Bardo or Not Bardo

IV. THE BARDO OF THE MEDUSA

During the summer of 1342, over the span of three days, the writer and actor Bogdan Schlumm approached the Bardo three times, under difficult conditions, without assistance. He could be heard reciting the Bardo Thödol in a powerful voice, then mumbling and, at the same time, pretending not to understand what his lips were proclaiming, and even feigning deafness. Three times thus he balanced himself across the Bardo’s narrow passageways, a very short distance away from the black space, staggering between death and reality. It was a grueling experience. At different moments during the trance, he spoke like one of the living, or listened and expressed himself like one of the dead. He didn’t move much, limiting his surface area to a few square meters of fallen leaves, already yellow, mainly birch. Atmospheric conditions were mediocre, which didn’t simplify his task. The ground was soggy and it was raining. When it wasn’t raining, an abnormal quantity of starlings descended onto the branches above Schlumm and chattered noisily, all while defecating on him, though sometimes they were magpies with their unbearable yapping. Nature had never been kind to Schlumm. Despite it all, he tried to make the best of a bad situation. He pretended to despise the adversity and guano, like the specialists recommended he do in this kind of scenario. He tried to concentrate firstly on his text and the gestures he had to make to better inhabit his characters. From time to time, he opened his eyes, his author’s eyes, then he closed them again. He was very lonely and it was wearing him out. Around him, under the trees, there was no one to applaud him.

It was Tuesday, then Wednesday, then it was Thursday.

The absence of spectators was a phenomenon with which Schlumm had always coexisted peacefully, but, this time, it affected his mood, since he’d made an effort to get people to come. One week earlier, he had launched a genuine publicity campaign. Though not a grand strategist in the art of media announcements, he knew about some hypnosis techniques that were used on the masses, and had wanted to utilize them to attract plenty of bodies to his theater. He had written some agitprop material in which he specified the times of the spectacle and the titles of the three plays he planned on interpreting. Admittedly, he had forgotten to mention the dates of the event, but that didn’t matter much. He had hand-copied the original agitorial text several times, which had required an enormous expenditure of energy. The finished pile was impressive. Without exaggerating, I think I can say there were eighteen or even nineteen identical — within a comma or two, anyway — copies. Bogdan Schlumm saved one of them for his archives and threw the others out his dormitory window. He thus proceeded with his first strike.

The papers flew. It was ten o’clock at night. The day hadn’t quite faded away yet. Finally, it was gone. The next day, in the grass and the currant bushes growing outside the Zenfl Wing, Schlumm could only find eleven tracts. The others had been carried off by the wind, but also, doubtlessly, by interested people or Untermenschen. Schlumm felt encouraged by the results of this first strike and quickly came up with a second. His target was still the inhabitants of the Zenfl Wing, where his dramaturgical existence had already been remarked upon by the care staff, and where the idle and curious abounded. Standing near the currant bushes, sunk to his ankles in loose earth, he rolled the tracts between his hands until they were perfectly-shaped pellets. The night and the rain had caused the paper to gain weight and, for aerodynamic reasons, he couldn’t reuse the pages as they were. The eleven tracts were once again thrown through the dormitory window, this time from the outside in. Four or five pellets rolled under beds and were lost, others didn’t reach the inside of the building, fell back into the bushes, and were torn to irredeemable pieces. But the information had circulated, undeniably. And rumor was going to be born and make waves, first in the Zenfl Wing, and then in other parts of the camp. The grapevine was going to work wonders. All that week, Schlumm let his mad hopes grow. He fantasized about the audience to come.

Hence his bitterness, hence his great bitterness.

During the spectacle, like I said, Schlumm sometimes closed his eyes, and sometimes opened them. When he lifted his eyelids and succeeded in sending his gaze beyond his dramatized worlds, the images he received included birch trunks, plants, puddles, and earth. There was nothing else among the unmoving silhouettes. The public hadn’t come. That Tuesday, that Wednesday, and that Thursday, neither fanatics of post-exotic theater, nor lost hikers, nor even other forest mammals witnessed the performances that Schlumm had so blatantly advertised.

