100
PARTISAN REVIEW
are wasting away in concentration camps or slaving on the trans-Sahara
railway. They have no money to spend in Esteve's brothel or to buy a
liter of red at Mme. Michel's grocery and wine-shop; there is no more
free baklava from the woman Stapoulos. And the only crime most of
them have committed is that of having no papers.
Today Jean Malaquais knows better himself what it is to want the
necessary papers. His last letter to me, in which he struggles against his
bitterness, says: "J'ai le sentiment d'etre devenu moralement un clochard"
-I
feel as if
I
had become morally a bum.
Probably no one over here knows when "Marianka" .was written, but
since it has already appeared in a French literary magazine it cannot
be
very recent.
It
shows Malaquais' mastery of the brutal technique necessary
for describing such scenes of violence. Though the story is laid in a vii·
lage in the Ukraine between the rivers Dnieper and Pripet during the
counter-revolution of 1919, the author could not but have thought also of
the criines being committed every day in his native Poland. Only one other
short story by Malaquais has appeared in English: "Lament for Mimiq!"
in the July 1940 issue of
Life and Letters Today
published in London.
Like "Marianka," it was translated with the author's permission by Antony
Manton.
LISTEN,
it was quite a small village hidden away among
the
black soils in Ukraine the Immense, between the arms of the
Dniept<r and the Pripet, its tributary, on the Government of Cher–
nigov's Western boundary. A village, if one likes to call it that;
or rather, a scattering of several farms whose population at that
time numbered some thirty souls in all. True, before the war, the
number of inhabitants was higher, possibly double.... But
with
war, revolution, bad harvests, the younger men and the stronger
men had gradually filtered away, and there only remained at
Marianka the old men, the women and us children.
Peasants we were, everyone of us, three Jewish families,
two
German families, to one of which I belonged, a few Ukrainean
families. My parents had settled in the land towards the year 90,
at the tail of other emigrants who had preferred to go further
afield, towards the Volga. I was born here, and, at this time, in
1919, was approaching my fifteenth year.
It was a troubled period, there were rumours of revolution,
famine, epidemics. One day, old Hans Kremmer, my father,
brought home with him two deserters, two peasants, who had been
