A lot of construction was going on in Budapest—one sharp tower tried to outgrow the other. And what sunsets they had over the city! The pink and purple sky disintegrated above the roofs. Tesla worked with the engineers who built the sixth European switchboard. Everything smelled like Big Time.
A blond conquistador’s beard was always in the thick of things. Ferenc Puskás! Puskás slapped Tesla on the back like Uncle Branković used to do a long time ago. He promoted him and started to call him “sonny.”
“Faster, sonny, faster!”
If someone asked, Tesla would say that impatience was a synonym for genius. He complained that the world was too slow and enjoyed cramming his days full of obligations. Day was on his right side, and night was on his left. He could not wait for dawn to break so that he could continue to work. It was so fascinating, so painfully fascinating. Tesla disappeared at work—a blind force that resembled fire was in his place. A visor fell over his eyes. In the glare, he saw an even brighter window and in it something that did not exist before. That is how he came up with his first invention.
“What did you make?” Szigety was curious.
“A telephone earpiece! I increased the number of magnets in the receiver of the telephone,” Nikola responded. “And I changed their position in relation to the diaphragm.”
“Does Puskás like it?”
The young man’s face lit up:
“He’ll use my invention in the telephone broadcast of an operatic performance in February.”
During the pre-Lent Season, Erkel’s opera Hunyadi László was performed at the National Theatre. “The whole of Budapest” simultaneously followed the production in the Vigadó Concert Hall. The quality of the broadcast was better than in Paris. In the electric light, dignitaries looked a little touched in the head.
“But where’s Tesla?” Puskás asked Szigety in a disgruntled whisper.
Up until the day before, Tesla planned the broadcast with utmost enthusiasm, rushed Puskás on, and kept repeating, “Work created man. Let it destroy him too!”
Nikola had accelerated until the finest wire in his head snapped. His soul seemed to have hung by that wire. After it broke, the young man turned into a bundle of burning nerves. He was lying in bed behind heavy curtains in Mrs. Várnai’s apartment. When they told him about the success of the broadcast, he did not have enough strength to smile.
CHAPTER 29
The Decadent
And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth”
John 11:43
It would be a mistake to judge Mrs. Várnai’s educational background from her books for children. Tesla’s landlady could recite Verlaine in French. She asked her tenant if he had read Baudelaire only to discover that he remembered just one line: “Satan, have mercy on my ultimate despair.”
By that time, Les fleurs du mal was the same age as Tesla. A generation of poets inspired by the book had already stepped onto the scene. Poets and painters started to insist on morbid hypersensitivity, the urban cult, and life with dark circles around the eyes. European art turned into the princess and the pea. But Mrs. Várnai knew that none of those artists who worshiped hashish and the green spirit of absinthe were any more sensitive or decadent than Nikola Tesla.
Before the opera broadcast, Tesla rested five hours a day but slept only two. He woke up before dawn and hurried to his office. He could not decide whether to blame Budapest or fate for the deterioration of his health.
This city gets under my skin, he wrote in his diary.
“Let’s go! Keep it up, sonny!” Ferenc Puskás shouted.
For his part, Tesla also egged Puskás on and increased the pace.
Then something snapped.
The whole world quivered, and Tesla with it. And yet, instead of quietly falling in sync with each other, these quivers clashed. Below the trembling, even in complete silence, a conversation went on that only the sick man could hear. Nikola broke that hallucination down into its basic components. The murmur of the universe, both distant and close, sounded like g-a-aaa-arbl-ed words. Beneath the sounds of the outside noises, these words ran on, slow and drawn out. Who was talking—God or a monster hidden behind the face of daily life?
The whistle of a distant train shook the bench he was sitting on. A clock in the third room struck like a hammer hitting an anvil. Tesla heard ants scuttling across the floor. A fly alighting on the table sent a flash under the dome of his skull. In the darkness, he could sense an object several yards away through a creepy feeling on his forehead.
“You’re a bat,” Szigety declared.
