RICHARD SKINNER
The Red Dancer
Those who know the enemy as well as they know themselves will never suffer defeat.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
The story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
Part I:
1. Amsterdam 1895–96
2. Dutch East Indies 1897–99
3. Gamelan
4. Bejoe-Biroe, Java, Dutch East Indies, 1900–01
5. Amsterdam, 1902
6. Paris, 1903
7. Les Affiches
8. Paris, 1904
9. Paris, 1905
10. La Presse
Part II:
11. Orient Express
12. Vienna, 1906
13. Berlin, 1907
14. The Green House, 1908
15. Juju
16. Paris, 1909
17. Lörrach, Baden, Württemberg, Germany, 1910
18. Virgula Divina
19. Zermatt, Switzerland, 1911
20. Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris 1912–14
21. The Black Hand
22. Berlin, 1914
23. Zeppelin
24. Picardie, France, 1915
25. Vittel, France, 1916
26. Oleum Absinthii
27. London, 1916
28. Madrid 1917
Part III:
29. St Lazare, Paris, 1917
30. Vincennes, Paris, 1917
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Also by Richard Skinner
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
Foreward to the new edition
History is nothing other than a distillation of rumour.
Thomas Carlyle
Before I wrote The Red Dancer, I had no idea who Mata Hari was. I thought of her in the same way that I thought of Rasputin, or Madame Blavatsky – she was a ‘name’, yes, but why? What did she do to make herself so famous? I started researching the life of Mata Hari in the summer of 1998 by reading all the biographies of her life I could lay my hands on in the old British Library Reading Room with its beautiful blue-domed ceiling. As I read them, I found that they all contradicted each other, and so I thought I couldn’t trust any of them. But, crucially, they all had one thing in common – there seemed to be two keys to understanding her life: personal reinvention and self-delusion. How strongly we identify with historic figures depends on the idea of singleness and consistency – the more singular and consistent they are in the way they live their lives, the more ‘knowable’ they become (think of Einstein, Churchill or Gandhi) – but the life of Mata Hari was neither singular nor consistent; quite the contrary. Rather than let that stop me from writing the book, though, I decided to see if I could structure The Red Dancer around this problem of who exactly Mata Hari was. I eventually arrived at the idea that the narrative could be a series of multiple and inconsistent points of view, made up of eyewitness accounts by people both real and imagined, mixed together with letters, newspaper cuttings, documents, quotations, interviews both real and imagined, as well as fiction.
My idea was that each of these chapters, narrated by people who encountered Mata Hari, would be discrete entities which, taken together, would paint a fuller picture of Mata Hari in a way that no single viewpoint could. But each of these narrators wouldn’t know that their testimony was part of a larger picture. They were not narrating with an agenda; they were just telling their story. The only character who doesn’t have a voice in the book (except in the Prologue) is Mata Hari herself. Living in the public eye as she did, and in such a male-dominated world, Mata Hari’s life wasn’t entirely her own to control or keep. This is the real sadness in the story. In some ways, I think of Mata Hari as a proto-feminist but, at times, she was also her own worst enemy. Ultimately, my aim was not to take up a position for or against Mata Hari; rather, I wanted to present enough material for the reader to judge for themselves. After all, as Carlyle’s quotation points out, history itself is nothing other than contesting stories, and the different stories surrounding the myth of Mata Hari is what lies at the heart of The Red Dancer.
Every novel has its antecedents in other novels, and mine is no exception. I read Madame Bovary for the first time just before I started writing The Red Dancer – indeed, it was the very fact that I was going to write The Red Dancer that made me read Madame Bovary. The two women have much in common – dissatisfaction, self-delusion – and meet much the same fate. More useful, however, was the amount of detail in Flaubert’s book about the kinds of cloth, furs, dresses, haberdashery, hats and gloves Emma Bovary wore. Fabulous. What a wordsmith he was.
The other book that was a huge influence on The Red Dancer was The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić, which I was reviewing for the Financial Times at the time. Ugrešić’s book is incredible – one of the most unusual and original novels I have ever come across – diary entries, footnotes, quotations, descriptions of photographs and bits of autobiography mixed with the cultural history, myth, fables and dreams of her native Croatia – social realism shot through with magic realism.
Even more so than books, however, I would say that behind every novel I’ve ever written there lies a film or films as the main influence. In the case of The Red Dancer, this influence was François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, which I had seen at the Venice Film Festival in 1993 when I managed to persuade the Sunday Times to issue me a press card. As with Ugrešić’s book, Girard’s film operates around the theory of montage, placing things in harsh juxtaposition rather than in smooth transition and thus we get thirty-two mini-documentaries: five interviews with people who knew him, recreations of scenes from Gould’s life, as well as various odd items such as ‘Gould Meets McLaren’, in which animated spheres reminiscent of those in McLaren’s animations move in time to Gould’s music. Girard said: ‘As Gould was such a complex character, the biggest problem was to find a way to look at his work and deal with his visions. The film is built of fragments, each one trying to capture an aspect of Gould. There is no way of putting Gould in one box. The film gives the viewer thirty-two impressions of him. I didn’t want to reduce him to one dimension.’
