Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  There were twelve men in the firing squad. Six in front, and six behind, but not directly behind, centered in such a manner so that they were between the shoulders of those men who were in front so that their rifles had a clear path to the target.

  Sister Leonide was saying, Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.

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  N O U S E

  IT WAS NO USE, thought Anna Lintjens, she could feel that the bills were slightly damp even after all the opening and closing of the neckline of her dress.

  After the horse-drawn cab left her off at the entrance to the prison, she told the cabdriver to wait for her and then she walked up the stone steps and knocked on the door. Charles, who had not been assigned to the execution, rose from his chair at his desk and came to open it.

  Yes? What is it? he said.

  She did not know what to say, so instead she reached inside her dress and pulled out the damp roll of bills and put them on his desk.

  What’s this? Charles said.

  It’s a bribe, she said.

  For what?

  For Mata Hari.

  Charles sat back down in the chair. He felt the cut on his Adam’s apple beginning to bleed again and he pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his throat.

  How much is there? he asked.

  Anna Lintjens shrugged. A lot, she said, and while she said it 2 6 5

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  the bills seemed to acknowledge what she was saying and began to unfurl, displaying the many heads of rulers on their sheets of well-worn paper.

  Where did you get that kind of money, old lady?

  Men. A lot of men, Anna Lintjens answered. Charles nodded, then he stood up, and he took the roll of francs, and he took Anna Lintjens by the arm, and he led her back outside to where her cab was waiting for her.

  You’re too late, he said.

  Too late?

  Charles looked at his watch. By five minutes, he said.

  Anna Lintjens nodded her head. Then she turned and held out her hand so that Charles could place the roll of francs back in it.

  Charles shook his head. This is what we call an illegal bribe of a prison officer, he said.

  Anna Lintjens had to do it to the school bully once. She remembered how it worked. First you punch him where he’s already hurting. In the case of the school bully it was in the black eye he already sported from a row with his father. Punching him there made him release the lunch money he had stolen from her at school. It spurted blood anew all over, and the dirt of the schoolyard quickly drank it up. In the case of Charles, it was of course his Adam’s apple that was her target. To deliver the blow this time, her fist was not the instrument, but instead she used an extralong sewing pin she had placed in the bun at the top of her head before she set off on her trip. You never know when you might need a little protection when traveling in a strange place.

  The jab into his neck with the extralong pin brought Charles to his knees and he dropped the roll of francs and grabbed his 2 6 6

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  throat with both hands, the same way the bully had dropped her lunch money and brought both of his hands to his black eye.

  Before Charles’s blood could even begin to fall and stain the roll of francs and the stone of the Paris sidewalk, Anna Lintjens swiftly picked up the money and then she was off and inside the cab, which she had told to wait for her, just in case, of course, she had been lucky enough to make a quick getaway with Mata Hari.

  In the horse-drawn cab, driving back to her hotel still holding the roll of francs, Anna Lintjens remembered what Mata Hari always said about plans. She always said that she hated them, that they either were wrecked, or foiled, or not carried out and Anna Lintjens had to agree with her about plans. Hers certainly never seemed to work out, and now the horse-drawn cab was moving slowly through the heart of Paris, a city Anna Lintjens had never visited before, and she could not see what was outside the window, the tears in her eyes were making everything, the buildings, the river, the bridges, just one blurred mix of a vision.

  And damn journeys, anyway, she thought, you never get to see all that you want to.

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  J U ST I N E

  IF YOU ARE about to be executed, don’t accept the blindfold they give you to tie around your eyes. Shake your head no to the ropes they would use to tie around your hands and that they would use to tie your body to the stake made from the young tree limb thrust into the ground. Set your eyes on the nun who is crying for you and who is wearing your coat that you gave her because the morning is damp and chilly, and think to yourself how small she is and how big the coat looks on her small frame. Set your eyes also on the doctor who has taken care of you and whose trouser legs are brown from him kneeling in his garden tending to his radishes.

  Do not set your eyes on the twelve soldiers of the Fourth Zouave Regiment. Do not listen to the Sabre à la main! they shout. The Présentez armes! they shout. Maybe you can’t help it, though.

  Your eye catches the glint of a saber being raised in the sky by the officer of the men and you avert your eyes just for a moment from the nun and the doctor, long enough to see where you really are — in a field full of dead grass, swirled and matted, dry yellow blades by your fashionable button-up-the-ankle shoes.

  When the call, Joue!, is shouted by the officer and he lowers his saber and the soldiers raise their rifles to their cheeks, smile, 2 6 8

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  you are about to walk through the cloud that you thought for so long was a crushing wall of water.

  AFTER SHE had fallen to the dry grass on the ground from the eleven shots (one Zouave, the twelfth Zouave, had been up all night concerned that he could not shoot a woman, could not bring himself to fire), her pearl gray dress ballooned up around her and a cavalry sergeant marched up to her to make sure she was dead and he fired the coup de grâce, a shot that went through her ear.