The vibrations of Budapest traffic, penetrating through the frame of the building, his bed, and his chair, shook the bat’s entire body. Sun machine-gunned through the leaves of the houseplants and dazed him. He was grateful for the heavy drapes in Mrs. Várnai’s apartment. He put rubber pads under the legs of his bed. He wanted to lie down eight stories beneath the ground. He was so tired.
“What’s happening to me?” the young engineer trembled.
Doctors passed through the rooms of potted rhododendrons and smoky mirrors. Szigety showed their self-assured spectacles and goatees to the door. After a fortnight of physicians’ visits, Tesla still did not feel any better. His fingers dangled as if they were about to fall off his hands. His arms dangled as if they were about to fall off his shoulders.
“How do you feel?” Szigety asked from the door.
“Like Saint Sebastian,” Tesla whispered.
The arrows opened holes in Saint Sebastian’s skin, while eyes started to open on Tesla’s: one on the back of his head, another on his shoulder, and yet another on his stomach. Perception flayed him alive. He was all eyes and lips.
“We need your help,” Szigety told Mrs. Várnai.
The landlady gave a sidelong look, full of understanding and compassion. From that moment on, she was a daily visitor to the darkened room in which she could hear the sick man rave.
“Dane, let me go! Please let me go!”
She brought in some cakes and chamomile tea sweetened with honey, and whispered, “Eat.”
Nikola bared his fangs, trying to smile.
Mrs. Várnai’s clasped fingers went white as she prayed for him. She longed to caress that tormented creature. Once, while he was asleep, she branded his forehead with a kiss. The young man pretended not to notice it. He gave her a furtive look and instantly regretted it. Her entire feminine soul was in her eyes.
When Lajos Várnai came to visit his mother from Sarajevo, he felt Tesla’s irregular pulse and prescribed a large dose of potassium bromide.
“He’s at death’s door,” he said and insisted on a second opinion. A distinguished specialist, Dr. Rosenzweig, came, snapped his bag shut in the end, and declared, “Medical science can’t help him.”
“Fuck science!” Szigety raged.
Since he had already failed to get Tesla to a brothel, the next best thing was to at least make him do some physical exercise.
“Trust me,” he told Tesla as he lifted him off the bed.
Did not John the Golden Mouth say that men are just shadows of bursting soap bubbles? Nikola was cloaked in numbness and suffered from spells of deafness and nausea. In the fluid of his own fear, he pulsated like an amoeba. He walked on the streets as if they were caked in ice. In the buzzing world, he moved as if his next step would be his last.
Szigety urged him on.
“Get up. Illness comes in bulk and goes in parcels.”
Szigety was the only one who believed that his friend could beat his illness. Disgusted with doctors, he said to himself, “People are blind. They don’t see anything. They don’t get anything. Most of them.”
He forced Nikola to live. He dragged him out for a walk every day. The wind played with the powder of snow on the roofs. The smell of frost was a greeting from God. Under his breath, Nikola cursed the obnoxiously noisy city to its steeples. Whenever he passed under a bridge, he felt as if a huge weight w
as crushing his skull. This is why they preferred to walk in the open fields. Szigety gradually added calisthenics to their outings. Holding dumbbells, Tesla spread his arms from his hips and lifted them above his head. He felt bad, and when a person does not feel well, he hears the music only for himself. This was how he felt when it first occurred to him that he might make it. He was like a shipwreck survivor who sensed the nearness of the shore. And in the next moment, it was not a mere sensation—it was a veritable shore. He even started to believe his painful hatching was coming to an end. Something was prodding him from the other side of the membrane. The solution to the mystery was close at hand.
CHAPTER 30
The Park
As it set behind the Buda Hills, the sun lit up the frozen river, the big city, and two elegant young men taking a stroll along the graveled paths in the park. February 1882 was without snow, but frosty. One young man wore a black overcoat, buttoned all the way to the top, while the other was cloaked in a yellow camel hair coat. The hair of the man in the dark coat was black and slickly brushed back. His companion was chubby, with a fair mustache. He frowned unwillingly every so often.
