Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  You’ve done well, Tekul said, and that is when I turned and looked and saw Non. It was really her behind the birds of paradise, her hands I saw, not some hands I had imagined while in a hazy drugged state.

  Her mouth was shut tight, her lips one line, and I thought for a moment that she had been through my cosmetics, had found my lip paint and had drawn the line herself, some girlish play I had not yet known she was ready for. But it was not lip paint. It was the look of a girl who has seen her mother naked and the servant’s body, not her father’s body, moving in her mother and over her, the bodies stuck so close together they may have well been a flat rock stuck in mud, and unstuck what would crawl out but mandibled, pincered, million-legged things, their tails in scythelike curves.

  I pushed Tekul off me. He was so light, no thicker than a cattail and almost the same brown, that I could fling him, really, and he landed in the tangled vines where house cats kept by long-ago renters of our house now lived wild and defecated through the leaves. There was no consoling her. She ran from me.

  Since when had she become so fast? Or was I so slow? Was the cigarette Tekul had given me still at work? I could barely move.

  I heard her slam the bedroom door. I looked up to the window of her bedroom, but it was not she who was standing behind the curtain, but Kidul, her horror something she clenched in her fists at her chest. I noticed the curtain blowing from side to side in front of her, as if it were a cloth working to erase a classroom’s chalked letters from the slate.

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  I do not remember all the rest. Maybe I tried to console them both. Maybe I explained to Kidul how the drug had turned me into someone else. Maybe I pleaded with her to understand that what her husband meant to me was nothing at all. Maybe I tried to pull Non from her hiding place behind the bamboo chair and tell her what she saw was just a play. We had been actors. We had parts. I was the evil princess and Tekul the kris-dagger god come to slay me. Maybe I put both Norman and Non back to bed. I brought them rice milk from the kitchen served in wineglasses.

  Let’s be elegant, I might have said. Let’s pretend we are in the house of the king and the queen, I said, and tied my hair behind my head because when it was loose and falling by my face I had noticed it still held the smell of Tekul’s secret island cigarette.

  Then, only days later, when the children were poisoned and it was Kidul who had done it, the memory of the night with Tekul was gone from my thoughts. I blamed MacLeod instead.

  What Non remembered of that night with me I have no way of knowing. She never mentioned anything to me about it, but now, looking back at it while in my cell after the trial, I realized that throughout the years, it was not just MacLeod who kept Non from seeing me, it was probably Non herself. She hated me for having hurt Kidul, who was her loving nanny, her playmate, and the one who bathed her from a brown ceramic pitcher whose stream of water she held above her head, telling her stories of the mountain gods while she rinsed her hair of ginger soap and later scented it with myrrh. And she hated me because it was my fault her brother was dead.

  How stupid of me, I thought, and I pounded my leg with my fist in disgust and anger, and Sister Leonide, who was in the cell with me, caught my fist in midair and held it, bringing the back 2 3 6

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  of my hand close to her mouth, where she kissed it. Then she told me to have faith and to have courage, maybe there could be a retrial. I looked at her for a moment, thinking of a way she might be right, that Non could see it all a different way, but then I realized Sister Leonide was talking about the trial in which I was condemned for being a spy.

  Oh, the trial, I said. That is what you mean. Sentenced to death, I said. I could not think about it now. Of course, I said.

  A just punishment. And I thought how I wished it was the next morning that I would be shot, because I did not think I could live another day knowing that it was my fault that my Non and Norm had been taken from me. I looked at my prison wall, but I did not study its stone surface. Instead I saw Non again, refusing to let me kiss her good-night while she lay in bed next to Norm, how she turned away from me and buried her head in the pillow and hunched her back so her shoulders stuck up sharply like axe blades hidden in her gown. All that I could kiss of her was her thick, dark hair, smelling of Kidul’s myrrh.

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  A N I N Q U I RY

  A B O U T T H E G A R D E N

  DR. B IZARD WAS in his garden with a watering can, watering his radishes, when he received a phone call from the prison and heard the news. He had hoped that the thunderstorm would have done the job for him, and he had turned and scowled at the passing clouds when they did not produce any rain, only a dark green sky that made his radishes appear less red and almost sickly in the light.

  When he arrived at the prison, he expected her to be crying into her pillow on the bed. He had brought a calmative too, just in case. When he got there, it was not she who was lying down and crying, but Sister Leonide. Dr. Bizard looked at Mata Hari and noticed for the first time how she looked like all the other prisoners in the building. She no longer looked as if she were lengthening, and her squat neck seemed to sit deep within her collarbone. Her fingers did not seem all that long, but fat-ter now at the knuckles and arthritic in their appearance. She did not look as if her entire body was striving to be set free.

  She was rubbing her hand on Sister Leonide’s back, comforting her, bending close to her ear. When Mata Hari saw Dr. Bizard, she said, Finally, you’re here, and she held out her hand to Dr.

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  Bizard to take the calmative from him so she could give it to Sister Leonide. When Sister Leonide sat up, one could see how she was clasping her silver cross while she lay on the bed and now on her cheek there was an imprint of the cross, where it had dug into her skin.

