Kashi. Daniela Jodorf

Phil. I have to see her. I just have to hear her play.”

      “You have never been interested in Indian music.”

      “It´s not the music, it´s her. I have to see her.”

      Phil had never seen Paul that spontaneous before, and he knew that nothing could hold him back.

      Paul conducted the concert with split awareness. Part of it was here in the Konzerthaus, doing what he had practiced countless times, mechanically moving his arms, giving signals and holding the corpus of the orchestra together. The other half thought about the woman, her name, her profession, her life. He tried to figure out, how old she was, where she might live and why he had never heard of her. This divided awareness did not diminish his performance. He conducted just as virtuosic and flawless as ever.

      Only shortly before the curtain fell for the intermission, he had a glimpse into the auditorium and tried to find the elderly gentleman. Paul spotted one empty seat in the middle of the third row. Surely this was his. Paul felt the same disappointment again that had struck him when the man had left the bar without further explanations yesterday. But he forgot the encounter immediately when he came backstage. The woman´s presence was too strong, too meaningful and too frightening. He could not think of anyone or anything else. In fact, suddenly anything else seemed meaningless and unimportant.

      He fled the scene once again when the final applause did not stop. After the third bow, he left the stage, pulling the first violin in the front next to Phil. He did not care if the audience would feel disappointed. He was no longer willing to keep up the habits. After all, concerts too followed the principal of giving and taking. He was disappointed too and people might as well see how he felt. They did receive his compositions much more openly than he had expected, but still they did not see, what he tried to show, they did not feel, what he tried to describe, they did not hear the story he had told. He felt helplessly stuck in a repetitive pattern and he did not find the exit.

      He almost ran back to the hotel through the freezing winter night. Huge orange trucks tried to keep the roads free from heavy snowfall that had again started during the concert. Men were sweeping and salting the sidewalk without Paul´s notice. He did not even get cold.

      As soon as he reached the hotel he opened his computer to search for Karen Garin on the net. She did not have a personal website, no social media account; she did not advertise herself. After quite a while he found a group of people chatting about her. The members called her "master of the sitar", a denomination that has only been achieved by Indian men so far. The group spoke of her very respectfully, and one girl called her "the only truly spiritual artist" she had ever met. Paul looked out of the window into big, fluffy, slowly sinking snowflakes. He tried to recall Karen Garin´s appearance and compare it with the judgments he read about her. She definitely was a special person. He had felt that too, that night. But he would never have found such words to describe her. "She is the modern day pearl in a long rosary of tradition that goes back to the time when the sitar was brought to India from ancient Persia", he read.

      The more he found out about her, the stronger he wondered, why she had approached him in New York. She did not come to the bar accidentally, he suspected. She must have sought for him intentionally. Why did she know him? How? And how the hell, did she find him? He had never been in that bar before!

      Some people had posted pictures of Karen Garin on stage with a drummer, after a concert, in a crowd of admirers. She seemed to always smile gently, but when Paul looked at the images more closely, her lips did not smile, only her eyes did. There was a gentleness in them, that deeply touched him. "Loving kindness", he thought. "She embodies loving kindness." Suddenly, he wondered, why he had feared her so much. And then he remembered: because of her self-assurance. He had feared the way she had talked to him: totally sure of herself and her message. There had not been the slightest doubt in her. A wave of coldness ran up his spine. Paul had felt this extreme certainty even stronger in his dream when she had told him to awake.

      When he tried to find her music on one of the video channels, that his work was frequently posted on, he did not discover anything. One thing was certain: she was not a mainstream artist. She rather seemed to reach a small group of people, who saw more in her work, than just entertainment. For them, it had a numinous quality, a spiritual aspect that was not simply owed to the Indian origin of her instrument. He spent half of the night on the net, but in the end, the information began to repeat. He had not yet found out, where she came from, where she lived, how old she was. The only reliable information he could get was that she toured with her band, a drum, a tanpura and a violin, for four months a year, from September till January, mostly in Europe and the States, but also in Asia and Australia. And she had played in a small venue off-Broadway the night they had met in SoHo.

      The orchestra had left early Sunday morning. Phil had been worried to leave Paul in Berlin.

      “I can stay with you if you want… if you need me…", he suggested carefully.

      “I appreciate that, Phil. But you don´t have to. I am alright and I will be alright.”

      “I hope this Karen will not be a disappointment.”

      “How could she. I expect nothing of her. I am just curious.”

      “Just curious? I am sorry Paul, but this is more than curiosity.”

      Paul laughed. “I guess your right. I will call you and let you know how it went.”

      Phil just could not stop worrying. “Will you really be okay all by yourself?”

      “Absolutely! Go and celebrate Christmas at home! I don´t know how long I will stay here.”

      Phil hugged Paul warmly. “Take care! I hope you will find, what you are looking for!”

      “Same to you!" Paul tried to smile but failed.

      Back alone in his room, Paul experienced a sudden shift in consciousness. He felt much more relaxed, relieved almost, and he was very aware of the fact that he was alone - not lonely, but with himself only. “When have I been alone, except at home in my apartment in New York”, he asked himself. For a very long time, he had always been somewhere with somebody, most of the time either with his family or with large groups up to a hundred people. When the orchestra traveled in the U.S. and overseas, he was responsible for the entire group. He was more than just the musical director. He was a mentor, friend, and teacher; a father almost for many of the younger musicians. He had never felt his responsibility as a burden, but that Sunday alone in Berlin he realized for the first time in his career, that there was no balance in his life. He was always responsible: as a husband, as a father, as a teacher, as a composer, as a conductor. Did Karen Garin mean realizations like this, when she had told him to be aware of his thoughts and feelings? It was peculiar, but Paul felt as if he really was more aware now – not because he tried to be, rather because she prophesied, he would be. It seemed like her will, not his.

      He liked the alone-ness and tried to explore the state of mind that came with it. He relaxed deeper, closing his eyes, feeling warmth and energy spreading in his body. His thoughts slowed down; fewer ideas, fewer plans, fewer soliloquies, fewer needs, fewer ambitions. His body felt static, almost immobile, but in a comfortable way. Paul enjoyed the relaxation and lightness. Suddenly he witnessed a strong, wide expansion in the area of his chest that seemed extremely liberating at first, but the next moment tears rolled down his cheeks and Paul started to sob heavily. He could not stop crying, for no reason out of the blue. This emotional outburst scared him. How could he lose control so completely and where did this sudden weakness originate? He did not see any reason for this acute sadness, and yet, cried over an hour. After that, he felt worn out, exhausted and very tired. He lied down on his bed and fell asleep immediately.

      When he woke up around six, his mood was back to normal and nothing reminded him of the sadness, that had swept over his mind and colored it so completely, that he did not have the slightest chance to escape. His heart center felt differently though, he noticed. It was wider, more open, less weighted.

      ◊◊◊

      On Monday Paul ran a few errands and tried to kill time in the archaeological Pergamon Museum. Even