The Miernik Dossier

4. REPORT BY PAUL CHRISTOPHER, AN AMERICAN UNDER DEEP COVER IN GENEVA, TO A U.S. INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.

Tadeusz Miernik phoned me early this morning (19 May) to ask that I meet him in the Parc Mon Repos at 11:30 A.M. He explained that he wished to talk to me alone before we joined Nigel Collins, Léon Brochard, Kalash el Khatar, and Hassan Khan for our usual Friday lunch. Miernik sounded over the phone even more shaken than he usually does. (I have mentioned in earlier reports that his normal tone of voice is one of acute distress. I continue to wonder if he sounds like that in Polish, as well as in English, French, and German.)

I found Miernik standing by the edge of the lake with the usual bag of stale bread in his hand. He was feeding the swans. All three buttons of his coat were carefully fastened, and he wore the look of a man who is phrasing his last will and testament. Nothing unusual there: he always looks like that.

Miernik has a way of beginning conversations with a non sequitur, if you know what I mean. “Only a month ago,” he said, “one of these beautiful swans killed a child with a blow of its beak. You saw the newspapers? The child was feeding it. It fractured the child’s skull. Can you tell, by looking at the swans, which is the murderer?” He scattered the last of his crusts on the water and turned his big face to me while he wiped his hands with a handkerchief. “No,” I said. “Can you pick out the guilty swan?” Miernik smiled (a movement of the muscles that always suggests the awakening of Boris Karloff in Dr. F.’s laboratory) and said, “Perhaps the swans know, but they will not talk.” (I give you this extraneous detail so that you will perhaps appreciate the oracular quality of Miernik’s conversation: layers within layers, sorrows within sorrows.)

We walked together along the lakeside. It was a sunny day. The park was full of pretty girls and other people. We could see Mont Blanc and the other high mountains, covered with snow. There were sailboats on the water. Miernik trudged through the crowd with his hands clasped in the small of his back. I have noticed before that scenes of beauty and happiness seem to fill him with melancholy. His eyes moved over the girls, over the children, over the old people. He wore a smile like that of an actor who has renounced the woman he loves because he knows that he is going to die in battle. “All this is not for me!” Miernik seems to sigh. But he adores observing the middle class in its leisure. “These people have the illusion that happiness is a right that cannot be taken away,” he said.

All the benches were occupied by noontime sunbathers, so Miernik led me to an empty place on one of the lawns. I leaned against a tree, waiting for him to say whatever it was that he had rehearsed. (I don’t mean to be flippant; his English is fluent, but studied.) Miernik turned his back to me and looked at the lake. When, at length, he turned around, he was again wearing his doomed smile. “There is something I do not want to discuss at lunch,” he said. I waited. “I wish what I am going to say to remain absolutely between you and me,” he said.

“All right.”

“My contract at WRO expires at the end of next month.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I have learned that it may not be renewed.”

“Is that important? It’s a dull job.”

“Important to me. You are an American. Perhaps you won’t understand what I am going to tell you.

“I’ll do my best.”

“It will not be renewed because the ambassador of my country has demanded that it not be renewed.”

“Demanded? He can’t tell WRO what to do.”

“He can tell them that they will lose the goodwill of my country if they do not do as he asks. My well-being is a small thing to WRO. The Organization survives by avoiding trouble. If I am trouble, it will avoid me.”

“How do you know what the Polish ambassador has demanded?”

“I know,” Miernik said.

“All right. Then why should the ambassador care one way or the other about your contract?”

“He does not. The ambassador is a government servant. Perhaps he guesses the reasons behind his instructions. Unless he is very stupid, he guesses.

“Tell me the reason.”

“Warsaw, someone in Warsaw, wants their hands upon me. Or perhaps someone farther east wants that.”

“Miernik!” I put disbelief in my voice, not to encourage him to tell his story, because he was obviously going to do that anyway. I meant to shake his performance, if that’s what it was.

“You scoff,” Miernik said. “They wish to arrest me, to question me, to imprison me. Perhaps more than that.”

“What on earth for?”

Miernik went on as if I hadn’t spoken: he had hit the rhythm of his role. “Arrest, question, imprison, ”he said. “You cannot possibly hear in those words the… echoes that a Pole hears.”

“Probably not. But why you? Do you live a secret life you haven’t told me about?”

Miernik grimaced. “A joke to an American. Something else to a secret policeman. Knowing you is enough to convince them that I work for American intelligence.”

(Don’t be startled by this remark. He meant to joke. Maybe he does think that I work for you-it’s probable, even, that he thinks so. But he wasn’t provoking me here. His tone was: That’s how ridiculous they are. He was keeping up the appearance that he does not suspect me by assigning the suspicion to the Polish secret police, who are known idiots.)

