Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

MIERNIK: Not with everyone with whom you have an experience, I expect.

BENTLEY: The vast majority.

MIERNIK: It’s a new experience for me to be in a majority of any kind. I don’t like it as much as I always thought I would.

BENTLEY: Miernik, you must stop feeling sorry for yourself all the time. With you, if it isn’t politics it’s sex. Why don’t you just live and make the best of things like everyone else?

MIERNIK: A good question. I think I won’t see you again. I thank you for everything.

BENTLEY: Look, Miernik, if you want to…

MIERNIK: Now it is I who say good-bye.

(Conversation terminates at 2006 hours.)

5 June. Ilona phoned me at the office this morning and invited me to lunch. She drove me at an incredible speed out to Genthod to a restaurant beside the lake. We ate filets de perche and drank a great deal of Mont-sur-Rolle, sitting under the plane trees. Ilona ate her fish with her fingers, very rapidly. A ring of grease around her mouth from the fish. Why are the beautiful never disgusting? The more bestial they are and the more cruel, the better we love them. Ilona was-not contrite, but sorry she had been unkind when I phoned her Saturday night. She said I caught her at a bad time. She said she is like Nigel, all joy one moment and all black despair the next. When their moods coincide all is well. They must be marvelous lovers, or so I kept thinking as she chattered. We sat side by side on a bench. Watching her eat, I became sexually aroused. I hadn’t the courage to tell her this: she would have regarded it as a delightful new perversion.

Ilona wishes to be my friend. She says that friendship is the most extreme emotion of which she is capable. She calls her affair with Collins a sexual friendship. Ours, I think, is not to be that any longer. I am in difficulty and everyone must rally around, she told me. What could she do for me? She does not imagine that she can destroy me. She is the only beautiful girl I have ever had; I do not suppose that I will ever have another.

There is no longer any reason not to trust people. This flashed through my mind as Ilona and I talked. For years I have been deprived of half the power of the speech: fear has done this to me, and training and necessity. I have never had the experience of confiding in another human being. Mother died before I had any secrets, Father did not invite confidences, Zofia had to be protected from every kind of truth. But now my stars have freed me. I am between an old world and a new one. I am in a free fall between lives. Until my passport expires and I enter my new orbit, I can say whatever I like to anyone. For three entire weeks I cannot harm myself by being trustful.

Therefore I told Ilona about Christopher’s idea of going to Sudan. She was most interested. (Why is she so inquisitive? asked the old Miernik. Quiet! She is only being kind, replied the new Miernik.) “This is marvelous,” Ilona said, “you will go away, no one can touch you in Kalash’s desert-you must go, Tadeusz.” I said, joking, “Why don’t you come too?” Her face changed into that expression, merry and secretive, that women have after making love. “That would be interesting,” she said, “to spend three weeks under the stars with you and Nigel-and Kalash.” (Him, too? I cannot doubt it.)

She plied me with questions about the arrangements, the route, the dates. I know almost nothing about it; I may even have left Christopher with the impression that I am not going. Ilona is right-I must go. Duty is duty, and the bridge between the old world and the new. For Ilona it is an adventure-down the Nile, through the desert. Bandits, perhaps. She had a thousand questions; I answered them all. Her hand on my thigh as we talked.

Now, two hours later, the habit of a lifetime comes back to warn me that I should have told her nothing. Suspicion is a disease: guilt’s little sister. I cannot be cured of it even by this girl whom I now love. (I realize that I was tempted to refuse Christopher, and therefore refuse my escape and my duty to go to Sudan, because I wanted to stay near Ilona-at least in the same city, if not in the same bed.) I should have told her nothing.

She shook my hand when she let me out of the car. Her skin is always warm and perfectly dry. Her hair was windblown, her lips a little swollen, I suppose from the excitement of fast driving in an open car; she pulls up her skirt like a child when she drives. I don’t know whom she will sleep with tonight. Nor, my dear Tadeusz, does she.

Entbehren sollet du, sollet entbehren! Das ist der ewige Gesang. [3]

Finally, for its value as entertainment, I include the following note on a conversation between Nigel Collins and Ilona Bentley that I overheard on the evening of 6 June in the Restaurant Plat d’Argent. It contains some useful information about the Pole, Tadeusz Miernik, and other personalities in whom you have expressed an interest.

In the Plat d’Argent are a number of booths with very high backs. I was seated in one of these with a young woman at about 8:30 when I heard, issuing from the adjoining booth, the unmistakable voice of Collins. He was speaking in what he imagined to be an undertone to a female who I at once realized must be Bentley. These two make no secret of the fact that they are lovers.

“Of course you can’t come along,” Collins was saying. “How could you think we’d take you? There’ll be no room in the car if both Christopher and Miernik come. Besides, you’d likely end up in a harem.”

Bentley giggled. “I think I’d rather like that,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose you would. Being had by some diseased old Arab who pumps himself full of aphrodisiacs sounds like one of your sexual fantasies. You can do it without my cooperation.”

“I haven’t noticed that you’ve been so awfully cooperative lately, dear Nigel.”

“Perhaps I need an aphrodisiac.”

“I know someone who doesn’t.”

“Really? How pleasant for you.”

“You don’t want to know who?”

“Really, Ilona, you don’t expect me to rise to that old bait again? You can do as you like.”

“All right, we won’t discuss the shambles of my love life. Normal people, my dear Nigel, often sleep with the opposite sex at least once a week. Sometimes more often. Does that astonish you?”

“It astonishes me that you should want to go to the Sudan with me if I leave you so frustrated,” Collins said.

“We will not be alone. I can creep from tent to tent under the desert stars until my horrible appetites are satisfied.”

“Yes, you could do that, couldn’t you?”

“Nigel, I don’t want to do that-really I don’t. I thought it would be rather nice to be with you, away from Geneva, for a time. I’ve always wanted to see the Nile and the desert. Why can’t I come?”

“Because Kalash hasn’t asked you to come-and won’t.”

“Of course he will, if you tell him you want me. After all, Kalash is my friend too.”

“Kalash? Your friend? My dear, the thought that a woman might be a friend is impossible to Kalash. He regards you as conveniences. He’s an Arab and a prince besides. All you or any female can be to him is a warm place into which he can have a discharge.”

“How poetic you make it sound. He is awfully good-looking, you know.”

“Yes, and Kalash knows it too. He won’t have you in his Cadillac. He doesn’t need you down there-half the girls of Central Africa are available to him. He has only to pick them off a baobab tree.”

This sort of squabbling, a good deal better-natured than it seems when written down, went on for some time. It would appear that Collins, Prince Kalash el Khatar, Paul Christopher, and Miernik are planning a trip by automobile to the Sudan. The ostensible purpose is to deliver a Cadillac to Khatar’s father.