Mata Hari's Last Dance (12 page)

“What happened to Norman?” Edouard asks gently.

I wave him off. I never allow myself to visit that dark corner of my memory.

When the clock strikes four o'clock, I begin pouring wine. “You don't think something's happened?” I ask. “Should we call the station? The train may be delayed.”

He calls the station. No trains are delayed. I stare out the window
as darkness begins falling. I had wanted so badly for her first sight of the villa to be in daylight. “Something has gone wrong.”

“Perhaps . . .” He tries to think of a positive scenario.

“What?” My voice sounds foreign in my ears.

“I don't know.”

At eight, when Anna arrives alone, Edouard holds me close to him as I cry. “I'm sorry, ma'am,” Anna whispers. “I'm so very sorry—”

“What happened?” Edouard demands.

“Her father was there. He arrived moments after I had taken her by the hand. He began shouting for the police.”

“No!” I scream. “He's going to kill her!”

“You don't know that.”

“I do! I do know that! You wanted to know what happened to Norman? It was all Rudolph's fault!”

Edouard guides me to a chair. Anna sits on the edge of the couch and I tell them the whole ugly story. I tell them that when Non was a baby and Norman was three, Rudolph was made commander of a garrison in Melan. We had two weeks to pack all our belongings and move from our home. I hoped things would be different now that Rudolph had a high-status position; he would be required to entertain society, so I wouldn't be so isolated. In Melan, I became Lady MacLeod. Ours was the biggest house with the widest lawn and a marble fountain. Our garden parties saw more than two hundred people and soon I was so busy hosting that Rudolph hired a nurse to care for the children, a Javanese woman named Fairuza.

I hired Mahadevi and I watched her dance at my parties. I wanted to be her, to feel that free—like a child again in my father's hat shop, where anything was possible. Rudolph would never allow me to dance in public. But she agreed to teach me in private, to show me how to make magic with my hips and hands. She watched me practice with longing. The way Rudolph never watched me.

“Close your eyes,” she instructed and I did as she told me.

We danced together wearing indigo silks, our bare feet flat on her polished floor. We danced until we were both dizzy, until my body felt as supple as the silk. She told me that you are what you believe yourself to be. She was able to look at a man and say, “He wants me for a week. No more, no less.”

“If I'd had that skill,” I tell them, “my heart would never have been broken. When she invited me to dance in public, I said yes.”

Edouard leans forward. “So you performed—”

“Yes. I danced with Mahadevi at one of the parties I hosted. I dressed in a scarlet sarong I bought at the pasar. I was exotic. An orchid among buttercups. Three hundred people dressed in chiffon and gold sat in our garden: my husband's colleagues, his subordinates, their wives.”

I danced with Mahadevi; primitive and wild. When we were finished, Mahadevi kissed me on the lips, and our bodies melted together in the warm island moonlight to the sound of applause.

“Your husband must have been shocked,” Anna says.

“He was enraged.” He seethed as I mingled with our guests. And when we were alone, he warned me, “You will never disgrace me like that again!” I said the worst thing I could think of in Malay. “Is that right?” he asked, reaching into a drawer. What was he going to do? I heard the click of his gun just as I heard the creak of a door from upstairs.

“Norman was on the landing,” I tell them.

Edouard looks horrified.

“ ‘Go to bed!' I said. ‘Go to bed, Norman!' I heard little feet scamper down the hall and the click of a door. Rudolph whipped me across the face and afterward, all I could recall was his heavy weight on top of me and the smell of alcohol on his breath. I went to Mahadevi the next day, a veil over my face to hide my blackened
eye and bruised cheek. ‘Give me something that will keep him away from me,' I begged. She gave me cajeput oil. ‘Smear this between your legs and he will never bother you again.' The next time he tried to take me his prick was covered with small red blotches. I told him, ‘My body has turned against you.' ”

Tears begin leaking from the corners of my eyes, remembering what happened next. Edouard reaches out and takes my hand. I try to catch my breath.

“It was the middle of the night,” I tell them. “I went to Norman's crib. He was sleeping. I caressed his cheek. He was three years old. I looked at Non, all curled up and warm. I slipped one finger into her palm. Her little hand closed around it. I shut my eyes and sang softly, a nursery rhyme my mother sang to me when I was a child. Then I heard the screams. They were Fairuza's.”

