Tesla (13 page)

Tesla interrupted him: “It seems to me there’ve been a number of contracts signed with the devil in Prague.”

“Quite a few, quite a few,” Žurek answered with pride.

CHAPTER 28

The Smart Cabbage

Nikola’s uncle Pajo Mandić came to Prague from Budapest. He looked at his nephew with his bovine eyes and informed him that the director of Edison’s office in Paris was named Tivadar Puskás.

“So what?” Nikola wondered.

Colonel Mandić took a shot of Becherovka. He looked askance at his nephew—he still remembered Nikola’s gambling days.

“Tivadar gave his brother Ferenc all the rights to build a telephone network in Hungary. Ferenc is my friend. He needs electrical engineers. If you want the job, it’s yours.”

The first man who embraced Tesla at the Budapest railway station was Antal Szigety.

He’s a good-looking man
, Tesla thought with some envy. Szigety’s laughing eyes reminded him of the Plitvice Lakes. Antal had the body of a swimmer or a gymnast who does squats with barbells. Antal raised Tesla off the ground in a hug, then jumped and shouted, “You’re too thin! We’ll change that!”

On Saturdays, Tesla’s rich uncle Pajo Mandić and Farkas Szigety alternated entertaining the young men. The elder Szigety was an architect who spent a long time bouncing across rutted roads and sketching examples of Hungarian rural ornaments. He found accommodations for Nikola with a female family friend.

“Is she widowed or divorced?” Tesla asked.

“She’s divorced from her own mind,” Antal grinned.

The salon in Tesla’s new apartment was decorated with a white tiled stove in the shape of a pagoda. There were two paintings on the wall. On the landlady’s portrait as a young woman, paint cracks wrinkled the green-eyed blond’s face. On the other painting someone was being crowned—a foreigner could not tell whether it was Saint István or Matthias Corvinus. The ceilings were so lofty that even a tall man standing on horseback could not touch them. All the furniture suffered from elephantiasis.

As soon as the move was complete, Szigety put a potbelly-shaped bottle on the table. As Tesla smiled, Szigety announced, “It’s real Tokay.”

They invited the landlady to join them.

Her name was Márta Várnai, and she was the author of two children’s books:
The Smart Cabbage
and
The Hedgehog’s Lecture.
Her foggy Hungarian accent hung above the stream of her fluent German. In a sensible voice, she spoke about the works of Miklós Jósika, the Hungarian romantic writer, whom Mojo and Nikola enjoyed reading in Gospić. Her son recently became an army doctor serving in Sarajevo, which was almost in Nikola’s homeland. In her sensible voice, Mrs. Várnai stated that Budapest—the empire’s “other capital”—needed new blood.

“We need engineers like you, Mr. Tesla.” She continued eagerly, “We need a new opera house, new bridges, new streets.”

Márta spread her arms as if creating space for future boulevards.

The sensible voice of Mrs. Várnai said one thing, but her charm said another. It surfaced as a glint in her eye, as a ticklish lilt in her laughter. Light engulfed Tesla. Some amorphous warmth from her entire body brushed against him and Szigety, who just happened to drop by.

Szigety sighed when she left them. “Did you see that?”

“What?” Tesla asked.

“I’m not surprised she buried two husbands,” Szigety whispered. “She didn’t outlive them—she wore them out!”

He sorely regretted having not known her thirty years before.

“Smart cabbage, my ass. Only children can buy into that. Ha! If only I could have been a fly on the ceiling in her bedroom.”

In Budapest, Antal Szigety first spoke openly about his desires. He liked for women to undress and show him the sacred places on their bodies. He liked them to walk around the room naked and with their hips reveal the same force that makes stars and planets rotate. Antal frequented brothels where girls’ smiles radiated erotic fire and cunning. He told Tesla of the inner slickness of women and offered to take him to a house of ill-repute, which Tesla sensed had something to do with Dante’s
Inferno.
In his friend’s room, Antal left a copy of Casanova’s
Memoirs.
Nikola did not read beyond the titles of the chapters, such as “A Disquieting Night,” “I Fell in Love with Two Sisters and Forgot about Angela,” and “The Captain Left Us in Reggio Where I Spent a Night with Henrietta.”

“Casanova!” Tesla murmured. He put the book aside; his yawn was wide like the sound hole on a guitar.

Just like in Tobelbad a long time ago, he and Antal soaked in the hot springs. His friend took him to hear some really odd-looking musicians. The female singer was twice as tall as the violinist, who played with his eyes closed. The man who performed on the hammer dulcimer hit the strings with mallets wrapped in burning flax. The tamboura players broke their fingernails on the strings. Women twirled around in folk costumes embroidered with pearls. Men danced with carafes of wine on their hats. Tesla’s soul responded to upbeat songs, but even more so to melancholy ones. The empire’s “other capital” agreed with him, especially since he had enough money for the first time in his life. Not only did he dress well, he had completely mastered the silent language of clothes. Mrs. Várnai assisted him with her subtle advice. Tesla thanked her with a bouquet of roses into which she buried her face when she was left alone.

A lot of construction was going on in Budapest—one sharp tower tried to outgrow the other. And what sunsets they had over the city! The pink and purple sky disintegrated above the roofs. Tesla worked with the engineers who built the sixth European switchboard. Everything smelled like Big Time.

A blond conquistador’s beard was always in the thick of things. Ferenc Puskás! Puskás slapped Tesla on the back like Uncle Branković used to do a long time ago. He promoted him and started to call him “sonny.”

