Tesla (26 page)

Paris

“I won’t!”

“You will!” d’Arsonval said.

The two scientists were standing in front of one of Lautrec’s posters, which was washed out from the rain. The profile of a skinny man in a top hat stood out in the foreground. In a circle of male and female silhouettes behind him, a blond stuck her leg out from the rose of her skirts.

“You will!” d’Arsonval insisted and dragged Tesla into the Moulin Rouge.

The host nodded to the waiter, and a table with a flower and a bottle of wine in a silver cylinder materialized in front of them.

“Oho-ho…,” the host sighed.

The orchestra played at a frantic pace. Glasses tinkled. Tesla concluded that this was a place in which provincial bankers mingled with metropolitan actresses among throngs of witty young men.

Prince Albert of Belgium was late. His table also materialized next to the stage. The prince waved his hand to d’Arsonval and the famous Tesla, inviting them to join tables. Tesla had already given too many interviews. So many that…

“I’ve read… We’ll talk…” The prince shouted over the music.

“God is the only one left for you to meet here,” d’Arsonval whispered hoarsely.

The beauty of a few of the women was almost impossible to bear. And yet, at the sight of their jewelry, Tesla felt as if he tasted blood in his mouth. Blushing faces bloomed on well-dressed bodies. People tapped the table surfaces with their opera glasses and fingers. Some crazy guests embarked on a competition of who could shout and scream the loudest.

“Encore!”

“This is the music of paroxysm,” Tesla concluded rationally.

What, in the middle of the wildest merriment, happened to the soul? What happened to the soul, which swims through the dissolving thickness and darkness beneath consciousness? What happened to the soul that is a deep-sea fish?

He suddenly noticed that he was sweating. Somewhere, something was wrong. Right now…

The speed in which he lived turned his friends into acquaintances, and acquaintances into… ghosts. He wondered if anyone would remain real.

It suddenly crossed his mind:
Where’s the biblical hell? Where?

An unnerving apprehension dyed everything green and turned the dancers, who already looked grotesque, into demons.

The musical avalanche was falling on pale Tesla and grinning d’Arsonval. The girls screamed! La Goulue (the “glutton”) danced with her elastic partner. The dancers lifted their legs, kicked them out, and then dropped to the floor in splits.

D’Arsonval was beaming. He raised his handsome head with a cropped mustache and a beard the shape of a swallow’s tail.

Tesla watched the show like a cat given salad to eat.

“This is cacophony.” He frowned. “This has no head or tail to it.”

“Well, what do you have to say?” his colleague asked him after they had left.

“Wonderful,” Tesla noted with a straight face, and, with an apology, asked his new friend to take him to the Hotel de la Paix.

The city lights filtered through his eyelashes. And yet, the cold crawled up his spine and some metallic taste alarmed his palate. He somehow managed to say good-bye to d’Arsonval and stepped under the glass half shell above the hotel entrance.

“Monsieur Tesla,” a eunuch’s voice echoed in the lobby.

“Yes?”

A boy as pink as a rabbit’s nose looked at him with his gray eyes and handed him a cable:

Djuka on deathbed. Come immediately.

Uncle Pavle.

CHAPTER 54

The Rush

The race with death began. He discovered that his mind became an insufferable player piano. Like a man plagued by a hangover who feels that the stench of alcohol had saturated his soul, Tesla felt that the rhythm of the cancan permeated his.

The thrumming train echoed that rhythm. His hands shook. His chest was a drum, and his heart pounded in his throat so hard it drowned out the sound of the wheels. The wheels rattled through the smoke. The speed stretched the line of the woods, and the woods merged into one another. Vienna, which he would never get to know, stayed behind the window. In Ljubljana, Nikola’s anxiety turned into pain. The zinc taste in his mouth was even worse than the suffering. It resembled an epileptic fit. Everything had sped up since he had met Westinghouse. His success was like the frost; it came with the deep solitude. Uncle Pajo met him in Zagreb. Pajo Mandić had a habit of yelling “Hey!” at people as if waking them up. Burly, with graying hair, he turned his sheep-like eyes to Nikola.

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“I feel like someone’s squeezing my stomach with pliers,” Nikola moaned.

With the infernal cancan still ringing in his head, he transferred from train to coach. His apprehension grew. She could not die if he got there. He would grab her arms and drag her back to his side, across the edge of death.

“How’s Mother?” he asked his uncle.

“The way she has to be.”

Gospić was a city but smelled like a village. An old man was lighting the lamps along Tesla’s street.

A storm was brewing, and everything turned green. Curtains of rain fell and white shards crackled on the pavement. The wet horses pulled up in front of his house. The old house looked shrunken, but it still radiated light.

“Maternal light,” Nikola murmured. “Mother’s light.”

From rooms lit by electricity, he came back to oil lamps.

“Home is your home, and the moon is your neighbor.”

He had not changed. He simply did not know how to return.

Theirs was a city house, but—probably due to the handwoven rugs—it still had the faint smell of sheep. For ten years, that world had not existed for him. He felt everything to be unreal, but, at the same time, only this was real. His long-gone world returned. Everything became magical and profound. It hurt frightfully. Then the noose of reality expanded. Things became ordinary again because that was how they had to be.

