Femme Fatale

by Pat Shipman

  Soon Griet realized what was going on and started complaining that Rudolf left her home alone too often while he went out with his friends. One who heard the complaints was interviewed by writer Sam Waagenaar in the late 1920s; he identifies her only as “Mrs. V.” Rudolf had called upon her when he first arrived in the Netherlands, bringing greetings from her son, a fellow officer. But Rudolf had offended Mrs. V. and her mother by telling an off-color joke and they thought very little of him. Following his engagement to Griet, Rudolf took his fiancée to call on Mrs. V. After seeing the couple together, Mrs. V. wondered if the marriage would survive. Griet was very pretty and very naïve and expected a lot of life, she felt, while Rudolf had crude manners and would hardly provide his young bride with “the right guidance.” Perhaps the Indies—where women went to parties with their husbands rather than staying demurely home—would suit Griet. She hoped so.

  During either their brief courtship or early marriage, the couple attended the 1895 Hotel and Travel Sector Exposition in Amsterdam, which was open between May 11 and October 31. Somehow they had made the acquaintance of N. A. Calisch, the chairman of the executive committee, who had organized the event. Calisch made the couple his personal guests, ensuring they had a wonderful time at the exposition. It was an extraordinary event attended by more than one million people. The exhibits included a re-created seventeenth-century Dutch village, complete with canal; a life-sized model of the ship Prins Hendrick afloat in a specially dug basin; a huge papier-mâché construction depicting an Indian elephant, with a mahout and a three-story howdah on its back. There were also ornamental gardens to stroll in and myriad smaller pavilions flying bright flags.

  As a result of their acquaintance, Calisch loaned Rudolf three thousand guilders sometime between 1895 and 1897. He was never repaid; the loan note, signed by Rudolf, was found among Calisch’s possessions after his death some years later. Three thousand guilders was a very substantial sum—about half a year’s pay for a married officer in the Dutch Indies army in 1896 and the equivalent of more than twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency. When Rudolf later retired from the army as a major with almost thirty years of service, his annual pension was only twenty-eight hundred guilders, less than the amount loaned to him by Calisch. One of the outrages with which Zelle charged Rudolf in his book about his daughter’s life was humiliating her by asking her to “be nice” to Mr. Calisch, so he would not demand payment of his loan. The clear implication is that Rudolf was urging his wife into something very like prostitution in order to clear his debts.

  Zelle’s book featured a heartrending story of spending the last evening in the Netherlands with his daughter, before she and her husband left for the Indies. He described her shame as moneylenders pounded on her door demanding payment of Rudolf’s notes, about which she knew nothing. Whether or not Zelle and his wife actually witnessed the arrival of moneylenders cannot be determined; Zelle is the only source to mention it, and his book is clearly contrived to heap maximum blame on Rudolf. But the unpaid loan from Calisch is documented, as is the large amount of money owed in the Indies, for letters from Rudolf and Griet often complain about the amount of the regular payments they must make.

  On March 16, 1896, almost a year after Griet and Rudolf first met, Rudolf’s leave was extended because of his still-precarious health. His drinking and carousing had done nothing to improve his physical situation and had sabotaged his financial circumstances. The couple moved out of Tante Frida’s apartment into their own place on Jacob Lennepkade to diminish the domestic conflict, but Tante Frida visited frequently and continued to criticize all too freely.

  A few weeks later, on April 23, Griet and Rudolf went to a reception at the Royal Palace given by the queen regent Emma, mother of the young queen Wilhelmina, in honor of the queen’s upcoming sixteenth birthday on April 30. The MacLeods were privileged to be invited. Griet dressed in her yellow silk gown, and, as at their wedding, Rudolf wore his best dress uniform. Many at the reception commented what a beautiful couple they were, the lady so dark-haired in her vivid gown, the gentleman so upright and dignified, with his gold braid and medals. This was the sort of high-society life Griet had doubtless envisioned for herself, far from staying home and cooking frugal meals! Proud and happy with their social triumph at the reception, the couple drew closer again. Within days, Griet was pregnant with their first child.

