The Miernik Dossier

70. FROM THE DEBRIEFING OF ZOFIA MIERNIK.

By the time we reached Khartoum all of us, I think, wanted a few minutes alone. One gets incredibly dirty in the desert. In camp, Kalash allowed us only a little water in the morning for washing-enough to clean the teeth and the corners of the eyes. So when we got to the Grand Hotel (which is not so very grand, by the way) we all went in our own directions and took baths and so forth. I didn’t see anyone from midnight one night until just before dinner the next. Not even Tadeusz. All of these people were tremendous diarists-they were always writing down the day’s events, like explorers or journalists. I don’t know why. I supposed when I didn’t see anyone that that was what they were doing- writing. I was glad to take a hot bath and be left alone. I read an American book Paul had given me. I closed the blinds and didn’t go outside at all. I had had enough of the sun. I wanted a cool dark place.

Q. Was there any more byplay between Collins and your brother over Ilona?

A. No. After we left Cairo they both became surprisingly uninterested in Ilona, and she in them, for that matter. We all became comrades. There was no more sexual banter. I must say Ilona behaved very well. She did most of the work around the camp-the cooking and sewing and so on. She behaved like a chum instead of a tart. She really was very fond of all the men. I never liked her, as I’ve told you, not even after she had undergone this change in personality. But I could see her charm. Really, she gave one no cause to condemn her. She accepted everyone else exactly as she found them. I suppose I should have done the same for her. As for Tadeusz, he was more like his old self. That peculiar cringing behavior I saw in Cairo disappeared once we got into the desert.

Q. We’d like as many details of the trip out of Khartoum as you can remember. Can you just take it day by day for us?

A. I don’t remember each day equally well, of course.

We left on a Friday and went down the White Nile. Kalash drove the Cadillac, with Ilona and Collins and Tadeusz as passengers. I rode with Paul in the Land Rover. Kalash had to go more slowly because the Land Rover couldn’t keep up. After we left the paved roads, the Land Rover led, because of the dust. We stopped a few times to look at the scenery. It was rather thrilling to see the boats on the Nile-dhows, with those sharp sails like the wings of swallows. Once we saw a whole group of them together and Paul said, “Look, the sails are like a line of Arabic script.” That’s just what they looked like.

Actually, nothing much happened until Sunday night. By that time we were in a routine-start off very early, drive until just before dark, make camp, have supper, talk awhile. Usually I played the guitar. Ilona would sing. It was a happy atmosphere.

Q. What did you talk about?

A. Anything but ourselves. I found this strange at first. For a Pole it was disconcerting-we are always discussing our souls. Westerners do not speak of their inner lives-at least not Paul and Nigel and Ilona. Kalash, of course, is a black Englishman. On the trip we talked about literature, the theater. All of them had a great store of information. One of them was bound to know all about almost anything that came up in conversation. Nigel, for example, seemed to know the names of all the butterflies and birds in the world. No one ever mentioned politics. The subject did not seem to interest them.

Q. There were no arguments, no conflicts?

A. No. The only possible friction would have come over Ilona, between Nigel and Tadeusz. As I said, that didn’t happen. It was all very civilized, from beginning to end.

Q. Let’s talk about Sunday night.

A. Yes. Well, it had been a serene day. We camped somewhere near El Obeid. Kalash had led us off the main road. He wanted to show Nigel the place where the army of the Mahdi had wiped out the English and the Egyptians seventy-five years ago. Kashgil was the name of the place where the battle took place. Kalash told us where the armies had been and described the massacre in great detail. He knew exactly how many rifles and cannon had been captured, how many foreigners had been killed. He was amusing. “On this spot an English officer, a rather fat one with an angry red face, Nigel, charged into a group of native horsemen, waving his sword and shouting insults. He was killed more quickly than the others because we rather admired his bravery.” Nigel was not amused. These English don’t much like the memory of defeat, especially when they lost to natives. Paul stood by smiling; he always found Kalash delightful.

We camped not far away, between some hills. There was a big moon; for the whole trip we had wonderful moonlight. There was no reason to expect what happened. We went to bed as usual about nine o’clock. Ilona always stripped completely before going to sleep, and hung her clothes on the rope of the tent. We perspired a great deal during the day, of course, and the night air took away some of the odor. I wore an American T-shirt Paul had given me as a nightgown. But Ilona slept naked. She was a restless sleeper, turning and muttering all night. Since we had left civilization, Kalash had made us sleep with the guns. He and Tadeusz and Paul had the sub-machine guns, Nigel a pistol. Ilona and I had a pistol, too, hanging on a hook from the ridgepole of the tent.

I was asleep when the noise started. I was not confused at all. As soon as I woke, even before I opened my eyes, I knew that shooting was going on. I thought: bandits. Kalash had said all along that there might be bandits. The first shots were not very loud. Then there was a tremendous amount of firing. The flap of our tent was open and I looked out. All up and down the hillside were muzzle flashes, flickering in the darkpink and blue, like the flame of a gas stove. Also yellow, all mixed together. Kalash was running in his white robes with a gun in his hands. He fell full length and I thought he was killed. But then he began to shoot again. Nigel and Tadeusz came out of their tent on their hands and knees, also shooting. Beside me, Ilona kicked away her sleeping bag and reached up for the pistol. “We have to get out of the tent,” she said. “They’ll shoot into the tents.” She was a quick thinker- she stopped me from crawling out the front of the tent. She ripped open the back and we crawled out that way. She was naked and I might as well have been, in my T-shirt. It was terribly frightening for a woman to lie there with her body exposed. We huddled on the ground together, in a little depression in the dirt. Ilona held the pistol in both hands.