In the public’s defense, it must be said that the theater’s location was only accessible by a long trek through the woods, the last few kilometers being a series of increasingly-muddy passages. The choosing of this marginal scene had been dictated by ideological considerations as much as Schlumm’s harsh schizophrenic timidity. No one had questioned him about it, but if they had, he would have once more proclaimed his refusal of official literatures and the facilities from which they benefit in exchange for their complicity. Schlumm hated the star system and didn’t want to be ground up in that machine, such as by performing in a more traditional setting, like the Zenfl Wing’s inner courtyard, or the canteen, or the offices reserved for the care staff. Moreover, Schlumm thought that the depths of the forest would allow him to explore his art without concession, far from the snobberies and prejudices of urban centers, zoos, or camps.

Schlumm left for the forest; he reached the miniscule stage, surrounded by silvery trunks and silence, an ideal spot for a post-exotic trance, nearly as favorable for shamanism as a cell in a high-security sector. He unloaded his meager equipment and, once the woodland scene no longer resembled a woodland scene, he began his vertiginous dance with the Bardo before death and the Bardo after death. He created spoken silence, to borrow a term he liked to use to qualify his theater. Then, when the spectacle was over, he packed up his belongings, ate an apple, and returned to the Zenfl Wing — which is to say his home, which is to say our home — to sleep.

The rain fell on the first day in violent showers, but after that the weather, however fickle, was no longer unfavorable for Schlumm. If there were any incidents, they weren’t due to meteorological malice, but instead to the fact that the trees were laden with birds whose stridencies often came into direct competition with the actor’s numerous voices, and whose intermittent evacuations interrupted or humiliated him. Even though he considered himself an Untermensch, Schlumm hated getting excrement on his face. He would have liked to keep going and not stop, but he always failed. The droppings were acidic. When they fell into his eyes or mouth, he had to wipe them away completely before he could continue experiencing his text.

Bogdan Schlumm played every role himself; he hadn’t had the chance to get a troupe together. Of the three actors he had considered, one was in a state of depression much too intense to memorize a monologue or even stand mutely against a tree trunk somewhere, the second had been shot for trying to escape, and the third, after several consultations with the care staff, had made it known to Schlumm that he had engagements elsewhere and would not be available this season, or any of the following. Schlumm had thus decided to say and do everything himself, as usual.

The pieces on display, in the presence of obscure beetles and waterlogged trees, belong to an ensemble named The Seven Bardic Playlets, which Bogdan Schlumm also called The Bardo of the Medusa, to allude to the gelatinous nature of the voices and characters introduced. Bogdan Schlumm has always held that these scenes must be performed simultaneously, on a stage likely to welcome all seven settings and groups of actors at the same time. To the best of my knowledge, no theater company has ever performed The Bardo of the Medusa and followed the author’s extremist instructions. There have been many aberrations staged in the realm of experimental theater, some of them reproducing carceral reality with a sickening minimalism, some of them dangerous for both the actors and the audience, others revolting, others still quite simply ridiculous, but that particular aberration has never reared its head. Nowhere in the camp or the world have Bogdan Schlumm’s seven sketches been depicted fully and simultaneously. At one point during his stay in the Zenfl Wing, he tried his hardest to make us believe that a troupe of amateurs in Singapore, the “Baba and Nyonya Theater,” staged regularly, on every second Sunday in November, the Seven Bardic Playlets in their most radical polyphonic form. According to Bogdan Schlumm, the Asiatic audience came all the way from Sydney, Hong Kong, and Nagasaki to see these performances, with the same enthusiasm that pushes fanatics of Chinese opera to travel the globe to witness in totality the fifty-five acts of The Peony Pavilion. Upon inquiry, the Singapore story reflects Schlumm’s repressed desires, his risible dreams of large-scale glory, in complete contradiction to his hostility toward the star system. In reality, Schlumm shamelessly exaggerated the facts. The “Baba and Nyonya Theater” had put on one bardic play one time, Last Stand Before the Bardo. The room had remained empty from start to finish, so the actors decided to cancel the second showing, scheduled for the following day.