  On September 17, Rudolf was given another six months’ extension of his leave, this time because of Griet’s pregnancy. Taking a woman to the Indies was risky enough without expecting her to travel in an advanced state of pregnancy. Their financial situation was precarious. Griet suspected that Rudolf saw other women; they quarreled frequently. Yet he was very pleased when she delivered a baby boy on January 30, 1897, and proudly named him Norman John—Norman in honor of the retired general, John in honor of Rudolf’s paternal grandfather. After the child’s birth, Rudolf was absent more often than ever, leaving Griet home alone with the baby. According to her father’s biased account, Griet grew certain that Rudolf was spending all their money on “ladies” from the “ice skating club.”

  Rudolf, Margaretha, and their infant son, Norman, set sail for the Dutch East Indies on the S.S. Prinses Amalia in 1897. Margaretha is in the first row at the left; Rudolf is the second man from the left standing behind his wife. Norman is not seen. (The Mata Hari Foundation/Fries Museum)

  On May 1, 1897, Rudolf, Griet, and baby Norman left on the steamboat S.S. Prinses Amalia for the Dutch East Indies. They were accompanied by a detachment of raw troops direct from Harderwijk for which Rudolf was responsible. The young MacLeod family was about to experience life in the colonies in the military service. Although the procedures, duties, and conditions were certainly familiar to Rudolf, Griet had little or no idea what to expect.

  As was customary, a group photograph was taken of those leaving on the Prinses Amalia that day. In the foreground are seated four young women, including Griet, and an older matron in black bombazine. Two small children sit at the women’s feet, while one clings to a woman seated next to Griet—presumably the child’s mother. Norman does not appear in the picture. Behind the seated women stand the men—two officers in uniform including Rudolf, a man who is probably the captain, two well-dressed civilians who might be planters or civil servants, and another officer. Interspersed among the men are three other young women, one of whom is clearly Eurasian, and a Eurasian child. Elsewhere on the ship, but not of a social status to be included in this photograph, were the new recruits from Harderwijk.

  Griet looks the youngest and freshest-faced of the women; she has an expectant half smile on her face. She had wed impulsively and her marriage was not entirely happy, but she was a young matron of high social standing going to a new life in a new land. Promise was in the air. Contrary to her optimistic expectation, what transpired in the Indies was a tragedy that grew directly out of the practices of the Dutch colonials. It was a tragedy that would strongly influence the rest of her life and the formation of her famous persona, Mata Hari.

  4

  Indies Life

  FIVE WEEKS LATER, on June 7, 1897, the S.S. Prinses Amalia carried the MacLeod family into the harbor at Tanjung Priok near Batavia. The harbor was full of extraordinary sailing ships painted in vivid hues with terra-cotta-colored sails. The ships’ crews were made up of natives from a dozen islands, small men in bright sarongs that showed off their muscular builds. All had bronzed skin and dark hair. They moved on bare, calloused feet with an athletic ease that spoke of years on ships. The men called to one another in exotic languages as they tossed lines, hauled goods, furled sails, or vied for the attention of the women on the docks who were selling food and drink. Rudolf had seen all this before—the ships, the busy harbor, the strange and wonderful cargos being unloaded by the natives of the Indies—but Griet drank in the new sights and smells and sounds as if she had been starved for color her whole life. A new existence was opening up for her.

  Griet had been
ill during the voyage to the Indies. She may have been seasick, as many were on such voyages. The description in Zelle’s book—purported to be Griet’s own words—is ambiguous as to the exact cause of her misery: “Physically and morally I suffered enormous complaints; the terror of fever haunted me day and night; my weary brains hammered in my poor head until it burst and the appalling heat, which even in the middle of the night gave no cooling, held me steady as if in a bath of sheer flames.”

  By saying she suffered from moral complaints, Griet (or Zelle) may have been hinting that she had caught a disease that originated in immorality: in other words, a venereal disease. Without the evidence of Griet’s later letters, which indicate unmistakably that Rudolf had given Griet syphilis, the clue in this passage would be flimsy indeed.