It seemed to him that the power of vision was more intense at the top of the world, but the experience of life was deeper at the bottom. No, this was not Lord Kelvin’s, Prince Albert’s, or his colleague d’Arsonval’s world. The view from here was sharper and more painful. This was the old world of comb-and-grass-blade music, turquoise lakes, round loaves of bread, stubborn winds, and Lika hats looking like poppies in the fields.

The rooms, the smells—everything struck him to the quick. On Father’s icon, Saint George was still indifferently killing the dragon, whose red head was like a roasted lamb’s. The fool and the younger brother returned home a famous man. His relatives blinked their brown eyes. They herded together. There was much love and kindness here. It also appeared that they felt ashamed of each other.

The whole house carefully listened to Djuka’s breathing as she lay in the bedroom. Tesla was more at ease talking with his brothers-in-law than with his sisters, who wiped their eyes hunched over in the hallway. Marica approached him, looking at him with the eyes of a wary dog. He noticed that she had aged considerably.

“Hug—and forget!” He had made up his mind.

Marica treated Nikola as if he were a noble stranger. She did not know how to love him because she always felt pity toward those she loved. The way she saw love tinged the whole of human existence with sadness. Her body was a well of ancient tears, filled all the way to her eyes, which could overflow at any moment. That well was deeper than her body—it reached three hundred yards beneath the ground.

Nikola put his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t cr-cry…”

“Don’t you cry.”

He reached for the handle on Djuka’s door.

“Pray to God that she recognizes you,” he heard someone behind him say. “Hey!”

The heat of Mother’s room overwhelmed him. He sat on the bed and took her by the hand. The hand was light. The eyes were tired. She too was waiting for him. He choked when he saw her faded eyes. She caressed his head with tiny movements.

“My Niko.”

Nikola pressed the feather-like hand against his cheek and felt a deep, unparalleled calm descend on him.

The departing, fragile woman was protecting him still.

CHAPTER 55

Ba-Bam

The fairies eat garlic seeds and live until life becomes too boring,

and when this happens they quit eating and die a painless death.

Djuka Tesla

Ba-Bam!

Baba-Baba-Ba-Bam!

The infernal cancan kept playing in his head. The funeral took place at the Jasikovac Cemetery. The aspens trembled and Nikola felt nauseous.

He could not understand the words at all.

“We’re like water spilled on the ground that can’t return,” murmured one of Djuka’s brothers.

Nikola could not understand the words.

“And I will go to her but she will never come to me,” another priest read.

The voices came closer, and then faded away.

“Like the wind, which goes and never returns,” the prophet spoke through the mouth of his uncle, Bishop Petar.

Nikola spilled half a glass of brandy for the departed soul, and drank the rest. Instead of heat, crushed ice filled his veins. More horrible than the ice, the sting in his stomach, or standing by her grave was the thought that Djuka had been buried her whole life. Her whole life, she worked from four in the morning to eleven at night. Because her mother was blind, Djuka hit against a closed iron door at an early age. And once she hit it, she reached an undeniable conclusion: “That’s how things are.”

At dawn—as if he saw her there—Djuka shook her wet fingers over the stove and the droplets hissed on the hot metal.

She placed apple peels on the stove for fragrance. Before everyone woke up, before she put on her head scarf for the day, she combed her hair. The fire shone through the door and the cracks in the stove.

Lit by the flames, Mother became something else. Mother turned bronze. Nikola watched in secret. He alone. He always wanted to redeem her. He wanted to save her. But he never found (he wept)… time.

It was like a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it.

The world pushed him away.

Life lost its center.

Mother was the only human being more important to him than his work. Now he was at the mercy of his work.

The devil’s deft hand gathered all the warmth from the world, like wool. The world had been divided into the warm inner one and the cold outer one. Now they switched places.

And the truth? The truth did not stand a chance against the craving for protection. The truth was just nagging. Rules and values had no meaning before the needs of the soul. His inventions and the mankind they served became worthless. Worthless was the floating world—and he in it.

Where would warmth come from now? From his own gold flashes? From nowhere?

Nikola’s feet somehow found the ground. The world was expanding before it blacked out. He swallowed air as he sobbed.

Rustling swallowed him.

“And I’m not in this world anymore, but they are in this world, while I’m walking toward you.”

Ba-Bam.

Yes, the aspens trembled and he felt nauseated. He stiffened his knees to avoid slipping. Vertigo deepened the grave. With an irresistible spinning force, Djuka’s death dragged him into the grave as well.

Bam-Bam.

He paused in front of the headstone he had erected for Father.

Gospić Priest, Protojerej Milutin Tesla 1819–April 17, 1879. His Grateful Son Nikola, 1889.

Father used to say, “Will clay tell the potter: You have no hands! Can He be blind who created the eye?” Father believed that honesty was the answer to all the questions in life, convinced that even the clouds in the sky judged how honest he was.

The grateful son was still angry at the man who, in an attempt to save the boy’s soul, trampled on it.

His feet went numb. Yes. His feet somehow found the ground.

What goes through the forest without a rustle, through the water without a splash? A shadow.

He did not know how they got home. Each window, each table, each chest of drawers, even each box, was covered by the embroidery she made with her fingers, “nimble as flames.” She kissed his hair, warm from the sun, “to make it better.” The house smelled like her. His sisters clattered trays as they served. The relatives raised their glasses remembering the deceased: