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S I G N E D, M ATA H A R I
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A L S O B Y Y A N N I C K M U R P H Y
Here They Come
The Sea of Trees
Stories in Another Language
F o r C h i l d r e n
Ahwoooooooo!
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SIGNED,
M ATA HARI
A N O V E L
Yannic k Murphy
L I T T L E , B R O W N A N D C O M P A N Y
New York Bost on London
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Copyright © 2007 by Yannick Murphy
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the
U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
First eBook Edition: November 2007
ISBN:
0-316-02332-9
1. Mata Hari, 1876–1917 — Fiction. 2. World War, 1914–1918 — Secret service —
Fiction. 3. Women spies — Fiction. I. Title.
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For Non and Norman
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S I G N E D, M ATA H A R I
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A M E L A N D
I CHEATED DEATH. I walked across the sea. When the tide was low I went over the furrowed sandbanks in my small bare feet. I skipped school one day and traveled to an island near my home called Ameland. I had heard stories, every child who lived in the Netherlands knew the stories, about the mud like quicksand and about the water like a great gray wall when the tide came in and how it could catch you and knock you down and pour into your mouth and drown you so that you couldn’t ever return, no matter how hard you tried to climb out of the mud like quicksand and over the great gray wall. But I returned. I went back to the nuns, who had been tolling bells, looking for me. When they found me they showed me their palms, raw from pulling the bell’s rope, and they took me to the headmistress for punishment. Walking to her chambers I whispered proudly into the black folds of their habits. I have walked across the sea. Later my whispers came out as the nuns knelt for Mass, released like cold air once trapped in a cellar, now mixing with their prayers.
I KNEW my walk at low tide to the island of Ameland would always be with me. I was to walk it years later, again and again, in bed with men who snored beside me, a meaty arm of theirs 3
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across my chest. In the hot, sweaty jungles of Java I walked the wet sand to Ameland and did not always smell the smell of the lotus growing out my window, but instead I smelled the cold salt spray of the ocean of my homeland. I walked my walk to Ameland most often in the prison of Saint-Lazare, where every stone on the floor of my cell held a trip for me across the darkened sand. When I walked back, I turned around and looked over my shoulder to watch the sea advancing. Try and catch me, I said out loud, and what answered back was the sky, at first in low rumbles, then louder as thunder rolled closer. But it never did catch me, and I outran the tide and lived.
FIRST THERE is flour, mother said in the kitchen. Then the eggs.
With the flour on her hands, puffing up along her arms, she was already becoming a ghost.
The cake she made was for my birthday. My father said that in a country called Mexico the birthday child’s face is pushed into the cake. For good luck and a long life, he said.
Not in this country, my mother said, and she slid the cake away from me so that I would not push my face into her frosting, spread with a spoon so that it looked like small cuppy waves, curved tips held suspended in a gentle roll.
Father said, Next birthday when you are fifteen, Margaretha, you can do it.
I was given weekly horseback riding lessons for my birthday.
After the lessons I went to Father’s store.
One time he showed me a hat.
Touch it, he said. He rubbed the soft felt against my cheek.
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Think of the animal that died so that this hat could be made from its fur, he said.
I pushed the hat away. I wanted to think of all the men who would wear the hat and the parties they would wear it to.
Father put the hat in the window to display it, but I knew that in an hour or so he would take it down and replace it with another hat from a shelf inside the store. By doing this, he kept the colors of the hats from fading in the sun.
Father was not there for my next birthday. He closed up his shop. He took down all the hats and sold them at reduction and held the cash in his hand and licked his fingertips to count without making a mistake. I sat in the storefront window. The sun beat down through the glass and I now knew how quickly the hats could fade and lose their color and I thought how funny that was because everyone had always told me to stay out of the sun, saying it would make my olive skin darker.
After he was gone, all that was left of him was a flowered vest he once wore that hung in the closet. The vest was stretched around the waist, where the girth of him had pushed against the cloth. Mother never put anything else in the closet, and if I opened the door quickly, the breeze would set the flowered vest in motion on the wooden hanger.
He gave us no address. He left saying he would come for us after he found a job in the south.
Mother cried at night. There were holes in the walls, large patches where the paint was peeling and the plaster was crumbling. I thought her cries would enter the holes and stay forever in the house, trapped and ricocheting behind our walls. I tried to drown out the cries by pounding out songs on the keys of the 5
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piano, but all that happened was the paint peeled even more, the plaster crumbled to the floor and left small white piles like those inside a sand timer, marking hours that could not be turned upside down.
