Mata Hari’s case for innocence

While the 19th century made a “great game” of the imperial powers’ secret struggles with one another, it remained for the 20th to transform espionage into a separate sphere of human existence, a parallel world governed by an aesthetic of betrayal.

It may say something of other, more intimate subversions of the inherited order that although the great treacheries of the last 100 years almost invariably were worked by men, the archetypal spy who springs most readily to mind is a woman -- Mata Hari, the Dutch-born exotic dancer, whom the French executed at Vincennes in 1917 because they believed she was a German double agent.

The Mata Hari -- or Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, as she legally was known -- who speaks from the pages of Yannick Murphy’s layered, unself-consciously sensual and achingly beautiful third novel, “Signed, Mata Hari,” is her own best advocate. Over and above the incriminating circumstances cataloged by her accusers, she is utterly convinced of her innocence not only by the exculpatory force of her own explanations but also by the fact that she had, since girlhood, “cheated death.”

Thus, in Murphy’s artful hands, the story of Margaretha’s life emerges as a series of anecdotal tales, reveries and reflections, delivered Scheherazade-like, as Margaretha -- dolefully imprisoned and awaiting execution -- attempts to seduce the authorities into clemency. Her audience is her prosecutor/interrogator, Bouchardon, and the nuns charged with caring for her in solitary confinement. (The liberties Murphy has taken in her reimagining of Margaretha’s inner life are all the more credible for her close study of the details surrounding the historical Mata Hari’s case. Her Bouchardon, like the actual attorney, bites his nails to the quick, for example.)

Troubled childhood

From her earliest years, the girl who became Mata Hari seems to have lived a life dominated by loss and two deeply empowering realizations -- that the normal rules of risk and reward might not apply to her (that she could, indeed, cheat death) and that the sexuality she seems to have enjoyed from an early age could be a source of power and a tool of survival. Her father was a prosperous hatter who appears to have doted upon and indulged his only daughter. Her mother was a kind and long-suffering mother who essentially worked herself to death after business reverses led her husband to abandon the family. With his wife dead, he parceled his children off to relatives and went about pursuing his own fortune.

After a failed stint as a teacher, Margaretha responded to a newspaper ad and married a much older Dutch army officer, who turned out to be a brutal alcoholic. Still, she was ecstatic when her husband was posted back to Java and -- over his strenuous, often physical objections -- she embraced the exotic physical beauty of her new home, along with the language, culture and dress of its Hindu inhabitants.

While in Java, Margaretha bore two children, took various lovers and suffered one of the two most devastating tragedies of her life. In a pivotal chapter entitled “A Stew,” she convinces her soon-to-be-former husband to take their disintegrating family back to Europe, though not to Holland:

“If you want to be a good wife to a bad husband, you sleep with your lover, Dr. VanVoort, one last time and make love on the sand in the dying light while overhead bats as large as foxes fly by. In the morning you wake your servant, Kulon, who has fallen asleep exactly where you left him in the gray roots like arms of the kapok tree and you go on back up the trail to your lavender mountain carrying your eyelet linen behind you and two silver salt and pepper shakers, dome-shaped on top, and a fleur-de-lis-framed watercolor painting of a sandy brown castle somewhere on a hill in the Western world. You get back to your husband and you ask him if he’s ever been to Paris and you ask him if he’d like to go. You tell him your daughter would have the best teachers there. You tell him they could drink fine wine instead of the island wine they drink here, which he would sometimes throw across the room in disgust so that it would splash in an arc on the woven mats on the floor. You tell him he’s too young to spend the rest of his days in a fog-ridden mountain surrounded by shrieking monyets and hairy-chested white-handed gibbons. You wear him down.”

Becoming a spy

Back in Europe, Margaretha loses both husband and -- heartbreakingly -- daughter. In desperation, she invents the Indian temple dancer persona, Mata Hari, under which she will win celebrity and, as she ages, a further career as an internationally renowned courtesan. Fatally, she never loses her weakness for men in uniform, and her liaisons with senior officers who will be soon at war with one another will prove her undoing -- that and her last great love, a penniless Russian officer 20 years her junior, for whom she takes up spying to support. Her efforts in that regard are desultory, never much more than collecting gossipy pillow talk.

“It helps to be fluent in a number of languages if you want to become a spy,” Mata Hari reflects. “I spoke Dutch, German, Spanish, French and even Malay. If you have a studious mind, this helps you become a spy. If you do not have a studious mind, this too helps, because who would suspect you, being ignorant of how to break a code, of knowing how to concoct invisible ink from a number of vials? Anything helps if you want to become a spy, because everyone wants to believe you are a spy.”

These passages suggest something of this lovely novel’s concision -- short, exquisite, though never precious, chapters refined almost to a sequence of prose poems.

One chapter -- “Tilt and Adjust” -- appears about two-third’s through the narrative and reads in its entirety: “If you are a mourner, you are on the threshold between one phase of life and the next. You must keep your balance as you cross troubled waters. While you hold your head high, experience teaches you that to restore your equilibrium and get through tumultuous days, you need to tilt and adjust, tilt and adjust, that is how you get to firm ground. These are the teachings of Siva.”

Murphy’s “Signed, Mata Hari” is a profound and profoundly beautiful novel, one that forcefully renews literary fiction’s claim to be a laboratory of the human spirit.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com