  The impact of arriving in the Indies and discovering a world of light, heat, lush vegetation, and social freedom was enormous on Griet, as it was on most of the Dutch colonials. The brilliant colors, the abundant flowers, the spicy food, the succulent fruits, the volcanos that loomed above the rice paddies, the intricate patterns of native Indonesian music, clothing, art, design—all these were worlds away from staid, dull, carefully controlled Holland. The Indies were exuberant, wild, exotic, and very beautiful. Going there was transformational; the old life of the Netherlands, the old identity, the old rules of behavior, fell away. To symbolize the change in herself, she sometimes called herself Gretha—another common nickname derived from Margaretha—rather than Griet.

  In those days, all the colonials who went to the Dutch East Indies to live were altered irrevocably by the experience. For example, one of the characters in Madelon Székely-Lulofs’s novel Rubber says:

  You get acclimatized here. Acclimatized and standardized…. Here everybody loses his particular personal characteristics, forgets what he has learned, forgets what his mother taught him in the nursery. All of that is let go here…and a new type of man emerges…. Here you became transformed into an isolated human being without connection with your family and your youth.

  Similarly, journalist W. L. Ritter wrote in 1856: “A European, no matter where he may have been born, becomes an entirely different creature in the Indies than he would have been had he stayed home…. The European man who goes to the Indies removes his old self, as it were, in order to assume a new self.”

  Gretha probably hoped for a transformation of her quarrelsome, overcrowded marriage into a freer, happier arrangement. She was beautiful and young—only twenty years old—but in the Indies, she was the wife of a very important man, a captain soon to be a major. Here Gretha’s bankrupt father and her precocious affair with the headmaster at the Leiden school were unknown to anyone. Here she and Rudolf could and did live like royalty, with servants and a grand house: no more penny-pinching, no more sharing an apartment with a sister-in-law. Here Tante Frida and her censorious remarks were thousands of miles away, and so was their former friend Mr. Calisch, with his ugly demands for repayment of loans.

  After a week in Batavia, Rudolf was posted to the Eighth Battalion at Willem I, a military fort in Ambarawa near Semarang in Central Java. The MacLeod family boarded the S.S. Speelman to travel from Batavia to Semarang and then went on horseback and oxcart to Ambarawa, where Rudolf would train raw recruits. Ambarawa was a small place and not a particularly good posting for Rudolf. There Gretha began to learn about housekeeping and society in the Indies.

  If there was something a totok, or newcomer, to the Indies learned quickly, it was the importance of reinforcing European superiority and prestige at every turn. Though morals were looser in the Indies than in the Netherlands, the hierarchical separation between Indonesians and Europeans was maintained with the utmost seriousness. Even a modest household employed half a dozen Indonesian servants—a cook, a houseboy, a nursemaid, or babu, a ladies’ maid, a gardener, a laundress and seamstress, for example—who would generally be treated as if they were invisible until summoned with a shout or a clap of the hands. Yet these servants and their families lived at the back of the compound that housed the European family they served; their cooking smells, the cries of their children, the crooning songs of mothers, the low men’s voices talking into the night, formed an integral backdrop to colonial Indies life. The servants were there and yet not there, socially unrecognized and yet essential to daily life for the Dutch.

  As a totok, Gretha was in danger of acting inappropriately in her new social milieu. Most newly arrived women were thought too familiar with their servants, not commanding enough in their orders, and not demanding enough in the standards of cleanliness, hygiene, and subservience they expected. Some were criticized for being “indecorous in their speech and dress,” as the tropical climate of the Indies prompted them to abandon their corsets (and sometimes their morals) to wear looser, more revealing clothing made of lightweight fabrics. As Jean Gelman Taylor noted in her study of Dutch colonial life:

  It was precisely when the immigrants were able to keep in close touch with the homeland, by furlough, telegraph, libraries, and so forth, that they ostentatiously adopted Indonesian practices [in food, bathing, clothing, napping]…. Starting from the late nineteenth century, the Dutch civil servant wore colonial whites, left the office at two in the afternoon, and donned batik pyjamas after a siesta and an Indonesian meal.