Tesla was in a good mood, and he whistled a tune from Vivaldi’s Winter. Szigety’s lips were curled in a “smile of playful Eros.”
“In this very park a scene from The Memoirs of a German Lady Singer by Wilhelmina Schröder-Devrient is set,” he informed the indifferent Tesla.
Two women wearing hats with large plumes went by. They were talking about a famous violinist.
Tesla and Szigety overheard one saying, “He doesn’t look like much in person, but his music is so intoxicating.”
Two maids followed the women. A brunette with straight hair and a square jaw held the arm of a little blond who resembled a jelly roll.
“My teeth are bad. Whenever I eat anything sweet, I cry,” the blond complained in a joyful voice. “But I still like to…”
A little boy dressed like a girl sat on his bottom and the maid with bad teeth yanked him up. “Come on, Herve. Don’t try to be cute, please.”
A high-spirited sparrow hopped across the path. With their quivering bills, tame ducks pecked at grain scattered for them in the grass.
“I’ve almost forgotten that all of this exists,” Tesla sighed.
Szigety had also forgotten about the world.
He was thinking about Rita’s lips on his!
He dreamed of spreading her thighs with his knee and—shivers ran down his spine at the thought—of her stockings making a hissing sound. Her face was dancing. Oh, Muse, help me describe the dancing of that face. Was she disgusted? Or was she melting with pleasure? Was she furious but unable to resist the force that carried the two of them away…
“Look!” Tesla shook him. “By God, look at the sunset!”
The young Hungarian raised his eyes and saw inky clouds behind which the golden disc drowned in crimson.
Tesla was seeing the sun off by reciting lines from Goethe’s Faust:
The daily work being done, the glitter is going away,
Rushing to create new life on a new day.
Szigety looked around and stammered, “Look—the entire park has turned red from the sun. Everyone has become an Indian.”
Tesla did not respond.
“The evergreen bushes have been trimmed into chess pieces! Look at the screaming colors!”
Again, Tesla did not respond. A golden spike flashed in each window in Budapest. The horizon was peppered with birds, and the sun was going down behind them. When the flock flew over the park, Szigety became aware that his friend was still locked in place, gazing at the sun.
“What happened?” Szigety was flustered.
Nikola stared at the flaming orb without blinking.
“Look at me,” Szigety called out.
“Look at me,” Tesla echoed.
Then he said, still gazing at the sun, “Watch me turn it around.”
Szigety looked left and right in search of the closest bench.
“I switch it on—click!—and it turns one way. Then—another click!—it reverses its course.”
This is the last thing I need, Szigety thought in desperation. Tactfully, he took Tesla by the elbow and suggested, “Let’s take a little rest.”
Tesla held his ground.
“I turn it off. It stops! And”—his face broke into an inspired, anguished smile—“can’t you see it doesn’t crackle?”
“What?”
“Well, the motor.”
Szigety’s face looked as if he’d grabbed a live wire.
“Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Where’s your motor?”
“Right here,” Tesla pointed at the space between them. “Turn it on—click! And the problem is solved!”
When talking with someone, Szigety often closed one eye. It was impossible to say whether it was out of irritation or the need to focus. So he squinted with one eye and asked, “What problem is solved?”
“The problem of my alternating current motor! Listen to how quietly it works.”
Like the wind, the spirit goes wherever it wants, but we can only know it by the sound, Jesus told Nicodemus the Pharisee. An inexplicable sense of excitement engulfed Szigety as he realized that what seemed like raving was not. An old print representing Ptolemy’s system, with the fixed earth surrounded by the celestial spheres, came to mind. Some rascal stuck his head through the spheres in the print and was looking out into space. Szigety felt like that rascal. He was suddenly cold.
Tesla’s face was bronzed by the setting sun.
