Tesla (3 page)

The silence in the forest got deeper. The three boys breathed as one. The bitter air stung their nostrils.

Nikola was deep in thought. Vinko took his arm off Nikola’s shoulder and looked down the ravine. Nikola noticed a vein pulsating on his temple. Vinko said, “At this moment a bear is sleeping somewhere in this forest. Hamsters and badgers sleep in their dens. Bugs sleep under frozen roots. And underneath all of that lies a dormant force.”

Nenad also took his arm off of Nikola’s shoulders and almost choked: “I’d love… I’d love to be a wolf in this forest.”

He threw his head back, craned his neck, and howled:

“Aaaaarrroooooo!”

When his cousins let him go, Nikola felt cold and naked.

“Let’s throw snowballs down the hill,” he said impatiently, “to see whose goes the farthest.”

“Sure.”

The snow crunched between his palms. Unlike his two cousins, he did not have gloves. While he made snowballs and threw them down the hill, his fingers grew numb. As the snowballs rolled along the slope, they gathered more snow and got bigger, but most of them grew too heavy and soon stopped.

“Look at mine,” Nenad squeaked. “It’s the best!”

“It’s crap!” Vinko yelled. “Look at mine!”

“Yours stopped too!”

“Sure it did, it hit a stump.”

Nikola’s hands ached from the cold. He felt as though his palms were stripped of flesh—it was as if he packed snow with clenched, frozen bones. He shoved his hands under his armpits trying to warm them up. Finally, he put them in his pants, underneath his balls.

“Look at my snowball!” yelped Nenad.

“Look at mine!” shouted Vinko.

Nikola did not look. He pulled his cold hands from between his thighs. Silently, he made a snowball. He threw it like he was throwing dice. The snowball bowled down the slope, gathering snow on the way. It quickly spun. It quickly grew. It turned into a huge ball of snow that whooshed and scudded. Then it stopped whooshing—it roared, storming down the ravine.

When the monstrous, rushing snowball started to amass topsoil the boys realized that things had become serious.

“Oh God, oh God,” whispered Vinko shrilly. “It’s turning into an avalanche!”

The snowball turned into a natural disaster. It left a jagged trail of ruination and effortlessly brushed away a row of birches and pines at the far end of the slope. Thundering and sweeping everything before it, it disappeared from sight, moving toward the village. The entire mountain shook from the impact.

At that moment, it became apparent that one of Nikola’s cousins was frightened by and the other delighted with life.

“Yee-haw!” whooped Nenad the destroyer, as if the fear physically pleased him.

While the earth shook under their feet, Vinko started to cry and plead, “O God, save us from another avalanche from up the slope… God, please don’t let this one destroy the village down there!”

Nikola stood entranced. He also felt ecstatic from the destruction. He was intoxicated by the release of this natural force.

The little white thing he tossed down the hill with his own hand tore out boulders and swept down pines as if they were matchsticks. It moved matter and released a primal force. Nothing could stop that snowball once it started down the slope at that unique, exact angle. Nikola got goose bumps as he stood between the frightened Vinko and the enthusiastic Nenad.

“Destiny,” he whispered in awe.

CHAPTER 4

Winters

God was still busy with creation in Smiljan. Villagers were as tall as giants. People’s words were not dead—they were alive. Nature was primal. The smell of frost was a divine greeting.

Back then, winters were colder than those that came later. They felt more Russian or Finnish than Balkan. To Nikola it seemed that the villagers left a sparkling trail as they tromped through the snow. A snowball that hit a tree exploded into a flash of light. One evening, something odd happened with the tomcat that Niko liked to hug and wrestle. On his way to light the candles, the boy rubbed the cat and felt sparks crackling underneath his palm. He looked from left to right, following his hand. Light shimmered between his fingers and the cat’s back. This was yet another “beautiful phenomenon” related to God’s work.

“Would you look at that!” exclaimed Djuka.

Milutin figured out that what they saw—and there was no doubt that they all saw it—was electricity. He explained that peculiarity the best he could.

That was the first time it occurred to Nikola that Nature was like a huge cat. He wondered: who’s rubbing her?

“We live in an illuminated world,” whispered Milutin to his wife and son.

“What does ‘illuminated’ mean?” Djuka whispered back.

“Lit from within.”

CHAPTER 5

The Visors

When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

Plato,
The Republic
, book VII

(trans. Benjamin Jowett)

“It comes out of nowhere!” little Nikola complained to his parents.

He closed his eyes, and light engulfed him. The entire world dissolved in liquid fire.

“I’m disappearing. I’m getting absorbed by light,” the boy whispered.

He struggled to return to the precious world of daily existence.

“This thing has a will of its own!” he cried.

“Does it feel like it does when you turn your face toward the sun with your eyes closed?” asked Mother.

