Tesla (14 page)

“Fuck science!” Szigety raged.

Since he had already failed to get Tesla to a brothel, the next best thing was to at least make him do some physical exercise.

“Trust me,” he told Tesla as he lifted him off the bed.

Did not John the Golden Mouth say that men are just shadows of bursting soap bubbles? Nikola was cloaked in numbness and suffered from spells of deafness and nausea. In the fluid of his own fear, he pulsated like an amoeba. He walked on the streets as if they were caked in ice. In the buzzing world, he moved as if his next step would be his last.

Szigety urged him on.

“Get up. Illness comes in bulk and goes in parcels.”

Szigety was the only one who believed that his friend could beat his illness. Disgusted with doctors, he said to himself, “People are blind. They don’t see anything. They don’t get anything. Most of them.”

He forced Nikola to live. He dragged him out for a walk every day. The wind played with the powder of snow on the roofs. The smell of frost was a greeting from God. Under his breath, Nikola cursed the obnoxiously noisy city to its steeples. Whenever he passed under a bridge, he felt as if a huge weight was crushing his skull. This is why they preferred to walk in the open fields. Szigety gradually added calisthenics to their outings. Holding dumbbells, Tesla spread his arms from his hips and lifted them above his head. He felt bad, and when a person does not feel well, he hears the music only for himself. This was how he felt when it first occurred to him that he might make it. He was like a shipwreck survivor who sensed the nearness of the shore. And in the next moment, it was not a mere sensation—it was a veritable shore. He even started to believe his painful hatching was coming to an end. Something was prodding him from the other side of the membrane. The solution to the mystery was close at hand.

CHAPTER 30

The Park

As it set behind the Buda Hills, the sun lit up the frozen river, the big city, and two elegant young men taking a stroll along the graveled paths in the park. February 1882 was without snow, but frosty. One young man wore a black overcoat, buttoned all the way to the top, while the other was cloaked in a yellow camel hair coat. The hair of the man in the dark coat was black and slickly brushed back. His companion was chubby, with a fair mustache. He frowned unwillingly every so often.

Tesla was in a good mood, and he whistled a tune from Vivaldi’s
Winter.
Szigety’s lips were curled in a “smile of playful Eros.”

“In this very park a scene from
The Memoirs of a German Lady Singer
by Wilhelmina Schröder-Devrient is set,” he informed the indifferent Tesla.

Two women wearing hats with large plumes went by. They were talking about a famous violinist.

Tesla and Szigety overheard one saying, “He doesn’t look like much in person, but his music is so intoxicating.”

Two maids followed the women. A brunette with straight hair and a square jaw held the arm of a little blond who resembled a jelly roll.

“My teeth are bad. Whenever I eat anything sweet, I cry,” the blond complained in a joyful voice. “But I still like to…”

A little boy dressed like a girl sat on his bottom and the maid with bad teeth yanked him up. “Come on, Herve. Don’t try to be cute, please.”

A high-spirited sparrow hopped across the path. With their quivering bills, tame ducks pecked at grain scattered for them in the grass.

“I’ve almost forgotten that all of this exists,” Tesla sighed.

Szigety had also forgotten about the world.

He was thinking about Rita’s lips on his!

He dreamed of spreading her thighs with his knee and—shivers ran down his spine at the thought—of her stockings making a hissing sound. Her face was dancing. Oh, Muse, help me describe the dancing of that face. Was she disgusted? Or was she melting with pleasure? Was she furious but unable to resist the force that carried the two of them away…

“Look!” Tesla shook him. “By God, look at the sunset!”

The young Hungarian raised his eyes and saw inky clouds behind which the golden disc drowned in crimson.

Tesla was seeing the sun off by reciting lines from Goethe’s
Faust:

Szigety looked around and stammered, “Look—the entire park has turned red from the sun. Everyone has become an Indian.”

Tesla did not respond.

“The evergreen bushes have been trimmed into chess pieces! Look at the screaming colors!”

Again, Tesla did not respond. A golden spike flashed in each window in Budapest. The horizon was peppered with birds, and the sun was going down behind them. When the flock flew over the park, Szigety became aware that his friend was still locked in place, gazing at the sun.

“What happened?” Szigety was flustered.

Nikola stared at the flaming orb without blinking.

“Look at me,” Szigety called out.

“Look at me,” Tesla echoed.

Then he said, still gazing at the sun, “Watch me turn it around.”

Szigety looked left and right in search of the closest bench.

“I switch it on—click!—and it turns one way. Then—another click!—it reverses its course.”

This is the last thing I need
, Szigety thought in desperation. Tactfully, he took Tesla by the elbow and suggested, “Let’s take a little rest.”

Tesla held his ground.

“I turn it off. It stops! And”—his face broke into an inspired, anguished smile—“can’t you see it doesn’t crackle?”

“What?”

“Well, the motor.”

Szigety’s face looked as if he’d grabbed a live wire.

“Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Where’s your motor?”

“Right here,” Tesla pointed at the space between them. “Turn it on—click! And the problem is solved!”

When talking with someone, Szigety often closed one eye. It was impossible to say whether it was out of irritation or the need to focus. So he squinted with one eye and asked, “What problem is solved?”

“The problem of my alternating current motor! Listen to how quietly it works.”