Edouard and Anna glance at each other.

“She was in the kitchen with Rudolph. He . . . my husband was violating her. The household came awake. I could hear doors opening along the corridors. I grabbed Rudolph's arm and pulled him off of her. I steeled myself, waiting for him to hit me. But he was too drunk. He collapsed on the floor. The servants stepped around him and waited to see what Fairuza would do. There was blood on her legs, bruises on her arms. She was hysterical.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing. We put her to bed in her room. We left him on the floor. The next morning Rudolph awoke and he found himself lying half-naked exactly where he fell. It was ten in the morning and already hot. He was late for work. I expected a terrible fight. But there was nothing. I crept downstairs after he was gone and wondered where Fairuza was; had she gotten up early and gone home to her family, or to the police?

“I had no idea who was in my own house.

“ ‘Is she still here?' I asked Laksari.

“Laksari brought me into the parlor. Her voice was low. ‘She is devastated, ma'am.' She spoke in Malay. ‘She will not go to the police. It is bad luck for a woman to say she has been . . . she will leave the house tonight. After she has packed and said goodbye to the children.'

“ ‘I should see her,' I said. ‘I should pay her.'

“ ‘She says she doesn't want to see anyone.'

“I should have heeded the danger in Laksari's words, but I was blinded by guilt. I spent the day worried about what would happen to Fairuza and what I would tell Norman about her absence. When Rudolph came home, Fairuza was still in the house. I found him reading. ‘You raped a woman last night,' I said.

“ ‘She's a servant.' He straightened the paper and raised it in front of his face. ‘Let her disappear and find another house.'

“ ‘She was a good nurse for the children! She's a human being.'

“ ‘She's a goddamned native. Shut up for your own good.'

“I went into the kitchen. It was dark outside. The children were in bed. Laksari was bent over a bowl of rice and chicken. She stood when she saw me.

“ ‘Please, sit down. Finish eating.' I pulled up a chair next to her. I was thinking my husband deserved to die. We sat for several minutes in the kitchen, and then my children started screaming.
My children.
The entire house awakened for the second night in a row.

“Laksari and I exchanged glances, and there was something in her eyes, something that still haunts me. We rushed up the stairs. Inside the nursery my children lay in their beds, writhing, their faces contorted, their bodies racked with convulsions. They were poisoned. No one thought to look for Fairuza. But by then she was gone.

“I held my children in my lap, praying for a miracle—if only he would let Non and Norman live. ‘Please,' I whispered again and
again. ‘Please, God. Please.' My voice sounded feral, like a wild animal's. I rocked back and forth. Black vomit covered my nightgown. Non was still screaming but Norman's eyes were rolled back into his head. ‘Norman. You'll be fine. Norman. Please.' I felt panic as Norman convulsed in my arms. ‘Don't die! Norman, please don't die!' And then his three-year-old body stopped shaking. It went still. I held him in front of me and his face was pale. Non survived. But Norman was gone. Our first, our little boy. I hadn't spent enough time with him. Rudolph killed Norman. He raped our nanny so she killed our baby.”

Edouard covers his mouth. Anna's eyes are red. It's a terrible story.

“I spent three months in bed. Then I got dressed and went outside to watch Non play. I sat on the swing and went back and forth, watching my daughter without seeing her at all. The house was haunted. Norman was everywhere. So now you know the kind of man my daughter is with. And he is angry.”

Edouard has gone very still. I have to look close to see that he's even breathing. “We are going to get her away from that man,” he says. “I have to leave now. I must make some calls.”

“How? How are we going to get her now that Rudolph knows I want her?”

“I don't know.” He rises. “I don't know.”

Part 2

Fecundity

LINING UP OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKES AND ARCHDUCHESSES FOR THE FIGHT OVER THE SUCCESSION HAS BEGUN-BELIEF THAT THE TROUBLE, WHICH WILL COME WITH THE DEATH OF THE KAISER FRANZ JOSEF, IS CLOSE AT HAND-ONLY MUTUAL RESPECT FOR THE AGING MONARCH KEEPS THE BITTER COMBATANTS APART.

By Bernard Aston.

Special Correspondent.

Vienna, Oct. 1.

