Journey Through the Mirrors (26 page)

That was Madu. He’s working on some top-secret project with Sumsari and won’t tell any of us about it. Anyway, Sumsari said that I could record our lesson today. I’ve been having trouble mastering a few of the techniques he’s been teaching me. I’m hoping that if I record the lesson and listen to it again later, I’ll stand a better chance of picking up what I’ve been missing.

Logan heard a gentle male voice and figured it was Sumsari Baltik’s:

Sumsari:
I smell a delicious aroma coming from your bag.

Cassandra:
I baked you raisin scones. I thought they might remind you of England.

The rustling of a paper bag could be heard.

Sumsari:
These are wonderful, as good as the ones I enjoyed at a castle I frequented during my travels in the British Isles.

Cassandra:
I brought you something else.

Sumsari
(laughing): Where in the world did you find that? I haven’t had a good London porter since the Great Disruption.

Cassandra:
Camden brought it back from Switzerland. He just got back a couple of days ago.

Sumsari:
Thank you for this, and please thank Camden. I hope he had a productive trip.

The recording had been made two days after an entry Logan had read in the pages that had been ripped out of his father’s journal. Camden had
traveled to Switzerland because he suspected that Fendral Hitchlords had lied about how he discovered his set of the
Chronicles
at the Zurich train station. During that trip, Camden had spoken to several people who lived in the station’s ruins and uncovered evidence indicating that Fendral stole the
Chronicles
from the man who had originally found them, Giovanni Rast, and then killed him.

Sumsari:
So how is our mother-to-be? I can see by the glow on your face that motherhood agrees with you already.

Cassandra:
I’m fine. I have a few more months to go.

Sumsari:
Boy or girl?

Cassandra:
We don’t know.

Sumsari:
Would you like to know? I can show you how to find out.

Cassandra:
Do you have an ultrasound machine in here?

Sumsari:
No, but I do have a piano.

Cassandra:
How can your piano tell?

Sumsari:
Music can tell. More precisely, we can tell from a fetus’s reaction to particular musical sequences called the Coffa and Solokan progressions. Girls react to one, and boys react to the other.

Cassandra:
Even in the womb?

Sumsari:
Oh, yes. Would you like me to show you? Place your hands on your belly, and tell me when you feel your baby move. This first one is the Coffa progression.

Logan heard seven notes being played on the piano. There was a slight pause, as the sound faded away.

Sumsari:
Nothing? All right, this one is the Solokan progression.

There were more notes, different now and repeating.

Cassandra:
Oh! I felt two strong kicks! When you played the second sequence. Play the first one again . . . Now the second . . . Yes! The baby is kicking and moving. What does that mean, boy or girl?

Sumsari:
It means that you will have a boy.

More notes sounded again, of the second sequence.

Cassandra:
Where did you learn to do that? I’ve never heard of anyone predicting the gender of a fetus that way.

Sumsari:
I just tickle their souls. There is a sound constantly flowing all around us. These sequences enhance that constant melody surrounding us in a very subtle way. Babies are quite aware of it. They know when their soul is moved. One day, I will tell you more about my journey through Europe and what I learned at the castle. But that is not why you are here today. We are here to continue your violin training.

Cassandra:
Yes, that’s right. But I’m having trouble with the
son filé.
I’m just not able to get the proper bow angles, the pressure, the speed, or even the contact. I even went to the Library of Congress, or what’s left of it, and found a few books on it. I followed the explanations to the letter, but it didn’t seem to help.

Sumsari:
You are trying too hard. Stop attempting to become what you think a good musician should be. Instead, you must find your own voice. The great secret of the grand composers and musicians was that they created their own ways of playing. They created their own styles, rhythms, and techniques. Do you think that Mozart ever wrote a book about how to do what he did? What about Beethoven or Bach? Can a great poet ever write a poem about how to be a great poet, when the reason he is great is that he has found distinctiveness? Uniqueness makes one great, not conformity to what others say you should do or should be. There is only one way to play that violin sitting next to you, and that is Cassandra’s way! Stop trying to do it like someone else. What would Mozart have been if he tried to emulate Bach? What would the Beatles have been if they had attempted to emulate Beethoven? Each had their own sound, each had their own voice, each had their own groove. As it must be with you. Those books you read can only teach you what the author knows. But what if your destiny is to be greater than the author? Or simply different from the author?

Cassandra:
I’m not sure about that.

Sumsari:
Then I will be sure for you. I do not teach my students so that I can remain their teacher forever, I teach them so that one day, I can become their student.

Cassandra:
That is a wonderful goal. But I’m a long way from being your teacher.

Sumsari:
You are closer than you think. You only need to find your musical voice. If you wish to learn how to move a child in his mother’s womb, you need to listen for the voice of nature around you. Once you hear the voice of the earth, you can express it in unique ways.

This was what Logan was waiting for—Sumsari’s understanding of the voice of nature. He listened as his mother queried further.