Like the wind, the spirit goes wherever it wants, but we can only know it by the sound, Jesus told Nicodemus the Pharisee. An inexplicable sense of excitement engulfed Szigety as he realized that what seemed like raving was not. An old print representing Ptolemy’s system, with the fixed earth surrounded by the celestial spheres, came to mind. Some rascal stuck his head through the spheres in the print and was looking out into space. Szigety felt like that rascal. He was suddenly cold.

Tesla’s face was bronzed by the setting sun.

He had that inspired and tortured expression his father hated so much.

“I’ve solved it. Now I can die happy!”

“Please, explain it to me!”

Tesla pulled himself together and started to draw diagrams on the gravel path with his cane.

“You see,” he began. “Up until now, everyone who took on this problem had used only one electric circuit. I’ll use at least two. Why? Because more alternating currents in the same generator can produce magnetic fields in a number of electric spindles on the engine’s stator. Each spindle has the same frequency as the others, but their electromagnetic waves are out of sync.”

Szigety imagined a gentleman and a lady dancing without being able to coordinate their steps.

“Their strikes alternate,” Tesla continued. “This produces the effect of adding another cylinder to the engine. Two magnetic fields perpendicular to one another add up vector-like and the resulting field spins…”

Abstract concepts flew from Tesla’s mouth like cosmic winds that powered ethereal engines. He still drew on the gravel path with his cane. He spoke exhaling steam.

“It spins as the current changes its direction. This is how a mutable magnetic whirlpool is created, which firmly embraces the rotor. There’s no need for the commutator anymore.” He looked at Szigety openly. “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it simple?”

“It is simple,” affirmed Szigety.

“It will be possible to conduct electricity over long distances,” Tesla exclaimed. “This motor I invented is like Aladdin’s lamp. Once liberated, the genie inside will do huge favors for mankind.”

Nikola’s eyes were tearful as if he was about to sneeze. A spasm of wild joy ravished his bosom. Szigety pondered his words, his face colored by the setting sun. When he finally understood, a thrill shot through his legs. The wounded beast that was restrained under his skin snapped its leash. He felt jealous and did not want to listen anymore.

Your motor
…
your world
… Szigety thought.
Pretty cosmic recitals. Aladdin’s world! And what am I going to do in it?

The west bled a most tragic crimson. The two young men stared at the middle of the path that showed the blueprint of the motor.

Warm fog floated in Nikola’s brown eyes. The frost smelled like flowers. Szigety gazed at the drawing of the rotating field. Then he looked at the setting sun and overcame his selfishness like Jacob did the angel. For the first time, he grasped the importance of what his friend was telling him. Antal Szigety’s eyes flashed like Tesla’s, and he whispered in triumph:

“Impossible!”

CHAPTER 31

Without Love

The Budapest switchboard began to operate in the spring. There was no more work, so the young engineer packed his bags. Ferenc Puskás rubbed his happy belly and asked, “Why don’t you transfer to our central office in Paris?”

“Really?” Tesla asked skeptically.

“Really,” said Puskás.

Two weeks later, Tesla got off the train and sighed:
Here I am!
During the first month, he bathed in the lights of Paris like a sparrow in the dust. It seemed that the entire city was infected with an amorous fever. Love’s pressure was so strong it could crush a man wearing lighter armor. Couples embraced and rubbed against each other in alleys. Lips smeared with honey could barely part. Young men and women cooed in entryways. Trembling fingers intertwined and frightened eyes asked,
Do you love me?
Love pouted and rustled from every dark lane lined with trees, from every corner of the city. Who could ignore such an intoxicating whisper? But Nikola was deaf to the tittering coming from the alleys. He rushed through Paris streets following his own nose. In brothels, judges and bankers nibbled the fat thighs of women. On sidewalks, street girls pursed their golden lips and called out with laughter, “Monsieur, what are you up to? Are you lonely tonight?”

Tesla had his own definition of love. Paris was the center of the world and the national library was the center of the center. There—with love—he read Maupassant’s early short stories. With love he gazed at the buildings along Haussmann’s boulevards. He looked at the mansarded houses, wondering who lived in them, and got to know the demonic bestiary carved into the cathedral. Love also led him to the opera and—believe it or not—to art exhibitions. Since his Karlovac days, Nikola had associated art with starvation. The first thing that came to mind whenever he entered a gallery was roasted chicken. And yet, he dutifully nodded his head before the framed smudges of color that Durand-Ruel made famous.

Because of his love for Paris, Nikola ignored the meagerness of his little room in the Saint-Marceau quarter, “the suburb of martyrs,” which still remembered the Paris Commune. On the first of each month, the widow Jaubert, his landlady, snatched the rent from his hands. Although Tesla gave her money to buy soap, she always stashed the bar until he himself bought a new one. A couple of uncertain marital status lived next door. In the evenings, a tragic male voice echoed from their room: “You don’t love me like you used to!” Across the hallway lived a grayish old woman with her husband who had suffered a stroke. She took him out for snail-paced walks.

“Good day, Monsieur Tesla.” The old woman always greeted him first.

“Good day, Madame Masquart.”

After a while, Tesla got to know the neighbor who screamed, “You don’t love me anymore!” He was a biologist, and his name was Gaston Labasse. At one point, when they had a long conversation in the stairway, he suggested, “Why don’t you come to my institute and take a look through a microscope?”