  Dr. Bizard then had to determine that she was dead and he went up to her with his stethoscope in his ears and he unbuttoned the pearl buttons on her pearl gray dress front and he slid his stethoscope in and listened to her chest and when he heard nothing he pulled his stethoscope out and the sound receiver was covered in blood and he realized he had been trying to listen to her heart where instead there was a bullet hole.

  NO ONE claimed the body. The body was given to science, and one day a young medical student named Arboux walked into the dissection laboratory, and there, waiting for him on the metal table, was Mata Hari covered from head to toe in a sheet. When he lifted back the sheet he saw a female cadaver, approximate age forty-three, approximate height five feet ten inches, approximate weight 140 pounds. He named her Justine and set to work using a scalpel to peel off her skin, a job he bragged to his fellow students in the laboratory that was not as difficult as theirs considering there were eleven bullet holes in her body and therefore less skin to peel.

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  WHEN M ACL EOD read the news of her death he was in the room of his favorite whore, Lise, who wore her dyed-red hair piled on her head, except for tendrils of it that looked as if the curly tails of pigs were hanging by her cheeks. He was waiting for Lise to finish whatever she was doing in the toilet so she could come to him. The paper was there on the rickety table by the bed and he was still reading the article when Lise came out of the toilet and knelt down in front of him and unbuttoned his fly and an image came back to MacLeod of Mata Hari standing in front of her mirror in their hut in Java and dancing with her arms out and the ends of her long black hair looked like the tips of black flames, only the flames weren’t pointing upward, but downward, and he remembered thinking then an unclear thought of how she just might do it, she just might set the floorboards of the house on fire ju
st with the ends of her hair.

  SISTER L EONIDE kept Mata Hari’s blue wool coat and she took it to the dressmaker and had the length of the sleeves shortened and had it taken in at the shoulders. She liked the coat, and every night, while she said her prayers before bed, she prayed for Mata Hari’s soul and then she thanked Mata Hari again, for the coat kept her warm even on the coldest days.

  DR. V ANV OORT walked first on the windy palm grove trail, and his brown servant girl walked behind him. On her head she carried a basket filled with their babi and ayam nasi lunch wrapped in banana leaves and star and sukah and jackfruit and also newspapers that he had not yet read but were a few weeks behind, considering that was how long it took for the papers to make the trip from Holland to Java.

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  When he arrived at the white sand beach he looked out into the sea and saw the smooth gray backs of dolphins heading westward.

  His brown servant girl removed her sarong and laid it on the fine sand and he lay belly down on the flowered cotton cloth and she opened the woven reed basket and gave him a newspaper and he started to read.

  While he read, his brown servant girl massaged his muscles under the scapula of his shoulders, where he had always told her to, because it was there that the muscles tightened the most from picking the coffee beans from his plants all day long, and when he came to the article about Mata Hari being shot in front of a firing squad, he reached around and grabbed his brown servant girl’s wrist and said, Tidak, and he pushed her away and so she stopped and waited for what he would tell her to do next.

  While she sat there, a rare ajak trotted across the shoreline and she pointed to it and was about to call out, to tell Dr. VanVoort what she saw, but then she stopped herself, she knew he did not want to be disturbed at the moment, and so he never saw the rare ajak, and he died, many years later, never having seen one and never believing that his brown servant girl had either, because even the ajak’s paw prints at the shoreline were quickly washed away by the incoming tide.

  CLUNET had forgotten about the letter in his jacket pocket which Mata Hari wrote and had asked him to send to Non. He had worn his black jacket the day of Mata Hari’s execution and it was a jacket he wore only on special occasions and to funerals and so it hung in his closet for a year and was only removed by his wife who gave it to the undertaker so that he could wear it the 2 7 1

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  day of his own funeral. Clunet’s wife, in her grief, had forgotten to check the pocket of the jacket and so she never found the letter, and it was buried with Clunet in his coffin in a cemetery in a lush valley of the Pyrenees known for its thermal waters that cater to the vocal cords. Opera singers, lawyers, and politicians hoarse from promises all gather in the valley to breathe in the healing vapors.

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  J U ST L I K E M ATA H A R I

  NON KNEW it was wrong, but she had done it anyway. She had entered the house through a window that was open a crack when she noticed that Anna Lintjens had not been home for days. She did not know Anna Lintjens had gone to Paris to save her mother, but she could tell by the fact that every time she walked by the house in the evening, and no lights were on, that the maid must be away. Anna Lintjens was like that about houses. She believed they needed to breathe and she always kept a window open no matter what the weather.

  Non went straight to Mata Hari’s room and she opened her closet and she put her face against the sleeves of her mother’s dresses and breathed in the smell of her mother and then she tried on all of her mother’s dresses and all of her shoes and even her elbow-length kid gloves and then she tried on her costumes, the silver headpieces embedded with cut glass made to look like real jewels and the wide armbands and the brassieres made of strung-together beads and decorated with pearls and garnets and lapis lazuli and moonstone.

