Signed, Mata Hari

by Yannick Murphy

  Anyone could have obtained that information, I said. It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re suggesting, I said.

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  Then he turned and looked at me, and the wide, gaping craters, the acne scars by the sides of his mouth, elongated, changing into slits looking like the pupils in the eyes of a cobra, as he said to me, We have their code. We know it was you.

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  T H E M I STA K E

  O F T H E M A N I C U R I ST

  I HAD a picture of Non that I held in my hand as the train sped past Spaniards standing on ladders picking olives from the olive trees. I passed my hand over her hair in the picture. I touched my finger to the line of her jaw and remembered how it really was when she was a girl and how it felt with her small pulse beating under there and with the vibration of her throat as she spoke, the thrum of Mommy being said to me. With the train’s wheels rolling on the tracks, I could feel that vibration again and I was with her on that train ride. I would have her back again someday, I thought, I would have Vadime as my husband and her as my child again and all that I needed to set the wheels in motion was the money Ladoux had promised me, and then I turned to look out at the Spaniards in the high, hot sun who wore their shirts tied by the sleeves around their foreheads and let their backs take the brunt of the burning rays and turn brown, but it was their heads they wanted shielded, I thought, so they would not get dizzy and could still work and get the job done. I was to remember those Spaniards in Paris while I walked to Ladoux’s office and his secretary told me he was not there. I wanted the money Ladoux had promised for my intelligence work, but like the Spaniards who exposed their backs to save their heads from 2 2 2

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  the burning sun, I too was exposing my back. Maybe it would have been better if I had never tried to see Ladoux again. Maybe he would have forgotten about me and let me go.

  In Spain, before I left for France, I had asked Anna Lintjens to ask Van der Capellen to wire me money to the Banq Nacional de Paris. I needed money, any kind of money. I walked the streets waiting for the money to arrive.

  I visited jewelry shops and tried on rings I would never own and that at times did not slide easily on my finger and that I could not even slide past my first digit and I had trouble pulling them off, and then I panicked, wondering if the rings were really on for good and how would I pay for them?

  I read the newspaper. Germany launched an unrestricted war-fare campaign. A German sub sank a French battleship. There were no survivors. General Joseph Joffre resigned as French com-mander in chief.

  I went to have my nails done, and I asked the Asian girl with the fingers as long and thin as reeds and the hair as straight as chop-sticks covering her eyes if she thought the Allies had a chance.

  I’ve been reading the newspaper, I told her, and I think the French have plenty to worry about, what with all the changes of com-mand and the attacks. Then I looked across and saw a British soldier having his nails done by another Asian, and he was very relaxed, sitting in his salon chair, smoking a pipe and splaying out his pale, veiny hand across the Asian’s counter. Out loud I wondered if the British would ever leave France, they would oc-cupy France forever, I said, they like it here too much. Afterward, I did not like my nails painted dragon red, and I asked her to do them again, I asked her to do them French, and then I looked out the window while she set to doing them again and I looked at 2 2 3

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  the men who had been following me for days now and I waved to them.

  Finally, the money from Van der Capellen arrived at the Banq Nacional de Paris.

  I wrote to Vadime, I told him how I was trying hard to earn money so that we could finally start our life together. I told him all about Non in the letter. I told him how as a baby she would curl in my lap and poke the stems of flowers through my long braids and how I was sure he would like her, because I had been told she was like me. I was writing all this when there was no knock at the door, just the feel of the wind rushing through as the door opened quickly, and then the quick spread of warmth I could feel from the five policemen who stood there, taking up all the space there was in the small room I rented and sweating under their hats while they told me I was under arrest. When I told them it must be a mistake, that Captain Ladoux should be notified and that he’d clear it all up, they showed me the arrest notice and at the bottom it was signed by Ladoux, in his cramped hand with the last letter sitting almost upright, looking more like a cross than an X, and I thought, He probably signs his name like that on purpose, so people will think he is closer to God than the rest of us.

  Later, in my cell, I looked down at my fingers and noticed how the Asian manicurist had left some lacquer. I could see the faint lines of the dragon red beneath the cuticles, which should have been a pinkish cream, in the French style, and not this seeping in of red, a hint of pouring blood.

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  S O M E C H E E K

  GET UP FROM THE FLOOR, Mata Hari said to Sister Leonide. Stop your praying. The floor is filthy. You’ll spoil your habit. But Sister Leonide would not get up, and so while Sister Leonide was still on the floor Mata Hari knelt beside her and she lifted the black cloth of Sister Leonide’s habit and she held the cloth between the knuckles of both her fists and she rubbed. Sister Leonide reached out and grabbed Mata Hari’s hands in her own and she turned to her.

  Pray with me, she said. Mata Hari looked down at Sister Leonide’s hands. They were dry and rough.

  You need cream, Mata Hari said. Sister Leonide then smoothed back the hair from Mata Hari’s face and a tear fell from Mata Hari’s eye and Sister Leonide wiped it away and Mata Hari stood slowly, her knees hurting her, and she said, I don’t know how you nuns do it all day.

