her shoulders. Charlotte could see Sarah in her dream and at the same time she was Sarah.
Sarah held her face to the sun and asked herself why she felt so calm. Maybe she was already dead? At any rate, she didn’t have a mind of her own any more. She was at Hans’s mercy, for better or worse. She followed him mindlessly through the day, waiting for his orders. For example now, when Hans came out of the house and signalled her to come over. One short order, 'Sarah!' Sarah moved without hesitation or thinking, unable to act in any other way. For a moment she asked herself whether there was any deeper significance in this perverse game.
Hans marched towards the cellar and as Sarah followed him down the steps she watched his sun-tanned, strong neck. She knew that there was a man living in the cellar, or perhaps he was incarcerated there? She had seen him once from a distance. He probably wasn’t Jewish, but he had the aura of an intellectual person. She had been astonished to see what Hans was doing with him.
With a dominant gesture, Hans gave her to understand to wait in the first room of the cellar. Suddenly she knew by intuition what was going to happen. But she couldn’t feel sorry, nor could she feel compassion. She only felt burnt out, empty and cold. She didn’t even wonder why Hans enjoyed her being present in this. So she just waited in this warm, well-lit, grey cellar and felt nothing apart from a tiny shiver of fear. She didn’t hear anything either, but when she heard Hans’s boots on the cement floor, she knew that the other man was dead. Hans obviously hadn’t shot him, but must have chosen some silent way of killing him.
She didn’t have long to muse about these things, because now she was ordered to undress. Hans had a way of giving and enforcing out orders that suggested they were sensible – perhaps to some extent unpleasant, but for the good of everyone present. He indicated that she needed to be taught a lesson and came towards her with his fist extended. When confronted with her strength and her well-sculpted abdomen he shuddered. Then he started to punch her in the stomach. By combining muscle tensing and breathing, Sarah was able to avoid being injured but she could not avoid the pain. She suddenly had the image of the Amazon in her head, the one she had dreamed of the other night. By letting the images of this strong, well-trained woman flow by her inner eyes, she felt a new strength rising in her.
Hans became more and more irritated. He couldn’t comprehend this. His restricted way of thinking prevented him from understanding that this strength had its origin in another life, in another time. Even if he could not consciously comprehend that this breathing technique came from a matriarchal culture, he did feel something that for him was unbelievable. Confused, he stopped beating her.
While she hastily put her clothes back on, she could feel his glances and it chased anxious shivers down her back. He would punish her for her strength. When he got up she followed him out of the cellar. She kept her distance but stayed within ordering distance. Something had happened to her down in the cellar. She had been shocked out of her numbness. The pain and the tension in her stomach muscles seemed to have revived an important element in her.
Feelings of horror spread inside her. She suddenly became aware of the things Hans and his comrades were doing around her. While she was confined to the house most of the time, cleaning and serving, she was now absolutely certain that the men around her were playing with suffering, torture and death, a cruel, ghastly game with other people, Jewish people. She also suddenly realised that the insecurity that Hans had felt in the cellar, when her inner strength was revived out of the blue and became evident in trained muscles, would endanger her. It could even be her death sentence. If she wanted to survive she would have to act at once. The perverse game Hans had been playing with her had turned serious.
Charlotte woke the next morning with a dull grey fear in her heart. She was covered in sweat and felt she had to take immediate action to flee this dangerous situation. The thankful, secure feeling of the Beltane ritual was gone, along with the joy about her meeting with Christiane, and the experience of feeling the energy flow deblocked in a woman who was a complete stranger. Now only fear and a dull, terrible desperation filled her mind. Last night’s dream was clear in her mind and the memory of that led her once again to feel the horror she had experienced in her dream. It was rare for her to remember her dreams so vividly.
She tried hard to wake up completely and to shake off the dream. With a lot of effort she got up. The dream seemed to have pulled the ground out from underneath her feet. She took a hot shower until she felt warm. Then she sat down to meditate. Once she was relaxed, she became aware of the grey, dull void in her abdomen. She tried to send light, love and warmth into her belly and this seemed to ease the greyness a little, but she remained emotionally very unstable.
The days that followed exhausted her. She dragged herself through each day, feeling deeply unsettled. If she was scheduled to coach new groups during the day, she almost panicked in the morning, feeling totally incompetent. It was a surprise to her that the coaching sessions seemed to be successful, no doubt due to her routine. The days cost her a lot of strength and energy and she was always glad to retire in the evenings, thinking her bed a safe place to relax. But once there, the dreams tortured her: again and again, images of Sarah appeared in her dreams.
Christiane called her for two more treatments. Once they met for a long walk through the frosty autumnal forest. Anona ran around them happily. She was perfectly obedient and Charlotte could feel the beginning of a loving connection growing between owner and dog. The long walk relaxed Charlotte and they walked in silence most of the time, only interrupted by short dialogues about their respective jobs, the nature around them or several times about Anona. Christiane told Charlotte that she had started a Tai Chi course. To begin with she talked slowly and haltingly, but she soon became more animated telling about her experiences and the people she had met there. After the walk, Charlotte once again gave Christiane a treatment and she could feel that the energy in her now flowed more constantly and that her heart chakra seemed to be slowly warming up.
The next few weeks passed quietly for Charlotte, her projects and group mediations running smoothly. She didn’t have that much work and so she submitted herself with self-discipline to a very strict sports programme and meditations mornings and evenings. By keeping this routine up she came slowly back into her own. If not for those nightly dreams of Sarah, she would have said she felt very well. These dreams deeply unsettled her and she felt herself in a very unstable emotional balance.
Then one morning Charlotte once again awoke soaked in sweat and with a terrified trembling in her soul. Images of black leather boots, stamping brutally in step, burnt behind her eyelids and reverberated in her ears. She curled her body tightly but the soaking-wet nightie clung cold and wet to her body. The fear became dull and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Her troubled mind started to bombard her with worries about the work piling up on her desk and apprehension of her next presentation. She started to sweat again. Sighing – almost whimpering – she got up, took of the wet nightie, had a wash and rubbed herself warm with a towel before pulling on a warm and soft sweater. Then she lit a candle in the kitchen and made herself a cup of Pai Mu Tan tea.
The soft, hot taste in her mouth calmed her but once more the images of violence caused by people in uniform passed through her mind. She remembered women crying, children desperately sobbing, and men laughing cruelly. There was also one cutting and harsh woman's voice. But the images seemed to be slipping away, the sounds she remembered becoming diffuse. The more she tried to grasp them, the more her memory seemed to empty, until all that remained was a cold, torturing fear.
Charlotte shuddered. She lit an incense stick before the figurine of the dancing Shiva. Then she sat down in front of the white Tara in her meditation room and asked for inner peace. Cleo came in and climbed onto her lap and leaned against her belly. This small body managed to emit an astonishing amount of warmth and Cleo seemed to fill the cold empty void inside her with her warming purring. Charlotte sighed deeply, laid her hands on Cleo’s body, and closed her eyes. Although she did not really manage to concentrate, all of a sudden she felt the inner
