On the street, Tekul saw his mother, who was having trouble holding the imported cheese and tea she had bought in town for the officer she worked for and I told Tekul to run and walk her back using the umbrella so her employer’s supplies would not get ruined and so she would not be blamed for being careless. I walked back alone toward the house and when I turned a corner on the road, I almost ran into Willem. At that moment, the rain rained even harder and I could not hear what he was saying to me. He grabbed me by the elbow and he steered me past a few houses until he came to a house where he produced a key from his pocket and opened up the door.
Welcome, he said. This time it was he who went to fetch a towel. He did not hand the towel to me, though. He stood behind me and dried my hair for me and then he turned me toward him and he held the towel over my blouse on my breasts and he moved his hand in circles this way, lifting and pressing against 4 6
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me, his fingers moving through the towel, his thumb finding my nipple and circling it over and over again.
He moved the towel over my buttocks and then in front of me, up and down my thighs, and this time he did not split my sarong wide. Instead, with his teeth, he pulled the knot free and it fell to the floor and both his hands now worked at drying me and went down to my ankles and he dried them tenderly and after that is when he let the towel go and he started his kisses there, on the bones of my ankles.
I’m with child, I told him.
Good, then you can’t get pregnant again, he said, and he picked me up in his arms and carried me to his bed. I turned him over so that I was on top of him and his green eyes flecked with yellow smiled and I was thankful to see their color after having had so many days of gray skies and bleak rain. I unbuttoned his uniform and his shirt so that they lay splayed open next to him on the bed like the wings of a bat flat against the wall of a cave.
When I let him enter me, the size of him took my breath away and he wanted to know if I was all right and I told him he would take some getting used to and he said he liked that I used those words because he wanted me to get used to him.
Afterward I noticed that my damp hair and his wet uniform and our sex had made his sheets all wet and I began to remove them for him but he stopped and asked what I was doing and then I realized Tekul might be looking for me. Leaving, I said, and I ran out the door and he ran after me, stopping in the doorway with his uniform and shirt still unbuttoned, calling my name, calling, Margaretha, Margaretha. Later, when I was far from his house, I could still hear him calling me and I knew that I was just 4 7
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imagining I heard my name and that what I was really hearing was only the rain.
From then on, that is what the rain kept saying. All through the night, it was calling my name and I tried to stop it. I tried to sleep with pillows over my head. I took a blanket to go and sleep next to MacLeod on the floor because I knew his snoring was so loud it might drown out the sound of my name in the rain, but MacLeod wasn’t on the couch and he was still out, widening his lead, scoring more points by sleeping with more women.
I went to check on Norman and he was dreaming. I could
see his eyes moving back and forth beneath his eyelids. He was breathing so quietly it seemed as if he were hardly breathing at all and I shook him, wanting to wake him, thinking maybe I could read to him or we could play patty-cake and my name in the rain could not be heard above our clapping. But Norman did not wake, his eyes stopped moving back and forth and so he stopped dreaming, then he turned away from me, mumbling something I could not hear, and, Damn, I thought, why are children’s mouths so small?
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S O M A N Y Q U E ST I O N S
SHE TOLD the doctor as he listened to her heart that his stethoscope looked old, as if the rats had started gnawing at it, that maybe he had been too long here in the prison. He said it wasn’t as if he were a prisoner, that he could of course leave whenever he wanted to. He had a garden at home that he worked on. He grew beans and lettuces and radishes. He said he would bring her some next time, but of course he couldn’t and it was just something to say, the way people say bless you after you’ve sneezed and they say it without even thinking.
She told him she had spit up blood that morning when she coughed, she showed him how when she tried to hold her hand out steadily it trembled, she ran a comb through her hair and showed him all the strands that came away with each downward stroke of her arm, she said that when she was tired she knew red lines in her eyes would appear, looking like a meandering section of forked and branching roads drawn on a map in the middle of nowhere. She asked if she had those red lines now in her eyes, and then she said, Of course you can’t see, how could you see in this poor light? but she knew the red lines were there, she could almost feel them there under her lids, as if the lines were raised 4 9
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and her eyes were some sort of a raised map where one could trace with his fingertips the roads to nowhere.
He gave her pills for sleeping and her dreams were as deep as her sleep, and when she woke she felt as if she were fighting through layers and layers of the dreams to break through the surface.
She never knew when Bouchardon would call for her. When he did they sent a guard to escort her to his office. The guard waited a moment while she changed into her street shoes and the dark blue dress she had worn the first day she was taken to prison. She asked for a glass of water and the guard gave it to her and she used it to look at her reflection and then she placed two fingers in the glass and used the water to smooth back the coarse graying hairs at her temples, which had come undone from the bun at the back of her head.
She was still feeling the sleeping pills when she sat down in the chair Bouchardon offered her and she hoped her answers to his questions would not come slowly or sound dim-witted.
He had so many questions. How much money did the Germans give you? Where was the bedroom your maid slept in?
