Tesla (4 page)

The Horror

Dane leaned over a steep flight of stairs and called the servant, Mane, who was taking care of the brandy in the cellar. Nikola ran toward his brother, reaching for him. The sound of Dane’s fall merged with the dull sound of something breaking. As he lay on his back at the bottom of the stairs, Dane pointed a finger at Nikola.

Whenever he talked about that moment, Nikola spread his arms and whispered in an agitated voice, “But that wasn’t true!”

Mother’s heels clattered as she ran down the stairs. She slowly removed her lips from her son’s temple and looked at Father.

Accusing eyes multiplied around Nikola.

Something whispered into his ear:
The horror!

Something growled from the dark:
The horror!

Something screamed in his mind:
The horror!

The news spread to the neighboring houses. People started to bang on the door. The Young Joseph, the incomparable Danilo Tesla was fifteen when he died. Visitors filled the house and whispered condolences.

“The prince!” they wept over the casket.

They could not say to God, “Don’t aim for where you’re looking, but where you want to strike.” Mane served drinks to the teary-eyed relatives.

The suit Dane was to wear at his graduation turned into his funeral suit. Andja Alagić, who lived next door, stood by Djuka as she washed her dead son’s body and asked, “How can you do that?”

Djuka gave her a dark look and said, “Those who can’t do this should never have been born.”

CHAPTER 8

Let Me Go!

The chapel was right in the middle of Nikola’s room. The open casket was next to his bed. His brother was lying in the casket. His face was the color of tapers. He looked real, and seven-year-old Nikola stretched his arm to pat him on the forehead. His hand went through Dane’s face, but the face did not disappear. Nikola started to cry.

“Let me go,” he whispered into his brother’s ear. Dane refused to go away. “Please, let me go.”

Didn’t his mother always insist that it takes a peg to drive another peg out from the hole? It had happened before—someone would utter a word and the image of the physical object would appear in his head. Nikola was aware that what he saw was conjured, so he tried to protect himself with his own imagination.

He envisioned Mother’s face over the face of his dead brother. When his mother—a pure soul—appeared in the room, he felt greatly relieved. She stayed there for a while and then faded out. The horrifying face from the casket replaced his mother’s image. Nikola kept repeating the word
Mother
and she came again, but this time paler.

He said
Father
and the tall man with eyeglasses obediently came into his room. Then he vanished but was called back. When Father faded away, he whom Nikola feared appeared again.

It was bad. And when it was bad, you heard the music only for yourself. It was so frightening that he didn’t dare to feel scared. Every night, Nikola tripped over the same vision. The phantom tormented him even during the day. This obsession made living difficult for him. He fought back. The obsession persisted. He had to persist even harder.

He projected other images over
that
image. Thus he invoked all the people he knew, including his detested aunt Deva and the menacing Luka Bogić, who was still less frightening than the dead Dane. Finally, nothing he had actually seen in his small world was left to help him confront his brother.

And the funeral scene kept coming back. Father Alagić and the entire family walking behind the hearse kept coming back. The muddy spot where the black horses balked also came back. Each night Nikola’s dizziness deepened Dane’s grave a little. Each night they took the casket out of the hearse. His brother was lying in the open casket with his eyes open.

“Let me go!” Nikola cried. “Please, let me go!”

CHAPTER 9

An Aside on Flying

When I take a breath in a particular way, I begin to lift off the ground. I fly up through the chimney and leave the room and my terrifying brother. I ascend toward a solitary star without wondering if I left my body behind.

I say India, and I see the Ganges and the sacred monkeys of Benares. At another time, I see boatmen pulling the oar with their leg on the lakes of Burma. And then, I see the white monkeys in the hot springs of Japan. Next, I ride on gazelles among the birds and lilacs in Chinese Turkestan.

The world is marbled with lightning and full of images. I fly above forests outlined with yellow light and dread, over mountaintops and purple seas. Cities glow underneath. I see tiny people. I see them clearly when I squint. I alight like a bird, make friends with them, and we talk for a long time.

Sometimes I fly all the way to the stars, where it’s always morning and where people made of silver live. Sometimes I plunge through the blue void in between the lights of the universe or dive in the ocean depths among the glowing fish. In the middle of the night, I long to see the day, and I see it. Sometimes I see the day on my left and the night on my right. I am Alexander, the conqueror of apparitions. Now I can choose my own thoughts and steer them like Helios his chariot. I can see things that I imagine and hold them before my eyes as long as I want. I’ve learned how to defend myself. I’ve learned to cope with a wonder as vast as death.

CHAPTER 10

The First City

Milutin could not bear to live in the house where Dane died, so he turned the Smiljan parish over to Mile Ilić, gave his successor a farewell embrace, and moved with his family to Gospić. Holding his father’s hand, Nikola gazed at burly town houses and whispered, “So many windows!”