Over the course of those much-vaunted days in the summer of 1342, the three sketches from The Bardo of the Medusa were also not performed simultaneously. By taking on exhausting feats of acrobatics, Schlumm could play multiple characters at the same time, but he had neither the strength nor the technical prowess to perform all three plays at once. So he put them on in succession.

Tuesday was dedicated to No Objective, whose theme is impossible scientific exploration of the Bardo. Despite the heavy precipitation, the text was spoken without any sort of interruption, and entirely through a long, improvised, very striking pantomime, revealing Borschem, neither dead nor living, nor even living-dead, suffering from asphyxia and despair inside the Bardo instead of returning to the room where the monks who organized the fatal dive are waiting for him.

On Wednesday, Bogdan Schlumm performed The Coal Company, a short, sober play, whose dramatic intensity he rendered with a delicate touch. The forest’s natural decor didn’t help his efforts to replicate the darkness of the mine, the terrifying darkness of imprisonment under rock after a firedamp explosion. At the moment when Schlumm emitted the two survivors’ first breath, the sun was playing hide-and-seek between the birches and the clouds, coloring the stage with fantastic rays and making Bogdan Schlumm squint, undermining the credibility of his performance. Above him, the starlings spoke up. I’ve already talked about this plague. A flight of five-hundred individuals, at least, settled over Schlumm to discuss all their problems, passionately. They chirped, they whined, their racket didn’t mesh at all with the enclosed, shadowy, tomb-like space where two unfortunate men were trapped, reciting the Bardo Thödol before the cadaver of one of their comrades, not really believing in Buddhist doctrine and slowly becoming jealous of the dead man. The birds made Schlumm’s theatrical task excruciatingly difficult. Furthermore, as we’ve already bemoaned, they targeted Schlumm with their fecal matter. Schlumm clenched his teeth, but quickly lost his verve. He shortened replies or awkwardly dragged them out, all the while whistling and gesticulating to chase away the offending fowl. His head and shoulders were covered in guano. That Wednesday would not leave any major marks in the annals of bardic theatre.

On Thursday morning, new rainstorms arose, brief, gray. They dispersed the hordes of starlings. Afterward, a damp calm reigned in the forest, troubled, yes, by a company of magpies who for a few minutes threatened to reproduce above Schlumm the previous day’s hell. Their cries were annoying, but the episode was short-lived. The magpies flew away and never returned. Bogdan Schlumm performed Mishmash at the Morgue, a humorous, somewhat-facetious bardic skit. His work as an actor was excellent that day, he may have even gotten his message across.

I have always regretted that only a handful of minor invertebrates, slugs or others, in general devoid of literary savvy, were witness to this brilliant performance.

Even though no one asked me to, I will put here, as an appendix, a summary of Bogdan Schlumm’s three pieces. They can very easily be skipped over. No one listened to them, so no one has to go through the trouble of reading them; you can just skip over the pages and move on.

NO OBJECTIVE

The setting’s cast is comprised of four voices:

Djonn Gavianiouk, monastery Superior

Wilson, monk

Meyerberh, monk, instructor

Borschembschôôschlumm, also known as Borschem, monk emeritus

Over these four voices are grafted, toward the end, a chorus of whispers.

The scene opens in a large underground gymnasium, its sole opening an armored entryway and, at the end, a hermetically-sealed oven door. The instructor’s voice can be heard setting the pace for exercises. Springed machines are grating, a body is skipping rope, exerting itself, shadowboxing, or punching sandbags. The instructor is shouting things like: “That’s enough, Borschem!” or “Stop breathing!” or “You don’t need to breathe!”