  The knees of Dr. Bizard’s pants were brown with dirt.

  How is your garden? Mata Hari asked. And Dr. Bizard re-

  membered that is how some of his other patients who were told they would be shot would talk to him after they had learned the news. How they talked as if nothing had changed at all. They were most normal then, he thought, and he remembered some patients who beforehand had been so lunatic he could not have received a reply from them that made any sense, but once they were sentenced, it was as if a great calm had fallen onto them and they spoke in clear, full sentences, their eyes looked directly at him, and they looked more like leaders then, great rulers or presidents, people you would entrust to make life-changing deci-sions, and they did not bear any resemblance to the thieves and murderers they were when they first came.

  A shame about the rain, Mata Hari said, I bet your vegetables could have used a good watering.

  I’ve heard the news, Dr. Bizard said. I’m sorry.

  How does it happen? Do they all aim for the heart? Or is it the head?

  After she said this, Sister Leonide sobbed loudly, and Dr.

  Bizard passed her his handkerchief.

  I don’t know what they’ll do this time, Dr. Bizard said. I can inquire if you wish.

  By now, Sister Leonide had taken to crying steadily again and 2 3 9

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  Mata Hari leaned over her and put her arm around her. Through her crying, Sister Leonide said, I should be the one consoling you, I should be praying for you.

  Don’t worry, Mata Hari said. You were never a good nun anyway. You were probably a better cleaning lady. You were probably the best in all of France.

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  A N OT H E R P L A N

  VAN DER C APELLEN missed Mata Hari. She had been gone so long from Holland that he was beginning to think she had left altogether and had moved back to France for good, though she had always assured him she would return soon. He wo
ndered if she had found a new lover and he looked in the mirror and could not blame her if she had.

  He had gained weight recently and it all had gone right to his middle so that when he looked down he could not see the tops of his shoes. His neck, also, had gained weight and his collars were so tight that his wife noticed and one morning she said it looked as if it hurt him just to swallow his coffee and she said she would have the tailor make him some new shirts that fit him, extralarge in the collar she said. Mata Hari, he thought, never would have said anything about his fat middle or neck, though, and she would have taken him in her arms and kissed him and made love to him and later that month he would remember, dutifully, to send money to her house, which he himself had made the down payment on.

  He never would have gone directly to her house before. They would always meet in a hotel room, but he knew the address, of 2 4 1

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  course, and one day he found himself walking down her street.

  He rang the bell and the maid answered the door.

  Anna Lintjens invited Van der Capellen in and he sat on the sofa and she brought him tea and hoped that the legs of the sofa, now weak and in need of the screws being tightened or even replaced, would withstand the weight of his build.

  Van der Capellen held his tea as if he were just about to take a sip of it for the longest time, but he didn’t. Instead he spoke of Mata Hari. He spoke of how he missed her and he asked Anna Lintjens to forgive him for coming here and talking of it with her, but there was no one else, you see, he could talk to about it, and he was almost beginning to think that Mata Hari hadn’t existed at all and that he had made her up.

  Anna Lintjens assured him how real Mata Hari was and said she was also worried about the whereabouts of her employer.

  It had been weeks since she had heard from her and that was unusual. There was the house to look after. There was the leak in the roof that still needed patching. In the last rain the clothes in one of Mata Hari’s closets and some of her most treasured silk sarongs had become soaked and their colors ran and bled together.

  Van der Capellen told Anna Lintjens that he would pay for a roofer to come and nail shingles over the damaged section of roof and then he asked in a small voice, not looking Anna Lintjens in the eye, if she thought there was a possibility of another man in Mata Hari’s life. Anna Lintjens immediately said no, that was out of the question, but of course she thought to herself how she had just told a lie, there was a young Russian named Vadime whom Mata Hari would soon marry.

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  You don’t agree? Van der Capellen said when he saw Anna Lintjens shaking her head.

  I’m sorry, would you repeat what you just said, Anna Lintjens said.

  The consulate, Van der Capellen said, I think I should go there and make inquiries. I think they could file a report with the French consulate. There is a war going on, after all. What if she, I can’t bear to think of it, but what if she’s hurt? What if she’s lying in the middle of some bombed-out building or alone in some hospital bed dazed and confused?

  Yes, of course, you should go to the consulate. Go right away, Anna Lintjens said. She stood and took Van der Capellen’s cup from him, even though he had not drunk one sip.

  Just one thing, before I go, Van der Capellen said, I was wondering if maybe there was something of Mata Hari’s that I could have. I know it’s a silly question. I’m a silly man, perhaps. But it would help so much if I could just have something, anything really, even something she wore, it would help me get through the lonely periods. I think you understand, he said.

