The Miernik Dossier (13 page)

The bald man held out his hand to me. “Sasha Kirnov,” he said. “It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble.”

Kirnov put the car in gear and moved off through the empty streets. “These Communist towns,” he said matter-of-factly, “have the advantage of being very quiet—nothing like the traffic you have in the West. And some of them, particularly here in Czechoslovakia, are quite beautiful. It’s a pity you haven’t more time. Not many Americans see this part of the world.” He turned his head and smiled; he might have been a host, collecting a weekend visitor at the station.

“Zofia and I did a little sightseeing on the way to meet you,” I said. “Very interesting rifles on almost every street corner.”

“Tadeusz said you spoke excellent German. It’s quite perfect— better, alas, than mine. I have to change gears from Yiddish all the time. Did you study in Germany?”

“Yes.”

“Remarkable for an American, if you’ll forgive such a remark. You people don’t have a reputation as linguists.”

“No.”

“Strong peoples never do. They make others speak their language. How many Romans spoke Helvetian or ancient British? Or Russians any of the languages they now move among? It’s natural for the weak to have quick ears.”

We were by this time at the outskirts of the city, moving along an empty road. As we rolled to the top of a hill I saw the countryside stretching before us—little copses dotting the fields, horses and oxen working, the distant outline of the Little Carpathians. And, a mile or so off to the left, a high wooden watchtower on the frontier with the sun flashing on the lens of a searchlight.

Zofia touched my shoulder and said, “Excuse us a moment.” There followed an exchange of Polish between her and Kirnov. Kirnov gripped my knee and grinned. “My dear boy,” he said, “Zofia was telling me of your plan to take the riverboat. Very enterprising, but it would have been quite fatal. I see your reasoning, of course. It was obvious, to take the boat—so obvious that you thought it would attract no notice. Let me tell you, the Czech police do not think in that way. They always look first of all for the obvious. So you would have been caught in no time. No, no, no. It would never have done. But I congratulate you for being suspicious of us. It shows you are intelligent. One should trust nobody. Because you were suspicious of us, I may say I trust
you
a little more. So it’s a gain for all of us, this plan of yours, even though we cannot use it.” He looked in the mirror at Zofia. “You will have good company in our young Paul,” he said.

Zofia squeezed my shoulder. “I think you’re right, Sasha. Getting Swiss passports was very clever, Paul. We do appreciate all your trouble. But Sasha’s way is better. You’ll see.”

All this patting on the head was annoying. “Maybe you’ll let me judge that for myself,” I said. “I’d like to know right now where we are headed and what Sasha’s plan is, exactly.”

“Of course you do. What could be more natural?” Kirnov said. “Soon we’ll be at a place where we can talk comfortably. We have a little while to wait. Zofia will make us some tea, we will have something to eat, and we will go over the whole thing together. You will know everything.”

Kirnov turned the car into a dirt track leading away from the frontier. He drove fast, raising a cloud of dust. The old Citroën snaked over the rough ground, its unlatched hood flapping, its muffler rattling. Kirnov is not much larger than a half-grown child. He sat on a cushion, peering through the spokes of the steering wheel and working the pedals with the tips of his toes. He steered into a woods and followed what seemed to be a cow path at undiminished speed, running over rocks and crossing a good-sized stream, throwing up sheets of water that sprayed through the open windows. He laughed delightedly. At the end of the path we found a small house in a clearing. There were geese in the yard and a goat tied to the fence; the geese set up a racket when the Citroën emerged from the woods. Kirnov turned off the engine.

“The owners are away for the day,” he said, “but we can make ourselves at home. Zofia, the tea!” Kirnov helped Zofia out of the car and the two of them strode across the yard, scattering geese before them, and went into the cottage. It was obvious that they were on familiar ground. Still the keen observer, I noticed a lot of tire tracks in the dust near the Citroën and concluded that they had been staying here for some time. I watched the odometer and the landmarks, so I could doubtless locate the cottage on a relief map of the area. These admirable skills did not seem to mean much as I reflected on my situation. Our plan was out the window. I was thirty kilometers from my motorcycle, the riverboat had departed, and I was in the middle of a woods, unarmed, outside a strange house that might very well contain a detachment of security police.