The Superior has invited Wilson, an ordinary monk, to witness the last of Borschem’s training before his departure. He explains to Wilson that he, Wilson, an individual of mediocre spiritual capacities, very bad at yoga, normally shouldn’t be present in this secret room, situated well below the monastery’s cellars. We’re here, says Gavianiouk, in one of the Bardo’s antechambers. The Superior was keen on getting Wilson to come so he could fill the role of naïve witness. Wilson’s guileless remarks will be useful for the designers of the experiment. What is the experiment? Borschem is going to be sent into the Bardo beyond death, thanks to the particular training he’s been subjected to for the past fifteen years, he’s going to stay down there for three weeks, and then return to base.

Wilson is not at ease. He finds being so close to death distressing. He’s frightened by the idea of Borschem’s passing through what appears to be a boiler door. The Superior responds: it’s just a simple corridor. Gavianiouk reminds him as well that he cannot break Borschem’s concentration by calling out to him. Borschem was once a very close comrade, a sworn brother to Wilson, but he is excluded from addressing him, asking him anything or bidding him farewell.

In fact, Borschem’s state is already different from that of the living. “His body is alive,” says the Superior, “he moves and expresses himself, but, at the same time, he’s right on the point of being elsewhere, so much so that he already looks like one of the deceased wandering through the Bardo, in the world after death.”

Wilson has trouble recognizing the man sculpted “in dusty plastic,” but he still feels a brotherly love for him. He worries around Gavianiouk. What will happen to Borschem when he returns to the land of the living? Won’t he be forever traumatized by his journey? The Superior avoids the questions. The only thing that matters is for Borschem to report on objects and details, and that his dive furthers understanding of the Bardo, meager as it is at the time being.

Wilson approaches Borschem. He is undergoing one final transformation before his departure. He’s stringing together extreme physical exercises while holding his breath, since he won’t be breathing during his stay in the Bardo, scheduled to last a little over three weeks. He speaks breathlessly. He truly is a skilled monk, ready to endure the worst travel conditions imaginable. However, his conversation with his instructor Meyerberh has left him with a palpable anxiety. The experimenters plan to revive him on day twenty-nine of his journey. Fair enough. But what if time in the Bardo doesn’t line up with the land of the living? What will happen, for example, if one day in the Bardo corresponds to half a second in the monastery? Or, going the other way, if it’s a month to the living, or a year, or even longer?

Meyerberh reassures Borschem. He’ll have a distress beacon on him that he can fire if there’s a problem. A tantric team will be on-call night and day, ready to resuscitate him with special drums, horns, and magic spells.

Neither the trainer’s nor the Superior’s explanations fully reassure Borschem, or Wilson. Meyerberh and Borschem review the basic hypotheses for survival in the Bardo while Wilson, silenced by Gavianiouk, looks on. He hears a suite of convincing-enough instructions, such as: “If the darkness around me becomes unbearable, I’ll close my eyes, I won’t lose my good cheer, I’ll move like blood beneath the skin, I don’t need light to know where I’m going,” or “If a sea of fire envelops me, I’ll close my eyes, I’ll take refuge in the rattling of my bones, I’ll keep a joyous heart, I’ll dance as I move, like a flame among flames, I don’t need to be incombustible to walk through fire.” These phrases are quite lovely. There are about ten of them. The last one is most remarkable: “If my distress beacon doesn’t work, I’ll open my eyes, I’ll open my mouth, I’ll contemplate my situation with joy, I won’t move as I wait for your instructions, I don’t need the distress beacon to signal my distress.”

In Borschem’s mechanical recitations, Wilson keeps sensing zones of reticence. The Superior shrugs. He sweeps Wilson’s doubts away with a gesture. Borschem isn’t feeling anxious, he has been ready for the dive for years, he’s already visited the Bardo a thousand times in his meditation sessions, he knows he can overcome the perils there.

As one final review before departure, Meyerberh recites some excerpts from the Bardo Thödol, which will be read in its entirety, without interruption, near the door to the Bardo, so that Borschem can calculate how many days have passed since he began his dive. Each day corresponds to a precise piece of text. Borschem will only need to recognize an expression, a few magic words, to know where he is in the schedule. Meyerberh recites a phrase, Borschem says its exact location in the book. For example: “The sound will break like rollers on a rocky shore, and you will hear: ‘Attack! Destroy! Kill!’ while a series of magical syllables fills you with fear. Do not fear. Do not flee.” Day seven.

