“When there’s no church around, you can pray under a fir or linden tree,” Mother pointed out to Dane and Nikola.
She created the world, and then along came Father and cataloged it in books. Father wrinkled his nose at Mother’s stories. He wondered how such myths could have survived in a family full of priests.
“Let it go,” Milutin murmured. “Let evil go, and embrace the good. Let illness and misery go. Turn to health.”
CHAPTER 3
The Snowball
On the second day of Serbian Orthodox Christmas, Nikola and his two older cousins Vinko and Nenad slipped out of their parents’ sight and went deep into the forest above Smiljan.
“The snow’s really beautiful!” Nikola laughed.
“Beautiful, whatever… It gets in my eyes,” said Vinko.
Nenad snapped at snowflakes like a young dog.
They looked down at their feet. After the climb, it was hard to tell which one was the most winded.
Covered with icicles, the boulders looked like monsters. A deep silence reigned among the pines. From time to time, the wind moaned through the treetops and a heavy white burden fell off the branches. It was as if the forest were breathing.
The boys plowed deeper into the snow, and their feet became soaked. They pushed their hands against their knees to help them climb up the slope. They scrambled on a big boulder in the middle of a ravine, on top of which the wind played with drifting snow dust.
“We shouldn’t go any farther if we want to get home before nightfall,” Nikola announced.
The boys clutched their sides and breathed heavily. On the rock in the middle of the ravine, the two very different cousins stood on either side of Nikola, each with an arm flung over his shoulders. Vinko was a quiet and squeamish boy with bags under his eyes. He disappeared once and his parents looked for him the whole day. Finally they found him sitting huddled in the church. In Nikola’s family, men usually chose a religious or a military career. It seemed as if Vinko, with his quiet demeanor and bags under his eyes, had already made his choice.
His brother, Nenad, was hardly officer or priest material. Once he hoisted a big rock above his head and slammed it down on a turtle with all his might. When the Teslas’ cat had kittens, he drowned them in a bucket. When Nikola created a windmill powered by junebugs, Nenad grabbed the junebugs and ate them.
The silence in the forest got deeper. The three boys breathed as one. The bitter air stung their nostrils.
Nikola was deep in thought. Vinko took his arm off Nikola’s shoulder and looked down the ravine. Nikola noticed a vein pulsating on his temple. Vinko said, “At this moment a bear is sleeping somewhere in this forest. Hamsters and badgers sleep in their dens. Bugs sleep under frozen roots. And underneath all of that lies a dormant force.”
Nenad also took his arm off of Nikola’s shoulders and almost choked: “I’d love… I’d love to be a wolf in this forest.”
He threw his head back, craned his neck, and howled:
“Aaaaarrroooooo!”
When his cousins let him go, Nikola felt cold and naked.
“Let’s throw snowballs down the hill,” he said impatiently, “to see whose goes the farthest.”
“Sure.”
The snow crunched between his palms. Unlike his two cousins, he did not have gloves. While he made snowballs and threw them down the hill, his fingers grew numb. As the snowballs rolled along the slope, they gathered more snow and got bigger, but most of them grew too heavy and soon stopped.
“Look at mine,” Nenad squeaked. “It’s the best!”
“It’s crap!” Vinko yelled. “Look at mine!”
“Yours stopped too!”
“Sure it did, it hit a stump.”
Nikola’s hands ached from the cold. He felt as though his palms were stripped of flesh—it was as if he packed snow with clenched, frozen bones. He shoved his hands under his armpits trying to warm them up. Finally, he put them in his pants, underneath his balls.
“Look at my snowball!” yelped Nenad.
“Look at mine!” shouted Vinko.
Nikola did not look. He pulled his cold hands from between his thighs. Silently, he made a snowball. He threw it like he was throwing dice. The snowball bowled down the slope, gathering snow on the way. It quickly spun. It quickly grew. It turned into a huge ball of snow that whooshed and scudded. Then it stopped whooshing—it roared, storming down the ravine.