Secret strife rends the numerous Hapsburg clans. Only respect for the venerable Kaiser Franz Josef keeps it from open warfare. For twelve years past, but particularly since 1908, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand practically took command of the Empire, the one hundred and twenty-four archdukes and archduchesses have been divided sharply into two camps which hardly ever speak and seldom even meet one another. Of the seventy odd out of the one hundred and twenty-four who are old enough to have opinions, about twenty stand in with Archduke Franz Ferdinand: while about fifty are banded together to resist to the death the heir, his pretensions, and his morganatic wife. Members of the opposing groups no longer entertain one another, or even pay formal visits; they are at present engaged in severing their common property interest, and so universal is the feud that even the army is divided in mind as to what will be its duty when the great crash comes.

“The great crash” is involved in the decision for or against Franz Ferdinand, which is inevitable when Kai
ser Franz Josef dies. It is a European issue. For with the Austrian Slavs gravitating to Russia, and the Austrian Germans gravitating to Germany, a civil war in Austria almost certainly means a general war in Europe. And at most within a few years, but possibly within a few months, Europe will be faced with this risk.

Chapter 13

What's Done Is Done

1913

M
y opening of
Tristan and Isolde
in Berlin is stupendous. Every seat at the Deutsches Theater is filled. I should be happy, delirious even. I am thirty-seven years old today and my name is still flashing in lights. But it is a difficult anniversary for me. I am Aunt Marie's age when I took her husband; I am my mother's age when she died. My own daughter is no longer a little girl.

Edouard invites me to celebrate my birthday in an exquisite restaurant on the Kaiserdamm. I want to decline. After all, what am I celebrating? But Edouard is persistent.

“You glow,” he says when I slip into the padded leather chair across from him.

I have been drinking since the final curtain. “That's what Evert used to say,” I tell him, raising my glass and then finishing it. “He used to write poetry for me,” I say, recalling Evert's voice, his eyes. I order another bottle and pour myself more wine. “He used to call me beautiful. Not Dutch beautiful,
exotically
beautiful,” I clarify.

“Who is Evert?”

How many years have I known Edouard, and I've still never told him this story? “Someone I thought I knew,” I say. “I met him after
I left the Walrus's school. I was living with my father's sister, Aunt Marie.”

Edouard finishes his glass. “You told me about her years ago. Are you saying she wasn't too poor to take you in when you were a child?”

“Marie wasn't wealthy, but she wasn't impoverished either—my mother's sisters were misinformed. When I was expelled, Aunt Marie welcomed me into her home.”

“After you left the Haanstra School?”

“Yes. I had no one else to turn to, no place to live. So I took a chance and went to The Hague. I had very little money. I deposited myself on her doorstep. If she had turned me away—”

“Did she contact your father?”

“No. We didn't speak of my father. She was an unusual woman. When I arrived at her door, the first thing she did was apologize to me. She realized who I was immediately and said she was so very sorry for missing my mother's funeral. She was lame in one leg, travel was difficult for her. She invited me to live in her home without any hesitation—I didn't tell her I had been expelled from the school and she never asked. The first evening I spent with her she took me to her church to light a candle for my mother.”

“She was devout?”

“Very.” I stare into my wineglass. “That's how I took advantage of her. After living with so many other girls my age I was bored at Aunt Marie's. There was nothing to read in her house except the Bible. And I had almost nothing to do except a few household chores. I had too much time to think. I became restless. The best part of my day was running errands. We were in a port city. When I went to town, I was unsupervised. I would linger on the boardwalk and watch navy boys who had just arrived. They looked so handsome in their uniforms.”

Edouard says, “Some things never change.”

He's right. “I desperately wanted to meet one of them. I wanted to dance with a boy in uniform at the Grand Hotel. It was a mythical place to me: all the shopkeepers' daughters gossiped about dances at the Grand. I would overhear them and feel such longing. I knew Aunt Marie would never let me attend an event as scandalous as a dance, so I asked her if she would take me to a particular church I had heard of in Scheveningen, knowing she couldn't and that she'd tell me to visit it on my own.”

I can see my aunt now, her gray hair pulled back into a small, tight bun, her modest black dresses, her thin lips. “I'd like to visit the old church in Scheveningen,” I told her. “I've heard there are ancient relics there. Do you think you could take me?”

“Oh, M'greet, I've visited many times!” she said, surprised and delighted at my interest in holy things. “It's such a struggle for me to take the tram. Why don't you go? The journey's so picturesque. It's an exquisite church.”