Unfortunately, Meyerberh also mentions parts of the Bardo Thödol that Borschem shouldn’t have to hear during the experiment, speeches meant to guide the traveler beyond the twenty-fifth day. Borschem identifies them and protests: this part of the book doesn’t concern him. He’ll be revived at the start of week four. If the monks are reading these lines, it means he wasn’t brought back to the land of the living in time.

The instructor assures Borschem that no one’s even thought about the experiment failing, improbable as it is. The Bardo doors are in perfect working order, and will be reopened for him on day twenty-five. Borschem really has nothing to fear. Every last detail has been studied in depth.

Borschem doesn’t reply, but he appears to be more suspicious than at the start of training. Wilson, for his part, is now certain his brother is going on a suicide mission. He tells the Superior this. Gavianiouk doesn’t let him continue, since the departure ceremony has begun.

Several monks have formed a line to the door. They watch Borschem pass by them and whisper magical incantations from the Bardo Thödol: “Oh, Compassionate Ones, Borschem is going to leave this world for the hereafter. . In the Bardo he will have neither friends, nor protectors, nor strengths, nor parents. . He is entering into silence and darkness, he is going where stability does not exist. . Soon he will be terrified by the voices of the Lord of Death. . Oh, Compassionate Ones, protect defenseless Borschem. .”

Borschem sits, without breathing, before the iron door, while Meyerberh unlocks the hermetic seals. The metal screeches. Borschem points out that the door opens into a boiler, into something very clearly an oven of some sort, but someone retorts that it is just a corridor. He balks at going inside, but, seeing no other options than entering, he enters.

Wilson, in his turn, accompanies Borschem’s departure with prayers: “Oh, Compassionate Ones, save him from the Bardo’s long, narrow passage. . Help him. . He is powerless. My brother Borschem is completely powerless. . He comes at the moment when he must go alone. .”

Sounds of flames, metallic sounds, the door closes.

There is then silence, darkness. We have passed with Borschem into the Bardo. We try to interpret the miniscule echoes and scratchings. We hear Borschem moving. The silence lasts for a long minute. From the other side of what is maybe still the door, we then hear a voice. It is very deformed, as if it has traveled a long time through a pipe. You’d have to be a specialist in order to decipher it.

Borschem listens carefully. He is that specialist. He is dissatisfied with the sound’s quality. He complains about the fact that his journey is going to be ruined by poor acoustic conditions. While he is muttering, he suddenly realizes that his clothes are in tatters, and that he has lost his distress beacon. He then understands what the distant voice is reading.

It’s a passage found on the last page of the Bardo Thödol:

“Oh noble son, if you do not know the art of entering the right seed and do not master the art of entering the right womb, resist the desire to obtain a body and be reborn at all costs. Raise your head, think no more of those who you love who have stayed behind. Even on the last day, you can still avoid returning to the horrible cesspit of life. Take the inner paths, leave all the fetuses before you by the wayside. Enter the large dwellings made of precious metals. Enter the lovely gardens. .”

Day forty-nine.

This is a passage read forty-nine days after death.

The end of the journey has been reached, and Borschem has not been aware of any of it. He still does not feel the pangs of asphyxia, but he knows they will come soon enough. He didn’t notice the seven weeks he spent wandering. As an interloper in the Bardo, he managed to survive, but everything that happened during that time is foreign to him. He has no other perspective. He has no more time to return to the world of the living. The experiment has failed, the tantric team hasn’t revived him. Neither will he succeed, apparently, at leaving the Bardo as a fetus. There are no fetuses nearby. There is nothing.

The play ends with a rather distraught monologue by Borschem: “What gardens? What lovely gardens? Everything is dark and silent. . They’ve forgotten me. There’s no one. . What am I going to do now? What large dwellings? What inner paths?”

