MARIANKA
99
His language is eminently racy, vigorous, highly personal. Just read the
opening description of Maniek Bryla, the loquacious, sniffiing youth who
wants to go to the station to warm himself against the steam radiators. In
two pages a thin outcast rises up before you in his rags. Or take the final
paragraph of the hook with its Celinesque bitterness:
Puis, voila c'est cuit,
il
n'y a plus rien
a
raconter. En trois
tours de passe-passe une
Ile
a ete escamotee, comme une fleur de
pissenlit au vent, et pas une cicatrice n'en reste sur l'un quel–
conque des hemispheres connues pour marquer l'ex-endroit. On
peut toujours fendre l'eau, farfouiller les mappemondes, piquer
du bee dans les traites d'hydrographie: c'est frit flambe, Atropos
Ia parque y est passee avec son ahlateur pour queues de mouton
et c'est fini termine. Comme l'anaplerose, cette plaie qui fait
naitre de nouvelles chairs,
}ava-Cote-rfAzur
a change de situation
geographique. Porteurs de germe, les hommes soot alles coloniser
d'autres
Iles,
Ies pendards soot partis qui depensaient vingt mille
francs par semaine entre Vaugelas et la Double Pesee soit un
million par an. lis soot partis emportant leur miJlion annuel ces
caqueux erratiques a Ia recherche d'une fourriere, ils se soot
decanilles cui par-dessus tete dans la vase cosmique, et au pied
de Ia cheminee et sous le clapotis de Ia fontaine ils ont laisse leur
evocation d'excommunies qui reviennent et se font vampires.
The truth is somewhat less sensational than the legend. Born in War–
saw in 1908, the son of a professor of classical languages in the secondary
echool system, he came to Paris at the age of eighteen. After studying law
at the University of Paris for a time, he turned to writing and had articles
accepted hy well known periodicals. Soon he had attracted the attention
of such writers as Andre Gide, Franz Hellens, Andre Malraux and Roger
Martin
du Gard. Somewhere in the thirties he gave his Polish name
Malacki a French ending, which inevitably associated him in everyone's
llind with ·the beautiful embankment in Paris where Houdon's seated
Voltaire smiles sardonically on passers-by. In September 1939 he joined
the
French army and fought against Germany. Taken prisoner, he was
released in October 1940.
At present he is in Marseilles where he has been for over a year now,
lrying desperately to get papers and passage to America. This very morn–
a.g
with his wife Galina Yurkevitch, the young Russian painter, he may
11 have made his regular visit to the United States consulate, if there is
· I a United States consulate in Marseilles, to see if there was any news
this case. A letter of last August says: "To feel that I have friends
your country is one of the very few,
if
not the only, reality that allows
to hang on and to hope."
The "Javanese" whom Malaquais brought to life for us are distin–
' ed
by the fact that they have no passports, no identification papers.
a European few things can he more horrible. Consequently they are
· ually obsessed, subconsciously as well as consciously, hy the feeling
they
are unwanted wherever they are. Today those outcast workers