Bardo or Not Bardo. Antoine Volodine
came.
“Everyone’s over that way, for the Five Perfumes,” said Drumbog. “The monastery’s deserted. Nobody’s in the library right now either . . . If I hadn’t . . . If I hadn’t had to hole up in the bathroom . . . It’s always that fermented milk . . . I can’t digest it anymore, and I drink too much of it . . . How are you with fermented milk? Homemade Mongolian yogurt? Goddamn it causes some bad diarrhea!”
Kominform shifted.
“That you, Drumbog?” he asked without opening his eyes.
His dislocated voice didn’t vibrate beyond his mouth. He couldn’t be understood. He had a hiccup.
“He shot me in the stomach, the swine,” he said.
“He’s spitting up hemoglobin,” said Drumbog, having neither noticed nor deciphered Kominform’s mumbling. “It’d take a miracle for him to pull through.”
“In the lungs,” Kominform continued. “I’m going to die . . .”
“Kominform, can you hear me?” said Drumbog. “Can you hear me, little brother? Are you conscious?”
“I’m hurt,” said Kominform. “They got me . . . Old colleagues of mine . . . Converts . . . They work for the mafia now, for the billionaires in power . . . Social democrats and the nouveau riche and the like . . . There’s nothing worse than converts . . .”
The end of an iron wire had snagged the right sleeve of his coat and, whenever he tensed up a little to stammer, the fence started to creak. It was like someone writhing on a bad box-spring.
“Don’t wear yourself out, little brother,” suggested Drumbog. “Open your mouth. You have to let air find a passage through the blood.”
“That you, Drumbog?” asked Kominform.
“Yes, little brother, it’s me. I was on my way to the ceremony, the Five Precious Perfumed Oils, right? And all of a sudden I heard machine guns . . .”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Kominform. “Go. Don’t miss the benediction. Go on. Leave me here.”
His chest rose weakly.
He vomited blood.
The fence creaked.
“Anyway, I don’t have long,” he continued. “I’m done for.”
He clenched his jaw and went quiet. He hadn’t been an adherent to communism to show off, he hadn’t defended its principles to one-up prisoners. This was not the kind of man to weep in the face of death.
At that moment, the shells of dry vegetables cracked on the trail, the grass hissed. A hen fled, shouting in its avian dialect, put out from just almost being kicked. Someone was approaching.
“Holy cow!” Drumbog swore. “The killers are coming back! They’re going to liquidate any troublesome witnesses. Anyone would do the same in their place . . . It’s my turn next, you’ll see, I’m not going to cut it!”
His breath was short. A hint of sudden dread clutched his throat. The shrubs and folds in the fence hid the indignant hen from him, as well as the foot that had provoked its vehemence.
“In the past,” he continued, “if an astrologer had told me that my fate was to end up full of bullet holes while up against a henhouse, with a revolutionary communist by my side, I would’ve laughed right in his face . . . But everything’s connected . . . Cold yogurt, intestines . . . The blessing of the Five Oils . . . It was written . . .”
Whoever was walking down the path and stepping on beanstalks was now visible.
The surrounding atmosphere wasn’t dramatic at all: the exhalations of summer, vegetables yellowing in the sun, gallinaceans enjoying themselves, pecking at the dust, grasshoppers, gong echoes.
“They’re coming,” the old man mumbled. “They’re going to do me in . . . There’s two of them, a man and a woman . . .”
There were two of them, indeed.
The man was holding a pistol and had the shifty look of a soldier who now works in real estate, complete with the ridiculous blue three-piece suit. Perfect for real estate or insider trading. Heavy and respectable.
It was obvious at a glance that the woman had no relation to him whatsoever. She was more of a bird than a human woman anyway, strictly speaking. Her skin was covered in a very fine layer of silvery feathers, her clothing a gray researcher’s outfit. She moved with a dancer’s suppleness, and, when she spoke, it was to herself, addressing a voice recorder. Her name, like mine, was Maria Henkel. She was there to describe reality, not to take part in it. She was pretty, with a scar on her left breast, a heart-shaped mark that was easily noticeable since her outfit was more than form fitting.
“We are behind the monastery,” she said. “On the other side of the buildings, in the Temple of the Flaming Lotus, there is a ceremony underway in tribute to the Twelve Tutelary Divinities . . . Twelve or eleven . . . Perfumes are burned in their honor . . . Oils . . . A certain number are burned . . . Four or five, I think . . . They’re either burned or blessed . . . No matter, that’s not what we’re interested in today . . . I am right now beneath the windows of the library, in immediate proximity to the henhouse against which Kominform has collapsed. That’s what interests us.”
Kominform was no longer vomiting. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. He wasn’t troubled by the vision of the angel-bodied woman or the killer dressed in commercial blue. He wheezed.
“He has been hit by three bullets,” said Maria Henkel. “He is still lucid, but, in my opinion, he no longer knows it.”
“Those two aren’t with each other,” Drumbog assessed loudly. “The woman’s naked, she’s pretty, she belongs to a different civilization than our own. She must be a researcher from another dream. Just the guy with the pistol is dangerous . . . What’s the imbecile waiting for to shoot me? I’m ready . . . I don’t believe in his existence or the woman’s. Or mine . . . I’m ready to rejoin the luminous void which is the only indisputable reality . . . I shall remain tranquil, at the edge of things . . . indifferent to things, to their edge, to these people’s absurd lives . . . I fear nothing, I fear absolutely nothing, I . . .”
His voice rasped. Even if you feel ready to take a bullet to the head, your voice might still fail you.
“Here we are with the three characters in this tragedy,” Maria Henkel said.
First off, Kominform, alias Abram Schlumm or Tarchal Schlumm, a radical egalitarian, pursued by police worldwide ever since the world became exclusively capitalist, seeking asylum in the monastery of the Flaming Lotus. He is dressed in a soldier’s coat from civil war years, his preferred outfit since forever. He’s spitting up blood. He’s going to die. His death rattle is audible, the chaos of his heartbeats is audible. An old, almost centenarian, monk is propping him up tenderly.
This old monk is Drumbog, a Buddhist who believes in nothing, save for the absolute equality of suffering between men . . . Equality in suffering, which is precisely the minimum program defended by Kominform . . . Without reserve, Drumbog appreciates Kominform, his discourse, his praxis. He is the one who pleaded the community of monks to welcome and hide the fugitive, when the question came up, eight years ago. Eight or nine. Or maybe ten. This detail doesn’t interest us. Drumbog felt responsible for Kominform. He has also considered Kominform to be a bodhisattva, an enlightened man who has dedicated his existence to saving miserable humans, going into suffering to help the unenlightened free themselves from suffering.
Facing these two heroes, the wounded revolutionary and the Buddhist touched more by Alzheimer’s than grace, stands a man, the one responsible for a special political cleansing team, set up after the regime change. His name was once Strohbusch. He had put an operation together with an eye to negotiate with Kominform, he desired to convince him to disclose sensitive information, he didn’t want to liquidate Kominform, he had recommended to his agents to approach Kominform without