Signed, Mata Hari
By Yannick Murphy
Little, Brown, 278 pp., $23.99
Ninety years after 11 shots from a dozen rifles snuffed out her life, Margaretha Zelle seems less an actual woman than a personification of treachery. That's because by the time she was executed by firing squad in Paris, the world best knew Zelle as convicted World War I spy Mata Hari, a sobriquet now synonymous with any insidious, deceitful woman.
Much like an evil twin consumes its weaker half, Mata Hari has overwhelmed Zelle, who has been cloaked by the myths and intrigue of her alter ego. She has been the subject of numerous books and movies, including most famously, "Mata Hari," an overheated 1931 melodrama starring Greta Garbo. (For the record, unlike the luminous Garbo, Zelle was no beauty, though it seems few men of her time noticed.)
Indeed, Mata Hari was a fascinating woman - an exotic dancer and provocateur, lover of powerful men across Europe, and arguably a German spy. But so, too, was Zelle, and her often-overshadowed life provides the emotional core of Yannick Murphy's wondrous novel, "Signed, Mata Hari."
Zelle's death was merely the tragic end of a tragic life, and here Murphy, through exquisite and lush fiction, creates as fully-drawn a portrait of her as any biographer could have done. The story glides between Zelle's recollections of her difficult, flamboyant life, and her final days in a Paris cell awaiting the executioner's call. (Exacerbating the anxiety is the fact that the law forbade condemned prisoners from knowing the exact date of their death.)
Born in the Netherlands, Zelle learned heartbreak early. As a teenager, her father, a hat merchant, went broke and abandoned his family. A short time later, Zelle found her mother dead from what a doctor said was a lung infection. Seeking an escape, Zelle was 18 when she married a Dutch naval officer who advertised for a wife in a newspaper.
Yet marriage was no sanctuary. A Dutch naval officer, Rudolph MacLeod drank too much, cheated incessantly, and abused Zelle verbally and physically. Oddly, MacLeod was a doting father to their children, son Norman and daughter Non, though at times his attentiveness comes across as yet another way to chide Zelle for her perceived inadequacies.
When MacLeod takes an assignment and moves his family to Indonesia, Zelle comes into her own. She has affairs, and through her love of the local music, dance, and fashions, she begins to re-create herself as a Javanese temptress named Mata Hari. Moving back to Paris, she becomes the toast of Europe, but the price she has to pay - long before she was accused of espionage - is dreadfully steep. For all her lovers, for all the flowers and gifts she received from admirers, Zelle's life was destined to end in tears even if it had not ended before a firing squad.
Murphy doesn't dwell on the question of Zelle's guilt or innocence, and that's just fine. Instead, she concentrates on the life of a woman, an unabashed bohemian, who was vilified by the same kinds of weak men who once desired her.
"When the call 'Joue!' is shouted by the officer and he lowers his saber and the soldiers raise their rifles to their cheeks, smile, you are about to walk through the cloud that you thought for a long time was a crushing wall of water," Murphy writes of Zelle's final moments, which are sad, defiant, and tangibly triumphant.
After her death, no one came to claim Zelle's body. With "Signed, Mata Hari," Murphy, in a small but significant way, manages to rectify that sorrowful act.
Renée Graham is a freelance writer.