“So I took the tram to Scheveningen the next day,” I tell Edouard. “Ten minutes after I boarded I disembarked at Bains and walked along the beach until I arrived at the Grand. It was larger and more glamorous than any building I'd seen in my life, and I was dazzled by it. I stood in front of the hotel, hypnotized by its grandeur. Standing nearby were two sailors. Their uniforms were white against the sand.”

“Evert?” says Edouard.

“Evert and his friend Zeeman.” I remember it as if it were yesterday, not twenty years ago. The way they were laughing, full of their own adventures. I walked straight up to them without a moment's hesitation and introduced myself. I asked them where they were stationed.

“Java.” Evert shaded his eyes so he could see me better. “Been there two years.”

I learned of the Dutch East India Company's trading posts in school, and I knew that the government assumed control of Java after it ceased to exist. But I had never given much thought to the islands of the East Indies until Evert and Zeeman told me their ­stories—about Java's pristine beaches and temples as old as the ruins in Egypt. I was impressed to hear of their nights camped out under the stars and their days spent cutting their way through jungles. Zeeman read my emotions on my face. He said, “Don't let Evert's stories fool you. He may sleep on the ground with the rest of us in Java, but he comes from a very respectable family.”

“I was born in Caminghastate,” I said. “My father was a baron.”

Zeeman narrowed his eyes as if he didn't believe me, but he was short and unattractive and I didn't care. Whereas Evert's gaze made me giddy. He was tall and blond and possessed what the Dutch call
Beïnvloeden
. Power, influence. “You glow,” he told me, and I drank in his compliments, becoming intoxicated.

“I went to his hotel room,” I tell Edouard. “I thought I'd never have to fear for my future again. The next evening, I lied to my aunt and said I was having dinner with the daughter of a shopkeeper, that I had found a friend. I took the tram and met Evert at the Grand. The hotel had a dance floor like a wide-open sea. We danced and I imagined I was Mrs. Margaretha Pallandt.” I feel my cheeks warming, remembering how foolish I was. “Every Friday I lied to my aunt and went to meet Evert at the Grand.”

Edouard orders us another bottle of wine.

“I will be with you forever,” Evert promised me. He was so gracious and so eloquent: our evenings together were precisely as I imagined true love would be. Music from the dance floor drifting out onto the terrace. Stars like diamonds overhead. “In Java we'll have a house by the water,” he whispered. “Then we'll start a family.”

I tell Edouard about Evert Pallandt's plans. “He wanted a little
girl and two little boys. He wanted to reproduce his own family, and he had grown up with two sisters.”

“So what happened to this young prince?”

I finish my glass and pour myself another. How many glasses have I had? “Have I already told you that he was on leave? He was, and I waited for him to ask me to join him when he returned to duty.”

“To Java?”

I nod. “To Java. I had created our life together in my mind. I had never been outside of The Netherlands but Java was as real to me then as you are right now. Eight days before his ship was to sail, Evert appeared at my aunt's house. It was a Monday. Aunt Marie was taken aback by my handsome visitor.”

I remember how I rushed down the hall. “Evert!” I shook his hand as though we were old friends. “Aunt Marie,” I said, “this is Evert Pallandt, the brother of one of the girls I used to teach with. What a wonderful surprise!” Of course, she believed my lie. She had faith in me.

“Everyone believed whatever I told them,” I tell Edouard.

He doesn't look surprised. Neither did Evert. He introduced himself to my aunt and then said, “I have news for M'greet from my sister, who's fallen ill. May I take her for a walk to deliver the message? I will not keep her for long.”

My aunt cast a nervous glance at her husband, as if he might object. He didn't. “I'm so sorry. Well, I don't see why not.”

“I didn't realize your aunt was married,” Edouard interrupts. “You didn't mention that.”

“Yes. She was married. To a man named Taconis. They were a strange couple.”

He was not at all religious. I couldn't imagine what had brought them together until my aunt confided in me that she wasn't born a cripple; she was once young and carefree.

“When they were married they were a good match, I suppose; her leg was crushed near the docks where Taconis worked. She was bringing him his lunch, when a cable snapped. That ill-fated day made her pious; it caused him to retreat into guilt.”

“A sad story. Though now I have a more accurate vision of your circumstances. You were living with your aunt
and
her husband. What happened when Evert took you outside? Did your uncle reconsider giving you permission to walk alone with a young man?”

