Tesla (5 page)

“Hey, you, big ears! Are books all you care about?” he asked.

Nikola said that his childhood in Smiljan was much more dangerous than Mojo’s in Gospić.

“You don’t say!”

“I could’ve died many times,” Nikola said softly.

“You don’t say!”

“The first time I was still a baby. Mother put our laundry in a huge vat on the stove to soak and cook. I was crawling on the table. When I tried to stand up, I tottered and fell into the vat.”

Nikola looked surprised by his own words, but he continued.

“Once, my brother locked me in a mountain chapel that’s only opened once a year. And I could’ve drowned many times.”

Mojo raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

“It’s as if fate loves to bring me to the brink of death only to save me at the last moment…”

Surprised, Mojo said, “You’re a good liar.”

“I never lie,” retorted Nikola.

As he laughed, Mojo’s fat cheeks engulfed his eyes. “Actually, I don’t think you know that you can lie.”

CHAPTER 11

Secret and Sacred

Who could have imagined that Nikola and Mojo Medić, whose girth was increasing every day, would squeeze into the same desk at school and mix their blood in a blood-brother ritual? They played together during summer days, which stretched like shoreless oceans, and stayed out until their mothers’ calls brought them in for dinner:

“Nikolaaaaaa!”

And a moment later:

“Moooo-joooooo!”

“Just five more minutes!” yelled the two friends.

Buttons were very important in the life of a nine-year-old. A large button was worth four small buttons up until Adam Smith’s inexorable economic principles imposed themselves on the button trade. After that, the invisible hand of market economy shifted the value of the large button into five small ones. Nikola got a kreuzer from his uncle Pavle. The number 1, the letter
A
, and the year 1859 were encircled by a thick wreath on one side. A double-headed eagle stretched its legs on the other. In Nikola’s world, a kreuzer was worth four large buttons.

To Nikola, other people’s homes were like different planets with totally different atmospheres. Even his relatives were of another race. Their skin and odor seemed alien.

The inner breathing of things told him that everything was alive. He was a part of and whole with the outside world. He made a world out of himself. Under a blanket, his knees turned into mountains on which he arranged tin soldiers. These mountainous knees were his stage. In the cracks and moldy patches of the ceiling, he looked for and always found human faces, eyes, noses, and mouths. His vision became blurry as passages opened in the ornamental patterns in the rug.

His soul called to him from the outside world. He was fascinated with the liveliness and transparency of running water. Water turned his hands and feet into ice. He looked at swaying trees and heard a sweet song. He was mesmerized by the motion of treetops; they swirled around and drew him in.

He and Mojo Medić were friends with Vinko and Nenad as well as the Cukić brothers. They kept their distance from the Bjelobaba boy, who was sitting in front of his house, eating dirt with a spoon.

“Look at that cretin,” Mojo said.

“He doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Mojo and Nikola shook their blackberry-stained hands. They played a game called the sting of the wasp, which was not fun because Nenad Alagić did not hit with his hand but used his foot. They whittled wooden swords that had to have a hand guard because a smashed nail stayed black for months. They shot arrows straight up in the air until they disappeared from sight and watched them come back. In winter, their sleds turned into Indian ponies. Niko called his pony Hatatitla: “That means
thunderbolt
in Apache.”

They conquered the world in a series of small heroic feats. They battled a boy named Opača and his gang. Rocks zipped by their ears. Once, Nikola watched a rock grow in size until it hit him on the forehead and fell to the ground.

In spring, they played the game of
klis
, which led them far away from home. They played jacks, picking up pieces from the ground with deft movements. One time, Nikola threw a rock and killed a trout as it leapt from the stream. They explored the attic of a ruin overgrown with sumacs. They climbed trees, spied on clouds, and invented their own language.

They played hide-and-seek in summer evenings when bats started to fly. They chanted:

“Phooey, phooey, we’re not having fun, Maria Theresa took all our guns.”

After that they disappeared from this world, hiding like butterflies that went back into their cocoons.

The blindfolded boy looked for them.

Mojo and Nikola shared this mystical, semidelirious childhood.

All was ritual.

All was secret and sacred.