He had that inspired and tortured expression his father hated so much.
“I’ve solved it. Now I can die happy!”
“Please, explain it to me!”
Tesla pulled himself together and started to draw diagrams on the gravel path with his cane.
“You see,” he began. “Up until now, everyone who took on this problem had used only one electric circuit. I’ll use at least two. Why? Because more alternating currents in the same generator can produce magnetic fields in a number of electric spindles on the engine’s stator. Each spindle has the same frequency as the others, but their electromagnetic waves are out of sync.”
Szigety imagined a gentleman and a lady dancing without being able to coordinate their steps.
“Their strikes alternate,” Tesla continued. “This produces the effect of adding another cylinder to the engine. Two magnetic fields perpendicular to one another add up vector-like and the resulting field spins…”
Abstract concepts flew from Tesla’s mouth like cosmic winds that powered ethereal engines. He still drew on the gravel path with his cane. He spoke exhaling steam.
“It spins as the current changes its direction. This is how a mutable magnetic whirlpool is created, which firmly embraces the rotor. There’s no need for the commutator anymore.” He looked at Szigety openly. “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it simple?”
“It is simple,” affirmed Szigety.
“It will be possible to conduct electricity over long distances,” Tesla exclaimed. “This motor I invented is like Aladdin’s lamp. Once liberated, the genie inside will do huge favors for mankind.”
Nikola’s eyes were tearful as if he was about to sneeze. A spasm of wild joy ravished his bosom. Szigety pondered his words, his face colored by the setting sun. When he finally understood, a thrill shot through his legs. The wounded beast that was restrained under his skin snapped its leash. He felt jealous and did not want to listen anymore.
Your motor… your world… Szigety thought. Pretty cosmic recitals. Aladdin’s world! And what am I going to do in it?
The west bled a most tragic crimson. The two young men stared at the middle of the path that showed the blueprint of the motor.
Warm fog floated in Nikola’s brown eyes. The frost smelled like flowers. Szigety gazed at the drawing of the rotating field. Then he looked at the setting sun and overcame his selfishness like Jacob did the angel. For the first time, he grasped the
importance of what his friend was telling him. Antal Szigety’s eyes flashed like Tesla’s, and he whispered in triumph:
“Impossible!”
CHAPTER 31
Without Love
The Budapest switchboard began to operate in the spring. There was no more work, so the young engineer packed his bags. Ferenc Puskás rubbed his happy belly and asked, “Why don’t you transfer to our central office in Paris?”
“Really?” Tesla asked skeptically.
“Really,” said Puskás.
Two weeks later, Tesla got off the train and sighed: Here I am! During the first month, he bathed in the lights of Paris like a sparrow in the dust. It seemed that the entire city was infected with an amorous fever. Love’s pressure was so strong it could crush a man wearing lighter armor. Couples embraced and rubbed against each other in alleys. Lips smeared with honey could barely part. Young men and women cooed in entryways. Trembling fingers intertwined and frightened eyes asked, Do you love me? Love pouted and rustled from every dark lane lined with trees, from every corner of the city. Who could ignore such an intoxicating whisper? But Nikola was deaf to the tittering coming from the alleys. He rushed through Paris streets following his own nose. In brothels, judges and bankers nibbled the fat thighs of women. On sidewalks, street girls pursed their golden lips and called out with laughter, “Monsieur, what are you up to? Are you lonely tonight?”
Tesla had his own definition of love. Paris was the center of the world and the national library was the center of the center. There—with love—he read Maupassant’s early short stories. With love he gazed at the buildings along Haussmann’s boulevards. He looked at the mansarded houses, wondering who lived in them, and got to know the demonic bestiary carved into the cathedral. Love also led him to the opera and—believe it or not—to art exhibitions. Since his Karlovac days, Nikola had associated art with starvation. The first thing that came to mind whenever he entered a gallery was roasted chicken. And yet, he dutifully nodded his head before the framed smudges of color that Durand-Ruel made famous.
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