING ROOM of the hotel a French colonel named

  Danvignes came up to me with a carnation he had plucked from the flower vase at the front desk and he tucked it into the bosom of my dress while he introduced himself. He then asked if he could share my table with me. I learned that in a few days he would be going back to France.

  France? I said. You must do me a favor, I said.

  Anything, he said, reaching out then to rearrange the carnation in my bosom, saying he didn’t want it falling down beneath my neckline where no one could see it.

  I am penniless, I explained. Please contact Captain Ladoux 2 1 7

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  and tell him to send me word, what am I to do next? Tell him I need money too, I said. That is very important. He sent me here to Spain, but meanwhile I have no money to pay even the hotel bill, and I’m spending my days doing nothing, waiting for his orders.

  Colonel Danvignes then raised my fingers to his lips and kissed them. I will do it, he said, if you promise to see me again.

  Yes, of course, I said. Let’s have dinner together again before you leave.

  Then I left the dining room. I had an idea. I went to the desk of the hotel porter. There, lying on the desk, was the diplomatic yearbook. I turned to the page of the German embassy. In town there was a German named Major Von Kalle. I decided to pay him a visit. While I was waiting in Madrid for word from Ladoux, I might as well spend my time wisely. What if Von Kalle could tell me some useful information about what the Germans were planning? Wouldn’t that be worth the million francs Ladoux said he might pay me?

  I knew just the right height to lift my dress above my ankles as I sat in a chair in Von Kalle’s apartment. Von Kalle was curious as to why I had come to visit him, but I told him who I was and he had heard of me and my dancing career and he was pleased to have the company of an erudite woman and that was not something this war let him experience very often. His face was deeply scarred by adolescent acne, but his hair was thick and smooth and its beauty seemed to contrast sharply with his pitted skin, so that it almost seemed as if he were wearing a wig, but when he took me in his arms and started kissing me and I reached my fingers up toward his hair I found out that this of course was not true. Afterward he told me that he was tired, not from our love-2 1 8

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  making, but he had been busy with the preparation for a landing of German and Turkish soldiers from a submarine off the coast of Morocco, in the French zone.

  It takes all my time, he said.

  I told him that I hoped I did not tire him out too much, and he said that in fact I had injected new life into him, and then he asked where I was staying and I told him the Hotel Savoy.

  But for how long, I don’t know, I’ve run out of money, I said, and he then pulled 3,500 pesetas from his billfold and gave them to me.

  Then he brushed back a smooth lock of hair that had fallen across the pock-riddled bridge of his nose and said that I should be a good girl and run along and I was treated to a fun slap on the rear and a tweak on the cheek as I was escorted out the front door.

  A fine rain fell as I walked back to the Hotel Savoy, and it was so fine it felt more like a mist, and it hung in the air instead of falling, and I thought for a moment that I was back in Java, back in the forest, and that any moment I could look up and see a gibbon in a tree, but when I looked up from the ground all that I saw were men in a bar pla
ying dominoes who, when I passed by, raised their glasses to their lips and stared at me through their pale amber beer.

  Back at the hotel, Danvignes was sitting in the lobby, and when he saw me he rose from the chair with another carnation between his fingers. He was intent on placing it between my breasts again, but I took the carnation from him and told him to sit back down. I told him all about Von Kalle and about the German submarines landing in Morocco.

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  This is great news, woman! he said. You’ve done some fine intelligence work for your first time. But where, exactly, are the soldiers going to disembark? he said.

  I don’t know, I didn’t want to seem overly curious, so I didn’t ask him, I said.

  But you must go back and find out! Danvignes said. You must go back right away. I’m leaving on a train tomorrow afternoon for Paris, and if I had that information it would be so useful, I could arrive at the Gare du Nord and take a taxi straight to Ladoux and tell him about the marvelous work you’ve done.

  It was still raining the next morning when I walked down the street.

  When I arrived at Von Kalle’s, my skirts were almost completely soaked through with the persistent rain and I knew that the stray strands of hair by my temples had curled in the humidity into tight long ringlets like those worn by a Hasidic Jew.

  Von Kalle did not open the door for me.

  Enter, he said from inside his apartment after I had knocked.

  I entered, and his back was to me, and all I could see in the weak light was his smooth hair.

  It’s me, Mata Hari, I said. He still did not turn around, and then I realized that I did not want him to turn around. I did not want to see his scarred face, and maybe he knew this, and maybe that’s why he had not turned around yet.

  The French are sending radio messages all over, my dear, he said, inquiring about the German landings in Morocco. I wonder where they could have found that piece of information, he said.