Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

Kalash told us that he had arranged a party for us. Since Geneva he has talked about Somali girls, who are much valued here for their beauty and sexual ingenuity. From somewhere (probably the same corner of the palace where my sister and Ilona are sleeping) he had collected eight Somali girls-two for each of us. He had laid on a supper. Suitable clothing would be supplied to us by our servant boys. “Miernik,” he said, “I shouldn’t want your fastidiousness to interfere with your pleasure. I give you my word you have no disease to fear from these girls.” He set a time for the commencement of the party and left us.

I had brought my diary with me and I remained in the garden after the others left with the lion snoring gently beside me. As I was writing a few moments later, Kalash reappeared. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I have to go out into the mountains on an errand. There are some rather interesting ruins along the way, and it occurred to me you might like to see them. I can only take one of you as I will be accompanied by a couple of my father’s men. You are the obvious companion. Paul and Nigel haven’t your interest in archaeology.” It developed that he was talking about the stone relicts of the Darfur dynasties, so of course I agreed to go. He assured me that he expected to spend a peaceful day. “I shouldn’t think you’ll need your Sten gun this time,” he said. On some of these ruins are paintings of Christian saints on horseback. It is an interesting cultural puzzle that no one will ever solve. I suspect that Kalash is as much descended from these wild kings as from the Prophet.

Just after dark my boy appeared and helped me into the regalia Kalash had provided-robes and a turban, which the child, giggling, wound around my head, walking in circles with the end of the cloth in his hand while I sat on a stool; Going before me with a lamp, he guided me through the passageways of the palace and into a square room hung with mirrors. The mirrors were placed at floor level-sensible enough, since one sits on cushions laid on the carpets. Kalash and the others were already on hand, reclining behind low tables laid with platters of food. I joined them and was given a glass of tea by the boy, who then withdrew. We were quite alone, the first time I had been out of sight of servants since we arrived at the palace. Nigel gazed frankly at his reflection in the mirrors. “I rather like the look of myself in this outfit,” he said. “I think I have the figure for it. As for you, Miernik…” I did look odd, but if one is going to wear fancy dress it’s good to wear it in a place where masculine beauty is meaningless.

Music began to play, filtering through a screened door. I suppose the musicians were in the next room. With the first notes, the Somali girls entered. Not one of them could have been more than fifteen. Their faces were gentle, unmarked by experience, and wreathed in smiles. They approached Kalash on their knees. In Arabic he said to them, “You are late and we are hungry.” They rose with a collective giggle and two of them joined each of us. One immediately unbuckled my sandals and began to rub my feet. The other sat beside me and put bits of food into my mouth with her fingers. After each mouthful she would wipe my lips with a cloth. Variations of this went on with Kalash and Paul and Nigel and their girls. I tried to speak to them in Arabic but discovered that they did not understand the language. It was not a verbal experience that Kalash had arranged for us.

After a time the girls danced. They were not particularly graceful, but they believed that they were, and that was rather charming. One or the other of them from time to time would sing. There was much giggling. The girls neither ate nor drank. Kalash lay back, utterly relaxed, and accepted the food and the caresses. Paul and Nigel seemed able to approximate his nonchalance. As for me, I gradually lost the excruciating self-consciousness I had felt on entering the room in Arab clothing. The girls were so eager to please, and so obviously unable to imagine any life but the one they led, that inhibitions were irrelevant. In Europe what we were doing would have been an orgy which could only have taken place in a pornographic novel; in the Amir’s palace it was as ordinary as prayer.

At length I was no longer hungry. The girls kept trying to feed me until I refused three or four times. (I suppose this is part of the etiquette.) Then they led me to an alcove, where we lay down again. They arranged my limbs, glancing and nodding at me until I indicated that I was in a position of perfect comfort. They then removed their clothes and lay down beside me. Their bodies were remarkably beautiful: perfect breasts, long tapered rib cages, round buttocks carried high at the back, and the straight-calved long legs of their race. The only flaw, to my Central European eye, were the navels, which were protuberant and about the size of a walnut. One girl knelt and stroked my face with her breasts. The other rubbed my legs. I was still fully clothed; she reached under the skirts of my robe. Soon she left off this massage, which was intensely pleasurable (she seemed to know the location of all the nerve centers in the joints of the toes, ankles, and knees).

Biting, kissing, stroking, and tickling, one from the direction of the head and the other from the feet, the two girls met at the center of my body. As four hands and two mouths moved over my skin, I touched theirs. It was soft and smooth like a pelt, as if lacking pores; I have never felt such skin on a white woman. The girls were extremely inventive-though I suppose “inventive” is the wrong word. They had been trained in skills developed over generations by these desert people who look on appetite as a Slav looks on painting, as something which exalts and instructs each time it is experienced. One of the icons that will hang in my mind henceforth is this: a supple black girl gazing intently into my face with a look of great kindness, little lines of effort between her large eyes; she opens my lips and, counting my spasms, spits delicately into my open mouth in perfect rhythm with me.

The girls cleaned themselves like cats and went to sleep. I rose quietly and stepped out of the alcove. In other alcoves, Paul and Nigel slept with their black girls twined around them. I saw nothing of Kalash, who doubtless copulated in some other more regal place. Outside the door, asleep on the bare stones, was my servant boy. He awoke, fetched his lamp, and led me back to my room. Even as I write this the odor of the Somali girls (pepper and musk) still clings to my nostrils and my skin tingles. I understand why sheiks and amirs fear revolution: who would want to live without Somali girls once he has had them?

Miernik must. I think of what lies ahead. I know what I must do, which means taking myself out of the world for a time. What a queer successor to the desert saints is Miernik! What I have just done with the Somali girls is what those wild believers fought with prayer, hair shirt, and a diet of excrement. How they must have disgusted God. He was preparing temptations that make sex pale. In my desert, it is not pleasure and indulgence that provide the occasions of sin, but the opposite. In this desert, I plan meticulously to do what my nature tells me not to do: suffer, deny, betray. That is my assignment on earth; I sought it myself, and now-ten thousand kilometers from Warsaw-it is within my grasp. As earlier explorers passed through this continent looking for the source of the Nile, I trudge toward my rendezvous, seeking the very spot, the X on the map of political idealism, where the long river of futility empties into an ocean of sand.

O poetic! I wonder if God anticipated that Christianity (and all its branches that are the various forms of civilized politics) would prove to be the means by which men concealed their own nature from themselves. If so, He has a queer idea of mercy.