Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

We scrambled down a bank and walked along the beach. White sand, white surf, pale girl in the white moonlight. Zofia has a way of walking with her head down and her hands behind her, just like Miernik. She said, “Tadeusz thinks he startled you today, with the guns.”

“Well, he shoots a lot better than one would expect. Where did he learn that, in the army?” (Trap! Miernik was never in the army!)

“No,” said Zofia, “he was never in the army. He had asthma. But he was trained to shoot when he was a youth. Everyone had to learn a sport, the authorities wanted to do well in the Olympics. Tadeusz couldn’t run because of his asthma. He was a very good wrestler and boxer, but he always lost to boys who were less good because he ran out of breath. They said, all right, you don’t need to breathe to be a marksman. They discovered he was a kind of genius with firearms. My father said it was because Tedeusz is wholly lacking in aggression-when he shot, there was no emotion. The target was just a target, not an enemy. So he was very cool. It was an intellectual problem-trigonometry with noise. But Tadeusz hated it, and as soon as he got out of school he stopped competing. The authorities were very upset. Tadeusz managed to lose several competitions and they finally let him go. They realized he was losing on purpose. I suppose the Americans won the gold medals in shooting as a result. I’m sure Tadeusz’s lack of patriotic fervor is noted down in his dossier.”

For everything Miernik does there is a simple explanation.

Zofia and I walked on until we came to a rock formation that blocked the way. We walked back barefooted through the fringe of the tide; the water of the Red Sea was warmer than the air. We encountered no bandits. When we reached the camp everyone had gone to bed. I put the Walther in one of my boots and fell asleep with the sharp smell of the pistol in my nostrils. I dreamed in great detail of a Miernik. Not Tadeusz.

Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn? [8] What fragrance can be smelled through a mask? I carry the curse of a witness. I do not live, I observe life. I thought that Ilona would carry me into the center of experience. With this girl I would see only the dark of my eyelids, I would smell, touch, hear- feel. But who stood beside the bed in Rome, looking down on the hairy body and the silken body joined together? Who heard the groans and the whispers? Who observed the fluids dripping down to stain the sheets? Miernik. The real Miernik, the true. As the hairy one ejaculated into the tight purse of Ilona’s belly, he was more a part of the cold witness than of Ilona. Life has no power over me. I have been trained by experts not to live. Death itself does not interest me: it is the final act of life: only that. Life is not enough.

Still in all, I am not yet perfect. I know remorse. I am as wracked by guilt as a drunkard. I go to sleep with a groan, awake with a cry. “Filthy bastard!” I mutter, conversing with myself. These interior dialogues I have with the true Miernik are my last form of prayer: “God damn you!” Since childhood I have wished to summon a force more powerful than the real Miernik. “Loathe him!” I instruct the saints, with a finger pointed at my heart. If Kalash is among the sons of Mohammed, I was begotten by Augustine. “O Lord, make me pure-but not yet.”

Here in the desert I have lost all desire for Ilona. Even if she put her mouth on me I would not change. She does not know this: that flagrant kiss for Nigel in Cairo was designed to show her power. I realized, watching his hands on her body, that even she means nothing to me. The knowledge filled me with guilt: I had cuckolded my friend, brought this girl to a hundred orgasms, walked with her through the streets of Rome with my secretions swimming in her womb. And for nothing. The jealousy that I felt in Naples (and before, and even while Ilona whimpered under me) would never come again. Yet it gave me a moment of life before I subsided into my coma.

So, on with the sleepwalking. Kalash cuts a magnificent figure in his robes. In the desert he becomes a fragment of nature absolutely at peace, walking on the bones of his ancestors. He says it will take ten days to reach El Fasher. It is almost fifteen hundred miles over awful roads, through desert. The Cadillac will be worn out by the time we get there. Or perhaps before. Kalash is quite prepared to walk if necessary. I am not; I have promises to keep. In Port Sudan we bought a Land Rover from some cousin of Kalash. We had a mechanic check it over, and it seems to be all right. We have a chain to pull the Cadillac if necessary. The Land Rover cost five thousand dollars; I do not like to think what the price might have been if we had bought it from someone to whom Kalash was not related. Kalash, of course, carries no money: what king does? Christopher and Collins between them contributed three thousand. That meant that I had to make up the balance from Zofia’s rucksack. It was a painful moment. Nigel:“Come, come, Miernik, we all know you’ve got a lot of money on you. Give.” How could he know? He could not. It’s part of his tactic to penetrate me: he is like a clumsy window washer, hanging above the street, smearing the pane with a dirty rag. When at last he can see inside he will mistake the scene for something it is not. In many ways Nigel is a stupid man: he mistakes harassment for domination, and cheap curiosity for imagination. But it was better to pay than to be marooned in the desert.

That prospect pleases me less all the time, because of Zofia. Where she is concerned I am alive. She is a dull pain for me; worry has coiled around my stomach for her ever since I was left with responsibility for her. She looks like Mother-slimmer, and her gaiety has not yet turned into kindness-but otherwise she is very like her. Mother found me comical too, but with the same forgiveness.

Kalash’s machine guns awakened my anxiety. He really does believe in the possibility of bandits. That aspect of this country was not covered by my research: I know the language, the history, the religion. Knowing the names of everything does not equal knowledge. Knowledge is what I gained in that grove of trees in Poland, dressing Mother’s corpse. Hearing the Sten guns go off, smelling the cordite, I listened for a woman’s shriek.

This time, Zofia. I did not want to leave her alone out of sight beyond that hill. Prey: my sister might be prey to some band of animals. (I never have sex that I do not smell the woods where Mother died: ferns rotting in the damp earth: Ilona said the first time that I smelled of ferns: I was startled into another passion when I thought myself empty.) As I got ready to shoot, Nigel once again tried to annoy me, and he succeeded. I knew what the look on his face would be after he saw me shoot. Miernik? A marksman? He was suitably astonished.

It is not just the desert that is a threat. Where is Sasha? When there was no letter in Cairo I was in a panic. Did this mean that he had lost at last? He never fails to keep a promise. He told Zofia that a letter would await us in Cairo. There was no letter. Zofia found an explanation: the Egyptian mails. For me, that is not an explanation. It is a threat that Zofia may be alone, absolutely alone. Besides me, there is only Sasha. By now he should be back in Brazil, reading my message. Shaking his little head, sighing over my asininity. So I tell myself. Weeks of silence ahead. Zofia carefree for the first time in her life. I say nothing about Sasha, nothing about his letter, nothing about my message.

Beside me, under the sky, Zofia plays her guitar. Polish music-how rich it seems to me, how thin it must sound in the ear of an Arab. Ilona, sitting between Nigel and Kalash, lifts their hands to her lips and kisses them, first the black hand, then the white.