When the monstrous, rushing snowball started to amass topsoil the boys realized that things had become serious.
“Oh God, oh God,” whispered Vinko shrilly. “It’s turning into an avalanche!”
The snowball turned into a natural disaster. It left a jagged trail of ruination and effortlessly brushed away a row of birches and pines at the far end of the slope. Thundering and sweeping everything before it, it disappeared from sight, moving toward the village. The entire mountain shook from the impact.
At that moment, it became apparent that one of Nikola’s cousins was frightened by and the other delighted with life.
“Yee-haw!” whooped Nenad the destroyer, as if the fear physically pleased him.
While the earth shook under their feet, Vinko started to cry and plead, “O God, save us from another avalanche from up the slope… God, please don’t let this one destroy the village down there!”
Nikola stood entranced. He also felt ecstatic from the destruction. He was intoxicated by the release of this natural force.
The little white thing he tossed down the hill with his own hand tore out boulders and swept down pines as if they were matchsticks. It moved matter and released a primal force. Nothing could stop that snowball once it started down the slope at that unique, exact angle. Nikola got goose bumps as he stood between the frightened Vinko and the enthusiastic Nenad.
“Destiny,” he whispered in awe.
CHAPTER 4
Winters
God was still busy with creation in Smiljan. Villagers were as tall as giants. People’s words were not dead—they were alive. Nature was primal. The smell of frost was a divine greeting.
Back then, winters were colder than those that came later. They felt more Russian or Finnish than Balkan. To Nikola it seemed that the villagers left a sparkling trail as they tromped through the snow. A snowball that hit a tree exploded into a flash of light. One evening, something odd happened with the tomcat that Niko liked to hug and wrestle. On his way to light the candles, the boy rubbed the cat and felt sparks crackling underneath his palm. He looked from left to right, following his hand. Light shimmered between his fingers and the cat’s back. This was yet another “beautiful phenomenon” related to God’s work.
“Would you look at that!” exclaimed Djuka.
Milutin figured out that what they saw—and there was no doubt that they all saw it—was electricity. He explained that peculiarity the best he could.
That was the first time it occurred to Nikola that Nature was like a huge cat. He wondered: who’s rubbing her?
“We live in an illuminated world,” whispered Milutin to his wife and son.
“What does ‘illuminated’ mean?” Djuka whispered back.
“Lit from within.”
CHAPTER 5
The Visors
When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
Plato, The Republic, book VII
(trans. Benjamin Jowett)
“It comes out of nowhere!” little Nikola complained to his parents.
He closed his eyes, and light engulfed him. The entire world dissolved in liquid fire.
“I’m disappearing. I’m getting absorbed by light,” the boy whispered.
He struggled to return to the precious world of daily existence.
“This thing has a will of its own!” he cried.
“Does it feel like it does when you turn your face toward the sun with your eyes closed?” asked Mother.
“In
a way. A golden visor falls over my eyes while they’re open. There’s a flash and I’m floating in light.”
Milutin wondered, Could it be epilepsy?
It turned out to be something like the Tabor Light in the Eastern Church. The light that annihilated all the laws of the universe with one swoop fell on Nikola’s eyes. Seen from within, a golden hemisphere replaced his face. That illumination that shook the foundation of life and annihilated the physical world frightened Father Milutin.
This was when Dane, for the first time, took the side of his brother, who was younger by eight years.
“No. What Nikola’s talking about happens to me too.”
The parents felt relieved. Whatever happened to their prince could not be bad.
“Do images appear along with the flashes of light?” Dane asked his brother.
Nikola nodded.
“Don’t be afraid of them,” Dane said. “Let yourself go.”
With teary eyes, Nikola stared at him and wailed, “But that is the scariest of all!”
CHAPTER 6
Brother
“Who’s this handsome boy?” visitors asked, smiling at Dane Tesla.