“In a way. A golden visor falls over my eyes while they’re open. There’s a flash and I’m floating in light.”

Milutin wondered,
Could it be epilepsy?

It turned out to be something like the Tabor Light in the Eastern Church. The light that annihilated all the laws of the universe with one swoop fell on Nikola’s eyes. Seen from within, a golden hemisphere replaced his face. That illumination that shook the foundation of life and annihilated the physical world frightened Father Milutin.

This was when Dane, for the first time, took the side of his brother, who was younger by eight years.

“No. What Nikola’s talking about happens to me too.”

The parents felt relieved. Whatever happened to their prince could not be bad.

“Do images appear along with the flashes of light?” Dane asked his brother.

Nikola nodded.

“Don’t be afraid of them,” Dane said. “Let yourself go.”

With teary eyes, Nikola stared at him and wailed, “But that is the scariest of all!”

CHAPTER 6

Brother

“Who’s this handsome boy?” visitors asked, smiling at Dane Tesla.

They turned toward younger Nikola and said, “And who’s this?”

The brothers resembled each other, but no one noticed that. Auntie Deva, who was snaggletoothed like a boar, preferred Dane. So did Luka Bogić, the red-faced hunter who sometimes pointed his gun at children and threatened to kill them. The gray-bearded Father Alagić, who snorted as he laughed, also liked Dane better.

In front of visitors, Milutin never failed to boast about Dane’s intelligence.

“How many priest vestments hang on your mother’s family tree?” he asked impatiently.

“Thirty-six.”

“Who was the first one?”

“Tomo Mandić.”

“That’s my clever boy!”

When he started school, Dane never had to read a page more than once. Whatever he said was well said.

“The prince!” his relatives would say.

“Will he become a patriarch?” the sly Luka Bogić asked.

“He can be whatever he wants to be,” Milutin Tesla responded soberly. “But let him become a good man.”

There were no signs that Dane was bored by these performances for his father’s friends, even after he reached his teens. Whenever the exquisite Danilo Trbojević, the excellent Danilo Popović, or the diligent Damjan ČuČković came to visit, he recited Schiller’s poems in German, including “Unter Den Linden,” “Die Ideale,” or “Das Lied von der Glocke.”

“It’s obvious he comprehends every single line,” praised Čučković.

“Both comprehends and feels,” added Popović, who was himself a poet.

But the real mental exercises were conducted when Milutin was alone with his son. He demanded that the boy learn texts by rote, practice rhetorical skills, and read people’s minds. As a cadet in the military academy, Tesla observed his teacher, a Jesuit, get into a student’s face and command, “Refute Aristotle!”

He repeated the same drill with Dane. In the voice of the former officer, he ordered, “Refute Descartes!”

Dane had new growth shadowing his upper lip. He looked out the window and began: “Descartes doubted his own existence, suspecting all visible things to be merely props that a malicious demon placed around him.”

The boy paused deliberately. Then he raised his voice: “Tormented by his universal doubt, the philosopher searched for certainty. Excited and perhaps defiant, he uttered the famous sentence, ‘I think, therefore I am.’” Here Dane smiled and pointed out: “The problem that tortured Descartes was nothing new. In the fourteenth century, John of Mirecourt postulated, ‘If I deny or even doubt my own existence, I contradict myself. Is it possible to doubt one’s existence without implicitly confirming it?’ Saint Augustine foresaw Descartes’s dilemma when he exclaimed, ‘If I am deceived, I am!”’

Dane Tesla raised his arm and, like a matador killing a bull, concluded: “After all, Descartes was a thinker, and it does not come as a surprise that for him thinking was the source of certainty. Had he been a gardener, he would be looking for confirmation of his existence in his garden. As a musician, he would say, ‘I play, therefore I am.”’

“Not bad,” Milutin muttered, while his face was saying, “That’s exquisite, son! That’s top notch!”

And who was that big-eared boy with a triangular head, peering at his father and his brilliant brother from behind the door?

Nikola did not like to be called Niko, because in Serbian it meant “nobody”—the one who does not exist. Through the half-open door, the boy watched his brother, who was turning into a young man. Dane was as handsome as Young Joseph. How could one person be blessed with so many gifts? Who endowed them? Dane was mysterious with the mystery of youth. He felt blood rushing through his veins. Surprised by himself, he strained his ears to hear the voices in his own breathing. Nikola had to ask him three times before he got a response. Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Dane called him back.

“I’m going to eat.”

“Why? You’ll only get hungry again.”

Nikola laughed. His brother remained serious. When Dane’s smile eventually shone through, Nikola forgot himself and his envy. He never encountered such grace again.

If he were not around
, it occurred to Nikola more than once,
what kind of world would this be? Would the sun still shine?

Perhaps Nikola would be important in that thrilling world? Perhaps he would seem bright in that horrifying world without Dane?

CHAPTER 7