  Anna Lintjens knew he would like her to reach into Mata Hari’s top dresser drawer and produce for him one of her black satin panties, but of course she would not do it. Then she remembered, right beside her in the easy chair was her sewing box, it was filled with scraps of Mata Hari’s old costumes, which Anna Lintjens had kept because she liked the colors or the beads that had been sewn into them. There was one section of cloth that was from the shoulder of a costume and it was sewn with a row of ruby red beads, and Anna held it up and gave it to Van der Capellen and told him that the cloth was from a section of 2 4 3

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  cleavage of one of her costumes. There, that should be close enough to what he wanted, she thought, a piece of something that had rested on the warm skin of Mata Hari’s breasts and Van der Capellen was happy to receive the stray bit of cloth and he wanted to kiss it the moment it touched his hands, but he didn’t, of course, not in the presence of the maid, and instead he folded it carefully and put it into his pocket.

  He fingered the ruby red beads while he waited in line to fill out forms in the consulate office and twiddled his fingertip across one bead over and over again and imagined it being her nipple and he hoped when the woman behind the desk was ready to wait on him that the throbbing erection he had would have gone down and he tried not to touch the bead for a moment, but he couldn’t help himself, and by the time he reached the consulate woman’s desk and sat down in the chair that she offered him, he was sure, although he could not see for himself because of the size of his belly, that his fly was sticking straight up like a tent pole and the cloth of his pants was the canvas that covered it.

  The consulate woman had a nice smile. It wasn’t altogether straight and one side of her lips reached up higher on her face than the other, and it made her seem as if she weren’t quite sure of herself, which Van der Capellen found attractive and different, very different from Mata Hari, whose dark, almost Asian eyes and perfectly straight lips never hinted at any type of wavering stance whatsoever and always seemed to him to mean she knew exactly what she was doing and why.

  So it wasn’t a surprise to him, really, thinking back on it, that after he learned through a series of weeks passing that Mata Hari was being held in a prison for some kind of espionage act 2 4 4

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  that he asked the consulate woman out to dinner and later to a hotel and that he no longer carried the cloth with the ruby red beads in his pocket but had left it in some drawer at his office, along with some broken-nibbed pens and a small assortment of corks to bottles of wines he once had at lunch and liked and kept because he thought he might try them one day again but never did.

  Anna Lintjens read the letter he wrote telling her that he had found the whereabouts of Mata Hari, that she was in Saint-Lazare, accused of espionage, that he would no longer be sending a monthly check and that he thought Anna Lintjens might understand.

  Accused of espionage! Anna Lintjens thought, and she felt as if she could hit herself for not having come out of her room that night that she heard the sneaky Kramer come to the door with his vials of invisible ink tinkling against one another in Mata Hari’s hands as she took them. How she wished she had burst out of her room at the time of the knock at the door and told Kramer to leave and let her employer be.

  What did her employer know of vials of secret ink? What did she know of codes and code names? Her employer was a dancer, why was he giving her the name H21?

  Anna Lintjens sank back into her chair and let Van der

  Capellen’s letter fall from her fingertips and onto the floor she had just waxed and polished. There was no way she could think of to save her employer now. What could she do? Scale a prison wall? Bake a cake concealed with a saw-bladed knife? Bribe a guard? And with what money? she said to herself. Then she rose from her chair, picked up the letter, threw it away, and headed to her room. From her dresser drawer, wrapped in a holey silk stock-2 4 5

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  ing, she kept an emerald ring her mother had left to her when she died. She unwrapped the ring and held it to the light, watching the green facets. Then she dropped the ring into the pocket of her apron and went downstairs to the kitchen, where she took out her
canister of flour. It was time to make a crust and bake a pie. Time to think and hatch a plan.

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  T H E P I R AT E

  DR. V ANV OORT HAD a servant living with him who was as brown as one of the coffee beans on his plantation. Her Dutch was not good, so she tried to teach him Malay. He knew how to say things like spoon and good and night and shelf, but he did not know enough words to carry on a conversation with the girl, say about politics, but then of course there were no politics to discuss on the plantation, unless you counted the division of labor, who would be the workers today to harvest the beans, who would be the ones to grind them?

  She seemed to be the opposite of Mata Hari physically. When she lay down naked on the bed for him each night, she had no visible third eye between her legs. It was there, he knew, but its positioning was more posterior and did not look out at anything except the darkness that her own closed legs created. He wondered if Mata Hari had ever made it to Paris. He wondered what she was doing now. Was she in the drawing room of some ambassador, were they discussing the latest events of the war?

  Some days he dreamed of leaving and trying to find her there, but he was not certain where to look and then he would catch sight of himself in a mirror. His hair was thinning and his scalp showed through red all the time from too much sun so he had 2 4 7

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  taken to wearing a cloth over his head and he looked to himself more like a pirate than a physician and he thought how Mata Hari would probably not even recognize him now.

  His brown servant girl called to him that dinner was ready and he sat the way she did, cross-legged on a straw mat, and the tables in the house were all piled high with old newspapers he had read over and over again and would still read, taking one with him after his morning coffee and heading toward the outhouse made of thin bamboo poles that let decent-size bars of sunlight through to read by, and that in the strong winds that sometimes swept through would topple over and he’d have to right the outhouse, and he and his servant would inspect the damage to the ties that held the poles together, and then they would work side by side, nimble fingers at repair.