They turned toward younger Nikola and said, “And who’s this?”
The brothers resembled each other, but no one noticed that. Auntie Deva, who was snaggletoothed like a boar, preferred Dane. So did Luka Bogić, the red-faced hunter who sometimes pointed his gun at children and threatened to kill them. The gray-bearded Father Alagić, who snorted as he laughed, also liked Dane better.
In front of visitors, Milutin never failed to boast about Dane’s intelligence.
“How many priest vestments hang on your mother’s family tree?” he asked impatiently.
“Thirty-six.”
“Who was the first one?”
“Tomo Mandić.”
“That’s my clever boy!”
When he started school, Dane never had to read a page more than once. Whatever he said was well said.
“The prince!” his relatives would say.
“Will he become a patriarch?” the sly Luka Bogić asked.
“He can be whatever he wants to be,” Milutin Tesla responded soberly. “But let him become a good man.”
There were no signs that Dane was bored by these performances for his father’s friends, even after he reached his teens. Whenever the exquisite Danilo Trbojević, the excellent Danilo Popović, or the diligent Damjan ČuČković came to visit, he recited Schiller’s poems in German, including “Unter Den Linden,” “Die Ideale,” or “Das Lied von der Glocke.”
“It’s obvious he comprehends every single line,” praised Čučković.
“Both comprehends and feels,” added Popović, who was himself a poet.
But the real mental exercises were conducted when Milutin was alone with his son. He demanded that the boy learn texts by rote, practice rhetorical skills, and read people’s minds. As a cadet in the military academy, Tesla observed his teacher, a Jesuit, get into a student’s face and command, “Refute Aristotle!”
He repeated the same drill with Dane. In the voice of the former officer, he ordered, “Refute Descartes!”
Dane had new growth shadowing his upper lip. He looked out the window and began: “Descartes doubted his own existence, suspecting all visible things to be merely props that a malicious demon placed around him.”
The boy paused deliberately. Then he raised his voice: “Tormented by his universal doubt, the philosopher searched for certainty. Excited and perhaps defiant, he uttered the famous sentence, ‘I think, therefore I am.’” Here Dane smiled and pointed out: “The problem that tortured Descartes was nothing new. In the fourteenth century, John of Mirecourt postulated, ‘If I deny or even doubt my own existence, I contradict myself. Is it possible to doubt one’s existence without implicitly confirming it?’ Saint Augustine foresaw Descartes’s dilemma when he exclaimed, ‘If I am deceived, I am!”’
Dane Tesla raised his arm and, like a matador killing a bull, concluded: “After all, Descartes was a thinker, and it does not come as a surprise that for him thinking was the source of certainty. Had he been a gardener, he would be looking for confirmation of his existence in his garden. As a musician, he would say, ‘I play, therefore I am.”’
“Not bad,” Milutin muttered, while his face was saying, “That’s exquisite, son! That’s top notch!”
And who was that big-eared boy with a triangular head, peering at his father and his brilliant brother from behind the door?
Nikola did not like to be called Niko, because in Serbian it meant “nobody”—the one who does not exist. Through the half-open door, the boy watched his brother, who was turning into a young man. Dane was as handsome as Young Joseph. How could one person be blessed with so many gifts? Who endowed them? Dane was mysterious with the mystery of youth. He felt blood rushing through his veins. Surprised by himself, he strained his ears to hear the voices in his own breathing. Nikola had to ask him three times before he got a response. Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Dane called him back.
“I’m going to eat.”
“Why? You’ll only get hungry again.”
Nikola laughed. His brother remained serious. When Dane’s smile eventually shone through, Nikola forgot himself and his envy. He never encountered such grace again.
If he were not around, it occurred to Nikola more than once, what kind of world would this be? Would the sun still shine?
Perhaps Nikola would be important in that thrilling world? Perhaps he would seem bright in that horrifying world without Dane?
CHAPTER 7
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.
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