The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [71]
So, on with the sleepwalking. Kalash cuts a magnificent figure in his robes. In the desert he becomes a fragment of nature absolutely at peace, walking on the bones of his ancestors. He says it will take ten days to reach El Fasher. It is almost fifteen hundred miles over awful roads, through desert. The Cadillac will be worn out by the time we get there. Or perhaps before. Kalash is quite prepared to walk if necessary. I am not; I have promises to keep. In Port Sudan we bought a Land Rover from some cousin of Kalash. We had a mechanic check it over, and it seems to be all right. We have a chain to pull the Cadillac if necessary. The Land Rover cost five thousand dollars; I do not like to think what the price might have been if we had bought it from someone to whom Kalash was not related. Kalash, of course, carries no money: what king does? Christopher and Collins between them contributed three thousand. That meant that I had to make up the balance from Zofia’s rucksack. It was a painful moment. Nigel :“Come, come, Miernik, we all know you’ve got a lot of money on you. Give.” How could he know? He could not. It’s part of his tactic to penetrate me: he is like a clumsy window washer, hanging above the street, smearing the pane with a dirty rag. When at last he can see inside he will mistake the scene for something it is not. In many ways Nigel is a stupid man: he mistakes harassment for domination, and cheap curiosity for imagination. But it was better to pay than to be marooned in the desert.
That prospect pleases me less all the time, because of Zofia. Where she is concerned I am alive. She is a dull pain for me; worry has coiled around my stomach for her ever since I was left with responsibility for her. She looks like Mother—slimmer, and her gaiety has not yet turned into kindness—but otherwise she is very like her. Mother found me comical too, but with the same forgiveness.
Kalash’s machine guns awakened my anxiety. He really does believe in the possibility of bandits. That aspect of this country was not covered by my research: I know the language, the history, the religion. Knowing the names of everything does not equal knowledge. Knowledge is what I gained in that grove of trees in Poland, dressing Mother’s corpse. Hearing the Sten guns go off, smelling the cordite, I listened for a woman’s shriek.
This time, Zofia. I did not want to leave her alone out of sight beyond that hill. Prey: my sister might be prey to some band of animals. (I never have sex that I do not smell the woods where Mother died: ferns rotting in the damp earth: Ilona said the first time that I smelled of ferns: I was startled into another passion when I thought myself empty.) As I got ready to shoot, Nigel once again tried to annoy me, and he succeeded. I knew what the look on his face would be after he saw me shoot. Miernik? A marksman? He was suitably astonished.
It is not just the desert that is a threat. Where is Sasha? When there was no letter in Cairo I was in a panic. Did this mean that he had lost at last? He never fails to keep a promise. He told Zofia that a letter would await us in Cairo. There was no letter. Zofia found an explanation: the Egyptian mails. For me, that is not an explanation. It is a threat that Zofia may be alone, absolutely alone. Besides me, there is only Sasha. By now he should be back in Brazil, reading my message. Shaking his little head, sighing over my asininity. So I tell myself. Weeks of silence ahead. Zofia carefree for the first time in her life. I say nothing about Sasha, nothing about his letter, nothing about my message.
Beside me, under the sky, Zofia plays her guitar. Polish music—how rich it seems to me, how thin