Signed, Mata Hari Read online

  Sticking out from the wall was a single gas flame for light. It flickered as if there were a constant wind on it, threatening to blow it out. She asked for pen and paper. Sister Leonide brought them to her.

  Are you going to write your Russian fiancé? she asked.

  I will write two letters, she answered. One to the Dutch consulate asking again if they can release me from this prison. The other is a letter for my daughter.

  What will you say in the letter to your daughter? asked Sister Leonide.

  I don’t know. I could tell her that I’m having a wonderful time here.

  Sister Leonide shook her head.

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  T H R O U G H A WAT E R D R O P L E T

  AS IF my uncle knew it was the flour I least of all wanted to cook with, he began to ask for homemade biscuits every day. With a metal cup I scooped up the flour from a jar and poured it into a bowl. I added butter to the flour and with two knives I cut the butter so that it would mix with the flour. I thought I had done all right. I thought I had done a good job not getting the flour on me, but as it turned out I was wrong. I first saw it on my eye-lashes. In the tiled bathroom I had scrubbed on my hands and knees earlier in the day, in the mirror I had washed and wiped dry and streak-free with yesterday’s newspaper, I saw the first signs of my becoming a ghost.

  Niece, dear, would you empty out the trash while you’re in there, Uncle said on the other side of the bathroom door.

  The newspaper I had dried the mirrors with was in the trash.

  It was crumpled and wet, but still I could read the classified ad.

  Captain of the Army of the Indies, on leave in Holland, seeks a suitable wife . . . I shook the page dry, letting drops of water slide across the type, magnifying the word wife.

  Niece, is there something burning in the oven?

  I balled up the classifieds and stuffed them inside the cup of my brassiere, and then as an afterthought, to avoid looking lop-1 8

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  sided, I crumpled up the headlines too and stuffed them into the other cup of my brassiere. Then I opened the door and ran past my uncle to the kitchen. The biscuits were black on top. I cut the tops off and served them anyway.

  Uncle didn’t notice. What’s different about you today, niece?

  You’re looking lovely, he said while staring at the new size of my breasts.

  I ANSWERED Rudolph MacLeod’s ad that evening. In the envelope I also included a picture of myself that I thought made me look a little older, a little more of the marrying age.

  I liked the way the crumpled newspaper in my brassiere made my breasts seem larger, but I did not like how the newsprint blackened my skin and how the newspaper’s crumpled edges dug into my flesh and made me want to scratch. I pulled silk stockings from my drawer and they were soft against my skin and I stuffed my brassiere with those instead when I first met Rudolph MacLeod.

  There was something about a man in uniform that I liked.

  Maybe it was that it made him look rigid and I liked thinking how I would be the one to undo his brass buttons and throw back his lapels and make the jacket he wore hang half off his shoulders and lose its shape and crease where the tailor who sewed it never meant it to as I straddled him in a chair or as he lay in bed.

  Then, in the morning, he would stand up naked, slightly stooped from fatigue, a hangover playing behind his eyes, and he would fit himself back into his uniform, and all the buttons would be buttoned in the right place and the lapels would be straightened, and once again he would be an officer standing tall before me.

  MacLeod was balding, and where there was hair at his

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  temples it was graying. But he was in good shape, and did not sport the belly that Heer Wybrandus sported, and when I sat on his lap I could feel much more than just the beating of his pulse.

  I’m getting married, I told Uncle.

  What a relief that there is someone who wants you, Uncle answered.

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  T H R O U G H A T I N Y P O RT H O L E

  I HADN’T PLANNED on it so early, a child to raise. I could think only of the children at Heer Wybrandus’s who were my pupils and who never listened to me when I taught a lesson. But MacLeod had come back from a night on the town and he already smelled like another woman mixed with his own smell when he decided to enter me. I counted the days from the start of my last period, splaying my hand on the sheet as I ticked them off with my fingers, while he forced himself into me. It was the wrong time to have coitus. Heer Wybrandus had taught me that.

  I knew from nights before that if I had tried to push my husband off he would just push himself deeper into me, making it hurt, or he would hit me and in the morning my cheek or my eye would be swollen and I’d have to walk to market with a scarf covering my face, even on a hot, sunny day.

  The nights he stayed out with other women grew in number and in proportion, I thought, with the size of my expanding belly. My belly button started to protrude and it stuck out like a third eye and I wondered if it was the place my unborn child first saw the world from. Did the unborn child peek from its small porthole into the room where MacLeod was busy picking up 2 1

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  an empty decanter and throwing it against the wall so it rained down crystal?

  Damn it, he said. Can’t you remember to keep it filled! he yelled.

  The baby kicked. It jabbed up under my rib.

  I’ll try to remember, I said. But then I added, If you try to remember not to empty it so often.

  What’s that you said? he yelled, and he came for me and I went to Ameland in my thoughts again while I heard the joints in my neck crack like knuckles cracking as he dealt me the first blow.

