Tesla (59 page)
Authors: Vladimir Pistalo
Tesla remembered how Mr. Delmonico once asked him to play a game of billiards.
“I played billiards in Prague to support myself.” He smiled at Kosanović. “Still, I approached the table as if I were seeing it for the first time. I examined the cue as if deliberating whether to smell it or bite it. Then I chalked it and bent over. A whip of hair fell across my eye. As soon as I broke the balls, I knew how to finish the game. Playing flawlessly, I finished it in five minutes without fanfare. Everyone was in awe. Delmonico asked me, How did you do that? I explained to him that mathematical calculations help the scientist solve problems in all life’s situations.”
Tesla laughed soundlessly and then remained motionless, with his mouth open.
The uncle and his nephew walked through nervous horns, terrified sirens, frightened locomotive whistles.
Thousands of lights shine all around, every color imaginable, stars, reflectors, and rays cross each other, the rumble of over-the-ground and under-the-ground streetcars muffles the noise of crowds so vast the eye can’t take them in while I walk beside this great man as if in a dream. I can understand his melancholic, somewhat compassionate smile which hovers around his mouth. I listen to his soft voice. Gentleness and a strange intensity radiate from him.
With gentleness and a strange intensity, Tesla murmured, “I feel continuity.”
What continuity?
Where were the boxers who pummeled each other with their naked fists in fifty rounds? Where was the audience who applauded to gramophones? Where were the forgotten towns with tree-lined streets and a cat in each window? Where was the independent and melancholy Gibson Girl? Where were the two hundred feathers of Chief Standing Bear that trembled on the Ferris Wheel?
Where were the bowler hats filled with hemp fibers? Where were Lizzie the Dove and Tender Maggie? Where were the boulevard epics as dramatic as
The Odyssey
? Where were upturned bottles reflected in the stormy mirror of Chick Tricker’s Flea Bag and McGurk’s Suicide Hall? Where were the star-eyed Hudson Dusters? Where were the minstrels and the ventriloquists, the female opium smokers, the beeswax figures, the learned phrenologists, automatons, Lady Mephistopheles?
“I feel continuity,” Tesla repeated, gazing with his wounded and mysterious eyes through the millions of visible shapes of the larvae-like world.
Kosanović did not understand what kind of continuity his uncle felt.
“Dear Sir,” Mr. Weilage, the manager of Manhattan Storage, wrote to him. “This is our third warning. If you fail to pay your overdue storage fees, we will put the stored items up for public auction.”
Some ten years before, his correspondence and prototypes left the Pennsylvania Hotel and moved to the Manhattan Storage warehouses. Everything was there. Since Tesla ignored the last warning, Weilage announced the sell-off in a local newspaper.
Under Tesla’s eyelids, some lunar-infernal mists twirled.
His biographer O’Neill saw the ad by chance, and—for less than three hundred dollars—saved Tesla’s entire legacy from perishing.
“Let it go,” Tesla addressed humankind which, like a spectral choir, listened to what he would say in his solitude. “If you don’t care, why should I?”
CHAPTER 125
The Bard
The spark in the soul that has never touched either time or place rejects all created things.
Master Eckhart
Kosanović was somewhat annoyed because Tesla thought he knew better than the doctors.
“Well, it’s all about me,” the uncle explained.
The bewildered nephew wrote his uncle’s political speeches.
They talked “about everything.”
They often went to the movies together.
In the movie
The Cat People,
the painter Irena Dubrovna obsessively sketched the black panther in the zoo. Fears of the supernatural and the unknown afflicted her. Her fiancé, Oliver, showed some interest in a sculpture of an equestrian piercing a cat which she had in her apartment.
Each time Nikola went to bed at night, Doctor Dane came in and put his hand on his head. “When will you come to me, brother?” he asked with his face beaming. Blindly and lovingly, Tesla whispered back, “I know: you’re a demon.”
At those words, the room turned into an elevator and started to sink.
“That’s King John of Serbia,”
Irena explained in the movie.
“In the Middle Ages, he used to kill witches who often assumed the shape of a cat. King John was a good king. He drove the Mamluks out of Serbia and liberated his people.”
Light started to rise from Tesla’s toes. It splashed his feet, washed over his knees, but then turned abruptly green, like defective match heads. A flood of inner light reached his thighs. All of a sudden, it smelled like sulfur. The old golden sheen flashed beneath Tesla’s eyelids, transformed into some kind of lunar-infernal mist.
“That’s not a real cat,”
Irena continued.
“It represents the evil customs my village once practiced. You see, the Mamluks came to Serbia long ago and subjected the population. But, people were good at first and praised God in a truly Christian manner.”
Tesla inquired about his relatives in the old country. He remembered how his father and the Catholic priest Kostrenčić had held hands in front of the Gospić church.
“In Lika, we used to live with Croatian Catholics in complete harmony,” he repeated. “There was no hatred whatsoever until high politics sowed it.”
