Tesla (12 page)

Then the demon’s falsetto called, “Let’s go to the tavern! You’ll win!”

It started with a yearning in his belly. An itching slowly spread over his body like oil over the table.
Perhaps… I might
—an uptight inner voice whispered. The whole world felt ticklish and irritating. He was like a man running to the bathroom, unbuttoning his pants on the way. Powerless. Passionate. Trembling. God unhooked him from the hook of his reason. God made him greed incarnate.

He gnashed his itching teeth.

The inner rhythm repeated:
I want! I want! I want!

His obsession led him to the place where fingers spat out and received the cards. He fell on his chair. He bolted his drink down. The brandy drove a spike into his heart, burned and wormed up his stomach. He felt the heat creep across his shoulders. His shoulders fell, his thoughts grew softer. A forgotten cigarette charred the edge of the table. He sighed and a shameful sense of surrender turned into a sweet relief.

One suicidal, boring winter night he lost all his money at the Lamb in Gospić, playing with a defrocked priest and Nenad Alagić. He went home and said to his mother, “Give me more money to win back what I’ve lost!”

Mother did not believe people could be changed—they could only be loved. She opened a drawer and handed him all of the household’s money. “Here you are. Lose it all. Get it out of yourself!”

Nikola left the house and went toward the Lamb where Alagić and the defrocked priest waited for another bout. And again he turned into a rolling rock. With each step, he tried to prevent his fall. His hands crumpled the stash of cold money. And his legs walked by themselves, carrying him along. And the force carried him. And he tried to stop it, like a brakeman yanking the lever on a train heading toward an abyss. Inertia pushed him on. Metal screeched. And Nikola stopped.

He felt like swallowing and throwing up at the same time.

“What am I doing?”

He started to sob, his steps took him in the opposite direction. They continued to echo across the Gospić cobblestones until dawn. When he returned home, he found that Mother was still up.

“Never again!” he swore, his face beaming.

But she interrupted him: “Your father had an attack!”

“What happened?” The newly reformed gambler was upset.

Djuka put her finger to her lips and made him go to bed. Then she went up to her bedroom and tenderly addressed her husband: “My poor Milutin!”

“Never pity me.” He clasped her hand. “Not even on my deathbed.”

CHAPTER 26

All Nature Stood Still

“My father was an honest man, but not a good one,” Nikola Tesla told František Žurek in Prague.

During their last meeting, the tension between father and son ached like an old wound. It seemed their icy silence would shatter the walls of the room. Nikola sat on the sick man’s bed, just like Milutin had sat on his son’s bed during his bout with cholera. Father’s eyes and cheeks were sunken. Milutin could barely utter what he’d planned to say: “I promised to send you to study in Graz. Now you must promise me that you will continue your studies in Prague.”

When the old man was buried, Nikola was not there. They told him that the day was dark, but when they lowered the casket into the ground, the sun broke through. They told him that a lot of men and women passed for three days through their house—as was the custom—exhausting the family so much they could barely think.

The flood of visitors drowned Djuka, Milka, Angelina, and Marica in the noisy maelstrom of life—the visitors asked for brandy, quoted proverbs, made coffee, did the dishes, and gave advice. Everyone talked about the dead man. Alagić recounted a story that he once told Milutin about a man who spent a night nose to nose with a wolf and turned gray before dawn. Milutin would wave his hand, saying, “He’s no man, and that’s no wolf, either!”

They remembered his many-voiced arguments with himself and his incredible memory. He graduated from the School of Theology at the top of his class. The tall Milutin! He recited Schiller. He would push his glasses up on his forehead and forget that they were there. During the summer, he would not take shelter in the shade but would walk in the middle of the street. A smart man. A good man. They were all in agreement.

“And he had just turned sixty.”

“So sad!”

All of that tiring bustle was fine—anything was better than emptiness and solitude. Only when they were left alone did it become unbearable.

“How did he die?” Nikola asked as soon as he arrived in Gospić.

Mother put her hand on his shoulder: “He was lying in my lap breathing heavily. He was suffering. I let him go. Milutin, I told him, Milutin! You can go now. He looked at me. He closed his eyes. He sighed his last, relieved.”

It took Nikola three days before he unlocked his father’s desk.

In the drawer were Father’s treasures.

What was the scroll tied with red and blue string?

A letter. “Your son is a first-rate star.” Good!

And this? Professor Rogner’s letter in which he suggested that Father Tesla should bring his son home from school to prevent him from working himself to death.

He found a folder and untied a purple ribbon. Some old letters fell out. Father Milutin wrote to the citizens of Senj like Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and saved the copies. This is what he wrote:

From his strange father, Nikola inherited the gifts for mathematics and languages as well as a phenomenal memory.

He always lived in opposition to Father. He read Voltaire to oppose him. Nikola craved the relief of tears but did not know how to start. His hand trembled. Some newspaper clippings slipped out of the folder. He sniffed a twenty-five-year-old
Serbian Daily
in which his father reported on the “beautiful phenomenon” in the sky over Lika. This time, the son felt that the description did not read like a scientific article by an amateur, published in a provincial paper. It was true poetry:

CHAPTER 27

Do You Want to See Golden Prague?

