Tesla (34 page)

“A man can glow with divine light!” her father shouted. “A man can be a great prophet.”

“But a man can never be God,” the Lithuanian yelled.

There were some cabbage pierogi, rye bread, and herring on the table. The food was enough for three but was meant for five. It was much too little, selfish Father. Much too little, quarrelsome Father!

“It may be little”—her father spread his arms helplessly—“but when I read my Torah, I forget about everything and our miserable room turns into a palace.”

Her mother complained that her older children did not respect her because she could not speak English. As if English was so complicated. The blue soap bubbles sister Becca blew lingered and played in the air. Aimless joy rose in the bosom of the girl we have chosen to be our heroine.

The inner courtyard reeked ecstatically.

The girl, whose name was Miriam, covered herself at night with a piece of carpet.

A moldy smudge spread across the ceiling like a rather nice dybbuk.

The thoughtful girl wondered at the open gate of life. Would she work at Weiss’s sugar factory when she grew up? Would she get married? Would something good ever happen in her life?

At that moment, a shiny coach pulled up in front of the entrance. A sorrowful-looking man turned his head around. The gorgeous horse snorted.

“Would you like to go for a ride?” the man asked.

The girl said what no girl should say: “I would.”

“What’s your name?”

“Miriam Ganz.”

“All right, Maria,” the gentleman sighed.

Everything was so natural.

The gentleman looked around. Vivekananda’s words rang in his ears: “Take pity, my children, take pity on the poor, the ignorant, the oppressed…”

He felt pity for himself. On this street Stevan Prostran held out his hand and said, “Come. Where there’s enough for one, there’s plenty for two.” Here he and the young baker shared the same bed, in a room without windows.

Since he came to America, he had eaten a sack of salt. And where was he now? Like the Devil’s Apprentice, he could say, “I haven’t learned anything. I’ve forgotten even what I used to know.”

He told the coachman to take them to Upper Manhattan.

Miriam did not feel the cold. She proudly looked from her elevated position. Lo and behold: that was a position that suited her perfectly well in life! First she thought: Oh, if only Becca and Saul and Kevin could see me! Then she concluded that this was something:

“For me alone!”

“Can we go any faster?” Cinderella asked from her pumpkin coach.

“Sure we can!”

Sunlight blinded them from a side street. The wind swirled the dust into the color of saffron.

Clippety-clop!

Women wearing white head scarves disappeared from the streets. There were fewer people, they somehow fell silent, and the streets became actually passable. Top hats replaced flat caps. The glorious ghetto banners—laundry on the lines—stayed behind. So long, noisy neighbors! I never cared for you. So long, kids! You’re not good enough for me. Piles of rubbish became less frequent. Miriam looked with her huge scared eyes and wondered, “Mr. Sorrowful, who are you?”

His complexion was pale and yellowish, similar to hers, as were his eyes—except much sadder. He looked like her “second father.” Or maybe more like her uncle? All people, no matter how poor, deserve to have a rich uncle. Isn’t that so?

“What do you think, Mr. Sorrowful?”

Every dog needs to lick its wounds and move on—Mother’s words comforted Tesla.

Miriam could smell the odor of her calico dress and her armpits together with a new scent—the scent of the world. She was surprised with herself and listened to her own breathing. Just like Mojo Medić long ago, she heard the ticklish whisper of life. A million rosebuds opened in her ear.

They crossed the border of the known world and found themselves in the uptown, where she had never been before.

Volcanic joy erupted from her bosom. She saw the city, which she had never before seen. On a granite building, flags streamed in the wind. Sculptures with calm faces oversaw the snowflakes dancing in the sunshine. Ha! Snow and sun met in the November air. That was a small miracle in the grand miracle of the city. Shop windows were inscribed in gold. Coaches waited in front of chocolate shops and jewelry stores. Everything was clean. Her companion did not pay any attention to the streets.