  AT TRIAL, Adolphe Messimy, the ministry of war, wasn’t present to testify in Mata Hari’s defense. A letter was read out loud, written by his wife.

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  I’m sorry to inform you that my husband’s bout with rheumatism has prevented him from attending this trial.

  Besides, she wrote, the whole thing must be a mistake, my husband says he’s never even met the indicated

  person.

  Mata Hari laughed. He’s got some cheek, she said, and her laughter was infectious and all the men laughed because Mata Hari had been Monseigneur Messimy’s mistress off and on for a long time and he had been called as a witness for the defense because he could testify that she never, not once, while they were in each other’s arms, or while he was entering her from behind (the way he preferred, à la chien, he had said), did she ever discuss the war and if she were really a spy, wouldn’t the ministry of war be the best person to obtain information from while his genitals, dangling only by a thin wing of aged skin, were being caressed with her fingers whose nails were richly painted with a lacquer named Orient Plum Surprise?

  Jules Cambon was then called to the stand. He swore that he and Mata Hari never spoke of the war or his work. What did you discuss then?, he was asked.

  Ancient Rome, the pyramids, wine, and horse racing,

  he said. Mata Hari remembered that with the gentle Jules Cambon, ambassador in several military posts, there was more talk than anything else. Every time he tried to enter her, he was flaccid and he would spend countless minutes trying to stuff his penis inside of her, insisting that it would become hard once it was inside of her. That is when she would stroke his brow and bring up a topic like horse racing. He was very well versed in it and knew bloodlines back to Arabia, and sim-2 2 6

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  ple things too, like pastes of cloves and garlic and witch hazel used for poultices to wrap up horses’ swollen ankles. Out loud, in the dark, they weighed together the benefits of train-ing h
orses on a hard track or a soft track, the use of a German martingale or just a standard martingale found hanging in almost every barn.

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  T H E G A M E

  IT WAS HOT in the courtroom. She was sweating at the hairline beneath the blue three-cornered hat that she wore. They were all waiting for a thunderstorm to come, and men in the courtroom kept looking out the high windows to see if the rain had begun to fall. Except she wasn’t trying to look out the windows, she was looking at the door. She was hoping to see Non walk through, under the bust of Marianne, symbol of the republic, even though she’d been told that Non hadn’t been called as a witness. What used to be hanging above the door instead of the bust of Marianne was the figure of Christ on the cross. She wished it was still there. She would have preferred an image of his nailed palms and his bloody wrists and his halo of spiked thorns and his pathetic, thin white limbs, his legs crossed at the bony ankles to the image of Marianne and how she looked down upon her, because it was the same look Bouchardon wore when he looked at her, a woman he hated because she had taken advantage of men for her own gain and who he believed had endangered the lives of men who defended their country. She was incalculably worse than even the enemy was in the eyes of the wooden Marianne and the fingernail-biting Bouchardon and to how many more men in the courtroom at the time, she had no way of knowing.

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  She thought she may have had a chance at being set free, though.

  Wasn’t it clear to some of these men as it was clear to her, she thought, that she was never really a spy for Germany?

  She could hear the rumble of the thunder far off. It came from the direction of Rouen, from the north, where there were farm-houses and green fields and fields of corn, whose silk tips wavered in the wind while Vadime Masloff’s deposition was read out loud. To quote, he said, that the affair I had with the accused meant little to me. He added that he was not aware, in any way whatsoever, that she had been employed into the services of either the French republic or any republic for that matter.

  She thought what he wrote in his deposition was clever, the court would believe she was just a passing whim to him and there would be no reason to implicate him as well. There might still be a chance that they would be together after all.

  The storm was getting closer. The bust of Marianne appeared even darker in the courtroom, she looked more like a ship’s bow-sprit then, her features weathered rough and menacing by wind and splashed dark with spray. When the storm finally did reach them, there was only a muffled boom of thunder and then a few glimpses that did not seem like bolts, but more like a weak glow of lantern lights seen flashing in some faraway field, nothing more than a farmer’s nightly inspection of his budding crops and planted rows. The heat remained and left them in the same hot stupor as before, while the storm crawled its way toward the south.

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  I N T H I S H E AT

  IT WAS in this heat that the seven jurors, members of the third Permanent Council of War of the Military Government of Paris, all arrived at their verdict. Mata Hari sat next to her lawyer, Clunet, in the courtroom, and every once in a while he took her hand. His own hand was moist with sweat and she wished he wouldn’t hold it, especially after she noticed how yellow and ridged his nails had become with age, and that was a detail she hadn’t noticed in the poor light of her prison cell these past few months, but then she thought he needed someone to hold onto more than she did. After all, she had walked across the sea once as a girl and she believed she could do it again, only this time the sea wasn’t sand and salt but a roomful of old men she had to wade through, their spectacles sitting on the bridges of their noses, their graying hair matted with sweat dropping at their temples, their cheeks starred, asterisked with the small broken lines of blood vessels, and their eyes dull with passing clouds seen in them, the weather of the old. She let Clunet take her hand, poor man, he is no different from one of these old men, and together they listened to the verdict.

