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.