I found mother dead in the kitchen. The white flour was on her apron. It was up her arms. It was between the laces of her boots. It was in her mouth. The doctor said she died from an infection in her lungs. I thought she died from breathing in the flour. From the inside out, it turned her into a ghost. I never went into that kitchen again. The kitchen can kill you, I thought. I closed my eyes and was walking across the sea. Each time I remembered it, it was as if I were more there than the first time.
I noticed more things. The white sand crabs burrowing beside my feet. The water coming in, the bubbles springing up from beneath me, filling in between my toes, creeping up the hem of my silk skirt.
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L E T T H E M H E A R
SHE THOUGHT the nun at the prison of Saint-Lazare held her whispers in her robes, too. She knelt down and felt the cold of the silver cross hanging from the nun’s waist against her cheek as she spoke the same words she spoke as a child: I have walked across the sea.
Do you pray for your soul? asked the nun.
No, she answered. She wanted her words to be released
throughout the prison as the nun walked away. Let the rats hear them as they run through the dark, wet walls. Let the cooks hear them while thinning soup in the kitchen. Let Bouchardon the lawyer hear them as he taps his pencil on his pad, thinking of questions to ask and trap her in a life she did not lead. I have walked across the sea, she said. I will live.
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E A RT H WO R M S
THE THING ABOUT CHILDREN is that I never understood them. It took one or two tries before I knew what they were saying. They’d have to point. Speak up, I’d say. It was because their mouths were so small that they could not open them enough to say words I could understand. I told my godfather this, but he said their cheeks are like apples, and their hair is made of sunshine, and that, really, I had no choice and he didn’t have the money to keep me fed and clothed. So he sent me to teach at a school.
The children’s cheeks were pale and their hair slick with grease that always made the little girls look as if they’d braided their hair right after washing it and the water never dried and it made the boys look as if they’d dunked their heads in the wash water only moments before.
You must learn to rap their knuckles, Heer Wybrandus said.
He gave me a ruler for the job the first day I started. This is all you’ll need, he said.
Ink? Pens? Paper? I said.
He laughed. Yes, those too, he said, and he licked his lips, which were just two straight lines that looked like earthworms, one on top of the other.
Later he kissed me with those lips, and it was easier thinking of 8
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them as earthworms than thinking they were Heer Wybrandus’s lips.
The children did not learn from me. I wrote letters on the board, and they stared out the window cawing back to the black birds or pulling at one another’s slick hair.
I told you to rap their knuckles, Heer Wybrandus said into my ear. Afterward, in class, I put a loose strand of my hair behind my ear, and my ear and my hair felt wet from Heer Wybrandus’s mouth.
He called my breasts champagne cups because they were so small and he said he had to drink from them. He wet his finger with his tongue, then traced my nipple and covered it with his mouth.
Salud, he said.
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A V I S I T F R O M T H E D O C TO R
IN S AINT-L AZARE she said she’d like to see the doctor. He came in wearing a white coat. The rubber on his stethoscope looked old and cracked in places.
Your gown, Dr. Bizard said. She did not lower it over her shoulders.
Do it through the gown, she said.
I cannot hear your heart as well through the cloth, he said.
It’s not my heart that needs listening to, she said. He smiled.
He took the stethoscope and set it on the cot covered with a wool blanket, then leaned back against the chair. His eyes were blue and she thought how that should have been the color of the sky that day she walked across the sea to Ameland.
She’d like to have told him everything, but his blue eyes looked as though they knew it already. Instead she danced for him, for his eyes, just to see if the blue would change by the light of her dancing.
I had heard you were a great dancer, he said, and now I know it’s true. Afterward he clapped a steady clap of applause, and she wished her heart would follow its rhythm instead of pounding the way it did, as if it could pound its way out of her chest.
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L E S S O N S
THE CHILDREN IN CLASS weren’t learning anything, but I was. Heer Wybrandus taught me about being a woman.
Shouldn’t I be learning this from other women? I asked him.
No, he said. Other women won’t teach you anything. To learn what it is to be a woman, your teacher must be a man.
He told me what my monthly bleeding meant. He said it was my best friend because it told me when not to have coitus if I wanted to avoid becoming pregnant.
Other women call it the curse, he said, and that is entirely wrong. They should call it the gift instead.
When he was not telling me things, he was showing me. He would touch me with his fingers and then he would make me use my own fingers and explore myself as well so that I would know how it should be done. He gave me homework.
Practice in your room tonight, he said. His fingers looked like stubby sausages compared to mine, which looked to me like the ivory blades of finely carved letter openers, and I wondered if I would cut myself with them. After I did it I realized that the only thing that could really hurt me was the bed I slept in whose middle sank down into a pit. Every time I lay in it, the bed seemed intent on folding me in half.
