Tesla (15 page)

Tesla accepted and took a look. An abyss opened up under Paris. In the illuminated circle, he saw a Hobbesian world of invisible creatures. They were shaggy beasts, each one tearing apart the others.

“They’re devouring each other!” Tesla exclaimed in horror and yanked his head away from the eyepieces.

After he beheld the pit of microcosm, he bought five bars of soap and washed his hands as soon as he returned home. He’d almost prefer not to go out at all, if only the city were not so fascinating. On Saint-Marcel Boulevard someone played the accordion—the poor man’s organ. It seemed to him that the accordionist was the twin brother of a busker he remembered from Graz. A little farther, another street musician was on call with his sad street organ and a jolly monkey. The fire-eater next to him looked like a dragon. Still farther down the street, a magician poured water from his sleeve into his pocket. A falling leaf danced down into a beggar’s hat. He tossed it out and smiled a toothless smile.

Tesla hungered—for those boulevards, the voices of famous sopranos, books… He wanted to learn more about the research of French electrical engineers. When he received his salary, he turned into Louis XIV. With a wad of bills in his pocket, he immediately went to the Café Anglais, where the headwaiter looked like a prime minister. Through eight entrées, he ascended to the apex of the feast—rabbit in lemon juice. Finally, he ate frozen champagne with a spoon, which helped with his digestion. The rest of the month, he dined at the Two Brothers, which was frequented by charcoal deliverers. All the patrons sat at a large table, ate the same dish—beef Burgundy—and drank wine dipped from a barrel and poured into carafes.

“How are you?” Tesla shouted into the Paris sun.

During the summer months, he swam in the Seine each morning. Then he walked to the Continental Edison Company in Paris in the Ivry-sur-Seine suburb. It took about an hour to get to work. On Sundays, he rowed to relax. Blue and black smudges shimmered on the water’s surface. Exhausted from rowing, he would lie down in his boat. Bridges over the Seine blocked his view of the sky. Clouds foamed above the river.

The rains started in September. The whole of Paris put on the colors of the city’s pigeons. In November, Tesla started to ride horse-drawn streetcars. The common humanity of the people crammed in the vehicle smelled like homemade soup. The brief sense of camaraderie appealed to the lonely foreigner. During his first autumn in Paris, he lived on correspondence with his old friends. He did not forget them and regularly answered Medić’s and Kulišić’s letters. Szigety informed him that he had broken off his engagement. Tesla sighed: what a talented engineer and what a waste of time!

Each morning at seven thirty, he ate breakfast with French and American engineers in Ivry Edison’s friend Charles Bachelor spoke with a heavy British accent, and Tesla was barely able to understand what he wanted. Bachelor’s beard was so full that people were tempted to touch it.

“I work so hard I don’t even have time to plan what to do tomorrow,” he complained to Tesla.

Tesla shyly mentioned his motor. Bachelor stroked his well-groomed beard and said under his breath that both Edison and Werner von Siemens were against alternating current. The inventor ignored the remark with a patient smile. He had no doubt that all of them were in error, but his motor would rectify that shortly. As soon as he secured his position with the Continental Edison Company in Paris, he convinced his employer, Tivadar Puskás, to write to Szigety and offer him a job in Paris.

One day, Monsieur Pierre Raux rushed into Tesla’s office and hissed, “What a disaster!”

“What happened?”

A circuit had shorted out at the opening of the railway station in Strasbourg. A wall partially collapsed right in front of Kaiser Wilhelm I.

The company did not need this kind of scandal.

In short, Tesla was dispatched to Strasbourg.

“If you can fix this mess,” the winded director of the company promised, “you won’t regret it.”

He named a hefty sum.

Nikola took Szigety—who had just arrived from Budapest—with him to Alsace. The porter staggered behind them because the athlete Szigety had packed his dumbbells in his luggage. The friends arrived at their destination, the city embraced by waters. Here Nikola first tasted the sweet fruit of maturity. Very wealthy people accepted him as an equal.

