Mata Hari's Last Dance

by Michelle Moran

  “What? Don’t you trust Rousseau?”

  “Why should I trust him? I don’t even know him.”

  “You know me and I know Rousseau—he interrogates everyone thoroughly. He hired Anna, so she is qualified. She’s already in Amsterdam. Non will be here tomorrow!”

  Edouard looks positively ill. “M’greet. My men are meticulous. They’ve been working for—”

  “Months. And months and months! I can’t wait any longer, Edouard. Anna will arrive at my daughter’s school early for dismissal and say she is Rudolph’s new servant. She will produce a locket with my picture inside so Non won’t be afraid. The two of them will go directly to the train station.”

  He watches me with a strange expression in his eyes.

  “Non will be here tomorrow, Edouard. Be happy for me.”

  * * *

  It is the Ides of March. An unlucky day for Caesar, but my day of triumph. In three hours, Anna will return to France with Non.

  Edouard arrives at two o’clock. Together, in the salon, we wait.

  I am so excited, I feel brave enough to talk about the past. I say to Edouard, “In Java, Rudolph stopped forcing me to stay in the house after I became a mother. He decided that with a child I was safe and undesirable. Norman and I—my son and I—we visited all of the ancient shrines to gods my people don’t have names for. I took him to see Kraton, the two-hundred-year-old palace, and Tamansari, a water castle. Those were my favorite days. We would climb the stone steps and be the only people in the world. We’d be hypnotized by mango valleys newly washed with rain, listen to the chanting of monks. I told Norman about Buddhism and Hinduism. About why Brahma has four heads and Ganesh is an elephant. I began earnestly learning Malay. By that summer I was able to speak it.”

  “What happened to Norman?” Edouard asks gently.

  I wave him off. I never allow myself to visit that dark corner of my memory.

  When the clock strikes four o’clock, I begin pouring wine. “You don’t think something’s happened?” I ask. “Should we call the station? The train may be delayed.”

  He calls the station. No trains are delayed. I stare out the window as darkness begins falling. I had wanted so badly for her first sight of the villa to be in daylight. “Something has gone wrong.”

  “Perhaps . . .” He tries to think of a positive scenario.

  “What?” My voice sounds foreign in my ears.

  “I don’t know.”

  At eight, when Anna arrives alone, Edouard holds me close to him as I cry. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Anna whispers. “I’m so very sorry—”

  “What happened?” Edouard demands.

  “Her father was there. He arrived moments after I had taken her by the hand. He began shouting for the police.”

  “No!” I scream. “He’s going to kill her!”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do! I do know that! You wanted to know what happened to Norman? It was all Rudolph’s fault!”

  Edouard guides me to a chair. Anna sits on the edge of the couch and I tell them the whole ugly story. I tell them that when Non was a baby and Norman was three, Rudolph was made commander of a garrison in Melan. We had two weeks to pack all our belongings and move from our home. I hoped things would be different now that Rudolph had a high-status position; he would be required to entertain society, so I wouldn’t be so isolated. In Melan, I became Lady MacLeod. Ours was the biggest house with the widest lawn and a marble fountain. Our garden parties saw more than two hundred people and soon I was so busy hosting that Rudolph hired a nurse to care for the children, a Javanese woman named Fairuza.

  I hired Mahadevi and I watched her dance at my parties. I wanted to be her, to feel that free—like a child again in my father’s hat shop, where anything was possible. Rudolph would never allow me to dance in public. But she agreed to teach me in private, to show me how to make magic with my hips and hands. She watched me practice with longing. The way Rudolph never watched me.

  “Close your eyes,” she instructed and I did as she told me.

  We danced together wearing indigo silks, our bare feet flat on her polished floor. We danced until we were both dizzy, until my body felt as supple as the silk. She told me that you are what you believe yourself to be. She was able to look at a man and say, “He wants me for a week. No more, no less.”

  “If I’d had that skill,” I tell them, “my heart would never have been broken. When she invited me to dance in public, I said yes.”

