The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [59]
She and all the rest except M. are sailing today. There was some delay with the ship, an awful old tub that smells of machine oil and greasy shish kebab. M. and I fly down this afternoon from Rome. He is positively quaking—afraid of airplanes, I suspect. Afraid of the unknown, too. He is a timid chap. On the way from Naples in the car he held on for dear life, saying, “Here you are a little less frightening, darling—you fit right in with the Italians, who drive as madly as you do!”
He has been awfully sweet to me. In Rome we could not use our day and two nights to relax—we had to see the sights. Most methodical he is. I know a great deal more about the Forum, the Pantheon, the dates on which the city walls were built, the relationship between Berini and the Barberii pope than I ever expected to know. Marvelous food! Awful wine! M. runs around talking Latin to everyone. It’s most amusing, but they seem to understand him. At the Vatican, of course, he was a great hit with the chaps in petticoats.
The plan is this: we will all meet on the thirtieth in Cairo and then continue on by car. I’ve no idea how long the trip will take but it should be thrilling, so I don’t care really about the time element. I do hope you’ll ask your friends there to look me up. It’s so much more fun to see a strange city with one who knows it. And giving my news to someone you love will be almost as good as giving it to you.
Ever with love,
Annelise
54. FROM OUR DEBRIEFING OF ZOFIA MIERNIK (TRANSCRIBED SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THIS FILE).
You must understand that I was uncomfortable from the beginning. First of all, I had hardly ever seen any foreigners except for German soldiers when I was a child and the occasional Russian later on. Here I was, out of Poland for the first time in my life, and surrounded by a lot of my brother’s friends who spoke languages I had only used in school. I did not always understand exactly what they were saying—the talk went back and forth so quickly, they were all so clever and sardonic. My friends in Warsaw were artists, serious people who suffered all the time and talked only of themselves and their painting and sculpture—which, incidentally, no one would ever be able to see because it was decadent. I am not a melancholy person and I used to long for gaiety.
Now I had more gaiety than I knew what to do with. I found all of them charming. Paul I liked at once. He seemed so kind and so free of envy and sadness—exactly as I had always imagined an American to be. Of course he did a generous thing for me at the very beginning, so I was grateful to him. Nigel was another matter. As things went on I realized that he was nothing like as cold and sarcastic as he seemed at first. As for Prince Kalash, I ask you to imagine the impression he made upon me, this enormously tall, absolutely black man with the manners of a king. He frightened and fascinated me.
I did not like Ilona at all, at the start or afterward. I liked her less when I saw the state Tadeusz was in when we got to Cairo. All his life my brother had been a morose person. He was easy to hurt. Ilona had hurt him badly. He thought she had made him happy, but she is not the sort to make anyone happy for very long. When first I saw her I realized the sort of girl she was. I am no puritan. I have nothing against sex. But there should be, if not actually love, then some feeling between people. Ilona was in-capable of feeling. Her aim in life was only sensation. Nigel was already her lover. Nigel was my brother’s friend. She used them against each other to increase her own pleasure. She would have used Paul as well but he was too strong for her.
Back to Cairo. Ilona and Tadeusz met us when we drove up to the hotel. They had been together for five days. My brother, following along behind her, had been transformed into a lapdog. He cringed with love for her. The change in him was nauseating. From a man with a brilliant mind and the very best instincts he had changed into a character out of a pornographic novel. His eyes never left her. Her eyes