“But if you don’t work for the Americans, and I assume you don’t, then why are you worried?”

“To them, innocence is an illusion. They don’t like my nose. That’s enough.”

(Miernik has an unlovable nose: meaty, red, with a tendency to run.)

“If all this is true, then you have a problem,” I said.

“You don’t think that it’s true?”

“Why shouldn’t I? But is Poland really run by lunatics who’d lock you up for no reason at all?”

“You can’t quite conceive of that, can you?”

“I’ve never been to Poland.”

Miernik turned his back again. He blew his nose and cleared his throat into his handkerchief. This is one of his mannerisms when he is under stress.

“My dear friend,” he said, “I do not think that I can go back to Poland.”

“Then don’t go. Ask for asylum here. The Swiss will fix you up. They’ve done it in more doubtful cases than yours.

“I must go back.”

“You just said that you couldn’t.”

“Poland is my country.”

“Which wants to put you in jail for no reason.

“Perhaps not. Once it was suggested to me that I could be useful, in a patriotic way. When I was at the university. Perhaps they want to frighten me into something like that.”

“You won’t know until they try, will you?”

“Perhaps not even after.”

“Intrigue, Miernik. Everywhere intrigue.”

Miernik paid no attention to this remark. “Most of all,” he said, “there is another factor.” He fell into a silence.

(I might say at this point, for the benefit of those who sit inside, reading these reports-there is someone like that, isn’t there?- that there is a certain amount of strain involved in holding conversations with people like Miernik. Two sets of reactions operate at all times. I pretend to like him, for your purposes. I do like him, for reasons that have nothing to do with your requirements. I lie to him, for your reasons. And I lie to him so that he will not suspect that I am lying to him. I assume that he feels and does the same. In Miernik’s case, all this would be more bearable if he did not take himself so seriously. Of course, I don’t know whether he is taking himself seriously, or whether he is just pretending to do so in the name of professionalism. If he is a professional, then this narrative is laughable. If not, it’s not.)

“There is my sister,” Miernik said.

“What’s her name?” I asked this quickly.

Miernik hesitated. You will think that he was selecting a name that he’ll be sure to remember the next time I ask. It might have been that, or it might have been his normal citizen-of-a-police-state reaction: a man who asks for information, even innocent information, is to be mistrusted.

“Zofia,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“In Warsaw, at the university. She is studying art history.”

“She is alone?”

“You know that my parents are dead. She is alone.”

“Can’t she come out? Pretend to be going on vacation?”

“One passport to a family is the rule. I have ours.”

“Would they bother her if you didn’t go back?”

“Perhaps not immediately. Eventually, if they want me badly enough. She is my only relative. She is younger. I feel a great deal for her.”

“Tadeusz, I don’t think we can settle this before lunch. We ought to start walking toward the restaurant.”

“It helps to talk about it. You would like Zofia. We don’t look alike.”

“That’s reassuring.”

Miernik laughed for the first time. He does not joke about his appearance (his looks distress him, I think), so I assume that his laughter indicated, or was supposed to indicate, affection for his sister.

“She thinks I am too protective. I interviewed her boyfriends when she was sixteen. Before that, in the war, we all tried to make her feel as safe as possible. The winter that the Russians came, the Germans retreated in a hurry. In a snowbank around the corner from our house they left two dead German soldiers. They were just boys. Their faces were frozen-eyes open, mouths open, tongues very swollen. They lay in the snow on our path to school. During the entire winter, I took Zofia by a longer way so she wouldn’t see the dead Germans. I would go out every morning to see if they were gone. They were not. The Russians wouldn’t bother with them, the Poles would not touch them. They were not hauled away until spring, when they might smell. Zofia was angry with me over all that extra walking. I never told her why we went the long way to school. Why should a little girl know?”

“Have you ever explained?”

“No. I suppose she’s forgotten. She was only seven.”

We walked through the park again, Miernik with his hands behind him like a monk. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Do you want to talk about this later?”

“Yes. Your lack of sympathy does me good.”

“You can call me.”

Miernik said that he would.

You see the alternatives in this situation, I know. But I will list them anyway:

1) Miernik’s story is true, and he really is deciding whether to go back to Poland and, perhaps, to prison. If he doesn’t go back, he’ll have to ask for asylum in Switzerland.

2) He is in touch with the Poles (or the Soviets), and is under instructions to defect, and believes that I can put him in contact with the right Americans.

If (1), it’s a sad story. If (2), it’s very elaborate, hence very Polish.

Let me know how you want to handle this.