  She was told to rise from her chair. When she stood she straightened her coat and made sure her skirt hung properly 2 3 0

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  around her and was not clinging to her because of the sweat that she could feel dribbling down the backs of her knees and the lengths of her muscled calves.

  In the name of the Republic of France, we find the defendant guilty.

  Clunet grabbed onto her as if to shield her from the words being read aloud. She wanted to speak. She said something, but Clunet could not hear her. His hearing was not what it used to be, and the men in the room were all murmuring to one another.

  Ma petite, ma petite, he said loudly as if it were she who had trouble hearing instead. Later, when leaving the courtroom he was asked by others what she had said to him, and he replied, She said, It’s impossible. Impossible.

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  T H R O U G H B I R D S O F PA R A D I S E

  I DID NOT SAY Impossible. I said, I know now what she saw. At the exact moment that I was in the courtroom and was pronounced guilty, I remembered an incident that I had put out of my mind the moment it had happened years and years ago. If you had asked me before if I had ever believed that a memory like that could be so instantaneously wiped clean, I would have laughed, I would have asked what you’d been drinking, I would have joked, Have you any left? Then pour me some, I would have said.

  When I was pronounced guilty I forgot where I was, and I was thrown back in time into the heat of Java, and what I was condemned for was not being some absurd German spy with letters and numbers for a name. I was guilty of something much worse.

  It was a hot night, and MacLeod wasn’t there. If you had asked me then, I might have lied for him, I might have said he was out with the other officers, a late-night meeting over dinner and billiards and the passing of tightly wrapped cigars, when really there was no other place he was except with a girl, a teenager most likely who did as she was told in a velvet-wallpapered room in the gabled whorehouse in town.

  I had just checked on Non and Norman, and they were sleep-2 3 2

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  ing together as they sometimes liked to, their heads turned toward each other with their hairlines almost touching, like lovers discussing secrets in the dark. I shut the door and left the room and went out to the garden where it was cooler. Tekul was there.

  He never wore a shirt and his brown back looked almost gray in the moonlight, like cool stone. Where’s Kidul? I asked, and he nodded in the direction of their bedroom where she was sleeping. He was smoking a cigarette, and he asked me to sit down with him on a reed mat he had laid on the grass. I had never known Tekul ever to sit in a chair. He patted the mat with his hand, saying it was cooler closer to the earth. Come see, he said, and so I did, and he was right, and through my sarong I could feel the coolness creeping up into me.

  Master not home tonight? he said. I did not have to nod.

  Tekul nodded for me. We both knew where MacLeod was. I

  think I sighed, though, and Tekul passed me his cigarette and I smoked it.

  Good, no? he said, and that is when I tasted the cigarette in my mouth and realized it was not tobacco, but he was right, it tasted good, as if vanilla had been added to it.

  Tekul, what is this? I asked.

  Island secret, he said, smiling.

  It did not take long before the cigarette started to take effect.

  I thought there was a movement behind the birds of paradise.

  I thought I saw them part and I thought I saw the smallest of hands clutching on the stems, pulling them aside.

  Look, don’t you see? I said to Tekul. Then he took my hand.

  Nothing there, just inside your mind, he said. You have to do this right, ma’am, he said. You have to not worry. You worry, you will have a bad time with the
power of the island secret.

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  Mengerti? he said, and then he said, Come, lie down, and he took me and had me lie back on the cool reed mat and he looked down at me.

  In the dark, I could see the whites of his eyes and they shone wetly, forming perfect rings around his pupils. They looked like the white rings on the side of ships that were thrown to rescue people who had fallen overboard. I kept looking at them, telling myself they could save my life. Then I felt Tekul’s fingers on me.

  He reached up into my sarong and slid his hand on my leg above my knee and touched me as gently as if he were a breeze, and I felt myself feeling the warmth of his hand and his fingertips and being amazed that I enjoyed the warmth, when for so long I had been complaining of the heat of the island. Soon I felt his face upon my shirt. He moved the cloth aside with his teeth and put his mouth on my breast. Meanwhile, his hand did not stop, it reached farther up into me and found me wet. Tekul, this is not right, I said, and I tried to push him away, but Tekul gently laughed and from his laugh I could smell the smoke from his cigarette and then I could taste it because my mouth was open while he laughed, and at the same time I tasted it, he entered me, and I did not know how much I wanted to feel him inside me until he was there, pushing into me. In a climax that seemed to have a flight pattern, where I flew over hills and mountains, then down below the mantle of the earth, I floated through slow-moving magma, then up again I sprang from a desert, shedding the sand like water droplets as I headed straight up and then across, seeing hundreds of pink and red sunrises and sunsets, a speeded-up lifetime of many souls, and then I landed in a talking river where branches splashed in a rushing current and pebbles rolled, their knocking sound a gentle conversation, a hush 2 3 4

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  to be quiet from a mother to her child, and then awash, onshore, newly come to life, I opened my eyes while on the reed mat, still in my garden.