Miriam looked at the gentleman’s frozen face with understanding and decided,
I’ll be joyful for you.

On rich streets, women were wrapped in feathery fur. Their manicured hands were too precious to get exposed. They hid them in muffs. Even children wore fur. The vapor of people’s breath was visible in the sun. She looked furtively at the gentleman. What was the color of his soul? Blue?

The blue-souled man pinched himself to keep from crying. His throat tightened. He opened his mouth to relieve the strain. God never burdens men more than they can bear. That was what he hoped. The pain. He saw elongated lightning in his laboratory. The pain. He saw Twain’s long drooping mustache photographed above a lightbulb. After each thought, like a
stop
in a telegram: the pain. He was cold. He rode through the streets, herding a legion of bad dreams before him. A little sleep at night, a few bites of food during the day—those were his victories.

“There I was able to do…”

He lived Frankenstein-like days stitched together from dead fragments of sorrow. His soul was full of scorpions and barbed wire. And yet, in each of Tesla’s gloomy days that came after the fire, there was at least one gold sting, a momentary burst of wild joy like this one. Otherwise, he felt slightly deranged and suffered from a distorted view of everything around him.

His troubles persisted. He had to persevere even more. He thought:
I’ve been alive for the last ten minutes. I’ve been alive for the last half hour.

That helped.

The girl and the magician did not talk. Miriam-Maria looked over Central Park and the lake in silence. She witnessed the first glimmers of streetlights coming on in the park. She squinted and the lamplight became a tangle of spikes. Then the coachman turned the horse back.

Clippety-clop!

They returned from heaven by the same road.

The streets became rougher.

The sorrowful gentleman looked down his nose, which followed the straight line of his forehead; he listened to the clop of the hooves. He remembered the old synagogue and the Jewish cemetery in Prague: the layers of graves on top of other graves. Once again, they found themselves in the world of porcelain foreheads, melancholic eyes, bearded fiddlers, dybbuks, balalaikas, Socialist newspapers, Dostoyevsky, diminutives, and Yiddish chants. Oy vey! In the world of flying tzadiks and holy quarrels!

The piles of trash that Miriam had completely forgotten about reappeared on the cobblestone streets. A pigeon that a coach ran over turned into a feathery smudge. White water trickled over the sidewalks. The gray walls behind which Smerdyakov killed old Karamazov and Raskolnikov killed the moneylender were back in view. People were again yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. Some kind of tinware was sold on the corner. People with their rolled-up sleeves flashed their powerful forearms. In silence, a group of men with flat caps and dusty shoulders dragged a classical sculpture out of an art studio. Like a captured animal, it had a rope around its neck. A hen ran across the street. An Italian kid rushed after it.

Only then did she remember her home. Chopped liver, chicken fat, and bread on the table. Enough for three but meant for five. It’s too little, sad Father. Too little, obnoxious Father.

The gentleman dropped her off in front of her house.

His name? She never learned it.

The gentleman took his hat off and tapped the coachman with it on the back. Maria stood at the same spot as in the beginning of the story. But nothing was the same anymore. The joy that poured from her bosom remained in the outer world. The cheerful dusk dissipated into thousands of songs: around her curls, the dusk whispered in voices of ghosts and men.

CHAPTER 70

Yen-yen

“Tesla! Finally!”

The new laboratory was completed. There were no fireworks. And yet, the news got around. Johnson was among the first to drop by. With great authority, he put on his pince-nez and looked at Tesla.

“What’s going on?” he exhaled as he threw his gloves into his hat.

“Well…” Tesla sighed.

Last Tuesday, in the Palm Room at the Waldorf Astoria (where old women spoke in unusually low voices), he had met with Edward Dean Adams. The powerful man with a horseshoe of wrinkles on his forehead suggested they start a company with five hundred thousand dollars in capital. “It would exclusively deal with your research,” Adams emphasized in a growling voice and knocked on the table.

“You turned it down?” Johnson could not believe his ears.