Between two rocks, they cracked apricot pits, which tasted like almonds. They stole potatoes from home, baked them, and ate them half raw. Even cooking was a ritual. As they baked the potatoes, they talked about worlds beyond this one, animal and supernatural. A bear killed a donkey in the cemetery above the town. In India, the British were settling scores with the Thuggees, a secret sect of sworn assassins. There was an oasis in the Arctic and there was a secret world. Mummies could come to life but only under certain conditions. A dragon visited Mane Cukić’s crazy aunt. Vinko Alagić’s grandma had a vision of a woman in white who told her that Gospić would sink into an underground lake that was a thousand yards beneath the town.

CHAPTER 12

The Theologians

One summer in Gospić, Milutin Tesla agreed to tutor two theology students who were preparing for their exams. One of them, the stocky Oklobdžija boy, was a relation of Father Tomo Oklobdžija, who baptized Nikola long ago. Milutin sat down with the young men and told them that in his own time, under Bishop Jovanović, he had to take exams in dogmatic, polemic, moral, and pastoral theology, in history, Slavic grammar, and rhetoric and—what was that called?—oh, yes, the
Typikon
with chanting, as well as the methodology of teaching. He asked them if it was still the same. Pleased with what he heard, Milutin nodded his head and noted that it was good to combine subjects pertaining to practical and dogmatic theology. He laughed good-naturedly and explained, “In this way you will become well-rounded men.”

First Milutin spoke briefly about the clash between the iconoclasts and the iconophiles in the Eastern Church. While he passionately argued how essential it was to represent or omit the human form in all three monotheistic religions, Oklobdžija stifled a yawn. The other boy, Korica, yawned openly.

It was not until their next session that Milutin Tesla was able to understand the meaning of the phrase
the patience of a saint.
Not even that virtue helped him explain the conflict between medieval nominalists and realists in the Western Church to those two blockheads. At the beginning of his lecture, Milutin humbly admitted that the philosophical disagreement he was about to discuss was similar to the proverbial dilemma of what came first—the chicken or the egg. The twelfth-century theologian Roscellinus insisted that every abstract notion was nothing but a name—
flatus vocis.

Milutin dramatically paused before he addressed the position of the realists. Often labeled naive, the realists were medieval thinkers who maintained that general notions objectively existed in reality.

“Is that clear?” Milutin cautiously asked.

Instead of answering, young Oklobdžija stared at the ceiling. Korica, realizing that his friend was so interested in ceilings, directed his attention to the floor. Faced with their silence, Milutin girded himself as he reached the conclusion that the problem under discussion could be basically reduced to three questions: Do general notions exist as words, as logical premises, or as parts of the real world outside human thought?

His students resembled roasted lambs on a spit as they stared at him.

“The learned Abelard says,” Milutin Tesla continued tirelessly, “that the universal concept of
Man
is a confusing idea, derived from many images of various people I’ve met in my life.

“Elsewhere,” Milutin elaborated elegantly, “Abelard concedes that universal concepts exist—as logical constructs.”

At this intriguing point, he paused and gave his students an inquisitive look. “But how about this question: does
man as such
exist in reality, outside our minds?”

Confronted with this subtle issue, Korica scratched himself systematically, while Oklobdžija stared at the wall as if he expected it to represent him in this affair.

Nomen est omen
, Milutin Tesla thought.
I have never met such a numskull as this Korica in my life nor anyone as permanently armored against all knowledge as this Oklobdžija.
¹

“What those general words refer to does exist in reality,” Djuka Tesla interjected.

No one had noticed that she was listening to their conversation as she stood in the doorway with her hands covered in flour.

Her husband gave her a look. “How so?”

Djuka struggled with unfamiliar words.

“When you think of bad people, you cover all of them and lump them together into one word, while each of them still exists as a person.”

“Bravo!” Tesla was genuinely pleased. “That’s exactly what Abelard says. Only particularities exist outside our minds. Unity belongs to ideas, not to real objects.”

Milutin clapped his hands and turned toward the embarrassed Oklobdžija and Korica. “There you go, you sage scholars. This illiterate wife of mine has put you in your place!”

He turned toward his wife: “Nikola! Look at your mother. She’s a real man. She’s the sharp one.”

Djuka choked up at these words. She had not cried at her son’s funeral. Now she cried because she never went to school.

1
. The name Korica means
crust
in Serbian; Oklobdžija is a derivative of
armor.

CHAPTER 13

Life’s Novices

Who could ever imagine this!

Who could imagine that, years later, Nikola and Mojo would embark on an important journey, huddled together on a train?