  Edouard leans forward. “So you performed—”

  “Yes. I danced with Mahadevi at one of the parties I hosted. I dressed in a scarlet sarong I bought at the pasar. I was exotic. An orchid among buttercups. Three hundred people dressed in chiffon and gold sat in our garden: my husband’s colleagues, his subordinates, their wives.”

  I danced with Mahadevi; primitive and wild. When we were finished, Mahadevi kissed me on the lips, and our bodies melted together in the warm island moonlight to the sound of applause.

  “Your husband must have been shocked,” Anna says.

  “He was enraged.” He seethed as I mingled with our guests. And when we were alone, he warned me, “You will never disgrace me like that again!” I said the worst thing I could think of in Malay. “Is that right?” he asked, reaching into a drawer. What was he going to do? I heard the click of his gun just as I heard the creak of a door from upstairs.

  “Norman was on the landing,” I tell them.

  Edouard looks horrified.

  “ ‘Go to bed!’ I said. ‘Go to bed, Norman!’ I heard little feet scamper down the hall and the click of a door. Rudolph whipped me across the face and afterward, all I could recall was his heavy weight on top of me and the smell of alcohol on his breath. I went to Mahadevi the next day, a veil over my face to hide my blackened eye and bruised cheek. ‘Give me something that will keep him away from me,’ I begged. She gave me cajeput oil. ‘Smear this between your legs and he will never bother you again.’ The next time he tried to take me his prick was covered with small red blotches. I told him, ‘My body has turned against you.’ ”

  Tears begin leaking from the corners of my eyes, remembering what happened next. Edouard reaches out and takes my hand. I try to catch my breath.

  “It was the middle of the night,” I tell them. “I went to Norman’s crib. He was sleeping. I caressed his cheek. He was three years old. I looked at Non, all curled up and warm. I slipped one finger into her palm. Her little hand closed around it. I shut my eyes and sang softly, a nursery rhyme my mother sang to me when I was a child. Then I heard the screams. They were Fairuza’s.”

  Edouard and Anna glance at each other.

  “She was in the kitchen with Rudolph. He . . . my husband was violating her. The household came awake. I could hear doors opening along the corridors. I grabbed Rudolph’s arm and pulled him off of her. I steeled myself, waiting for him to hit me. But he was too drunk. He collapsed on the floor. The servants stepped around him and waited to see what Fairuza would do. There was blood on her legs, bruises on her arms. She was hysterical.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing. We put her to bed in her room. We left him on the floor. The next morning Rudolph awoke and he found himself lying half-naked exactly where he fell. It was ten in the morning and already hot. He was late for work. I expected a terrible fight. But there was nothing. I crept downstairs after he was gone and wondered where Fairuza was; had she gotten up early and gone home to her family, or to the police?

  “I had no idea who was in my own house.

  “ ‘Is she still here?’ I asked Laksari.

  “Laksari brought me into the parlor. Her voice was low. ‘She is devastated, ma’am.’ She spoke in Malay. ‘She will not go to the police. It is bad luck for a woman to say she has been . . . she will leave the house tonight. After she has packed and said go
odbye to the children.’

  “ ‘I should see her,’ I said. ‘I should pay her.’

  “ ‘She says she doesn’t want to see anyone.’

  “I should have heeded the danger in Laksari’s words, but I was blinded by guilt. I spent the day worried about what would happen to Fairuza and what I would tell Norman about her absence. When Rudolph came home, Fairuza was still in the house. I found him reading. ‘You raped a woman last night,’ I said.

  “ ‘She’s a servant.’ He straightened the paper and raised it in front of his face. ‘Let her disappear and find another house.’

  “ ‘She was a good nurse for the children! She’s a human being.’

  “ ‘She’s a goddamned native. Shut up for your own good.’

  “I went into the kitchen. It was dark outside. The children were in bed. Laksari was bent over a bowl of rice and chicken. She stood when she saw me.

  “ ‘Please, sit down. Finish eating.’ I pulled up a chair next to her. I was thinking my husband deserved to die. We sat for several minutes in the kitchen, and then my children started screaming. My children. The entire house awakened for the second night in a row.