All this was intoxicating to me, and Ugrešić and Girard taught me to be bold in how I structured The Red Dancer. I decided that I would fragment Mata Hari’s story by including several non-fiction chapters, which would serve to arrest and open out the story to provide a cultural and social context. These chapters would show how the times in which Mata Hari lived helped shape her life. They were also great fun to research and write and, when I delivered a draft of The Red Dancer to my editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone, there were almost as many non-fiction chapters as fiction.He and I spent several weekends at his flat in Battersea while he went through the text and, much to my alarm, stripped them out one by one. Out went chapters on maths, fashion and truffles. Lee felt that so many non-fiction chapters left Mata Hari out of focus and he kept cutting until the ratio of fiction to non-fiction chapters was about two to one. He was absolutely right, of course.
Since its original publication in 2001, I’ve dipped in and out of The Red Dancer but I haven’t reread it in its entirety. For this reissue, Faber asked me if I would like to make any changes to the text. It didn’t take me long to realise the problem with an invitation like that – where would you stop if you did want to change somet
hing? You would go on and on making changes, unravelling the original story until there was nothing left. Each time you write a novel, there’s only so much time it remains malleable in your mind and, once it’s been ‘cast’ and published, you can never revisit it in quite the same way again. That way madness lies and so, for that reason, I quickly decided that I would leave the text as it was, warts and all. Looking back over the book for this reissue, I’m glad Lee and I made those decisions to cut and cut. I like the way the book still operates around the principle of harsh juxtaposition, rather than smooth transition, with the character of Mata Hari herself represented not as a continuous wave but as a storm of interruptions. This is perhaps a more honest way of portraying such a complex character. After all, how many of us can truly say we are the same ‘being’ at any given moment? We are, in fact, all complicated people with many facets to our personalities, and this is what the structure of The Red Dancer tries to portray in the case of Mata Hari.
Richard Skinner, 2017
Prologue
I am absolutely Oriental.
I was born in the south of India on the coast of Malabar, in the holy city of Jaffnapatam, the child of a family within the sacred caste of Brahma. By reason of his piety and pureness of heart my father was called Assirvadam, which means ‘The Blessing of God’. My mother was a glorious bayadère in the temple of Kanda Swany. She died when she was fourteen, on the day I was born. The priests of the temple, having cremated my mother, adopted me under the baptismal name of Mata Hari, which means ‘Eye of the Dawn’.
From the time when I took my first uncertain steps I was shut up in the great subterranean hall of the pagoda of Siva, where I was to be trained to follow in my mother’s footsteps through the holy rites of the dance. Of these early years my mind retains only vague recollections of a monotonous existence in which, during the long morning hours, I was taught to imitate automatically the movements of the bayadères, and in the afternoons was allowed to walk in the gardens while weaving garlands of jasmine for decorating the altars.
When I reached the threshold of womanhood, my foster mother saw in me a predestined soul and resolved to dedicate me to Siva and to reveal to me the mystery of love and faith on the night of Sakty-pudja, in the following spring. It was on the purple granite altar of the Kanda Swany that, at the age of thirteen, I was initiated. Naked, I danced before the rajahs on the banks of the sacred Ganges . . .
PART I
Portrait of Margaretha as a young girl
1
Amsterdam, 1895–96
Captain in the East Indies army, currently on leave, seeks to return to the East Indies as a married man. He’s seeking a cultured young lady of pleasing appearance and gentle character. Please reply to Post Box 206, Amsterdam.
Het Nieuws van den Dag, 1895
It was my idea to place the personal ad in Het Nieuws van den Dag. I thought it would be amusing to see how a womaniser like MacLeod would respond. The idea came to me while I was at Sergeant Stam’s stag party at the Café Americain in February 1895. At the end of the evening, Stam was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He put his arm around my neck and told me that the only man in the East Indies who had had more women than him was MacLeod. When they were garrisoned at Padang together, Stam said, MacLeod had slept with more than fifty women. And then in Banhermassin, the figure was rumoured to be even higher. ‘Damn good man,’ Stam said before falling over.
At the time, MacLeod and I were captains in the Dutch army. We were both on extended leave in Amsterdam after long periods of service in the East Indies. I met him one night at the Café Americain and liked him immediately. He struck me as the kind of man who enjoyed the company of other men. He was witty and very generous – always buying drinks for everyone and proposing toasts. The other officers teased him about his reputation with women, but he derived great pleasure from it and was proud that he was still a bachelor. I’d heard other stories about him, though, uglier stories, and one or two officers warned me of his notorious temper.
Two days after Stam’s stag party, I placed the ad in the personal section using MacLeod’s post box number. Then I waited. MacLeod received the first reply three days later and brought it with him that night to the Café Americain. He was very amused. He waved the letter in the air and asked who had played the joke on him. I owned up straight away. He clapped me on the back and said he hadn’t laughed as much in months.