Up to now I had not seen Paul. I wondered if he had been shot. Bullets were flying all through the camp. Sparks flew off the cars as the bullets hit. It seemed quite impossible that any of us would live through all this. Nigel and Kalash were under the Land Rover, firing. Now Tadeusz had vanished as well. I was filled with a peculiar feeling-I don’t know how to describe it. That my brother should have gone through all he had gone through in order to be murdered in the middle of nowhere by a bunch of illiterate tribesmen. Oddly enough, I thought of that English officer Kalash told us about, the fat one. I understood his rage. How dared these savages kill us, who were so intelligent, so cultured, so civilized?

Kalash and Nigel kept shooting. All of a sudden, there was much more firing on the hill, machine guns. The bandits began to yell to each other, Kalash and Nigel got on their feet and ran out toward the hill. They fell down side by side and shot again.

Then the firing stopped. It was very sudden. The sound persisted. There was a kind of ringing in the air-the memory of the guns going off. Kalash leaped into the Land Rover and started it up. Nigel got in, too, holding Kalash’s machine gun. They went tearing off into the desert with the lights blazing, and pretty soon, a few hundred meters away perhaps, I heard them shooting again. While they were gone, Paul and Tadeusz came running into the camp. They were wearing only their shorts, carrying their guns.

Paul’s face was covered with blood. The lower half of his face. They were calling our names. Ilona and I stood up, and although Paul and my brother were only a few feet away from us, we both waved. Ilona and I stood up on our tiptoes, as if we were standing in a crowd on a train platform, and waved. Remember, she was completely naked and I was wearing only that shirt that came down to my hips. Paul stopped in his tracks and laughed. He roared with laughter. Of course, it was a funny sight-Ilona with that big pistol in her hand and me beside her, waving. Paul just thought it was awfully funny. It was the tension, and the relief.

All I could see was Paul’s blood. I thought he’d been shot, naturally. So-this will seem strange, perhaps, but at the time it seemed so obvious-I pulled off the T-shirt and pressed it against his face, to try to stop the bleeding. He let me do it. All he had was a nosebleed-he fell or something and hit his nose and it gushed blood all over him.

So when Kalash and Nigel came back with the Land Rover they found us like that-two nude girls and their friends standing by with hot machine guns. They hardly glanced at us. Kalash had gathered up the bodies of the bandits they had killed. They had thrown three of them into the back of the Land Rover. A fourth was only wounded, but very badly. All were dressed in white robes, with great stains of blood on them. Kalash tried to question the wounded one. He was not gentle about it. He pulled the man into a sitting position and shouted at him in Arabic. The man’s head kept rolling onto his shoulder. Kalash gripped his chin and held the head upright. The man was breathing very loudly and blood was pumping out of his body. Spurting. Nigel wanted to put a tourniquet on him, but Kalash kept shouting at the dying man. He was very young. I don’t think he heard what Kalash was saying to him. Certainly he never answered. His eyes rolled back in his head and he died. I suppose you know that the bowels and the bladder empty at that moment. I didn’t. What I remember is the sudden, rotten stink. Kalash stood up and held his hands in front of him, fingers rigid and spread out wide, in a gesture of disgust.

While this was going on, my brother crawled into one of the tents and came back with two blankets for Ilona and me. We wrapped up in them and Ilona-this will show what people will do under stress-lit the camp stove and made tea. We stood about drinking tea with sugar and tinned milk in it with four dead bodies on the ground at our feet. Kalash and Paul searched the bodies. They found something that interested them, but I don’t know what it was. They didn’t discuss it with the rest of us.

It was a miracle none of us was even hurt, except for Paul’s bloody nose. The bandits had attacked too soon. Kalash couldn’t understand why the bandits had been so stupid. He seemed offended that they had opened fire from such a distance instead of sneaking into the camp and executing us in our sleep. Paul said the bandits probably did not realize we had firearms. Perhaps they thought we would surrender, or run into the desert. Maybe all they wanted was to steal the cars and the equipment.

There were five or six bullet holes in the Cadillac, and one of the windows was smashed. I don’t think the Land Rover was damaged at all. Both cars ran all right. When I went back to the tent to get my clothes I saw that there were several holes in the canvas. Ilona was right about that, and so it’s true that she saved my life, just as Nigel said to me later on.

We didn’t sleep anymore that night. The men went out into the desert a little way and waited with their guns-set up a perimeter, as Paul said. Ilona and I lay near them in our sleeping bags. The bandits didn’t come back.

The next morning, when we went away in the cars, we left the dead men where they were, lying in the sun. Kalash walked from one body to the other just before he got in the car. He spat on the face of each corpse. For just a moment, while he did that, one could see that his people had not always been gentlemen from Oxford.