  An hour later, when she heard a noise in the street that might have been Anna Lintjens coming home, she quickly put the clothes and the costumes back, and when she returned to her 2 7 3

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  aunt Louise’s house her aunt Louise kissed her on the cheek and wondered what perfume Non was wearing and it reminded her of someone and it wasn’t until the next morning, when Louise was working in her garden, making sure the bed of dirt where the tulip bulbs would come up in the spring was free of strangle weed, that Louise remembered. Mata Hari had smelled the same way.

  Later, when Non read in the paper that her mother had been executed, she decided she would go back to Java someday. She wanted to find the house they lived in together. She had memories of sitting with her mother on a reed mat on the floor. She was telling Non not to move, she was busy weaving the small white bunga melati buds through her braids. You don’t want the petals bruised, do you? she had said to Non. That was almost the only memory she had of her mother, she could not remember anything else.

  A year later, Non graduated from nursing school and she accepted a job in Java. Her ship was supposed to set sail the next day when she felt a headache coming on. Louise said it was all the rushing around she had been doing. Why, every time she looked in the young woman’s trunk Non had taken out a sensible dress that Louise had put in there.

  It’s not sensible, Non had told her aunt. I remember the heat, I was there, you weren’t, she said. If I wore this dress in the heat I would die.

  What then do you expect to wear while you’re there, those vulgar sarongs like your mother wore? Aunt Louise said.

  And then Non held onto one side of her trunk and turned it and tipped it over and emptied out all the clothes Aunt Louise 2 7 4

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  had packed and said, Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll wear, I’ll be just like my mother. I’ll be just like Mata Hari.

  Louise was about to yell at Non because the hasp shackle of the trunk, when it was turned over, scraped deep and painful-looking scratches into her just polished floorboards. But she didn’t get a chance to yell. Non’s headache became so terrible that she fell back onto the bed.

  At the funeral Aunt Louise told MacLeod that there were no last words that Non spoke before the embolism struck, unless of course you count her saying, Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll wear, I’ll be just like my mother. I’ll be just like Mata Hari.

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  W H I R L P O O L S

  THERE WERE enough francs to do it, Anna Lintjens thought.

  Enough francs to visit the town she grew up in and offer the old man farmer, who she found out was still alive, a down payment for one of the houses he had on his land. So she did it and moved into the house.

  It was summer again, and the corn was at its highest when the farmer continued his tradition and cut another maze through the field right before harvest. An old lady in a long black skirt now, she walked through the maze along with children from the town.

  Their voices carried up over the ears of corn, the yellow tassels shuddering in a breeze or just from the sounds of the children’s excited voices as they ran, shouting through the stalks. The gluey leaves dragged against the cloth of her skirt and the sleeves of her blouse, as if to grab her gently, wanting her to stay. She caught glimpses of the children as they ran. Seen through a space in the rows she saw their sun-streaked hair, their sun-browned arms as they pushed the stalks aside, trying to find a way out.

  There were even enough francs left over for a horse. She had loved Mata Hari’s horse, Radjah, and went to buy him back from the stable that Mata Hari had sold him to. In the stable she saw that he still had the look in his eyes that he had when Mata 2 7 6

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  Hari had come back from riding him and the look seemed to say that he had just galloped to the edge of the world and back. She knew she was too old to ride him, but she kept him and groomed h
im and held his shank and walked him on the roads, taking him to town with her when she ran her errands, talking to him as she walked, pointing out the bluebells and baby’s breath that grew by the sides of the road. She was careful not to walk him too far, though, remembering how his hooves once suffered when Mata Hari rode him to find Non and how he needed to stand in buckets of ice in order to heal.

  He nickered when she came to him in the field and trotted up to meet her at the fence. He had cowlicks on his neck by his mane, swirls like small whirlpools, and she thought if she looked at them long enough she could enter into him that way, become a part of him, the way a whirlpool made of water could take one down into the deep. On his shoulder there was an angel’s kiss, a dimple in his chestnut hide that she often kissed when she first saw him or when she said good-bye.

  At home she washed his blankets in a large metal tub, the salt from his body quickly clouding up the water. While she ate her meal alone she sometimes stopped bringing the fork to her mouth, and she would turn her head and lift her shoulder so she could smell the smell of Radjah on her sleeve. And sometimes, on a warm night, she would even bring her own blanket with her to the field and lay it down on the soft grass near where her horse stood and he would bend his head down to her before she fell asleep, his lips touching her ear or her smiling mouth.

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  A G O O D G H O ST

  IF YOU WANT to be a good ghost, stay quiet for almost a century.

  Then, on the anniversary of your death, begin to haunt the dreams of a writer so that the writer tells your story the way it should be told.

  Signed,

  Mata Hari

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  Y ANNICK M URPHY is the author of Stories in

  Another Language, The Sea of Trees, and Here They Come. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’