Tesla (9 page)

Humming to himself, the young man lowered his eyes from the stars and saw a late passerby. It was a tall man with a sharp nose. Oblivious to the cooing couples in the gateways, the lanky fellow strode on with determination. There was no doubt that he knew what city he was in, what year it was, and who he was. If one had asked him, he would have readily responded that it was Graz, 1876, and he was… Then the young man from the gateway recognized him and shouted, “Hey, Tesla!”

The busy stranger turned around and a smile lit up his face: “Szigety!”

“Where have you been?” The nighttime lover caught up with Tesla.

Szigety noticed that Tesla had a sharp but classical profile. His nose was like a road sign he followed with haste. Tesla’s high brow bulged between his eyes. The voice in which he responded was raspy and quiet: “I worked late, so I got all foggy inside. I took myself out for a walk, like I was a dog.”

Under his arm Tesla had Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary
, one of the hundred volumes people said he had sworn he would read.

“I’ve just walked my sweetheart home.” Szigety tried to suppress the triumph in his voice. “If you’ll allow me, how are things for you… in that regard?”

“What?” Tesla asked.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ Do you have a girlfriend?”

Szigety’s question was in a language Tesla did not speak. His eyebrows knotted and he assumed an anguished expression. He did not respond. When the silence grew uncomfortable, Szigety raised his arms: “Oh, please, please! I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, it’s all right,” Tesla said kindly.

Nikola had nothing to say on that topic. While still in Karlovac, Mojo Medić chided him for avoiding girls “like the plague.” In Graz, he stayed away from those
displays of God’s nature
even more. Szigety was amazed by his fellow student’s reaction to the mention of the most fascinating thing in the world. He decided to turn left at the next corner and leave this oddball alone with his Voltaire. At the corner, he showed his perfect teeth and remarked that he was going a different way. In order to make up for his sudden change of direction, he mumbled, “Maybe we could have breakfast at Alexander’s sometime?”

“Great!” Tesla said. “Tomorrow at nine?”

Szigety was sure his hardworking classmate would not accept the invitation. As he did so, Szigety exclaimed without thinking, “No, wait a minute…”

“What?” Nikola responded.

Szigety pulled out his pocket watch. The hands piggybacked on the Roman “I.”

“It’s been Monday for a while,” Szigety informed his colleague. “How much sleep do you get?”

Tesla’s eyes were the color of a wild chestnut fresh from the shell. Sparks flashed in those unusual eyes and he said, “Out of twenty-four hours, I sleep four.”

Late-riser Szigety cursed under his breath. “All right then,” he sighed. “I’ll see you at Alexander’s at nine.”

They both went home—Szigety to float in bliss from Ulrike’s embraces and then to sleep, and Tesla to work long into the night. Finally, the latter turned off his lights as well. The night streamed on while people snored under the high roofs. Then the indigo sky paled. A rose-fingered dawn touched the roofs as the sun began to rouse the world: first the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then the city of Graz. The students Antal Szigety and Nikola Tesla arose, dressed, and—in accordance with their commitment—went to meet at Alexander’s.

“Come in, please come in,” the owner of the café greeted his first customers of the morning. Big Elsa’s and Little Elsa’s smiling faces were arrayed above identical collars and aprons. At forty, Big Elsa was more attractive than her daughter. She gazed into Szigety’s eyes a bit longer than necessary. Antal and Nikola chose a table near the window, sunlit and covered with a checkered tablecloth. Little Elsa, pug-nosed like a bat, had quick movements and a broad smile on her face. In the blink of an eye, coffee cups appeared, nestled on lace napkins. Dew-beaded balls of butter curled in a silver bowl. In a basket, buns lay covered with a cloth to keep them hot. The sunlight that warmed Szigety’s cheek fell on a small jar of apricot jam. The atmosphere was pleasant from the very beginning. Their conversation was spontaneous and in a half hour the young men dropped their air of formality and called each other by their first names. Amazed but still drowsy, Antal examined the impeccable Nikola. His hair was combed back, and his bony fingers placed his cup of café au lait precisely back in place.

He looks so fresh
, Antal could not help thinking.

Their conversation showed Nikola to be neither rude nor arrogant, at least not in the way Antal expected him to be. Antal took the liberty of suggesting his new friend part his hair in the middle rather than to comb it back. Sure, Nikola would consider it.

Tesla had found the young man likable ever since—in the lecture hall—Szigety first smiled at him from under his blond mustache, extended his hand, and said, “Antal Szigety.” What he especially appreciated was the other’s ability to say the funniest thing with a straight face—just like Professor Pöschl. Whenever they wanted to emphasize a point—or, as young people commonly do, to interrupt each other—they tapped each other’s shoulders. It turned out that Szigety also read Voltaire. They were anxious to show off their knowledge of the great Frenchman’s ideas. It so happened that they chose contradicting quotes.

“The physician knows all mankind’s weaknesses, the lawyer all its corruptions, and the priest all about its stupidity,” Tesla said.

“If God didn’t exist, man would have to create Him. But everything in Nature hails His existence,” Szigety quoted the same Voltaire.

Continuing to smile, Tesla told Szigety that he had no recollection of such a quote by Voltaire. Breaking a bun and watching the steam rise, he admitted, “I probably don’t remember such a statement because, in Voltaire, I always looked for arguments against my father, who tried to crush my soul in order to save it. If I hadn’t almost died, he would’ve forced me to study theology.”

