EXCERPT: “Conducting” from Book 1 “Perceval”

copyright C.C. Yager.  Please do not copy, print or reproduce without written permission from the author.

Evan straightened, inhaled a deep breath, exhaled, nodded and handed his half-full water bottle to the stage manager.  The door swung wide.  With confidence, he strode on stage through the cello section, his shoulders squared and chin up.

Applause rippled the air.  Evan bowed, taking in the mass of faces, the giant sparkling crystal chandeliers overhead and the serene gold goddess statues at regular intervals along the walls of the Grosser Saal of Vienna’s Musikverein, home to one of the best orchestras in the world.  Evan leaped up onto the podium and faced the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra, baton in hand, the symphony’s score open to the first page on the conductor’s stand at waist height.  Above and behind the orchestra, burnished organ pipes extended to the ceiling.  The applause subsided into the silent, energized anticipation he’d loved all his life.

Evan gave the downbeat for the basses and cellos to begin the Caine symphony’s dark introduction.  His arms winged wide as if to embrace the violins.  Their bowing mirrored his fluid movements.

He knew the grief in this music.  Moving his left hand like a seagull riding a gentle air current, Evan quieted the strings as the main theme’s taut melody emerged.  The violins played over a menacing line in the cellos, basses and bassoons where he heard Caine’s musical voice again.  His sense of time faded into Caine’s musical time which filtered through his body and guided his hands.

He had been four when Uncle Joe had pulled him out from under the piano, his favorite place to listen to Uncle Joe play or compose his music, and stood him before the keyboard.  He’d smelled of wood smoke and oranges that day.  Uncle Joe had taught him the C major scale, the correct fingering and arpeggio chords.  His music education with Uncle Joe had begun.

Uncle Joe’s music swelled, and with it, Evan swayed up on his toes and down.  Strings and woodwinds keened the return of the introduction.  Evan nodded for the brass to enter.  The music ascended out of its sorrow but then dissolved into a grim ostinato.  He controlled this angry lamentation, the pizzicato strings, the piano’s brash chords, and the acceleration into a caricature of itself as Caine intended.  The galloping rhythms vibrated within his body.  He thrust his arms up as if to release them out over the musicians.  They were all of one mind, one body: Joseph Caine’s.

Evan wanted to live here forever inside music, sound, emotion.  Music had been his home since before that first lesson with Uncle Joe.  Music had filled the Caine’s house.  He had felt love there, safe and protected, and had wondered if he had been born into the wrong family.

Evan brought his arms close in to his body, to restrain his beat for the dirge that diminished into the first movement’s final notes.  After the cut-off, he brushed a lock of his hair away from his eyes and allowed himself a wry smile.  Uncle Joe had told him once that music was the brandy of the damned.

copyright C. C. Yager.  Please do not copy, print or reproduce without written permission from the author.

The synopsis for Perceval can be found on the “Synopses” page.  

“Escape” — Excerpt from Book 1: “Perceval”

 (copyright C. C. Yager.  Please do not copy, print or reproduce without written permission from the author.)

Outside on a deserted, shadowy Boesendorferstrasse, the vermilion and beige Musikverein concert hall loomed opposite the rear of the hotel.  Evan checked to his left.  Stacked, bulging canvas bags supporting metal beams surrounded a mound of gravel and dirt.  Beyond the dirt stood the hotel’s three large garbage dumpsters like open fish mouths pointed at the night sky.

First, he smeared dirt over his face, hands and clothes from the mound.  Stepping beyond the dirt, he checked the first dumpster: recycled bottles.  Paper and cardboard containers filled the second.  The third stank and offered what he wanted: food waste.  He hid the Scotch bottle behind the dumpster and hoisted himself up and over its side.  The hotel’s back door burst open.  He ducked down, his feet sinking into the squishy muck.

“Scheisse,” a woman said.

Evan peered over the dumpster’s side.  A mini dress of transparent gold material shimmered over the woman’s naked body.  She riffled through her purse, muttering to herself, swaying on stiletto heels.  One of Richard’s luscious Fraeuleins.  She stumbled across the street, still looking in her purse, headed toward Canovagasse.

The garbage.  Holding his breath, Evan smeared the rotting, slimy food on his face, his neck, and rolled in it.  When he climbed out of the dumpster, his eyes watered from the stench and he felt queasy.  He retrieved the Scotch bottle.

At the corner, Evan peered around the hotel’s wall.  Halfway up Dumbastrasse, the Arts Council guard Dave leaned against the hotel, smoking a cigarette, nonchalant, confident, the only other human on the street.  Although Evan had imagined this moment over and over, the reality terrified him.  Dave flicked ash onto the sidewalk.  A snatch of music came into Evan’s mind, something his mother had sung to him in German when he was a boy.  She’d told him it came from Die Dreigroschenoper, The Three Penny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and the dirge-like ballad told the story of a dangerous man, a shark of a killer.  At Juilliard, he’d learned the jazzy American version of the song in English: “Mack the Knife.”

Evan pulled the old bush hat down on his forehead and stooped as he ambled drunkenly across the sidewalk under a streetlight.  He sang in German the ballad about the shark with razor teeth.  Dave noticed him, straightened with interest.

“Hey!” Dave called.

Evan swayed across the street, swinging the Scotch bottle, slurring the song louder, the part about a corpse on the street and a shadow flitting around a corner, as he reached the opposite curb.

“Hey, you bum!  You know what we’d do with you in America?”

Evan heard Dave’s running footsteps behind him.  He couldn’t react, couldn’t show his face.  Dave shoved him to the ground.  The click of his switchblade punctuated his gleeful laughter.

“I’ll tattoo your heart with my little switchblade.”

Evan hid his face, whimpered into his hunched shoulder as Dave grabbed him.

“Oh!  You stink like shit!”  Dave released him and backed away with, “Drunken shit.  I’d call a street cleaner van for you in America.”  He slapped his hand on his jeans, rubbing it against the denim.

Evan’s heart raced and his whole body had gone weak and wobbly.  He crawled to the next corner where he used a building wall to steady himself as he stood.  He glanced back.  Dave walked toward the hotel, throwing stones in the Musikverein’s direction.  Dave had believed he was a drunken bum.  Evan smiled.  He walked toward the brighter Ringstrasse, the curved, tree-lined boulevard that encircled Vienna’s oldest district.

(copyright protected: do not copy, print out or reproduce in any way without the author’s written permission.)

***The Synopsis for Perceval can be found on the “Synopses” page.***