  Gretha’s regal bearing probably served her in good stead as she began to assume the role of captain’s wife and slowly integrated Indies ways into her life. The most important hire, which she made immediately, was of a babu to look after Norman. Not to have one was unthinkable.

  For any child raised in the Indies, the babu was a central figure, a beloved and loving person devoted solely to that child for his entire life (a liifbabu, or nanny-for-life). Rob Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch writer raised in the Indies, wrote of his babu with tremendous love and affection when he was in his seventies:

  Nènèk Tidjah was my liifbabu at least until I was five, and therefore my first mother. I have been told that the first words I spoke were Javanese. Later I talked with her in a strange lingo of Javanese and Malay, interspersed with Dutch words. She always called me Lih, pronounced with a long drawn-out vowel, which was an abbreviation of lilih, which means darling in Javanese. When my parents were out visiting or went to the opera…Nènèk Tidjah had to take care of us. That was always a party. She installed herself in front of our beds with her sirih apparatus (oh that sharp scent of bruised sirih leaves, chewing tobacco, gambir and pinang I can still smell them in my mind) and she began her breathtaking stories about gods and goddesses, about petrification and metamorphoses. Sometimes she performed long sections from the Ramayana using two different voices, and when it began to rain during the west monsoon, accompanied by thunder and lightning, I knew that “up there” the powers of good and evil were engaged in noisy combat with one another. Then I was allowed to sit in her lap. I must have inhaled the smell of her body and her clothes, especially her sarong, quite intensely, a sort of preeroticism. She caressed me by pressing me close to her and by stroking me…. And thanks to Nènèk Tidjah’s stories, Indies nature is angker to me, that is to say holy, alive, peopled by living creatures which you learn to manipulate by murmuring holy formulas or by giving selamantan [religious offerings of food]. I was raised as a child in a magic world—and that means a lot.

  Sirih leaves, chewing tobacco, gambir, and pinang were considered the essential ingredients to be added to betel nuts when they were chewed; these accoutrements were usually carried in a small, special box with compartments for each item. Betel-nut chewing turned the saliva red and was regarded by Europeans as disgusting, but Indonesians embraced the habit as a mild vice as enjoyable as smoking.

  Though Gretha was not raised in the Indies, she too was raised in a sort of magic world, and her innate belief that somehow her life could be transformed into the fairy tale she longed for never left her.

  Despite the babu’s intense and constant intimacy with the child, she was distinctly subordinate to any member of the fa
mily, even the youngest. Her name was usually forgotten or never learned by her white master and mistress; she was known simply as “babu Norman.” But the Dutch who tried so hard to keep themselves aloof and superior from the natives undermined their own efforts by turning their children over to babus to be raised. They rarely saw that the generations born in the Indies and raised by babus would be so deeply imbued with the customs, sounds, beliefs, tastes, and smells of the Indies that the Netherlands would be forever foreign to them. The children of the Indies were neither native nor Eurasian nor Dutch but something wholly new born of the colonial situation.

  Race played a major role in Indies life and influenced Gretha’s experiences strongly. In his previous years there Rudolf had learned the intricate social calibrations based on race that characterized Indies society, but to Gretha the crucial influence of race came as a shock. The Indies were a minefield of racial categories, the distinctions among which were fraught with emotional and social importance.

  By 1897, when Gretha, Rudolf, and Norman arrived in the Indies, the legal and social category of “European” was a strange and motley collection of people of various ethnic ancestries. In Java particularly there were a great many families—even very prominent ones—comprising a complex mixture of Dutch and Indonesian or sometimes Chinese ancestry. Since 1854 no one had attempted to determine who was a pure-blooded European and who was of mixed blood, but at that time, more than half (9,360) of the 18,000 Europeans had “the characteristic skin color” that was seen as indicative of mixed blood, while another 5,600 Europeans born in the Indies did not have a darker skin color but were nonetheless also of mixed blood. By 1900, the estimated number of mestizos, or mixed bloods, was in the tens of thousands and amounted to about three-quarters of the legally European population.