Cassandra:
Are you saying that the earth makes an actual sound?

Sumsari:
Yes. Science calls it the Schumann resonance. The earth is like a massive tuning fork. Understand it this way. The conductor of an orchestra tunes the entire orchestra to middle A before the concert begins. But once the performance starts, each musician must express his own singularity and uniqueness yet still stay in tune with the rest of the orchestra. The earth does the same with every insect, animal, and human ever born. It endeavors to keep us in tune. The voice of nature runs through all of us, even though we may not hear it.

Cassandra:
What happens if we stop being in tune? Or worse, if the earth goes out of tune?

Sumsari:
I think we would look like the screaming man in a picture I once saw.

There was an extended moment of silence on the recording. The image of Munch’s “The Scream” flashed through Logan’s mind. Could it be that Jamie’s headaches were a result of the earth going out of tune? Were the earthquakes with no epicenters being caused by the same thing? And could all of this be linked to the mysterious phrase that was painted on the shaft of the whistle,
Wrap thin serpent to discover earth voice
?

Cassandra:
How long did it take you to hear the voice of nature? How long should I expect it to take me?

Sumsari:
That, my lovely lady, is called the journey. If any of us had the answer to the question of how long anything might take, we could have written the
Chronicles
ourselves. But until then, evolve, create, and teach yourself to play in a way the world has never witnessed before. It is the only way to engage in any task you undertake. If you teach that to your son, you will do him a great service.

With that, the recorder clicked off. Logan looked at it and saw that there was another recording on this chip. It was from later that afternoon. He pressed the Play button and heard the rustling of papers before his mother spoke.

After my lesson with Sumsari, I went over to Deya’s. I told her what Sumsari had told me about the voice of the earth and that I needed to discover my own way of playing the violin. She smiled and told me to follow her and to bring my violin with me. We went downstairs to her meditation area. She told me that when she was a child, she dreamed of becoming a singer. But she wasn’t able to accomplish her goal. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I told her that she’d sung beautifully at our wedding a few months ago. She grinned and told me that she couldn’t have done that two years before. She agreed with Sumsari: as long as we have expectations of how things should be, we will always be disappointed. She told me that before the Great Disruption, she and Babu traveled to a city in southern England. While they were strolling down a street there, they came upon a poem stamped into the concrete.

I wrote down the poem Deya recited so I wouldn’t forget it. It went like this:

Arise from the earth like water,

Give birth to your sacred dreams,

This world is an ocean of mirrors,

An invitation to create and be seen.

Deya told me that she’d never forgotten the words, but it wasn’t until she read the
Chronicles
that she fully understood what they meant. She agreed with Sumsari’s assertion that we have to create something new; we can’t create something that already exists. That is not creating, that is duplicating, just as it says in the
Chronicles.
She told me that she learned to put these words into practice. I asked her how, and she pointed to the mirror. She repeated some of the words from the poem again:
The world is an ocean of mirrors, an invitation to create and be seen.

She told me to look at three words in that sentence:
mirror, create,
and
seen.

She turned, looked into the mirror, and closed her eyes. Somehow I knew to step back from her. Her body began to sway slowly back and forth, as if in time to music that only she could hear. She opened her eyes and looked at her reflection just as she had instructed me to do. Several minutes passed as she gazed into the mirror and then began to sing. I have no words to describe the purity of her voice and how utterly transfixed I was by it. I didn’t understand a word of what she sang in her mother tongue of Hindi, but I felt her emotion. I felt lifted. She continued to sway in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. When she was finished, she closed her eyes and stood motionless for a few moments. Then she turned to me and said that simply watching your own reflection perform a task can train your brain to help you become what you desire.

She repeated the three words from the poem:
mirror, create, seen.
She told me that the secret to the art of Reflecting is to reach the moment when you don’t know if you are the reflection or the one looking at the reflection. She said that sincerity and lack of expectations were the keys to reaching that state. She picked up my violin and handed it to me.

I knew what she wanted me to do, but I was too uncomfortable to play in front of anyone. Deya didn’t take no for an answer. So I tried. It didn’t work. Deya told me to stop trying to play the violin perfectly, stop trying to imitate what she had done. She told me that I needed to play as Cassandra the creator and not Cassandra the imitator. It was the same thing that Sumsari had said. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The short musical sequence that I had heard Sumsari playing for Madu when I had entered Sumsari’s studio earlier that afternoon came into my head.

Logan heard his mother hum the sequence a few times. It was the same melody that Jamie had been humming at the doctor’s office that morning.

I opened my eyes and began to play. I played better this time, but I was still too conscious of Deya’s presence. She was right, though. There were moments when I felt as if I was the person in the mirror looking back at me. It is very unnerving for your perspective to shift like that. At one moment, I’m looking at my reflection in the mirror, and in the next moment, I’m the person in the mirror looking at myself. I lost track of who and what was real.