Tesla (11 page)

The Duel

Once, a red-faced student accosted Nikola Tesla in the atrium of the Graz Polytechnic.

“Run home,” he said. “Study hard so that your professors love you even more.”

This student was a member of a fraternity and had a rapier scar on his face. And he was jealous. His name was Werner Lundgren, but they called him Tannhäuser, after Wagner’s hero who cried for help from the hell of pleasure.

“We all know that you’re good at burying your nose in a book,” Lundgren told Tesla. “But can you live life to the fullest, sing a song, or raise hell?” He emphasized the words, staring mockingly into Tesla’s eyes.

Tesla’s animated face assumed the blank expression of his ancestors, who knew how to respond to a challenge.

“How about tonight?” he retorted. “In the Botanical Garden?”

Tannhäuser nodded.

At this point of the story, I have to gently but firmly take the reader by the arm, as we are about to step into legend.

There are several disputed points: Did Nikola Tesla and Werner Lundgren, known as Tannhäuser, really meet in the botanical garden that evening? Did the storied drinking duel actually take place? Was the table covered with clinking glasses? Did Austrian and Serbian students shout and cheer for their champion? Did the room start to distort and spin? Did the waitress run her fingers through Nikola’s sweaty hair? Did Tesla’s opponent and cosufferer begin to waver and dissolve in the yellow light? Did Tannhäuser collapse together with his chair, and did his young head bounce off the floor? Did Nikola, deaf to the screams of his supporters, stagger out into the transfigured night?

Did the duel change Nikola’s life?

Was the duel the trigger?

CHAPTER 24

A Different Graz

The hangover opened Tesla’s eyes to a different Graz. People grinned like foxes and feral cats. Carriages and brewery carts full of barrels clattered over the cobblestones. Billiard balls clacked in ale houses, and students drank to each other’s health.

“Down with thirst!”

Tesla also started toasting with the merry students.

He wrote in his diary:
I should have thanked Tannhäuser for opening my eyes. If you want academics to recognize your knowledge, you have to renounce personal insight, because they don’t ask the questions that you ask. Students see only what their professors tell them they will see. An opportunist won’t direct his thoughts to anything that doesn’t bring a reward. Why? Because the right and light of his own existence do not guide his thinking. He thinks what he is allowed to think.

The city was lively, and so was he. In that different Graz, he turned into a different man. Before he went out for the evening, he would lick his finger and groom his eyebrows and mustache. He swaggered in an overcoat he did not know how to pay for. He borrowed more money from Murko the tailor. It was hard to tell whether a fly flew up Murko’s nose or whether he tried to smile charmingly. Nikola neglected his classes and started to spend more time with Tannhäuser. His friends knew a medical student nicknamed the Doctor, and whenever they called for drinks, they shouted, “That’s what the doctor ordered!” Tannhäuser clapped him on the back: “Niko is a great guy!”

On the green felt of the billiard table, Tesla envisioned geometrical figures. He deftly walked around the table, while the shots multiplied before his eyes. His back arched like a cat’s. He never made an unnecessary move.

As he played, he never stopped thinking about the motor without the brushes and commutator. The solution seemed to lurk on the other side of a translucent membrane. Success was like an invisible man whose hand he could shake at any moment. In Tesla’s homeland everything failed, so a successful man was considered a traitor. Success smelled like the January wind and solitude. Tesla was afraid of success, the presence of which he could almost smell. He feared success like a catastrophe. That fear may have prodded him to shout, “That’s what the doctor ordered!” and to play endless games of billiards.

“Everyone likes to be forgiven for something,” Szigety said, defending him.

Nikola woke up to a perfect break that scattered the balls and opened a game.

He did not play for buttons anymore, like he used to do with Mojo Medić. He played for money.

Antal Szigety came to see him at the Botanical Garden.

A slim young man with a wisp of hair across his forehead threw away a cigarette and came forward to meet him.

Szigety broke into laughter: “You look like a gigolo!”

Kosta Kulišić arrived as well, emancipated from any trace of kindness as usual.

“Don’t worry, these two don’t bite,” Tesla told the waitress. “They are quite tame.”

The friends played a game together.

“You need to know what your final shot will be as soon as you first scatter the balls,” Tesla instructed Szigety, brushing the hair from his forehead.

“He’s still innocent,” Szigety said to Kulišić when they went out. “He just looks at you with those eyes of his.”

“He’s a little bit scary,” Kulišić replied. “He is a scary guy.”

One Saturday afternoon when nothing else was in sight, Nikola put down his cue and went over to the table where people were quietly playing cards. They offered him a seat.

“Do you want to try?”

“I’d love to.”

Nikola surrendered to the game with the passion of a mathematician. His “angelic mind” tried to calculate all the possibilities held in a deck of cards. He followed the ebb and flow of luck that hovered above the checkered tablecloth. The invisible current of luck ran through the cards, so the players had to feel it. When he was winning, Tesla was elated. When he was losing, he experienced an inexplicable dizzy pleasure. With his thin mustache, neatly combed hair, and long fingers, he turned into a real gambler. He met people different from those he knew before. Drunks who staggered from the tavern like chickens with their heads cut off. Waiters who poured the first morning drink into the mouths of men whose hands shook too badly to hold a glass themselves. One of those wretches looked back at him.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” the man said in a mossy voice.

Outside was fog. Inside was cigarette smoke. Nikola kept gambling. Sometimes he returned the money to the sore losers. No one ever gave
him
any money back. Despite his quick intellect, the riffraff played better than he did. Fat Franz, whose double chin was as big as his head, robbed Tesla blind while telling him, “You’re a good kid. Why are you hanging out with scum?”