Was that an ordinary life then?

No, our hero had never had an ordinary life. Capricious miracles shackled him forever. He could not control the onslaughts of light. Whenever the golden visor fell over his eyes, the universe made decisions for him. In Strasbourg, just like in Budapest, it was too easy for him to fall off the edge of the world. Powerful flashes pounded behind his eyelids, so he went to bed early. The frequencies and signals from the starry sky caused the branches of his nerves to fire up.

What else happened to him? Well, yes, he took command of everything, paid the engineers, and sent reports to Paris. At the end of the day, he locked his office and had a drink with Hyppolite Bauzain, the formerly French mayor of Strasbourg. With his uplifted hand, he invited Tesla to admire the Rohan Palace. The city had suffered some damage during the Franco-Prussian War, but not as much as during the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century.

“Two centuries ago people were eating each other here,” Bauzain said. “What can you do? Let’s go to a restaurant.”

He asked his guest about the books he read. Tesla mentioned Maupassant’s
A Woman’s Life.
Bauzain was happy. He had already read Maupassant’s story about a prostitute and a Prussian officer, which was published in a magazine.

“I’m glad you’re not one of
those
engineers,” Bauzain put his hands by his eyes like horse blinders.

Tesla shaded his eyes with the same gesture: “No, I’m not one of those engineers.”

“What kind of name is Nikola?” Bauzain asked. “Serbian?”

He knew that Hugo wrote favorably about the Serbs during the Serbian-Turkish War. Tesla reminded him of Lamartine’s poems about Serbia and Mérimée’s imitations of Serbian folk songs. Bauzain preferred Balzac to Stendhal. He was especially fond of
The Wild Ass’s Skin
and
The Unknown Masterpiece.
Flaubert left him cold. “You can shoot me, but he leaves me cold!” He could not believe that Tesla liked Racine more than Molière. Both of them were devoted to Voltaire.

Bauzain married late, and he adored his two children. He himself cut food into small pieces for his four-year-old son, Pierre, and was the happiest man in the world whenever his eight-month-old daughter grabbed him by the mouth.

“Look at her!” His ecstatic look bore into Tesla’s face.

And yet—in his wife’s presence—he reminded his guest of Robespierre’s idea that all children should be separated from their parents at the age of seven or eight and raised together so as to acquire openness to new ideas. With a smile, he spoke of Saint-Simon’s insistence on the “sexual minimum.”

They were eating Alsatian fondue and angels tickled their palates through the taste of Gewürtztraminer. Madame Bauzain claimed that there was no flavor in the world that was not to be found in some cheese.

“Big words,” Tesla said.

In reply, Madame Bauzain issued another La Rochefoucauldesque maxim: “Once you feel like closing your eyes while eating—when you wonder and sigh—those are the signs of great cuisine. The rest is nothing.”

The glow of recent motherhood enhanced Madame Jeanne Bauzain’s radiant beauty. She liked the softness of Tesla’s eyes.

“You’re single, Monsieur,” she addressed him both as a coquette and a mother. “Why is that?”

“I work,” Tesla responded good-naturedly and gave a cheerful wave. “I’m not wasting my time.”

Jeanne brushed him off. “Without love, all time is wasted.”

One day, Bauzain called Tesla aside and told him that in 1870, when the Germans came, he buried quite a few bottles of Saint-Estèphe that dated back to the time when Nikola’s grandfather was a soldier in Napoléon’s army.

“I recently dug them up,” Bauzain said. “There’s no one else I’d rather drink them with than you.”

Nikola asked him if he could invite Szigety as well.

“Fine,” Bauzain agreed.