I recall the scene. How I'd teased Evert. “Are you nervous?” I'd asked. I was so confident in him.

“Nervous? No.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I want to say,” we paused under the shade of a maple, “that I love you, M'greet.” He pulled his hand out of his pocket and placed something round and solid in my palm.

My heart beat so fast I could hear it in my ears. I closed my eyes, painting the moment behind my eyelids so I could see it always, even when I was asleep. Then I opened them and looked at what I was holding.

It was a locket containing a photo of the two of us.

“I don't understand,” I whispered.

“It's a token,” he said, “for when we're apart.” He paused. “I told my parents about you.” He wouldn't meet my eyes. “If I take you with me to Java, they'll disown me.”

It's been twenty years and the memory still brings me to tears. I swirl the wine in my glass so I don't have to look at Edouard, who says quietly, “The boy was a fool.”

I meet his eyes. “When he gave me that locket, I remembered something my mother told me one afternoon while we were sitting in the garden together. ‘There are the girls you marry and there are the girls you enjoy but never take home.' I had given myself to Evert because I thought I was the girl he would marry. But I was wrong. I
was the other girl—the one no one wanted to take home.” I dab my eyes with my napkin.

“What did you say to him? You must have been deeply shocked at the turn of events.”

“I said nothing. I threw the locket in his face. Then I ran back to Aunt Marie's house. I expected him to chase after me. When he didn't, I cried for days. After a week passed I was
still
hoping he'd change his mind. That he'd come back for me. That he would propose.” I shake my head at my foolishness, my naivety.

“You were young,” Edouard says. “You were gullible. You were hoping he'd do what your father hadn't.”

“Yes. Come back and rescue me.” I hadn't learned anything. “The date he was due to leave The Hague for Java came and went. I never saw him again. But I loved him.”

“You
think
you loved him,” Edouard counters.

I cover my eyes. “I've never told anyone this story,” I say.

“I'm honored you shared it with me.”

*    *    *

We head down nearly deserted streets to my apartment and stumble drunkenly across the doorway. “I think it's time I kissed you,” Edouard says. And I let him. I let him raise my chin and kiss my lips. Then I let him kiss my arms, my neck, my breasts. And take me into the bedroom and make love to me, as if we've been apart for a hundred years.

*    *    *

In the morning, he finds me in the kitchen, already dressed. He is wearing a half grin. He comes behind me, wraps his arms around my waist. When he turns me around to kiss me, I can't meet his eyes.

“Oh, God, don't tell me you think it was a mistake,” he jokes.

I don't say anything. My eyes grow hot with tears.

“Jesus Christ!” he says, stunned. He stares at me for a long moment. Then he kicks the counter. “I'm not one of your playthings! You want me and that makes you scared. You think I don't know you after all this time, Margaretha MacLeod?” He summons my old name, a judge pronouncing a verdict.

“Don't ever call me that again!” I say, appalled. “My name is Mata Hari. I'm not the person you think I am. You don't know me at all, Edouard Clunet!”

“Is that so? I don't know you at all? Tell me this—were those another girl's memories you shared with me last night?”

I am sickened with myself. “If you want to know me, call on my aunt Marie in The Hague.”

“What are you talking about? Why would I do such a thing?”

“I didn't tell you everything last evening, Edouard. You don't know the true M'greet.”

“Then tell me. Who is the true M'greet?”

We look across the counter at each other. All right. He wants to know what I really am? “After Evert left for Java, I took Taconis to the Grand.”

“Aunt Marie's husband,” he says quietly.

“Yes.” He worked on the docks and was rugged, handsome. I led him onto the dance floor and he put his hand around my waist. I rested my head on his shoulder. “I wanted Evert to mean nothing to me. I wanted to extinguish him with new memories.” A different face, the same room
.
I wrapped my shawl around Taconis's neck. I tugged on the silk and pulled him toward me. He bent forward to kiss my lips and I let him. We took a room at the Grand and I replaced Evert's memories there, too. Then we went back home for Aunt Marie's dinner.

“You were very young, M'greet—”

“I was old enough,” I interrupt Edouard. “I knew
exactly
what I was doing.”

Aunt Marie watched Taconis and me laughing together over stories in the newspaper, or telling each other jokes, and she would smile like a mother who is watching children she no longer understands. And this continued for months.