  At first the darkness over the sandbanks reminded me of the time after the volcano of Krakatoa in Indonesia had erupted, sending smoke and ash into the atmosphere. The skies were dark from the ash that drifted across the world. My father closed shop early in the evenings that followed. We ate dinner early and went to bed early. Days went by and then the darkness lifted, but my father still closed the shop early. He would come home and he would carry me outside on his shoulders. We would walk to the hill behind our house and stand and watch the sunset. The sunsets after the eruptions were all beautiful. They were purple and gold and red and streaked. In places they looked like bright wads of cotton that had been pulled at from the sides and stretched across the sky. But it had been years since the eruption that day I walked across the sea. The darkness did not come from ash and smoke in a distant land. It just came from the clouds gathering for the usual summer storm over a waterless sea.

  My father came to my wedding and that is the last time I saw him before he died, but really all I saw of him was the back of him walking away. I was told he was at the wedding and then 2 2

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  after I took my vows I ran down the street to see if I could catch him. I saw his back walking up the hill. MacLeod chased me and grabbed me and told me to come back inside, saying that my father was walking away because I wasn’t marrying into money.

  But there was a gorgeous sunset that day. He must have wanted to see it. He must have wanted to go to the top of a hill the way we used to when I was a girl. That’s why he left early, I told MacLeod. He just wanted to look at the sky.

  I RODE a horse when I was pregnant. I wore MacLeod’s pants and since I could not button them over my belly I sewed them with one loose wide stitch at the waist so they would not fall.

  The pants did fall in a fast trot on a long stretch of trail clover-lined and carpeted with cherry leaves. When I returned to the stable, MacLeod was there. The neighbor had told him she had seen me leaving the house with my riding boots on.

  MacLeod accused me of coming to the stable because, he
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  said, I wanted to make love to the stable boy. The stable boy hid in a stall, peeking from behind a wooden wall chewed up by a nervous horse so that the wood was now splintered and raw. I laughed at MacLeod, and the horse that I had just ridden jerked back its head, and its black mane bounced on its neck, shiny with sweat.

  MacLeod walked me home and he held my arm hard as we

  walked through the streets and he tipped his hat to passersby and with my hand in the shape of a fist I held onto the waist of my pants so they would not fall down to my ankles.

  MacLeod felt the need to watch over me as if I were a child.

  Before he left the house he would make sure I was not cooking something in the oven that I would accidentally forget about 2 3

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  and somehow set the place on fire. At a party for officers he wanted to take me home early one night. The other officers were dancing with me, one right after the other, and he wanted to protect me from them, as if I were the daughter he did not yet have. Their hands slid down the length of my back, their pinky fingers turned in the direction of my buttocks, poised to reach down like a divining rod that could not help itself in the presence of water. He watched me grow, not in height, but in aware-ness. At first I did not know the men were looking at me, and then I knew they were looking at me, and then I knew I wanted them to look at me.

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  S N A K E S O N T H E P I L LOW

  IN THE MORNINGS she had coffee. Sister Leonide would bring it to her and tell her the weather. The degree. The high and the low.

  She would drink it while still under the wool blanket and propped up on her side. Sister Leonide would ask her if she wanted to join her in morning prayer and she would shake her head.

  You say it without me, she would say. Before she finished all of her coffee, she would make sure to leave some in the cup so that she could see her reflection in it when she combed her hair. She could not tell very well from the reflection how badly her hair was turning gray, but she could tell from the pillow she slept on at night. She would notice hairs that were half dyed black and half gray that had fallen out of her head in her sleep as she turned her head back and forth on the pillow. They lay in S-shaped curves on the pillowcase like snakes and she told Sister Leonide that, being like snakes that could rise up and bite, they were good luck and she told about how when she lived in Indonesia the old people would have been interested in her S-shaped gray-and-black hairs and they would have told her all the snake stories they knew and showed her their snake tattoos, faded now and hard to see within the lines of their loose, hanging skin.

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  A G O O D FAT H E R

  THE MOMENT my son was born, MacLeod scooped him from the midwife’s arms and carried him down to the corner to the Café Americain. I imagined he showed the other officers his boy, and they passed MacLeod a whisky, and as he drank while smiling, yellow drops of it fell from his mouth, quickly soaking into my boy’s white blanket.

  I lay in bed, waiting for him to bring me back my son. MacLeod was gone such a long time I thought maybe he had left with my son for good and now all I would have would be the pain from the stitches between my legs and two rock-hard breasts that had already begun to leak milk, like water from a stone.

  MacLeod was not the father I thought he would be. He came back and was there beside his new son all night. He leaned over and peered at my boy when my boy slept and he was worried by the small animal noises my boy made in his sleep. He shook me awake when my boy woke and made sure he was drinking enough and that all of my nipple was correctly inside his mouth.

  While I nursed my boy, MacLeod laid his hand on the mattress of the crib so that the space there would be kept warm for when he was put back to sleep. MacLeod told me that I was fastening the pins on my boy’s diaper too tightly, and he showed me how I 2 6

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  should do it so as not to hurt my boy’s soft skin. Then he named my boy Norman, after his father, and I felt that it was just the start of my boy, my Norm, being taken away from me.

