The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [31]
By the time we reached him he was up on all fours, feeling in the grass for his glasses. Without the spectacles his face had a naked look. Blood oozed from a scrape on his cheek, and a dribble of pink saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. He was breathing hard. “No matter,” he said, “I have another pair of glasses in my bag.” Collins reached the scene at this moment, out of breath from his scramble up the steep path. “Miernik, you clumsy ass,” he cried, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Miernik, still down on his hands and knees, shook his head from side to side, looking more than ever like a wounded animal. It was almost impossible to feel sympathy for him. If ever a man was born to be injured it is Miernik; it occurred to me that this unconscious masochism is his essential quality. It makes it impossible to like him-or to abandon him. Even when he is all buttoned up in one of his black suits, walking through a quiet park surrounded by harmless children and little dogs on leashes, you have the feeling that something terrible is going to happen to him. When it happens, you find yourself nodding your head—you knew it all along. “You’d better feel his bones,” Kalash said. “He may have broken something.”
Miernik turned his face toward Collins; we hadn’t been able to find his glasses, and no doubt he saw nothing but a blur dressed in a red sweater. It is just as well that he could not see the expressions on any of our faces. Collins’s was a mask of disgust. “I’m sorry to say that I have not killed myself, Nigel,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you are, Collins said. “I’ll get some snow for your face; you’ve got dirt in those cuts.”
Miernik was able to walk. He stumbled down the mountain path between Collins and me, leaning heavily on our arms. He was sweating heavily and trembling. Collins held him upright in cold silence, and when we got to the village, he turned away and started back to the hotel. Miernik got little more sympathy from the local doctor, who seems to have been driven into a state of perpetual annoyance by the stupid accidents of skiers. “If you cannot deal with the mountain, you should not be on the mountain,” he said, poking fingers into Miernik’s stomach and manipulating his limbs. The doctor was still in pajamas. He found a dislocated shoulder and some cracked ribs and bandaged them. “Also,” the doctor said, as he pocketed his fee, “you should not have walked in those ski boots. It ruins them.”
At the hotel we found Nigel and Kalash sitting in the sun on the terrace with the remains of their breakfast in front of them. Miernik sat down heavily, his arm in a sling and the left side of his face painted bright red with Merthiolate. He groaned. “I’m not going to be very comfortable in the car,” he said, “but that can’t be helped.” Kalash asked about Miernik’s injuries; Collins picked up a newspaper and began to read it. Miernik, refusing to eat, stumbled away. When he was out of earshot, Collins put down his paper. “Really, Paul,” he said. “How on earth could he do such a thing?”
I shrugged. “We all know he can’t ski,” I said. “Why did we let him try it?”
“You realize the whole trip is going to be one thing like this after another, don’t you?” Collins said. “We’ll spend all our time helping him across the street and bandaging his wounds.”
Miernik returned, wearing his spare glasses. He had managed somehow to get into a shirt and tie, and he wore a pressed suit coat, the empty sleeve draped over his bad shoulder. Collins said, “I’ll pack for you, Miernik, and have your bags brought down. We ought to leave in half an hour.”
Miernik nodded. I ordered some tea for him and he began to drink it clumsily, sitting far back from