Native costumes, civilian clothes, and uniforms jostled against each other in the streets. A brass band played in the square on Sundays. The noise of clattering carts was deafening. In the barbershop, retired soldiers talked about the Italian war. Coffee shop doors opened and closed. In a bar, young people crowded around a billiard table. Old domino players were sitting in another tavern. They stacked the bones, which clinked like coins and cursed “bloody Sunday.”

The river Lika looked very green to Nikola. Gospić seemed huge. In Milutin’s new church, innumerable candles burned for both the living and the dead. On holidays, Milutin went to visit the local Roman Catholic church.

He and the Catholic priest, Kostrenčić, stood in the churchyard holding each other’s hand after the service.

“So many windows!” the boy whispered.

Since the move, Nikola listened to the pulsating noise of the streets and its distinct and muted sounds:

“I’ll talk to Tomo when he gives me back my tools.”

“He went to school with my late brother.”

“I was sick all day yesterday. I’m not used to being sick. So I said, ‘Mila, fix me a bowl of soup.”’

“Hey, buddy, we need another one for the game.”

“So that guy just kept filling my glass. And you know how they blast the music over there…”

“…and I had four bowls of soup.”

“What I want is for you to take care of the kids, not simply let them fly around like ladybugs so you can go to the liquor store with your drunken friends.”

It appeared to Nikola that people were not talking with each other but past each other.

“People are blind,” Djuka told her son. “They don’t see anything. They don’t understand anything. Most of them, anyway.”

Nikola missed life in Smiljan.

He was not the first boy in his village to figure out that it was much easier to take a pocket watch apart than to reassemble it, nor the last to try to fly with an umbrella. He buried things in the ground all the time. He spread walnuts to dry in the attic. He rode a ram and tried to ride a gander. The gander had cold crocodile eyes and nipped Nikola’s navel. Spurred by a lecture titled On the Damage That Crows Do to Crops, Nikola tried to exterminate the birds but ended up getting pecked all over.

In Smiljan, Djuka poured water for Milutin to wash his face above the garden bed so that she could water her plants at the same time. In spring, trees in blossom looked like clouds. At night they resembled ghosts. The bees sang in summer. People were sitting in front of their houses in the evening cracking watermelons with their fists. There was a smell of dust. In the dark, a junebug hit Nikola right in the forehead.

In this Homeric world, Mother sang the epic song about the twins Predrag and Nenad. Father’s friends looked like Menelaus and Hector.

Not all of them, however.

“Give me your hand,” Father Alagić bawled at Luka Bogić.

“On one condition—I want it back,” the hunter said.

His fawn-like face stared at Nikola. The boy tried to endure the hunter’s leering green eyes but got frightened and lowered his head. Bogić walked through the morning fog, which came up to his knees, and was able to guess where a quail would shoot up from the ground. He recognized the silhouette of a black grouse against the full moon. The hunter caught and ate a fly right in front of the kids. The kids cried, “That’s gross!”

They did not notice that he caught the fly with one hand and ate it with the other.

A string of unicorns streamed under Nikola’s pillow. Fireflies started to light up in the summer dusk. Old men stared at the new moon. They grabbed their ears, hopped on one foot, and shouted, “You—old, me—young!”

In the early afternoon, buildings in Gospić stretched their shadows like snails stretch their horns. Streets were long. Tree-lined alleys were haunted with the cooing of doves: “Who’s there? You… you… you…”

Young men with sideburns, in long, loose jackets and light derby hats, hurried along the cobbled streets. The urchins who mimicked them knew just how to curl their lips in passing. Nikola preferred to stay indoors so he would not run into their sneers. In this new environment, he became a loner and read a lot.

“No more!” Father ordered.

“Why?”

“Because it will ruin your eyes.”

At night Nikola filled the keyhole and the crack under the door with hemp fibers. He read by candlelight with candles he made. At one time, the flame was so still it looked like a drop of light, and he teased it with his finger. At another, it looked like it wanted to flutter off the wick. Delighted, the boy devoured words while his shadow grew on the wall. The book in his lap was bigger than its reader. He blew out the candle and trembled each time he thought his father was coming.

Nikola grew tired of these secret reading sessions and soon became a member of the Gospić library. With the permission of the drunken librarian, he cleaned the books on the shelves that had been buried in dust. Nikola wiped the leather covers, which smelled like dried fruit. He was so thankful for the people who wrote books, so thankful. They were his friends in the town where he had none.

“Look how much this boy hangs out in the library,” the librarian griped to his wife.

She tapped her pimply brow with her index finger and whispered, “I think he’s crazy.”

Some other people thought the same.

In the school hall, Nikola lugged books around all the time. Once he was confronted by Mojo Medić, a chunky, dangerous-looking boy, who planted himself in front of Nikola.