Tesla threatened and warned Szigety to stay away from Madame Bauzain. They gathered around the table in an atmosphere more churchy than a church. The host brought in a bottle, holding it like a baby. He opened it and poured a round in silence. They took a sip. Tesla was the first to recover. He declared, moved, “I have never… Something like this…”

After the evening filled with laughter, the time had come for him and Szigety to go back to Paris. Bauzain promised that he would see to the education of Tesla’s heart and recommended his own tailors, one from Strasbourg and another from Paris. Upon his return to Paris, the young engineer sat down in his office, adjusted the knot of his tie, and wrote a letter to his illiterate mother in Lika. In a good mood, he entered Monsieur Raux’s office and said, “The job’s done. What about my reward?”

This was how Tesla got to know French politeness, which is more implacable than German meticulousness. He discovered that Monsieur Raux had undergone a complete and mysterious change. All of a sudden, he became a reserved man of terse words who explained to Tesla that the reward was not his responsibility, and that Tesla should talk to Monsieur Laibl about it. In turn, Laibl explained that he should see Mr. Stone. The mustached Mr. Stone brought the circle to a close by referring him to Monsieur Raux. They were the three proverbial monkeys who declared, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“If only Edison knew what these European paper pushers do in his name!” Tesla complained to Bachelor.

“So why don’t you transfer to our central office in New York?” Bachelor asked.

“Really?” Tesla asked.

“Really!” Bachelor nodded.

CHAPTER 32

The Crossing

I have forgotten the beginning, the departure, the journey, and the arrival.

The immortal Pierre Loti

A dangerous face bared its teeth at Tesla. He removed it with his fist. A painful blow from a club paralyzed his shoulder. Tesla turned around, kicked sideways, and swept a sailor away. With an arm longer than a truncheon, he displaced another sailor’s nose. Someone shoved him. Tesla hit the wall with the back of his head. The people around him turned into flailing rags of light and shadows.

“Break it up!” the captain shouted.

He pulled out a gun.

Bang!

The people involved in the fight on the deck froze in the void that followed the shot.

The captain shouted, “Who started this?”

“Someone in the crowd pushed me to divert my attention while someone else picked my pocket,” Tesla explained. “They took everything, my ticket and my money.”

“So how did you get on the boat?”

“I had a reservation under my name. No one else showed up, so they let me on.”

Two burly men from Lika listened compassionately. They introduced themselves by their surnames:

“Baćić.”

“Cvrkotić.”

Then they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and announced, “Two big shots from Lika.”

The third one, a skinny sixteen-year-old, held out his hand and whispered, “Stevan Prostran.”

The ship’s horn blared. The harbor receded in the distance and shrank to the size of a bluish mock-up. Sea mist sprayed the passengers. They threw apple cores to the seagulls.

Tesla wiped his face. “Where’re you from?” he asked Stevan.

“From Rastičevo.”

The expression of Tesla’s face did not change.

“Near Velika Popina,” the boy explained.

“I don’t know where that is,” Tesla said. “But my father would.” He asked the three men what they planned to do in America.

“Same as the others,” Baćić and Cvrkotić said.

Stevan Prostran was the only one who looked downhearted. He told a story about some man from Lika who got off the boat in the New York harbor. As soon as he stepped on land, the man became depressed.

“He sat down and simply wouldn’t get up,” the boy told them, wide-eyed. “Our people helped him for a while, but later they went their own way. That man, however, died right where he sat. Maybe the same will happen to me,” Prostran sighed.

“No, Stevan, it won’t.” His friends slapped him on the back.

Stevan shook his head in doubt.

Fear and hope whispered in his ears. What should he believe? On one hand, black coal mines and howling blast furnaces threatened to drain his life away. On the other, golden opportunities of wealth beckoned to him. The bright-eyed, skinny kid finally mustered some courage and told them about his big plans. He would stay in America five to seven years. Then he would buy some land in Lika.

“I’ll let my brothers work the land,” he beamed childishly. “And I’ll open a tavern.”

“What will you call it?”

“The American! I’m going to sit in front and read the paper all day.” Prostran leafed through the imaginary paper. “People will go by and greet me: ‘Good day, Master Stevo.’ To some I’ll respond and to some I won’t.”