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.
“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 Niko
la 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.”
&nb
sp; “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?
Nikola wore the shoes that had been bought for Dane when he was about to start high school. His father’s raised hand disappeared in the cloud of steam on the platform.
“My Niko,” murmured the father to his son, who could not hear him. “You’ve just barely learned how to be a child, and now you’re becoming a young man. When you learn how to be a young man, you’ll become mature. Then you’ll understand that in this life we’re always novices.”
“Here we go,” Mojo sighed.
A child with meticulously cropped hair entered their compartment, nudged on by his parents. The newcomers raised the window to protect themselves from sparks and soot. Nikola’s shoulders drooped. He and Mojo were adults now. They were supposed to discuss serious topics, which made Nikola’s tongue stick to his palate from boredom. But he had to be a man. He remembered how soldiers from Lika returned home from the war in Dalmatia in 1866, so he asked Mojo if the Austrian emperor had won that campaign.
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