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HEER W YBRANDUS liked for me to sit on his lap. I could feel his pulse beating between his legs, and he would reposition me sometimes or move me from side to side, saying as he did that I was making him grow, and he said, Can’t you feel how large I am? but I shook my head. He was small and what I felt the most through my dress was his warmth and the tap-tap-tap against me of his beating pulse.
By the river on a grass field on a blanket his wife had embroidered around the edges, I would sit on him, and when he asked me again if I could feel how large he was and I shook my head he pushed me off and so I began to fold up the embroidered blanket and Heer Wybrandus grabbed it from me in the middle of my folding and bunched it into a ball and then ran toward the riverbank and sent it flying over the tall grass and cattails, where it landed in the river and unfolded slowly in the current.
On the walk back to the school, he said it was my fault that I could not feel how large he had grown between his legs and that I had not done my homework well, I had not bothered to learn the lesson of being a woman yet.
I stopped listening to him. I thought again about my walk across the sea. When the tide goes out across the flats of Ameland, flocks of terns come to feed on the muddy sea bottom. When I walked across the sea the terns wheeled down in front of me and I saw seals lolling on the sandbanks. I thought that when the water returned, the terns and seals would be safe. They would fly away or swim. But in my silk skirt, whose hem was getting salt-stained and heavy, I would drown. My skirt would keep me down. I could have taken the skirt off. There was no one else to see me on the flats that day. But I didn’t. I think I liked knowing that the odds were against me.
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I F YO U WA N T TO B E A S P Y
IT HELPS to be fluent in a number of languages if you want to become a spy. I spoke Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and even Malay. If you have a studious mind, this helps you become a spy.
If you do not have a studious mind, this too helps, because who would suspect you, being ignorant of how to break a code, of knowing how to concoct invisible ink from a number of vials?
Anything helps if you want to become a spy, because everyone wants to believe you are a spy.
Sit with your left leg crossed over your right in a restaurant, then uncross them, then cross them again with your right leg over your left leg, then voilà, you are a spy and the waiter has reported you to the authorities and you all the while are just wondering why the coffee is taking forever to come to your table.
If you read the paper, you can be a spy too. You can tell your German lover something you read in the paper or something the hairdresser told you while you were having your hair dyed, and it will become a secret no one else knew and you are aiding and abetting the enemy. You could vow not to talk to Germans, but that too is suspicious because you always used to talk with them.
You could have spent ten years of your life being a famous 1 3
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exotic Eastern dancer and that gets hardly a mention on the lines of the pad of paper Bouchardon is writing and tapping his pencil on, because really your whole life, from the day you walked across the sea to Ameland, you were a spy. The terns, the seals, the couch grass and sea rocket and thrift and seaweed beneath your feet whispered secrets that flew to you in the wind before a thunderstorm, secrets you relayed back to the nuns (they too can be spies), and you are guilty and the firing squad is dismantling their guns, cleaning their barrels, oiling the working parts, getting ready for when you are placed in t
heir line of fire. And how do you convince Bouchardon you did not give secrets to the Germans when Bouchardon is so busy at the windowpane, drumming his fingers against it, some kind of nervous habit that sounds like his own secret code, telling everyone, the dirty gray pigeons shitting on the ledge even, that you are guilty to the mar-row of your bones.
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T H E R I G H T H E I G H T
F O R A M A N
HEER W YBRANDUS HUNG his head low and did not look up at me when he told me I had to leave the school.
My wife, the town, they know about us, he said, as if speaking to his massive belly. And they know you are only seventeen.
I gave him back the ruler he had given me to rap the children’s knuckles. I had never used it except to draw lines.
I went to live with my uncle in The Hague. I did the household chores. I bought the bread and vegetables and meat at market.
I washed the long windows while standing on chairs needle-pointed with designs of flower bouquets. I scrubbed the tiled bathrooms and smoothed the linens over the beds and fluffed the down feather pillows. I cooked the meals, and this was the part I did not like, because I had to be in the kitchen and I knew from experience that the kitchen could kill you.
You’re too tall for a man, Uncle told me once.
I’m a woman, I said.
Yes, of course. What I mean, he said, is that you’ll have difficulty finding a husband.
I thought about my walk across the sea to Ameland then and 1 5
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how I lived to tell the tale. Out loud, I said, I have walked across the sea.
What was that you said, dear niece? Uncle said.
I’ll start dinner, I said.
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W I S H YO U W E R E H E R E
SO IT WAS that the spaces in between the stone walls of her cell held the cries of other prisoners and she put her ear up against the cracks and told the nun she could hear them. Then she moved her cot away from the wall and slept in the middle of the cell.
Signed, Mata Hari Page 1