Did your maid wear a sleep mask? Did your maid take sleeping pills? Did your maid stay up and read in bed at night?
Are you asking if my maid was a spy? she said. He bit his fingernails and chewed them, answering between clenched teeth so that he could still keep hold of the nail he was working on chew-ing without having it fall onto the floor of his office.
Was she? he said.
No, of course not, she said.
Do you know for sure? he said.
She was my maid, she said. She brought my feather boas to 5 0
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the cleaners, she boiled the water for my tea, she lined up the shoes in my closet.
She accepted money for you from your lovers, did she not? he asked.
At times, because then she would send it on to me wherever I was.
Where was that? he asked.
What do you mean? she said.
Where were you when she sent it on to you? he said.
Anywhere, everywhere, she said. I performed in Italy, Berlin, Spain, France, The Hague, you know that, she said.
He nodded his head. He tapped his pencil on his pad. Then he went to the window and tapped his fingers on the pane.
I’m not a German spy, she said. His fingers kept tapping. Then he turned around.
That’s all for today, he said.
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M ATA H A R I
MY NAME had to change, I was tired of the sound of it being drummed out in the rain. Kidul was the one who suggested Mata Hari. She said it meant the eye of dawn, the sunrise. I liked the name, I did not hear it in the rain. I imagined it was the sound rays of sunlight made as they shone down on the forest floor and dried the soaked earth.
MacLeod laughed when he first heard Kidul call me Mata
Hari. More like eye of the storm, he said, and he slapped his knee and laughed s
ome more.
Norman climbed into his lap and MacLeod checked his hair, looking closely at his scalp and saying that other officers said their children were getting lice from the servants. Check them, MacLeod told me.
Our servants don’t have lice. If they did they would have let me know, I told him.
You trust them too much, MacLeod said.
When he said that I realized that the only one I didn’t trust was MacLeod. He took Norman off his knee and then he left and did not come back that night.
Norman called me Mama Hari and I loved it when he said it and picked him up and hugged him and he hugged me back and 5 2
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whispered in my ear, I didn’t tell on you, I didn’t tell Papa I heard you speak Malay.
Saya tidak mengerti, I don’t understand, I said to Kidul when Kidul asked if I had money for a badak’s horn.
You place it under your bed when the baby comes, Kidul
answered.
Then I said again, Saya tidak mengerti, what do I need a badak’s horn for?
You’ll have no pain if you do, Kidul said. The badak horn is powerful. If you don’t have enough money to buy one, you can rent one. Tekul knows someone who will rent you one for a good price.
Berapa? I said.
Maybe seribu, Kidul said.
I said that for that kind of money I’d rather have the birthing pains and keep the money to buy new cloth for sarongs.
GIBBONS CAME in through the door that night. They went to my dresser and took my hair combs and they went into the kitchen and took forks and they went into Norman’s room and took a toy metal car and Kidul and I woke up when they came in and we yelled at them to go away and the gibbons shrieked and knocked over a table and a chair and one pissed on the wall and another struck my mirror with the back of its hairy hand when it saw its own reflection. When MacLeod found out he was sure the gibbons would take Norman the next time they came so he sat in a chair on the balcony at night and with his hand on his pistol he waited for the gibbons to come back. He almost shot Willem when Willem came in the middle of the night. The bullet missed, though, and bore into the ground instead.
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I thought you were a gibbon, MacLeod said, apologizing from the balcony after hearing Willem cry out and then MacLeod looked at his watch and turned and looked at me leaning over the balcony in nothing but a silk robe to see what was going on and then he realized why Willem had come in the middle of the night and he put the pistol to my temple and said, You are disgusting.
I turned and went back to bed and MacLeod threw the covers off me and pulled me up by the wrists and threw me out the front door and down the bamboo steps. I caught up to Willem in the rain. He took off his jacket and held it over my head and together we entered his house.
Will he come and shoot me? Willem asked.
No, I don’t think so, I said, and Willem said he didn’t think so either. I told him that by now MacLeod was drunk and asleep in Norman’s room. Sometimes when he was very drunk he would go in there by Norman’s bed and on his knees he would stare at his son and fall asleep with his head on his son’s bed, holding his son’s hand. In the morning when I kissed Norman, his hair would smell of his father’s liquored breath and I would tell Kidul to give Norman a bath with rosewater and later I would feed him fresh buah and let him drink sips of my morning kopi to help take away the smell.
I lay back in Willem’s bed and he undid the belt of my silk robe. I thought he would cast it aside, but then he used the belt between my legs, sliding it over and over again, and then lightly kissing me through it while it rested on my pubis. Then he held the belt by both ends and slid it back and forth through me so that there was more pressure and his kisses were now deeper and his tongue was there, probing into me through the cloth where my wetness met the wetness of his mouth, and then finally when 5 4
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he unbuttoned his pants and he entered me, the belt entered along with him, and he drove into me, pushing deeper and deeper with each thrust, and just as I climaxed he withdrew the belt from inside me and I screamed because I had never felt anything like it before.
