The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [19]
Miernik began talking as soon as I opened the door. “I suppose you know the news,” he said. “Nigel informed me this afternoon. He called me into his office and shuffled his papers, which had my fate written across them. ‘My dear Miernik,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s Poland for you. Really, I had to laugh—he seems to think my anxiety is a joke. Your friend Collins has another side you’ve never seen. When he is on duty he is as cold as a fascist. He treated me as a British district officer would treat a native. I asked him—very quietly, very calmly, Paul—if he had any idea what this meant to me. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Really, Miernik,’ he said, ‘you must try not to be so theatrical. The worst that can happen is that you’ll spend a short time in custody, and then you’ll be let out. Things will be back to normal for you in no time at all.’ A short time in custody! Things will be back to normal! His idea of hell is his public school.”
“Did he really call you ‘my dear Miernik’?”
“Of course he did. What else would he call me? When I lost my papers, and therefore my identity as a functionary of WRO, I crossed over into another existence. Nigel’s friend Tadeusz vanishes. Miernik the statistic takes his place. Before my very eyes I became a dossier. I no longer have blood. I become a paper man. I am what Nigel Collins and the other bureaucrats write on my new paper skin: Take away his passport. Put him in jail. Kill him.”
Miernik said all these things before he had advanced far enough into the room to reach a chair. I put a drink into his hand and sat down. There was no point in saying anything to him. He emptied his glass, which contained about four ounces of neat whiskey, in a single gulp—and let a tremendous fart.
His face reddened and he clubbed himself on the forehead with his fist. “Aaaah!” he cried, throwing his glass against the wall. “Even before a firing squad I would be a joke.”
Miernik opened a window and began fanning the air with a magazine to drive the smell he had made out of the room. I gave him another drink. “That’s not necessary,” I said. He went on fanning.
“I shouldn’t have got you up for this,” he said. “I’ll go away in a minute.”
“Stay as long as you like.”
His mouth opened in a grin, showing stainless steel teeth at the back of his jaw. “Are you offering to hide me in your attic like a Jew?”
I laughed. “If necessary.”
Miernik, still standing with his arms hanging loose, gave me a solemn look; his jokes never last very long. “You really would do that, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“I don’t think it’s come to that yet, has it?”
“No. I am not in Poland yet.”
“Maybe you never will be.”
“My dear Paul, what do you imagine I am going to do—ascend to heaven on a sunbeam?”
“There are more than a hundred countries in the world. Surely one of them will have you.”
“The U.S.A., for instance?”
“Anything is possible. Walk into the embassy and ask for asylum.”
“Wonderful. I will find some Nigel with an American accent who will make two telephone calls and advise me to go back to Poland, where, after a short delay of perhaps twenty years, I can once again lead a normal life.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on Nigel. It wasn’t easy for him to tell you what he had to tell you. Maybe he was just embarrassed.”
Miernik, scowling, shook his head. Even at the hour of his doom, his compulsive neatness took hold of him. He got down on all fours and began picking up the fragments of the glass he had thrown against the wall. He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard the glass fall into the wastebasket. When he returned he had regained his composure, though he was still breathing audibly, drawing his breath