The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [14]
6. Please advise whether we should attempt to determine Miernik’s possible assignment through closer surveillance, including audio surveillance of his apartment and telephone.
17. TRANSCRIPTION OF A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MIERNIK AND ILONA BENTLEY (LISTENING DEVICE LOG; 26 MAY).
(Door opens and closes. Indistinct voices of two subjects. Sound of ice tray being emptied. etc.)
MIERNIK: I behaved very badly to Inge. I’m sure Léon is angry.
BENTLEY: Why should he be? Everyone has strong feelings. Léon understands that, if anyone does.
MIERNIK: But the French are so preoccupied with themselves.
BENTLEY: I suppose that the Poles are not. Or the English, or the Eskimos. You shouldn’t whip yourself, Tadeusz.
MIERNIK: Humanity should make a treaty with itself never to talk about the Germans.
BENTLEY: I’ll sign it.
MIERNIK: You must have more feeling about them than you let on. I can’t believe . . .
BENTLEY: As I said, I was young.
MIERNIK: But old enough to remember.
BENTLEY: When I am reminded, yes.
MIERNIK: I’m sorry. We’ll talk about other things. The Polish Question.
BENTLEY: That hasn’t been answered?
MIERNIK: Not for the Poles. You know the story about the Frenchman, the Englishman, the American, and the Pole who were asked to write about elephants? The Frenchman wrote about the sexual life of the elephant, the Englishman about the way the elephant treated small dogs, the American about the mass production of elephants. The Pole wrote a twenty-thousand-word monograph entitled “The Elephant and the Polish Question.”
BENTLEY: (Laughs.)
MIERNIK: You are extremely beautiful.
BENTLEY: When I laugh?
MIERNIK: At all times. Was your mother dark like you?
BENTLEY: Yes. My father was fair, like Nigel. English fairness.
MIERNIK: As soon as I say you are beautiful, you mention Nigel.
BENTLEY: That is the Hungarian part of me. Subtle.
MIERNIK: I like Nigel very much. I wonder if you do not find him frivolous.
BENTLEY: Why should I? He’s sort of solemn.
MIERNIK: That side of him I have never seen, except when he is doing his job. Then he has the Foreign Office manner. He glows with secrets, there is a dynamo of class privilege smoking under his good manners. But at all other times he does nothing but joke.
BENTLEY: They learn all that at school in England. It means nothing.
MIERNIK: You find it attractive?
BENTLEY: I find it irrelevant.
MIERNIK: In Nigel’s case only, or in the English as a whole?
BENTLEY: I’m English.
MIERNIK: Half.
BENTLEY: Half, then. But I don’t notice English manners particularly. I notice yours.
MIERNIK: Mine? Why?
BENTLEY: Because they are different from my own.
MIERNIK: And from Nigel’s?
BENTLEY: Yes. He would never mention any unhappiness he may have had. You mention little else. It’s a difference in cultures more than personality.
MIERNIK: Perhaps he has never been unhappy in the way that I have been unhappy.
BENTLEY: Nonsense. Everyone is unhappy.
MIERNIK: Even you?
BENTLEY: Even I.
MIERNIK: Even the beautiful are unhappy. That is very disillusioning.
BENTLEY: You’re an idiot.
MIERNIK: No, it’s important that the ugly, the miserable believe that the beautiful are serene.
BENTLEY: :What an idea. The Edwardians thought that nothing gave the poor greater pleasure than the sight of a rich man. That’s an odd viewpoint for a modern Communist.
MIERNIK: You think I’m a Communist?
BENTLEY: Well, aren’t you?
MIERNIK: No.
BENTLEY: Why on earth not?
MIERNIK: Why on earth should I be?
BENTLEY: The Polish Question. Surely that’s a Communist question from now on?
MIERNIK: No.
BENTLEY: But they control your country. They will go on controlling it for the rest of your life, unless Nigel is right and the bombs go off.
MIERNIK: The bombs?
BENTLEY: The H-bomb. The Americans will fry us all.
MIERNIK: Nigel thinks that?
BENTLEY: Don’t you?
MIERNIK: No. The Americans