I had forgotten all about it until one cold night in March, when I received a request from MacLeod to meet him at his sister Louise’s house, where he was staying on leave. I walked to the house on Leidschekade, which was just around the corner from the Café Americain. MacLeod showed me into the living room and offered me a schnapps. He sat me down and indicated some letters and photographs on the table. It took me a few moments to realise that they were replies to the ad. He explained that he had received fifteen letters in all. At first, he said, he had treated them as part of the joke, but gradually began reading them in earnest. The letters had made him think about himself in an unfamiliar way. He was thirty-nine and a confirmed bachelor. Would he ever marry? Would he ever have children?
He had spent the past few weeks sorting through the letters and had chosen one in particular that stirred him the most. It was from a Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, who lived in The Hague. She was very pretty, he said, and showed me the photograph she had sent. He was right – her face was quite round and her eyes were shaped like almonds. Her dark hair was pleasantly pinned up, using a comb and a ribbon. She was as dark and beautiful as a gypsy. MacLeod said that, in his experience, dark-haired women were always more passionate than blondes or brunettes. He told me that he was thinking of writing back to arrange a meeting with her. What did I think? I wasn’t sure if this was all an elaborate hoax. I looked for a hint of a smile, or a glint in the eye, but he seemed quite sincere. I said that if he thought it was a good idea, then he should go ahead with it. He nodded and clapped his hands. ‘Excellent!’ he said.
I spent the next five days in Flanders, visiting my brother, who had married a dull Flemish woman and settled in Gent. My brother’s apparent happiness and MacLeod’s change of heart weighed on my mind while I walked around the flat countryside. Would I ever marry? What did I want for myself? When I returned to Amsterdam, I bumped into MacLeod at the Americain, and he told me that he was meeting the girl the following morning at the Rijksmuseum. I laughed, because I knew he had no patience with the Arts, but MacLeod looked concerned. Was it the wrong kind of place? he asked. I assured him it was perfect for such a meeting. As I walked home that night, I still wasn’t sure if it was all a prank to get even with me. I decided that I would see for myself whether his assignation was real.
The next morning, I went into a coffee shop opposite the museum and took a table by the window. I read the paper and watched for MacLeod, who was due to meet the girl at midday. He arrived a little early and stood by the entrance, looking up and down the street. Years of army life had taught him, like me, the value of punctuality. I suppose I was a little surprised to see him there. Just after the clock above the Town Hall struck midday, a woman turned the corner and crossed the street. I recognised her from the photograph. She was wearing a cream muslin dress and a broad hat with ostrich plumes. As she approached, her legs pushed out the skirts of her dress and something stirred in me. MacLeod offered her his arm and led her up the stairs to the entrance of the tall, red-brick building. As they walked through the main archway, I realised that I was a little jealous.
I went to the Americain earlier than usual that evening in the hope of seeing MacLeod. I’d had three whiskies before he came in, looking very pleased with himself. He ordered a cognac and knocked it back in one. Well? I said. He put the glass down and announced that he knew he would marry the girl. I stood dumbfounded. He said two things had convinced him of the fact: the first was the glances of appreciation she had received as they wandered through the museum. The second was that she had admired a particular painting
, by Rembrandt, of a naked woman stepping from a bath. She had told him she liked the feeling of being naked. ‘She’s a woman after my own heart, Verster,’ he said. Six days later they were formally engaged.
In April, the girl moved into the house on Leidschekade and they arranged to have a small celebration there. On that evening, MacLeod introduced her as Margaretha, but he called her Gerda when they spoke together. Her black hair was done up in a chignon. She was wearing an ivory-white merino dress that showed off her cleavage. She was very charming. When I asked who else would be coming, MacLeod laughed and said it would just be the three of us. He and Gerda had agreed that they wanted only me there because I had brought them together in the first place. As if reading my mind, MacLeod told me not to worry – Gerda had found the joke as funny as he had. I smiled and shrugged and raised my glass to them. What else could I do?
The next time I saw her was at the Café Americain, when MacLeod introduced her to all the commissioned officers in the bar and ordered schnapps with beer chasers for everyone. Although she was the only woman in the place, she talked easily with the other officers, all of whom cast glances at MacLeod. He leant over to me and asked me how old I thought she was. I said twenty-three or four. He shook his head. Eighteen, he said. I looked again: she was young enough to be his daughter, but she would never have passed for such. He asked if I remembered the night of the party. I nodded. He said he had plucked her cherry that night. He laughed and said she had been afraid, but he loved plucking cherries so much that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had been in such a rush that he’d ripped off her petticoat.
Their wedding was in August. Margaretha wore a pearlgrey dress and veil. The ceremony at the Consulate was brief and attended only by close family members. When the marriage was first announced, Margaretha’s father, Adam Zelle, had refused to give his blessing. MacLeod had told me he thought the old man just couldn’t stand the idea of another man taking her away. Eventually, the old man had relented and attended the ceremony. The reception that followed was at the Café Americain. When everyone had sat down, it was noticed that Adam Zelle wasn’t present. No one knew where he had got to. MacLeod later told me that he had paid the driver of Zelle’s carriage to take him to a completely different restaurant.
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