Bardo or Not Bardo. Antoine Volodine
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certainly establish audible contacts, but not with him. Only with the manager of Studio One-Five-Zero-Nine. We spoke to each other over the radio when the waves transmitted.
I was on duty. I’m a reporter. I get sent to places my colleagues don’t want to go, in general from fear of boredom rather than misfortune or death. I’m the youngest, so it’s normal for me to get the drudgework. And now I’ve been assigned to report on the Bardo. I’m not complaining. The management decides where I’ll go, and I obey. Everything must be explored, so that the radio public is not ignorant of any of the strange nooks and crannies in the world. On my professional license, there is my name, Mario Schmunck, followed by a mention of my grandiloquent way of thinking. Mario Schmunck, special correspondent. They could have simply written that I’m a journalist.
“Are you receiving me?” I said. “Hello, can you hear me? Am I on air?”
Before my departure, I’d been set up with a device in my ear, and another in my mouth, near my uvula, supposedly so it wouldn’t get in the way. Communicating was a nuisance. It lacked power, parasites often made it inaudible. The Bardo is a part of the world, but wonders of technology don’t work in it. Since I’d arrived, my wireless systems had been malfunctioning.
“Hello?” I repeated. “Studio One-Five-Zero-Nine, can you hear me?”
I got a response.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll start then. Four, three, two, one, hello. Mario Schmunck here, special envoy for the Off-Shore-Info Broadcast. I’ve been asked to do a report on what’s going on here.” (A pause.) “We are currently in the Bardo. What is the Bardo? It’s not easy to define without resorting to complete nonsense. Since I’m addressing non-specialists, I’ll simplify. Let’s say that it’s a world before life and after death. It’s a floating state in which those who have just died awaken. A state or a world. Floating, either way.”
A pause.
“At the moment, it’s very dark,” says Mario Schmunck. “There’s neither up nor down, left nor right, nor any measurable flow of time. In any case, that’s the first impression people have of it. People starting their walk through the Bardo.” (A pause.) “Him, for example. This man here, this freshly deceased man is named Glouchenko. He can’t see a thing. He’s moving slowly, cautiously, through the shadows, but he’s a bit clumsy, and keeps bumping into obstacles. He’s already knocked over a stool, banged into a crate serving as a nightstand. He destabilized a shelf with a swing of his shoulder. He’s basically blind. Now, he’s heading toward a military trunk heaped with utensils and tableware. He’s going right over it. He’s going to trample it head-on.”
The impact is violent. Some of the tableware is dashed to the ground. The aluminum dishes bounce and roll away.
“Dammit dammit shit goddammit!” Glouchenko shouts.
Several fragile objects are in pieces. Vials, phials. Medical equipment. Glouchenko howls. He’s hurt himself, the shadows annoy him.
“He’s back in the thick of it,” Mario Schmunck comments. “He hit his right knee and toppled over, his arms swinging through the void. He’s hurt. It’d be better if he just stood still, but the darkness puts him on edge, so he’s agitated. He hopes he can find the basement. He’d like to place his hand on a circuit breaker, flip a switch, and get the power back on. So he started looking for a stairwell, some sort of passage down to the cellar. He has hardly any doubts about where he is. He’s certain he’s in a hospital dormitory or barracks. Barracks because he comes from a military universe, he was a second-class artilleryman before his death, he’d been sent to the equatorial front to civilize the Indian populations still hostile to the market economy. A hospital because his life ended in a medical post . . . in a nameless village, invisible in the forest . . . Anyway. Moving on. This Glouchenko doesn’t think for a second he’s nowhere, and that he’s just begun his journey through the Bardo. He’s convinced there’s a power outage. He doesn’t understand that he’s dead.”
Glouchenko makes his way through the scattered objects. Not incautiously, he shuffles his feet on the ground as he walks. He doesn’t have shoes, he is wary of glass shards, he doesn’t lift his legs. A metal plate accompanies him for a meter. He’s not walking on a wood floor. In any case, there aren’t any creaking boards.
“He doesn’t understand that he’s dead, no, not at all,” Mario Schmunck insists. “Like most of us, such a thought doesn’t even occur to him. The information has been given to him, however. He receives advice and explanations from a man speaking to him from the world of the living.” (A pause.) “You know, it seems quite simple, from the outside looking in, to pay attention to what a monk is murmuring in your cadaver’s ear. But in fact, no, it’s not so simple. You keep on. You imagine you’re in the dark, you’re still alive, and you’re the victim of a bad prank. You refuse to believe the evidence.”
Glouchenko is obviously hesitating in the darkness. His steps are heavy. You can easily imagine his clumsy movements, his crude, almost animal, stature, his absence of grace.
“He’s like a deaf man being serenaded with patience and compassion,” Mario Schmunck comments. “This dead man, instead of preparing for his encounter with the Clear Light, is looking for a light switch! He keeps his hands on the wall as he walks, his only thought getting down to the basement. His name is Glouchenko, he is thirty-five years old, he led a normal life . . .”
Far away, the Tibetan horns trumpet anew, and, much closer, a gong tolls. It emits a melodious, prolonged note. A superb note. It would make anyone want to join a monastery to hear it again, at any hour, day or night.
During this time, the special correspondent consults his file on Glouchenko. He turns the pages of a spiral notebook. Details abound, like in a police dossier. Mario Schmunck came prepared.
“I’ll summarize Glouchenko’s life,” Mario Schmunck announces. “Primary school, professional school, military service . . .”
The paper swishes as the journalist wields it.
“I’m just going to skim through this,” says Mario Schmunck. “Obviously, I’ll have to pass over some details . . . Delivery driver after the army . . . Buddhism attracts him momentarily . . . He pursues an education in a lamasery for eleven months, as if he were destined to become a monk, then gives it up . . . Often changed jobs between twenty-two and twenty-five . . . Duck killer on a duck farm . . . Gang of friends . . . Bad crowds . . . Dropout laborers, subversive groups . . . Radical propaganda, egalitarist speeches . . . Participates in a supposedly revolutionary heist . . . Eight years of reeducation with a strict diet . . . Prisoner’s medal for an endurance competition . . . New gang of friends from the camps . . . Social reintegration . . . Chicken killer on a chicken farm . . . Then he forgets all that, he enlists in Auxiliary Forces . . . He’s sent to export democracy to an equatorial district . . . Forests, swamps, creeper vines, giant centipedes, malaria, Cocambo Indians to subdue . . . In reality, he doesn’t have the time to get to know the country, or murder a single indigenous person. Just arrived at base camp, he helps unload a seaplane . . . A supply-crate explodes . . . Biological weapons, apparently . . . Glouchenko catches a deadly plague . . . It was thought he had been vaccinated before leaving, but he hadn’t. And then, yesterday, he died . . .” (A pause.) “A completely unremarkable life . . . Short, mediocre, incoherent . . .”
I don’t consider it useful to always say what I think, because it’s often shocking.
But I say this.
“A shit life,” I say.
A pause. Distant horns.
Gong. Silence.
Gong.
Now, the one heard is the voice of the officiant, the voice of Baabar Schmunck, the lama. It never stopped, but we weren’t paying attention for a while. And now, we hear it. The admirable vibration of the gong accompanies it.
“Oh Glouchenko,” Schmunck says peacefully, “oh noble son, at one time in your past life, we gave you an elementary religious education. And even if you drifted away from us,