  When MacLeod said his long leave was over and that we would now have to go to Indonesia, the sound of the name floated out of his mouth and at the same time he said it I thought I smelled the sweet smell of spice mixed with a nut smell, a damp smell, a blooming flower smell, and I hurried to my Norman and picked him up and whispered Indonesia into his ear and he looked up at me and laughed and clapped, as if the word itself was the start of a nursery rhyme song he had heard countless times before and knew that I would sing to him again.

  THE DAY we left on the SS Prinses Amalia, MacLeod put his finger in his mouth and held it up to the sky, telling Norman that was the way to tell which direction the wind was coming from. The wind was from the east. That night in our cabin, with Norman asleep, MacLeod wanted me to stay awake and listen to him.

  There were scorpions and bugs and snakes and monkeys I

  should know about. There were things in Java that hung from the trees that could strangle Norman and there were roots on the ground in angry, tangled masses that could trip him. There was rain that could drown Norman if he stood out in it too long.

  There were eruptions from volcanoes whose ash could choke him. Why are you smiling? MacLeod asked me. He could see my face in the light of the moon that came in through our window.

  I can’t wait to be there, I said. I feel as if my whole life I’ve just been waiting to live there and now the time has finally come.

  The damn humidity there makes my bones ache and the crack in my ass chafe, he said. I laughed when he said it and then he 2 7

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  told me to hush, that Norman was sleeping, so I covered my mouth because I could not stop from laughing. Then MacLeod said he couldn’t sleep and he sat up in the narrow bed we shared and he lit his pipe and I watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling of our cabin and blanket us like some sort of mist-covered sky. It was under the swirl of his pipe smoke that I decided to make love to him. Java was going to be a new beginning for us. I wanted it to start out right.

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  A H A I R

  SHE WAS ALLOWED into the yard only by herself. The other women prisoners were let out before her. She was kept separate, Bouchardon said, because the other women might have ripped out her hair and clawed her eyes if they saw her. Spies were worse than whores or thieves or baby killers, she was told. There wasn’t anything in the yard. It was just more stone around her. She looked for signs of the other women prisoners who had walked in the yard earlier in the day. If it was raining, she could sometimes see a footprint on the stone floor, though it would fade quickly, new raindrops covering it. But she wanted to walk in the footprint herself, to feel what it felt like to walk the same steps another woman had walked.

  Occasionally, there was a strand of hair on the walls stuck to the rough surface of a stone. It would waver in the wind and she watched it and then pulled it from the wall and held her hand high and let the wind take it over the stone wall and carry it somewhere else. After a quarter of an hour, she had to go back inside to her cell. When she entered it she would sit on her cot and close her eyes. The wall, the sky, a bird, whatever she had seen out in the yard was etched in silver under her eyelids and she watched it for as long as she could until the image blurred and blackness took its place.

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  T H E O G R E

  AT THE COAST, the beaches were windswept and smooth. The sand was white and fine and nothing like the dark sandbanks I had walked across to Ameland. We walked inland for the first time toward our new home and saw sparkling white waterfalls flowing down from shallow swamps and broad estuaries. Under our feet white and pink blooms covered the sandy trail and gnarled trees edged along the boiling ocean where huge waves rolled and crashed, rolled and crashed. Never take Norman he
re, MacLeod said, and we kept going.

  From across the savanna, tinted gold and orange from a new sunrise, black banteng bulls snorted powerfully and left a trail of hoof marks along the rims of muddy pools where they had wallowed. Away from the bulls, fawn-colored females grazed peace-fully and their young calves stood beneath them, shyly peeking out from behind their mothers’ legs at the mist clinging low to the ground and slowly burning off in the increasing heat of the day.

  Crisscrossing in front of the banteng bulls were small groups of rusa deer and wild pigs and in the trees pied and wreathed hornbills skittered back and forth and then suddenly they took flight with a great beating of their wings, which made us jump.

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  The wild pigs could kill a small boy easily, MacLeod said while I watched eagles and hawks soar above us, their eyes keen on squirrels or mice afoot on the ground where dry twigs and fallen leaves lay, lit by shafts of sunlight. MacLeod covered his ears. He did not like the constant sound of the insects buzzing and chir-ring and thrumming that like the sound of the crashing waves at the shoreline did not ever stop.

  We traveled a thin trail woven with vines, swollen as thick as MacLeod’s arms, and the vines’ blossoms had yellow and red hues that were radiant among all the green. A purple flower with a purple stem was picked by the Javanese men carrying our water. MacLeod said the locals used the flower as an aphrodi-siac and also to make wax for candles. Don’t touch it, it might be poisonous, he said. In fact, don’t pick anything that grows, and eat only fruit that you’ll see served at the restaurant in the commissary.

  Threaded up in high branches, orchids grew, and the sodden earth was dark and rich, pressed gently into leaf-covered hills.

  It was tight and humid among the foliage, and MacLeod cursed and said stop to the Javanese men carrying our water and took a long drink from the skins they carried while I looked up and listened to the riot of noise coming from what MacLeod said were silver leaf monkeys and gibbons and long-tailed macaques.