Kirnov came to the door with a bottle in his hand. He smiled cheerfully and clinked the bottle against a glass. “The sun is over the yardarm,” he called in English. Kirnov has a jocose quality; you expect him to start tumbling or juggling at any moment. It was impossible to be afraid of such a tiny man. I started toward the house. “Pay attention to the big goose,” Kirnov said. “She bites.”

Inside, Zofia was pushing twigs into the stove. She laid the table and sliced bread and cheese and a large salami. Her skirt swung with each strong cut of the knife. “Simple food gives the greatest happiness,” Kirnov said. He poured vodka for all of us. “To the happy future of this beautiful girl!” Kirnov and I drank. He filled our glasses again. “To our brave American!” This time Zofia drank. So did I.

Kirnov sat down on a kitchen chair and drew his short legs under him. He looked more than ever like a bald child. (He is not a dwarf, though he cannot be much over five feet tall; he is just a very small man.)

“Now you wish to know everything,” he said. “Very well. We will stay here until after dark. It is quite safe, everything has been arranged. At ten o’clock we will leave, once again in the car. Very innocent—a little drive along the road to a certain point. There we leave the car. We go through a woods to another point. There we will find a signal if all is well—a beer bottle on a stump. We will be very near the frontier. I will accompany you to the edge of the forbidden zone. A strip of land along the border has been plowed and harrowed, to show footprints. You will have a rake. As you go over the plowed strip, you will rake out your footprints. It will take you four minutes, perhaps five. Then you must cross a small meadow. At the edge of the meadow is a woods. You will be in Austria. Nothing will go wrong. It’s a simple plan.”

Kirnov put a piece of cheese into his mouth and gave me a merry look of conspiracy. My stomach churned with anger, and I waited for it to subside. It did not subside. I had come here with the idea of running an operation and I found myself being taken for granted by this Polish midget.

“At last I understand,” I said. “I am here because you needed someone to rake away Zofia’s footprints.”

Kirnov stopped chewing. “You are annoyed,” he said.

“No. I am astonished that you think I’ll accept to go along on this holiday you’ve planned, knowing no more than you’ve just told me.

Kirnov stood up. “But surely Tadeusz told you what was involved? You knew before you came that you’d be making a night crossing with Zofia.”

“I knew very little else. I still don’t. Some things you have left out, Sasha. For example, how close is the nearest guard tower? Are there any mines? Are there any trip wires? What is the schedule of the searchlight sweeps? Are there any patrols? How do we maintain direction going across? What are the frontier guards going to be doing while we stroll by under their noses, gardening as we go? What is your alternative plan if we are discovered? Little things like that.”

Kirnov held up his hand. “All those questions I can answer, gladly. In a word, you have nothing to worry about. We have a secret weapon.”

“I see. And what might that be?”

“The oldest of all secret weapons. Human nature. In this case, greed. There is a certain officer of the frontier forces who likes money. He has been paid. The exact sum is five thousand U.S. dollars. Pretty good for five minutes work. He is an honest workman. Don’t worry. You will not be discovered.”

“I’m sorry. That’s not good enough, Kirnov. I want facts, not reassurances.”

“Naturally,” Kirnov said. He hitched his chair closer and beckoned Zofia to sit down with us. “First, to all your questions— there are no trip wires where you will be walking, no patrols, no searchlights. The nearest watch-tower is fifty meters from your starting point. That sounds risky, but it is the essential safety factor. Our man will pay a call to this watchtower at exactly 11:10. He will find something wrong with the way the tower is being manned. He is an officer, he does not have to be logical. He will bring the entire crew to attention and berate them for five full minutes—inspect their rifles, criticize the timing of the searchlight, accuse them of every kind of negligence. At this time, the patrol will be on the other side of the watchtower. They will not see you or hear you. There is no moon tonight. On the Austrian side of the border, on a hilltop beyond the woods, there is a house. There will be a light in the window. You walk straight toward the light. This is important, because you are right—there are mines everywhere except where you will walk. As long as you walk with your eyes on the light, never deviating, you will be all right.”

“If I am raking, I’ll be walking backwards.”

“Yes, but Zofia will be walking normally. She will be your guide. Of course you’re right about the raking—we have to hide the footprints so that it will not be known that anyone went across. That’s why it takes two persons, one to guide and one to rake. Otherwise, our rich officer would not have the opportunity of spending his dollars.”