  “Laksari and I exchanged glances, and there was something in her eyes, something that still haunts me. We rushed up the stairs. Inside the nursery my children lay in their beds, writhing, their faces contorted, their bodies racked with convulsions. They were poisoned. No one thought to look for Fairuza. But by then she was gone.

  “I held my children in my lap, praying for a miracle—if only he would let Non and Norman live. ‘Please,’ I whispered again and again. ‘Please, God. Please.’ My voice sounded feral, like a wild animal’s. I rocked back and forth. Black vomit covered my nightgown. Non was still screaming but Norman’s eyes were rolled back into his head. ‘Norman. You’ll be fine. Norman. Please.’ I felt panic as Norman convulsed in my arms. ‘Don’t die! Norman, please don’t die!’ And then his three-year-old body stopped shaking. It went still. I held him in front of me and his face was pale. Non survived. But Norman was gone. Our first, our little boy. I hadn’t spent enough time with him. Rudolph killed Norman. He raped our nanny so she killed our baby.”

  Edouard covers his mouth. Anna’s eyes are red. It’s a terrible story.

  “I spent three months in bed. Then I got dressed and went outside to watch Non play. I sat on the swing and went back and forth, watching my daughter without seeing her at all. The house was haunted. Norman was everywhere. So now you know the kind of man my daughter is with. And he is angry.”

  Edouard has gone very still. I have to look close to see that he’s even breathing. “We are going to get her away from that man,” he says. “I have to leave now. I must make some calls.”

  “How? How are we going to get her now that Rudolph knows I want her?”

  “I don’t know.” He rises. “I don’t know.”

  Part 2

  Fecundity

  LINING UP OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKES AND ARCHDUCHESSES FOR THE FIGHT OVER THE SUCCESSION HAS BEGUN-BELIEF THAT THE TROUBLE, WHICH WILL COME WITH THE DEATH OF THE KAISER FRANZ JOSEF, IS CLOSE AT HAND-ONLY MUTUAL RESPECT FOR THE AGING MONARCH KEEPS THE BITTER COMBATANTS APART.

  By Bernard Aston.

  Special Correspondent.

  Vienna, Oct. 1.

  Secret strife rends the numerous Hapsburg clans. Only respect for the venerable Kaiser Franz Josef keeps it from open warfare. For twelve years past, but particularly since 1908, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand practically took command of the Empire, the one hundred and twenty-four archdukes and archduchesses have been divided sharply into two camps which hardly ever speak and seldom even meet one another. Of the seventy odd out of the one hundred and twenty-four who are old enough to have opinions, about twenty stand in with Archduke Franz Ferdinand: while about fifty are banded together to resist to the death the heir, his pretensions, and his morganatic wife. Members of the opposing groups no longer entertain one another, or even pay formal visits; they are at present engaged in severing their common property interest, and so universal is the feud that even the army is divided in mind as to what will be its duty when the great crash comes.

  “The great crash” is involved in the decision for or against Franz Ferdinand, which is inevitable when Kaiser Franz Josef dies. It is a European issue. For with the Austrian Slavs gravitating to Russia, and the Austrian Germans gravitating to Germany, a civil war in Austria almost certainly means a general war in Europe. And at most within a few years, but possibly within a few months, Europe will be faced with this risk.

  Chapter 13

  What's Done Is Done

  1913

  My opening of Tristan and Isolde in Berlin is stupendous. Every seat at the Deutsches Theater is filled. I should be happy, delirious even. I am thirty-seven years old today and my name is still flashing in lights. But it is a difficult anniversary for me. I am Aunt Marie’s age when I took her husband; I am my mother’s age when she died. My own daughter is no longer a little girl.

  Edouard invites me to celebrate my birthday in an exquisite restaurant on the Kaiserdamm. I want to decline. After all, what am I celebrating? But Edouard is persistent.

  “You glow,” he says when I slip into the padded leather chair across from him.