THE COAL COMPANY

The setting’s cast is reduced to two actors:

Moreno, underground worker,

Lougovoï, underground worker.

To the voices of the two actors are added the voices of two other characters

exterior to the scene:

Kamchatkine, engineer, rescue team coordinator,

Bandzo Grimm, lama.

The scene is plunged in a shadeless darkness. We are in mining tunnel, nine-hundred meters deep. There’s been a catastrophe. The two survivors, Moreno and Lougovoï, are unharmed. They have taken refuge in a narrow space, an intact tunnel blocked off by piles of coal and rock. Elsewhere in the mine, the disaster has reached grisly proportions. Flooded galleries, levels on fire, impassable wells, the alcove where Moreno and Lougovoï wait is, in reality, a tomb. No savior will soon come for them.

By intervals, miniscule bits of rubble fall into the dark space. Stones slide and roll over each other. Water seeps from somewhere next to the two men. The sounds are amplified in the encircling darkness.

The two miners have a work lantern with them. They’re saving it. They stay in the shadows, not talking much. They cough, they clear their throats. They know their chances of getting out are slim. One of the reasons they refrain from lighting the lamp is that it turns their shadows into horrible monsters. “It’s better to stay in the dark,” Lougovoï says. “In the light, we look like we’re dead. Like two dead men who’ve just woken up at the bottom of a crypt. It bums me out.” The presence of a cadaver nearby also doesn’t encourage them to push the shadows away. The deceased’s name is Yano Waldenberg; he is three-quarters buried in the rubble. Just his legs are sticking out. To escape this depressing sight, Lougovoï and Moreno leave the lantern unlit.

There are no perceptible human sounds beyond the tons and tons of collapsed material. Despite this, the two miners believe that several rescue teams are already on their way down, descending into the mine to look for survivors. This glimmer of hope keeps them going.

About a meter from where they are sitting, there is a beam to which is attached an emergency phone. The line, obviously, is cut. Nevertheless, Lougovoï keeps picking it up, taking the receiver off the hook, and calling. The operation is a morose one, as Moreno critiques with disillusioned comments. It’s improbable that the phone cables could have escaped destruction. Suddenly, there is a dial tone. It’s a miracle, contact is reestablished with the surface, and someone answers Lougovoï.

The man speaking to the miners is the rescue coordinator, a vicious engineer, Kamchatkine, who has in the past butted heads with Moreno and Lougovoï over union issues. They have no respect for him, and he, from their point of view, hates them for their anarchism. The conversation with Kamchatkine goes poorly. The engineer describes the magnitude of the damage: the level where the two survivors are interred cannot be cleared for several weeks. His announcement is frank. He doesn’t understand how the phone connection is possible and how Lougovoï and Moreno could have escaped death. After a remark from Moreno, the tone escalates. Kamchatkine is only interested in the dead, not survivors, his thoughts concern counting the dead who were part of Moreno and Lougovoï’s group, his compassion goes to Yano Waldenberg, an exemplary team leader, duly noted by management, unsuspected of terrorist involvement. The exchanges are so heated that both sides want to hang up. Unable to keep his anger in check, Kamchatkine passes the receiver to Bandzo Grimm, a lama who has come to give support to the disappeared and their families.

His is the presence that makes The Coal Company an actual bardic playlet. Bandzo Grimm is a lamaist priest whose spiritual authority is hardly recognized by Lougovoï and Moreno, since neither of them has ever been a fervent practitioner of Buddhism. In their personal history there are plenty of fights with management, affiliations with support networks in armed struggle, but few hours spent in meditation in temples.

Thus Bandzo Grimm’s urgent task is to convince the two miners that they will not be ideologically diminished by listening to and following his advice. Lougovoï and Moreno enter into a peaceful dialogue with the lama. Together they talk about death. The two miners have only a fragmentary idea about what is to come after, but the notion that they will walk for forty-nine days before being reborn appeals to them. It’s comforting. Bandzo Grimm has a persuasive voice, what he says is calming. After a while, the two men feel an active sympathy for the lama. Time passes, and, to fight against their dreary idleness, they accept Bandzo Grimm’s proposition: they will help Yano Waldenberg through his first steps in the Bardo, and, while aiding Waldenberg, they will learn what is essential for leading a good life, along with the fundamentals of good behavior after death. In fact, considering that they are not dying yet and that they are in greater need of psychological assistance than religious, Bandzo Grimm is asking them to prioritize Yano Waldenberg’s well-being over their own.

