The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [9]
“Finally the German looked at me. ‘Put on your pants, he said. He wrote me out a pass. ‘I advise you,’ the German said, ‘to keep your pants on in the presence of the German Army. Get out of here.”’
Inge, the Austrian girl, lifted misty eyes to Brochard. “Not all Germans were beasts,” she said.
Miernik gave a great snort, like a horse smelling a corpse. “That is a lot of shit,” he said in German. “Ilona, isn’t that a lot of shit?”
I had never heard Miernik use such a word, I would have been less surprised if he had pulled a gun.
“Which?” asked Ilona. “Léon’s story or Inge’s proposition?”
“Inge’s shit about the Germans.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve had no chance to observe the Germans?”
“I don’t suppose that I met the flower of Germany at Belsen.”
Ilona, herself a flower at Collins’ feet with her white skirt spread around her, reached over and touched Miernik’s heavy leg. He was quivering. The black cloth of his suit trembled.
“I’ve practically forgotten the camp; I was very young, Ilona said. It was hard to think that Ilona—she could hardly have been less beautiful, less fragile at the age of eight—had stood behind the wire in a sack dress, her hair shaved off, guard dogs sniffing her sour prisoner’s odor. She smiled apologetically, as if she really regretted that she could tell no horror stories.
Inge stared at Miernik, her face ready to break like a child’s. “I remind you that I am Austrian,” she said.
“I remind you, my dear Inge, that Austria was part of the German Reich when your lover was having his pants pulled off by German soldiers, while Ilona was in a concentration camp, while my country was being raped by the SS.”
“Really, Tad,” Brochard said. “Inge was hardly born when all that was going on.”
“I was thirteen when the war ended,” Inge said.
“Old enough,” Miernik cried. He pulled another bottle of vodka from the rattling ice and began filling glasses. Water poured off the end of the bottle, wetting everyone’s clothes. Inge pulled her glass aside, and the vodka splashed on the floor beside her.
“I was old enough to be thrown on the ground and raped by a company of Russian soldiers,” she said. “They are heroes, I suppose. Was Ilona raped by a German soldier? Did the Germans rape your mother, your sisters?”
“The Germans raped no one. That is an act of life.”
“Try it at thirteen,” Inge said. “Your act of life! I say shit right back at you.”
“Yes, an act of life. An act of spontaneous human beings. Brutal, yes. But human, Inge.”
“Wild beasts,” Inge said. There was no danger of her crying now. She was a victim, too.
“Better a beast than a machine,” Miernik said. “I will tell you the difference between the Russian Army and the German Army, since you are too young to remember.”
“Inge seems to remember, all right,” Ilona said. “Tad, we’re all a little drunk.”
Miernik remained standing, the bottle in one hand, the vodka glass in the other. He poured himself three quick drinks, throwing his head back to swallow. His hair fell over his forehead.
“The German Army was a machine,” he said. “A machine, Inge, a gray machine clanking through mankind. It smelled of steel and petrol. The Germans sat on the machines, like machines themselves. Gray, smelling of the machine shop.”
“I know what the Russians smelled like,” Inge said.
Miernik, holding Inge’s eyes, went around again with his bottle. He poured the vodka into glasses that were already full; it slopped over. He drank out of the bottle.
“The Russian Army,” he said. He fell into his chair with his legs spread and closed his eyes. “The Russian Army was like the earth. To see it coming was like seeing the earth move, a great mob of men in brown. It was an avalanche. It buried your Germans. The German Army, to me, is the burnt trucks and tanks in the Polish countryside.”
“Tell me how beautifully the Russians sang,” Inge said. “You people always tell that.”
“The fighting went right by our house,” Miernik said. “I went