  I have been drinking since the final curtain. “That’s what Evert used to say,” I tell him, raising my glass and then finishing it. “He used to write poetry for me,” I say, recalling Evert’s voice, his eyes. I order another bottle and pour myself more wine. “He used to call me beautiful. Not Dutch beautiful, exotically beautiful,” I clarify.

  “Who is Evert?”

  How many years have I known Edouard, and I’ve still never told him this story? “Someone I thought I knew,” I say. “I met him after I left the Walrus’s school. I was living with my father’s sister, Aunt Marie.”

  Edouard finishes his glass. “You told me about her years ago. Are you saying she wasn’t too poor to take you in when you were a child?”

  “Marie wasn’t wealthy, but she wasn’t impoverished either—my mother’s sisters were misinformed. When I was expelled, Aunt Marie welcomed me into her home.”

  “After you left the Haanstra School?”

  “Yes. I had no one else to turn to, no place to live. So I took a chance and went to The Hague. I had very little money. I deposited myself on her doorstep. If she had turned me away—”

  “Did she contact your father?”

  “No. We didn’t speak of my father. She was an unusual woman. When I arrived at her door, the first thing she did was apologize to me. She realized who I was immediately and said she was so very sorry for missing my mother’s funeral. She was lame in one leg, travel was difficult for her. She invited me to live in her home without any hesitation—I didn’t tell her I had been expelled from the school and she never asked. The first evening I spent with her she took me to her church to light a candle for my mother.”

  “She was devout?”

  “Very.” I stare into my wineglass. “That’s how I took advantage of her. After living with so many other girls my age I was bored at Aunt Marie’s. There was nothing to read in her house except the Bible. And I had almost nothing to do except a few household chores. I had too much time to think. I became restless. The best part of my day was running errands. We were in a port city. When I went to town, I was unsupervised. I would linger on the boardwalk and watch navy boys who had just arrived. They looked so handsome in their uniforms.”

  Edouard says, “Some things never change.”

  He’s right. “I desperately wanted to meet one of them. I wanted to dance with a boy in uniform at the Grand Hotel. It was a mythical place to me: all the shopkeepers’ daughters gossiped about dances at the Grand. I would overhear them and feel such longing. I knew Aunt Marie would never let me attend an event as scandalous as a dance, so I asked her i
f she would take me to a particular church I had heard of in Scheveningen, knowing she couldn’t and that she’d tell me to visit it on my own.”

  I can see my aunt now, her gray hair pulled back into a small, tight bun, her modest black dresses, her thin lips. “I’d like to visit the old church in Scheveningen,” I told her. “I’ve heard there are ancient relics there. Do you think you could take me?”

  “Oh, M’greet, I’ve visited many times!” she said, surprised and delighted at my interest in holy things. “It’s such a struggle for me to take the tram. Why don’t you go? The journey’s so picturesque. It’s an exquisite church.”

  “So I took the tram to Scheveningen the next day,” I tell Edouard. “Ten minutes after I boarded I disembarked at Bains and walked along the beach until I arrived at the Grand. It was larger and more glamorous than any building I’d seen in my life, and I was dazzled by it. I stood in front of the hotel, hypnotized by its grandeur. Standing nearby were two sailors. Their uniforms were white against the sand.”

  “Evert?” says Edouard.

  “Evert and his friend Zeeman.” I remember it as if it were yesterday, not twenty years ago. The way they were laughing, full of their own adventures. I walked straight up to them without a moment’s hesitation and introduced myself. I asked them where they were stationed.

  “Java.” Evert shaded his eyes so he could see me better. “Been there two years.”

  I learned of the Dutch East India Company’s trading posts in school, and I knew that the government assumed control of Java after it ceased to exist. But I had never given much thought to the islands of the East Indies until Evert and Zeeman told me their ­stories—about Java’s pristine beaches and temples as old as the ruins in Egypt. I was impressed to hear of their nights camped out under the stars and their days spent cutting their way through jungles. Zeeman read my emotions on my face. He said, “Don’t let Evert’s stories fool you. He may sleep on the ground with the rest of us in Java, but he comes from a very respectable family.”