There Lougovoï and Moreno are, tasked with reciting the Bardo Thödol to Yano Waldenberg, or rather, in the darkness near Waldenberg’s legs, sticking out of the sooty rock. They take turns doing it. Bandzo Grimm tells them the prayers, admonitions, exhortations, and counsels to the dead over the phone, and they repeat them. Sometimes they repeat them directly, without letting go of the receiver, with an evident lack of faith, and sometimes they feel their way over to the dead man, because they have been struck by the power and imagery of one passage or another, and they deliver the lines with gusto. They perform hesitantly at first, as something in their anarchistic convictions urges them to tomfoolery, but they don’t sabotage the text. On one hand, the text is beautiful, and on the other, they don’t want to disappoint Bandzo Grimm.

Then their feelings change.

They start to despise the solicitude with which Waldenberg must be addressed, all the pomp and circumstance rolled out just to save him. They start to grow jealous of the dead man. Waldenberg gets to walk toward illumination or rebirth, he gets to hear the warnings and explanations every dead person needs to hear so as not to tremble with fear and despair, two voices are at his side taking turns reading the Bardo Thödol to him. While they, Moreno and Lougovoï, will die far from the light, alone and afraid, with no one to remind them how stupid it is to fight and struggle to be reborn, only to die once again.

The reading of the Bardo Thödol moves into a chaotic phase. Bandzo Grimm continues dictating the sacred text to the miners, but now neither man hardly makes the effort to pass it on in the direction of Waldenberg’s corpse. Lougovoï and Moreno sit away from the telephone and remain silent, or they hold monologues or dialogues about Kamchatkine’s or Waldenberg’s spinelessness, or they ponder their fate, the fates of the privileged, of the proletariat.

They feel even more exhausted.

They cough.

Bandzo Grimm’s voice crackles in the dark. It crackles endlessly. It describes a world of absolute darkness, where every deceased person can easily cross through tremendously thick walls or any other dark obstacle.

Lougovoï and Moreno listen to this in their coal prison, they don’t light the lamp, they cough, they clear their throats, and they wait.

MISHMASH AT THE MORGUE

This setting’s cast is also limited to two actors:

Becky Glomostro, student,

Verena Lang, unemployed.

To the voices of the two actresses is added the recorded voice of a supplementary character:

Djamling Schruff, lama.

A medical student, Becky Glomostro, has night-watch duty at the Medico-Legal Institute. Her job isn’t difficult; it consists primarily of struggling to stay awake. She reads, she makes herself coffee so she won’t fall asleep, she watches the motors that keep the housed cadavers cool. For extra pay, she was also asked to take a body out of its drawer at a predetermined time and place a tape recorder near it. The family, it seems, adheres to the belief that a voice should guide the deceased through his first moments in the Bardo. The dead man happens to be a person of note, Hoïgo Iougorovski, who has just been assassinated. The recorded voice belongs to a lama reading the Bardo Thödol.

Becky Glomostro wants to break the boredom of her guard. She invites a friend, Verena Lang, to come join her. This young woman has several psychiatric issues. It turns out that she was once sexually abused by Hoïgo Iougorovski, of which Becky Glomostro is ignorant.

Verena Lang’s presence disrupts the aseptic calm of the place. Before Hoïgo Iougorovski’s cadaver, Verena Lang recounts the rape to which she was subjected, then carries out a trial against the corrupt officials who run the city. She compliments those who fill them with bullets. She starts or stops the tape against better judgment, she switches the cassettes, and she quickly subverts the reading of the Bardo Thödol. To get revenge on Hoïgo Iougorovski, she scrambles the instructions spoken to the dead man. She stands in for the lama, sometimes identifying herself so that the dead man recognizes her, sometimes mimicking the lama’s voice to give Hoïgo Iougorovski the wrong advice. In order to give rhythm to her words, she uses a lucky gong, a chrome basin meant for disposed autopsy material.