“Faster, sonny, faster!”

If someone asked, Tesla would say that
impatience
was a synonym for
genius.
He complained that the world was too slow and enjoyed cramming his days full of obligations. Day was on his right side, and night was on his left. He could not wait for dawn to break so that he could continue to work. It was so fascinating, so painfully fascinating. Tesla disappeared at work—a blind force that resembled fire was in his place. A visor fell over his eyes. In the glare, he saw an even brighter window and in it something that did not exist before. That is how he came up with his first invention.

“What did you make?” Szigety was curious.

“A telephone earpiece! I increased the number of magnets in the receiver of the telephone,” Nikola responded. “And I changed their position in relation to the diaphragm.”

“Does Puskás like it?”

The young man’s face lit up:

“He’ll use my invention in the telephone broadcast of an operatic performance in February.”

During the pre-Lent Season, Erkel’s opera
Hunyadi László
was performed at the National Theatre. “The whole of Budapest” simultaneously followed the production in the Vigadó Concert Hall. The quality of the broadcast was better than in Paris. In the electric light, dignitaries looked a little touched in the head.

“But where’s Tesla?” Puskás asked Szigety in a disgruntled whisper.

Up until the day before, Tesla planned the broadcast with utmost enthusiasm, rushed Puskás on, and kept repeating, “Work created man. Let it destroy him too!”

Nikola had accelerated until the finest wire in his head snapped. His soul seemed to have hung by that wire. After it broke, the young man turned into a bundle of burning nerves. He was lying in bed behind heavy curtains in Mrs. Várnai’s apartment. When they told him about the success of the broadcast, he did not have enough strength to smile.

CHAPTER 29

The Decadent

And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth”

John 11:43

It would be a mistake to judge Mrs. Várnai’s educational background from her books for children. Tesla’s landlady could recite Verlaine in French. She asked her tenant if he had read Baudelaire only to discover that he remembered just one line: “Satan, have mercy on my ultimate despair.”

By that time,
Les fleurs du mal
was the same age as Tesla. A generation of poets inspired by the book had already stepped onto the scene. Poets and painters started to insist on morbid hypersensitivity, the urban cult, and life with dark circles around the eyes. European art turned into the princess and the pea. But Mrs.
Várnai
knew that none of those artists who worshiped hashish and the green spirit of absinthe were any more sensitive or decadent than Nikola Tesla.

Before the opera broadcast, Tesla rested five hours a day but slept only two. He woke up before dawn and hurried to his office. He could not decide whether to blame Budapest or fate for the deterioration of his health.

This city gets under my skin
, he wrote in his diary.

“Let’s go! Keep it up, sonny!” Ferenc Puskás shouted.

For his part, Tesla also egged Puskás on and increased the pace.

Then something snapped.

The whole world quivered, and Tesla with it. And yet, instead of quietly falling in sync with each other, these quivers clashed. Below the trembling, even in complete silence, a conversation went on that only the sick man could hear. Nikola broke that hallucination down into its basic components. The murmur of the universe, both distant and close, sounded like g-a-aaa-arbl-ed words. Beneath the sounds of the outside noises, these words ran on, slow and drawn out. Who was talking—God or a monster hidden behind the face of daily life?

The whistle of a distant train shook the bench he was sitting on. A clock in the third room struck like a hammer hitting an anvil. Tesla heard ants scuttling across the floor. A fly alighting on the table sent a flash under the dome of his skull. In the darkness, he could sense an object several yards away through a creepy feeling on his forehead.

“You’re a bat,” Szigety declared.

The vibrations of Budapest traffic, penetrating through the frame of the building, his bed, and his chair, shook the bat’s entire body. Sun machine-gunned through the leaves of the houseplants and dazed him. He was grateful for the heavy drapes in Mrs. Várnai’s apartment. He put rubber pads under the legs of his bed. He wanted to lie down eight stories beneath the ground. He was so tired.

“What’s happening to me?” the young engineer trembled.

Doctors passed through the rooms of potted rhododendrons and smoky mirrors. Szigety showed their self-assured spectacles and goatees to the door. After a fortnight of physicians’ visits, Tesla still did not feel any better. His fingers dangled as if they were about to fall off his hands. His arms dangled as if they were about to fall off his shoulders.

“How do you feel?” Szigety asked from the door.

“Like Saint Sebastian,” Tesla whispered.

The arrows opened holes in Saint Sebastian’s skin, while eyes started to open on Tesla’s: one on the back of his head, another on his shoulder, and yet another on his stomach. Perception flayed him alive. He was all eyes and lips.

“We need your help,” Szigety told Mrs. Várnai.

The landlady gave a sidelong look, full of understanding and compassion. From that moment on, she was a daily visitor to the darkened room in which she could hear the sick man rave.

“Dane, let me go! Please let me go!”

She brought in some cakes and chamomile tea sweetened with honey, and whispered, “Eat.”

Nikola bared his fangs, trying to smile.

Mrs. Várnai’s clasped fingers went white as she prayed for him. She longed to caress that tormented creature. Once, while he was asleep, she branded his forehead with a kiss. The young man pretended not to notice it. He gave her a furtive look and instantly regretted it. Her entire feminine soul was in her eyes.

When Lajos Várnai came to visit his mother from Sarajevo, he felt Tesla’s irregular pulse and prescribed a large dose of potassium bromide.

“He’s at death’s door,” he said and insisted on a second opinion. A distinguished specialist, Dr. Rosenzweig, came, snapped his bag shut in the end, and declared, “Medical science can’t help him.”