Zofia smiled proudly at Kirnov. “Satisfied?” she asked me. “With Sasha’s good intentions, yes. Do you mind if I ask how well you know this officer you’ve paid?”

“Very well,” Kirnov said. “Oh, very well.”

“You’ve dealt with him before?”

Kirnov turned solemn. “I do not use a girl like Zofia, who is like my own child, as a guinea pig. If I had the slightest doubt that things will go exactly as I have told you, I would not let her leave this cottage. You can believe me when I tell you that.”

Zofia rose and put her arms around the little man. “Yes,” she said, “you can believe that. Now, Sasha, your tea.”

We ate our cold meal in silence by the light of an oil lamp. Zofia kept stealing glances at me. I rewarded her with no smiles, and gradually her air of happiness dissipated. Kirnov produced two large Havana cigars and offered me one. I refused—the idea of smoking a cigar before going over the top was the final touch of incongruity. Kirnov cut his Havana carefully and lit it with a splinter of its wooden wrapping. As he smoked I noticed that he wore a ruby ring on the index finger of his right hand. I realized that his dandyism—the double-breasted blazer, the suede shoes, the precise speech, and now the ring and the Havana—had annoyed me from the start. If headquarters is right in their suppositions about him, he belongs to another era of Russian secret agents. Kirnov belongs in E. Phillips Oppenheim, not in the KGB.

Zofia cleared the plates, giving Kirnov an adoring look as she did so. A guitar hung on the wall, and she took it down and struck the strings. “Sasha taught me to play when I was a little girl,” she said. Smiling at Kirnov, she played a tune I did not recognize. He closed his eyes in pleasure. When she finished, he said, “I always see your mother when I hear that song. A woman of gold.”

“Have you always known each other?” I asked politely. There seemed no point in adding to the bad atmosphere. I was committed to them for the rest of the evening.

“Always,” Kirnov said.

Zofia, with the guitar in her lap, said something in Polish. Kirnov shrugged.

“Sasha was always a friend of my parents,” Zofia said. “He is my godfather and Tadeusz’s too, which is a little strange because he is of course a Jew. My father and mother did not mention this to the priest when we were baptized, and Sasha had no hesitation in promising to raise us as believers in Christ because he saw nothing wrong in revering a fellow Jew.”

“Zofia, no blasphemy. I take my duty seriously. If all those millions of Christians believe Jesus to be God, he is God. All it requires to make a god is belief. Q.E.D.”

“So all through our childhood,” Zofia said, “there was Sasha, with candy and books and stories of his journeys. He always traveled. A long time would go by sometimes. Where is Sasha? We’d look out the window for him. Then, one day, up the walk would come Sasha, buried under a mountain of dolls for me and soldiers for Tadeusz.”

“Books for Tadeusz,” Kirnov said. “For Tadeusz, always books.”

“Then one day when I was very small, Sasha came to live with us. We woke up one morning, and Mother took us into the sitting room to tell us that Sasha was in the house. But we must never tell that he was there. We knew the Germans were in Warsaw. They wanted to kill Sasha because he was a Jew. So Sasha was going to live in our attic and we would keep him alive. From now on, we could never take any children upstairs. There were many rules, all to keep Sasha from being killed. He remained in the attic for four years, and that’s when he taught me to play the guitar.”

“I’ll tell you an amusing story about that,” Kirnov said. “One day in 1943, when I had already been upstairs for more than two years, I was giving Zofia a guitar lesson. It was early evening, just getting dark. You could always tell in those days when it was dusk, even if you had no windows in your room—and of course I had no windows. At dusk the air was filled with the smell of turnips cooking. In a thousand houses, turnips were in the pot—that was all anyone in Poland had to eat. So I smelled the turnips while Zofia tried to learn to play the guitar. I owed her a great deal—she came upstairs every day to see me. And she did other things. It’s indelicate to tell you this, but it will give you an idea of what the times were like. For a man in hiding there is always a problem— he cannot go downstairs to the toilet. One used a newspaper. So each day, Zofia would take a package on her bicycle as she rode to school, and each day put it in a different trash can along her route. For four years, the little packages. This long-haired blond girl on her bicycle with her books.