Things got so bad that Tannhäuser, red-faced, shouted, “Come on, slow down a bit!”

“Don’t shout,” Nikola retorted. “I can shout louder than you.”

“I can’t figure him out,” Szigety whispered to Kulišić.

“How can you figure him out when he can’t figure himself out?” Kulišić yawned.

“Why do smart people do stupid things?” Szigety persisted.

“I don’t know,” Kulišić answered darkly. “I’m not smart. And I never do stupid things.”

CHAPTER 25

Disappearing

Tesla did not stop.

He disappeared.

Everyone wondered where he was. His friends and relatives worried. Uncle Branković in Karlovac worried. Professors Rogner, Allé, and Pöschl worried. Big-nosed Kulišić worried. His three Mandić uncles worried. The tailor Murko, to whom Tesla owned money, worried. Some fellow students guessed that he jumped into the Mura out of desperation.

The men gossiped among themselves: “How could the son of such a father do that?”

“How could the son of such a mother do that?” the women murmured to each other.

Where did Nikola Tesla disappear to?

Kosta Kulišić unexpectedly found out when he applied for a position as a geography teacher in Maribor. Oskar Rösch, the school’s owner, interviewed him for four hours. He showed him around the town and left him in Taget’s tavern, across the street from the railroad station.

“I’ll get in touch with you.”

The young Herzegovinian surveyed the bar room and saw Tesla playing a game of piquet with some rough-looking men. Kulišić’s first thought was that—missing his opportunity to jump into the Mura in Graz—his roommate was pushing his luck for a second time in Maribor.

“Tesla, my goodness!” Kulišić yelled.

“Kosta,” Tesla beamed as he saw the well-known, imperious nose.

“You know, we thought you drowned in the Mura.”

With a smile, Tesla explained that an engineer had hired him for sixty forints a month.

“Why should I go back?” he said in a surprised voice. “I’m doing just fine where I am!”

In his head, Kulišić was already writing a letter to Tesla’s father. With an agitated eye, he scanned Tesla’s swaggering mustache from one end to the other. All in all, Nikola looked normal.

“I returned home reassured,” Nikola’s ex-roommate recalled later.

But soon after Kulišić’s departure, on March 8, 1879, Oldrich Taube, a Maribor city official, signed a document regarding case number 2160. The writ, initiated by local police, ordered Nikolaus Tesla, a person without any visible means of support, to vacate Maribor for Gospić, where his father lived, in order to “find gainful employment.” By March 17, the Gospić judge confirmed that Nikola Tesla had arrived at the specified destination.

Thus the fool and younger brother came back to the small town from the wide world. Just like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Nikola could now say, “I haven’t learned anything. I’ve forgotten even what I used to know.”

“What do you mean,
don’t?
” Father shouted at Mother. “Senile Granny Anka asks every man if he’s seeing a girl. She even asks her son-in-law if he’s seeing a girl. Whenever Nikola pays her a visit, she asks him the same question. And he just turns his head away.”

“Please don’t,” Djuka whispered.

“He didn’t want to become a priest… and why? To become a monk!”

“Easy, Milutin…”

The priest waved his hand at his wife. With that same hand, the one that so many people had kissed, he motioned Nikola to a chair.

“Sit down.”

Mother went out so they could talk. In the kitchen, she lifted the lid from the boiling pot of cabbage the color of gold. Then she stole back to hear what they were talking about.

“My God, the way you live!” the priest said with disgust as soon as his wife left the room. “I used to say: let him drink and gamble if only he could live like a normal young man. And then I heard that you did gamble. And that you did drink.”

You didn’t care about my top grades
, Nikola thought vengefully.
So how do you like this?

On the icon, Saint George, their patron saint, was killing a dragon, oblivious to what he was doing.

“You’re the one who lost the scholarship! You’re the one who got expelled from school! You’re the one who came home escorted by the police!” Father growled.

“God help me!” Djuka whispered behind the door.

“You don’t care about anything. Even the great Victor Hugo has written about us Serbs. This is what he said: ‘The Turks are killing off one entire nation. Where? In the heart of Europe!’ And what about you? How many times have you thought about your Serbian God and your people as you consorted with gamblers over there in Graz?”

“I may not have thought about those things very much, but I certainly did more often than Victor Hugo,” Nikola could not help saying.

In Gospić, Milutin criticized his son every time the young man took a breath. All his reproaches boiled down to this: he wanted a solemn promise from Nikola to quit gambling.

A mysterious, impish smile hovered on Nikola’s face.

Honesty was Milutin Tesla’s answer to any question that life posed. On his daily trips to the tavern, Nikola sometimes looked up at the clouds in the sky and wondered if Milutin’s honesty had any effect on them.

“Rest from thy righteousness and thou shalt live peacefully for the rest of thy days.” He mocked Father in the words of Abbot Pimen.

During the day, Nikola was lazy and apathetic. At night, he mounted the darkness. His heart beat one somersault forward, one somersault back. He ate little. He fed on the tavern’s lights, like a moth. Gamblers thought he was a weak-willed creature and an easy mark. With their servile and ironic grins, they greeted the man who was an irreplaceable part of the gambling scene. He, however, knew that he could quit at any time. Was he not the master of the will that “unlocked” hundreds of volumes by Voltaire and cracked any mathematical problem that came his way? He occasionally decided,
I won’t play again.