After returning to Prague, he walked a lot. He stood by the railing of the Charles Bridge and stared into the black water. A long time ago, Rabbi Levi created the golem in this city and breathed life into the clay giant. Very few among Nikola’s professors could do the same with their lectures. In the university halls, dead knowledge remained clay untouched by spirit as the professors’ flat voices drained meaning from their words. Nikola learned this was not something he could talk about with his peers. He murmured to himself: “There’s nothing worse than stumbling upon a prejudice people believe they don’t have.”

The academic bureaucracy was more complex than the hierarchy of angels in Assyrian mythology. It was as if huge insects sat on the other side of the counter. These gnats informed Nikola that due to his lack of knowledge of Greek, he could not enroll at Charles University as a full-time student. Therefore, twice a week, he attended the seminars of the famous Karel Domalíp as a part-time student. He also attended Adalbert von Waltenhofen’s lectures in physics at the German School of Engineering.

Szigety’s letters arrived in regular intervals. They were all the same, the only difference being that his object of adoration was named Erica at one time and Maria at another. Tesla wrote to him that he had separated the collector from the engine and affixed it to the other axle. In the letters he sent to Budapest, he repeatedly stated that a motor powered by alternating current must be possible.

In the morning, he drank coffee in the Národní Kavárna on Vodičkova Street. Wherever he went, he was followed by that other one, who was slowly becoming frightening. It seemed to him that the imposing contours of Hradčany Castle constantly hovered above him. He admired the dollhouses on Zlata Ulička, while the old Jewish cemetery with its layers of graves filled him with horror. In the evening, he went back to the Národní Kavárna for a beer.

One of the pleasant bohemians he met there was František Žurek, a former Charles University student. He started to take Tesla to concerts. Not unlike the moon, music created tides and swayed huge waves within Nikola’s soul. In the Národní Kavárna, Žurek pointed out to him the composer Bedřich Smetana sitting at the next table. The man looked awful.

“They say he’s crazy,” the bohemian whispered.

A supporter of Pan-Slavism—with a German grandmother—Žurek became interested in Tesla after an incident in the Imperial Public Library at the Clementinum. The red-haired philosophy student was comparing the German translation of Byron with the English original when Tesla approached him. Tesla grabbed the book with a bony hand.

“Read the beginning of any Byron poem to me,” he said, “and I’ll finish it from memory.”

The young Czech read a first line, and Tesla took it to the end. Žurek chose a poem from the back of the book. Looking him straight in the eye, Tesla finished it. He knew all of Byron by heart, so Žurek called him Manfred. “Manfred” spoke about everything in a “worldly and indifferent manner.” Whatever he said was well put. Slanderers spread rumors that he played billiards to support himself. At the Národní Kavárna, Tesla picked up the cue only occasionally but then played in such a way that everyone in the café quit talking.

“A prince!” they whispered in awe.

Manfred and his new friend walked around Prague and talked like poets:

“All things in the world are interconnected just like madmen believe they are,” Tesla murmured.

“Can you lose what doesn’t exist?” Žurek wondered.

Žurek’s goal was to show his guest every inch of the mysterious city.

Did Tesla know that here in Prague each stone could tell a story? He already knew the one about the golem? That’s good. Did he know that at least one-quarter of Bohemia was destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War? And did he know that tulips, before they became common in the Netherlands, adapted to the European climate here first, in the Royal Gardens, next to the Singing Fountain?

“And here”—ha, ha—“here we have something much more interesting,” Žurek the chaperone continued. “In the house at Forty Charles Square—I’m going to show it to you in a second—lived Dr. Faust. The devil took him away through that chimney over there.”

Tesla stared at the chimney.

Tesla’s soul suffered in Prague. Sorrow suffocated him. He was restless because he could not pretend that the world was not in flames. In his dreams, his late father visited him, legless and hovering, his frock undulating like an octopus. He also dreamed of a man who, instead of having a face, had two backs, and whose voice spoke from the fissure, sounding like many rivers running together.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your brother.”

“How come I’ve never seen you before?”

Nikola washed his face, put on his clothes, and walked until morning, pacing up and down in front of Dr. Faust’s house.

Something whispered in his ear:
The horror!

Something screamed in his mind:
The horror!

With his wounded, burning eyes he followed the flight of the snowflakes and their shadows. He went back after ten minutes, and his footprints were already covered. He walked up and down the street three times, and each time he found his footprints covered with snow. He did not notice that it was growing light. Old ladies bustled past him, hurrying to morning Mass. Organists in churches started to play the music of God’s thoughts.

“Have you heard about the tragic end of Master Hanuš, who built the astronomic clock?” Žurek went on. “Did you know that when Wenceslaus the Fourth cut out Saint John the Nepomuk’s tongue in Prague, the severed tongue continued to preach? When the saint was thrown off the Charles Bridge, the bridge started to crumble and no one could fix it until an architect entered into a contract with the devil and—”