At these words, Antal became serious and said that, on his part, he once believed he felt the “call” to become a priest.

“Why?” Tesla wondered.

“I dreamed about purity.” Antal fixed him with his blue eyes. “Not only did I read religious books, I also felt a mystical unity with all that exists. I desired to address the world in words of love, like Saint Francis of Assisi in his famous hymn:

CHAPTER 20

The Light

In moments of inspiration, Nikola had a feeling that he had been struck by lightning. The uppermost branches of his nerves lit up. The glare blinded him. Light spread from his forehead downward. While this was going on—or in its aftermath—he saw what he otherwise could only imagine.

“That’s the same energy!” Szigety exclaimed.

“What energy?” Nikola asked.

“The energy that binds a man and a woman together and leads to procreation,” Szigety said, grinning. “The cosmic energy, if you will—the most powerful energy that people are endowed with.”

Nikola raised his eyebrows.

“Let me tell you a story. When I was thirteen, I discovered that thing between my legs…”

Nikola raised his eyebrows even higher.

“So I started to explore it,” Szigety went on unabashed, “with gentle rubbing! You know what they told us at school, that masturbation is self-mutilation, that it saps your
nervous substance
, and all that stuff. So I was afraid to push it. But one day I decided to cross the line.”

“Oh!” Nikola’s eyebrows wanted to hide in his hair, but could not traverse his exceptionally high brow.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Szigety said. “It’s not important what you talk about—it’s how you say it. So, one day I found myself alone at home. I undressed and stood in front of a mirror. Then I lay on my sister’s bed and firmly grasped the tree of life.”

Tesla looked at his friend in polite disbelief.

“I started to make those movements, you know.” Szigety was so wrapped up in his story he frowned. “And all of a sudden, a light started to spread from my toes upward. Nikola, it lapped over my feet and washed up my knees. This flood of inner light spilled over my thighs and reached my loins. The first time, I got frightened and didn’t go all the way, so the light receded to where it came from. It’s the same. Don’t you get it? The same thing.”

“No,” retorted Tesla. “Discovery is the greatest excitement in the world. A discovery is a kiss from God.

“Compared to that all other thrills are nothing.

“Nothing!”

CHAPTER 21

The Impossible

When Nikola first saw Jakob Pöschl, the professor of theoretical and experimental physics, he did not know if Pöschl was a man or a bear. If he was a bear, where did they catch him? How did they succeed in shaving him? Who bound him into this gray suit? Pöschl’s feet would make a shoemaker despair. His hands were like shovels. The first-year student wondered how the professor could carry out his delicate experiments with such hands.

Another thing eluded Tesla. Why would Pöschl, a man of real abilities, be bragging about the three-story townhouse he acquired through marriage? Why would he talk about the Dominican mahogany desks he bought for his daughters, insisting that—without one—“intellectual work is impossible”? Why these stupidities? To Tesla it seemed that his professor craved things he did not respect and was proud of the unwanted things he already had. It appeared to him that Pöschl relied more upon his average shrewdness than upon his first-rate mind—as if he, without noticing, had lost the guiding light in his life, which Tesla was just discovering in his own.

The revolutionary year 1848 found Jakob Pöschl in the midst of the liberal demonstrations at the capital. In March of that year he was the hero Schiller and Byron envisioned. With the wind in his hair and a song on his lips, he shouted “Freedom!” and “Constitution!” As a member of the “Academic Legion,” he protested against Metternich’s spies and called the Archduke Ludwig a jackass in public. He envisioned himself taller than any of the Vienna church spires and imagined history following the moves of his baton. When an older relative cautioned him about the impossibility of his demands for universal voting rights, civil marriage, and the abolition of censorship, the young man responded with confidence, “We decide what’s possible.”

Pöschl never forgave himself for becoming so frightened on October 17, the day when Alfred Candid von Windischgrätz received the order to suppress the riots with force. Fleeing from Jelačić’s soldiers—in whose ranks Nikola’s uncle Branković humbly marched—he took shelter in his hometown of Graz. He was no longer the lawgiver who thundered against all the princes of this world. Now he paid attention not only to what was possible but also to what was expected. As he watched, the gains of the revolution either withered away or took root decades later. He let the social routine lead his life.

Pöschl never forgave himself, however, for betraying his youthful convictions and never completely lost all his rebellious traits from 1848. Instead of riding in a carriage, he sometimes came to the university on horseback. Like a pigeon from a conjurer’s hat, something so unexpected would occasionally flow from Pöschl’s mouth, his students would reel with laughter. Naturally, some of the students liked him and some did not. His wife told him, “I think those who don’t like you understand you better.”

Their friends insisted that his rich wife’s sense of humor—just like his own—somewhat compensated for her bad temper.

“Everyone has prejudices,” Pöschl told his colleague Rogner. “Some hate the Slavs. Some hate the Jews. Some hate the French. I hate the students.”

A sympathetic nod did not cost Rogner much. He knew that his erratic colleague was a good teacher, capable of sudden outbursts of enthusiasm. At the beginning of Nikola’s first year, with a glance around, Pöschl silenced the auditorium and promised, “Next year we’ll do experiments with the Gramme dynamo. I give you my word of honor. We just ordered one from Paris.”