“Unnoble brother,” she says, for example, “you who are called Hoïgo Iougorovski, you are now going to meet one of the creatures you tormented with your ignoble member, with your ignoble eyes, with your ignoble riches. You are going to try to escape her, but you won’t get anywhere. You’ll panickedly run from one side to the other like a beast caught in a trap. She will approach you to make you remember your criminal existence.” (Gong.) “Ask her nothing, do not appeal to her compassion. She is not there to help you, but to punish you. You’ll try even harder to flee her, and she will stretch ever farther over you to inflict suffering upon you.” (Gong.) “In the past the temples told you that you had to become one with the frightening entities of the Bardo to gain deliverance. But they were wrong, Iougorovski. Whether you flee or look for union, your fear will be immense. Listen to me, Iougorovski. Try not to scream, hide the trembling of your flesh. You will try your best to think about something else while she assaults you and defiles your most intimate organs, but you will fail. Your pain and sorrow will be a dead end, you should know that.” (Gong.) “I am Djamling Schruff, the lama your family hired to guide you to awakening. Listen to me. You will know neither awakening, nor deliverance, nor rebirth. You are going to be confronted with the ones you crushed beneath all your weight and terrorized with your member, and whom you had the ignominy to look at while you defiled them and while you sprayed them with your sperm.” (Gong.) “You will know no rest. They will heap on you terrible reprisals, many and many times over, and, when you try to crawl out of their grasp, they will trap you again and start anew.”

Becky Glomostro tries to oppose this sabotage, but, as she holds no esteem for the deceased, she lets herself be dragged into the cruel ceremony. She in turn addresses Hoïgo Iougorovski with words meant to mislead him. She is less obsessed with rape imagery than Verena Lang and lets her imagination run free. “Iougorovski,” she proclaims, “you are no more, you are in the ground. You are suffocating, you are struggling. You are a dust-sick bat, you would like to flit about but you have forgotten how to detach yourself from the dark ground. Your extremities twitch miserably. You will never get back up.”

To give theatrical weight to their curses, Becky Glomostro imitates Hoïgo Iougorovski’s voice. She comically exaggerates his terror, his spinelessness. She gives him grotesque, laughable attitudes. Hoïgo Iougorovski tries to cajole his persecutrices by offering them some dollars. He offers to intervene in their favor with the bloodthirsty divinities. Thanks to him, he claims, they’ll live like queens on the other side.

The situation has some humor, but remains fundamentally violent. The watch night takes on a fantastical tone. Becky Glomostro and Verena Lang leave reality behind, they enter the world of the dead and become the infernal instruments Hoïgo Iougorovski forged for himself by leading a criminal life. The reading of the Bardo Thödol at the deceased’s bedside transforms into a trial, then an irrational shamanic dance. Toward the end, the lights go out, the refrigerators stop humming, and it’s unclear if the two women haven’t actually fallen into a demonic universe where they must accompany the dead man or those like him in eternal castigation.

In his direction notes, Bogdan Schlumm insists on the physical traits of his characters.

“At the start, everything is normal and empty,” he says. “There’s nothing troubling about the mortuary’s atmosphere. We are in a world of birds. Becky Glomostro, and then Verena Lang, appear nude, their bodies covered in feathers. Becky Glomostro has a pearl-gray face, very pleasant to behold, above which rests an almost-phosphorescent emerald-green crest. She has amber eyes, still embellished by two downy circles, her hands are dark gray and very clean. Verena Lang is black, shiny, with the perimeter of her eyes dappled with electric blue, and on her stomach and back, gold-brown speckles. Her eyes are yellow, a mad and admirable yellow.”

There you have it. If you would like, you may now continue on.