But, bit by bit—the people became corrupt. When King John drove the Mamluks out and came to our village, he unearthed horrible things. People bowed to Satan and sang a Mass for him. King John cut some of them down, yet others—the craftiest and the most evil ones—escaped into the mountains. Their curse still haunts the village where I was born…
The news that Kosanović brought from “frightful home” was terrifying. “Right now it’s hell over there,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Serbs had been killed in Croatia. Many of his relatives, priests, were slaughtered. The Croatian Nazis, the
ustaše
, burned the house in which he was born.
“That’s not the Croatian people.” Kosanović was holding Tesla’s hand. “Those are the fascists—the traitors.”
“Sure,” Tesla whispered.
“Of course,” Kosanović confirmed in a tense voice.
“Do you know where the biblical hell is located in which the souls of the damned burn eternally?” Tesla asked unexpectedly.
“Where?” Kosanović was surprised.
“On the sun. The distance makes it the source of life.”
Kosanović wanted to surprise him.
He brought a real Homeric bard to suite 3321 of the New Yorker Hotel. The bard’s face was deeply wrinkled. His eyebrows and Adam’s apple stuck out. He introduced himself: “Petar Perunović. The folk
gusle
player.”
Nikola explained to him why he lived on the thirteenth floor: “The higher up you live, the fresher and cleaner the air gets, there are no insects, and in the summer it’s not as hot and humid as on the lower floors. The street noise and bustle don’t bother me here.”
They discussed the war. The folk
gusle
player said, “In this world, we’re God’s sheep. A ram is a ram. But—only one ram is in charge. He wears the bell.”
The nephew reminded Tesla that Professor Milman Parry proved that the Homeric tradition was still alive in the Balkans and that he had brought “a ton of sound recordings” from Yugoslavia.
“He also interviewed me!” the mustached Perunović beamed.
From the thirteenth floor, the vista opened onto ziggurats, elevated trains, bridges, and the humming multitudes.
“Take a look at that!” Perunović murmured above New York.
The bard smiled. In the midst of the glass and steel of the 1940s, he did not look out of place. Not having a traditional tripod stool to sit on, he sat on Tesla’s sickbed.
“Oooooo,” Perunović drawled out through his nose as he tuned his one-string instrument, which ended with the figure of an eagle carved in wood.
“The
gusle
isn’t an instrument—it’s an anesthetic,” Kosanović said in a whisper. “It numbs the doubting body and makes the soul fly to the realm of tales.”
“So reality becomes irrelevant?” the aged Don Quixote asked.
“Oooooo,” the bard repeated through his nose and outshouted the hum of New York with his monotonous string and trembling voice:
Almighty God, what a great event
,
When Milić the standard bearer got married…
He couldn’t find a girl to match his beauty
A great hero, he found a fault in each of the lasses
And he was about to forsake his marriage…
Nikola smiled with the smile of a sly lord in ancient Greece. He felt the bronze armor constrict him. Even his voice had suddenly turned bronze. While the bard sang, he saw what he had not seen in a very long time: The icicles on the roof of Father’s house looked like a frozen waterfall. The diamond wind blew over sunlit snow. People’s footprints glimmered. The traces of small animals zigzagged. A depression indicated that a field mouse burrowed under the snow, where it was warmer. A deer’s hoof was imprinted onto the whiteness as clearly as a stamp.
Dark and forbidden, sacred tools hung in the barn. Fish in the spring stream were like female cousins, while people were the gods’ younger brothers.
At one time,
gusle
epics celebrated one piece of bronze clashing with another. Now the whole world resounded with the steel of Midway Island and Stalingrad.
It seemed to Nikola that the same string that played at the world’s beginning was still playing. Three thousand years since Homer’s time and eight decades since the time of his childhood had not passed. Like Mojo Medić once said—time does not exist.
CHAPTER 126
Ghosts and Pigeons
Sometimes it seemed to Tesla that the New York sky was as dark as the Styx and that Charon’s barges ferried thousands across it. At other times, it looked as if the gloomy ferryman did not ferry anyone—Tesla was only reading about it while sitting in Charon’s barge in between life and death.
The wind blew away the beams of the spotlights on Times Square.
Naked lovers caressed in a room colored by the pulse of neon lights.
Death ticked in the clock.
Only one throb of the pulse separated him from the kiss of him whom they say is… Horrible—seen from afar. Beautiful—seen up close.
One single throb of the pulse.
If muscular tension relaxed for a brief moment, the hole within him would expand beyond his outline, and the creator would dissolve into his own creation. Nikola would vanish into the lights of New York.
Did not Saint Gregory Palamas say that he who participated in God’s energy, partly, himself becomes light?
Ever whiter, ever more translucent. With the wind at his back, he felt like a paper kite. He went out for midnight walks.
Like a blind fish, he roamed around Broadway at the hour when one could hear footsteps.
The world was a thorn of light in a sleepless shopwindow.
He shimmered like a ray of light in the mass of trembling iron, glass, and stone.
Who’s waiting for me at home?
he wondered.
Who’s waiting for me?
Yet, they waited for him.
Old friends, mostly dead.
Ghosts and pigeons.
CHAPTER 127