I left his place before the black of the rainy night turned into the gray of a rainy day. Before I left he told me to wait and he reached inside his pocket and he gave me a roll of guilders. He did not say anything to me as he gave them to me, and I did not say anything to him. Maybe I nodded, but that was all.
I showed Kidul and she said that was more than enough to rent a badak’s horn and I told her, Good, go rent one, because maybe when the time came I would need it after all.
MacLeod liked to tell me about the other women he saw
Willem with. He likes big breasts, all of his whores are like cows past milking, he said. You must be a disappointment in compari-son, he said.
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N O N
THE BADAK, or one-horned rhino, was shy. I never saw one. I went to the river to look, but all I saw were macaques crashing and screeching through the branches, and beneath them, in the muddy water, a crocodile cruised while onshore a thick python lay curled, snug in the hollow of a banyan tree.
With some leftover guilders from Willem I thought of asking Tekul to buy me a curving kris dagger because I thought it would give me strength. The goddess of the southern seas was married eight times, but each time her husband died on the wedding night.
For her ninth husband she chose a holy man, who in the wali tradition stayed up praying rather than make love to his new wife. In the middle of the cold, dark night, his praying was interrupted by an eerie sound and he saw a poisonous snake on the pillow by the head of his bride. He grabbed the snake and threw it to the floor, where, in an instant, it turned into a shining kris dagger.
You can marry a kris dagger, Kidul told me.
I’m already married, I said.
Yes, I know, Kidul said, but still you can marry one if you’d like. The holy men in my village will perform the rites.
I went to her village and a gamelan orchestra played their strange instruments while shadow dramas were played against a 5 6
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skin made from a banteng hide, which hung from the branches of an ironwood tree. The shadow drama was played for hours and Kidul and her mother wove in between those of us who sat on the ground and watched and they offered us sweet nasi goreng from baskets they held on their heads.
It was the old story of Prince Rama who was born to rid the world of the demon Ravana. Rama’s wife, Sita, was captured by Ravana, and to get her back Rama created an army of monkeys led by the monkey king and the monkey general. They pounced down on Ravana and slew him, and Sita was returned to her prince. It was not only the story I left the village remembering, but the sounds of the gamelan orchestra whose steady drumbeat followed me out of the forest like a lover who would not let me go, and I felt it pull at my wrists as tight as a gibbon’s grip and I almost stayed and dreamed of living in Kidul’s village, where I would rise every day just to sit on the ground and listen to the music of the wayang kulit shadow drama and at night I would sleep on a reed mat and dream of the river.
You did not stay for the marriage to the kris dagger, Kidul said as she walked next to me, and I said I never wanted to marry again, once in my life was more than enough, and anyway, I said, I had found a new lover back there more powerful than the kris dagger and it was the music from the gamelan orchestra.
Really? Kidul asked, and I turned and looked at Kidul and touched her brown cheek with the palm of my hand and said, It is just a way of speaking.
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T H E P R I C E O F C LOT H
MACL EOD WROTE LETTERS to his sister in the Netherlands, telling her how his wife was like a child and as the months went by she seemed to grow even younger.
He was afraid for his son and his unborn child and thought one day some harm would come to his son because of his wife forgetting to feed him or clothe him because she was too stupid and busy flirting with other officers, fitting herself into sarongs and learning Malay when he had forbidden her to speak it. He wrote that he would divorce his wife if it weren’t for the children and he wanted them to have a mother, if only it weren’t her.
Dear Brother, I am sending you the tailored shirts you requested. The tailor said he hoped your measurements have not changed since last time because those are the measurements he used as a guide. Also, the price of the cloth has risen by two guilders, and his workmanship by one.
As for Margaretha, I am sorry to hear what a drain she must be on you. You must be strong. If she behaves like a child, then you are right to treat her like one and discipline her. She was lucky to have found such a wonderful husband as you, and it saddens me to hear how unappreciated you 5 8
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are. Let’s hope there will come a time in her life when she will be ashamed of the way she treats you and that she will make a change for the better, at least for the sake of the children. For now, try and do your best to weather it out. If all else fails, then I’m sure that it would not take you long to find a more suitable wife if you were to come back home.
Oh, and how I wish you would come back! I’d very much like to see baby Norman again. Although he must be quite the little man by now and not the plump bundle he was the last time I saw him. Plant a kiss on his cheek for me.
Your sister,
Louise
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T H E B A DA K ’ S H O R N
I THOUGHT the badak’s horn beneath my bed did help. When the time came, Kidul placed it on a china plate and on the plate she lay a square of batik cloth so that the horn’s pointed end faced upward. When I saw how Kidul placed the horn, I laughed and knew why the badak horn helped relieve birthing pains. The woman in labor was so worried the whole time, thinking that if the bed broke and the loosely filled horsehair mattress fell down, then she’d be impaled right up through the back. So the pain of the labor was lessened by fear of death by the horn of a badak.
Signed, Mata Hari Page 4