“I have a poor tolerance for anything institutionalized,” Tesla explained. “I would die in there.”

A strand of hair fell across Tesla’s forehead. For a moment, the billiard player and gambler from Maribor and Graz was resurrected in him.

Unlike Rodin’s
The Thinker
, Robert Underwood Johnson did not believe one had to frown in order to contemplate—or even be serious, for that matter. But now he frowned to avoid saying anything.

“Universities don’t sell knowledge,” Tesla explained. “What they sell is status disguised as knowledge. Institutions legitimize the right of mediocre minds to be boring. I can’t breathe surrounded by empty frowns. I don’t want to! You know for certain that creativity without play is…”

Robert did not say anything—it was useless to insist on giving advice to someone who considered you boring.

“… either a fraud or a mistake.”

“Listen to me,” the jittery pragmatist exploded. “The Wall Street sultan J. P. Morgan is behind Adams! You’d be backed by enormous might.”

“Ideas come in a trickle when I work for money, but they gush forward like Niagara when I’m free.”

“Free from the limitations of common sense?” Johnson asked. He took off his pince-nez with great composure. “You turned the money down. Have you read anything about Marconi?”

“Marconi is a lost sheep in a forest.”

Johnson straightened his back. “That lost sheep now works with Lloyd’s of London, one of the so-called institutions that you despise so much.”

“But,” Tesla added, “they don’t know what frequency they’re using. They don’t understand the role the earth has in conveying messages.”

“But they are trying…” Robert smacked his pince-nez against the table.

“Listen,” Tesla said impatiently. “Thousands witnessed my wireless experiments in Saint Louis. I examined Marconi’s patent. The signals are said to be in hertz. They are not. He’s using my system.”

Tesla remained a lifelong hostage to irresponsible wonder. The universe made decisions for him. And yet, he had two tiny antennae on his temples. Whenever they started to quiver, he sensed danger. The wave of hostility had not completely crested as yet, but he was already able to smell suspicion—the embryo of anxiety.

Johnson checked his eyeglasses to see if he had scratched the lenses. He blew on them, tested them with his fingernail, and then wiped them with the pad of his thumb.

“Sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich will finish you,” he continued with more restraint. “Edison is ready to team up with Marconi. Mihajlo Pupin is on board too. Then Carl Hering from
Electric World.
Reginald Fessenden. Lewis Stillwell, Charles Steinmetz, Elihu Thomson.”

Tesla still faced the window.

His new neighborhood, on the edge of Chinatown, was divided between noisy rum and quiet opium. Yen-yen, the hunger for opium, reigned there. Both deacons and professors of mathematics spent twenty cents a day to buy a grain of opium the size of a pea. A pale-faced man with baggy eyes once explained to him in front of his building, “A drunk will slit the throat of his own mother. An opium smoker—never!”

Johnson looked at the electricity poet’s skinny shoulders and tried to figure out what the silence that surrounded him was turning into. “Don’t flaunt your invincibility,” he said to shatter Tesla’s silent air of superiority. “That’s stupid.”

“I’m not as stupid”—Tesla turned around suddenly—“as you look to me.”

Johnson gave a mirthless smile. He was convinced that, having turned Adams’s money down, his friend made a rash and fatal mistake. Neither people nor competitors inhabited Tesla’s world. He was blind to both reality and the danger of men.

Robert tried to bring him to his senses: “One should be wary of what one least fears.”

Tesla looked through the window and retorted, “I can only echo Petrarch: I can’t turn my mind into a commodity.”

He looked at the broad street. Some Chinese called out to each other. In their mysterious world, the Chinese spoke like bells under the water. They sold sea monsters at their fish markets. They sang like mice being strangled, ate swallows’ nests, opened restaurants and laundries, made paper birds, quoted Confucius: “Everything I see around me is Nothing that pretends to be Something, Emptiness that pretends to be Fullness, Dearth that pretends to be Affluence.”