Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

  “Hug—and forget!” He had made up his mind.

  Marica treated Nikola as if he were a noble stranger. She did not know how to love him because she always felt pity toward those she loved. The way she saw love tinged the whole of human existence with sadness. Her body was a well of ancient tears, filled all the way to her eyes, which could overflow at any moment. That well was deeper than her body—it reached three hundred yards beneath the ground.

  Nikola put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t cr-cry…”

  “Don’t you cry.”

  He reached for the handle on Djuka’s door.

  “Pray to God that she recognizes you,” he heard someone behind him say. “Hey!”

  The heat of Mother’s room overwhelmed him. He sat on the bed and took her by the hand. The hand was light. The eyes were tired. She too was waiting for him. He choked when he saw her faded eyes. She caressed his head with tiny movements.

  “My Niko.”

  Nikola pressed the feather-like hand against his cheek and felt a deep, unparalleled calm descend on him.

  The departing, fragile woman was protecting him still.

  CHAPTER 55

  Ba-Bam

  The fairies eat garlic seeds and live until life becomes too boring,

  and when this happens they quit eating and die a painless death.

  Djuka Tesla

  Ba-Bam!

  Baba-Baba-Ba-Bam!

  The infernal cancan kept playing in his head. The funeral took place at the Jasikovac Cemetery. The aspens trembled and Nikola felt nauseous.

  He could not understand the words at all.

  “We’re like water spilled on the ground that can’t return,” murmured one of Djuka’s brothers.

  Nikola could not understand the words.

  “And I will go to her but she will never come to me,” another priest read.

  The voices came closer, and then faded away.

  “Like the wind, which goes and never returns,” the prophet spoke through the mouth of his uncle, Bishop Petar.

  Nikola spilled half a glass of brandy for the departed soul, and drank the rest. Instead of heat, crushed ice filled his veins. More horrible than the ice, the sting in his stomach, or standing by her grave was the thought that Djuka had been buried her whole life. Her whole life, she worked from four in the morning to eleven at night. Because her mother was blind, Djuka hit against a closed iron door at an early age. And once she hit it, she reached an undeniable conclusion: “That’s how things are.”

  At dawn—as if he saw her there—Djuka shook her wet fingers over the stove and the droplets hissed on the hot metal.

  She placed apple peels on the stove for fragrance. Before everyone woke up, before she put on her head scarf for the day, she combed her hair. The fire shone through the door and the cracks in the stove.

  Lit by the flames, Mother became something else. Mother turned bronze. Nikola watched in secret. He alone. He always wanted to redeem her. He wanted to save her. But he never found (he wept)… time.

  It was like a tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it.

  The world pushed him away.

  Life lost its center.

  Mother was the only human being more important to him than his work. Now he was at the mercy of his work.

  The devil’s deft hand gathered all the warmth from the world, like wool. The world had been divided into the warm inner one and the cold outer one. Now they switched places.

  And the truth? The truth did not stand a chance against the craving for protection. The truth was just nagging. Rules and values had no meaning before the needs of the soul. His inventions and the mankind they served became worthless. Worthless was the floating world—and he in it.

  Where would warmth come from now? From his own gold flashes? From nowhere?

  Nikola’s feet somehow found the ground. The world was expanding before it blacked out. He swallowed air as he sobbed.

  Rustling swallowed him.

  “And I’m not in this world anymore, but they are in this world, while I’m walking toward you.”

  Ba-Bam.

  Yes, the aspens trembled and he felt nauseated. He stiffened his knees to avoid slipping. Vertigo deepened the grave. With an irresistible spinning force, Djuka’s death dragged him into the grave as well.

  Bam-Bam.

  He paused in front of the headstone he had erected for Father.

  Gospić Priest, Protojerej Milutin Tesla 1819–April 17, 1879. His Grateful Son Nikola, 1889.

  Father used to say, “Will clay tell the potter: You have no hands! Can He be blind who created the eye?” Father believed that honesty was the answer to all the questions in life, convinced that even the clouds in the sky judged how honest he was.

  The grateful son was still angry at the man who, in an attempt to save the boy’s soul, trampled on it.

  His feet went numb. Yes. His feet somehow found the ground.

  What goes through the forest without a rustle, through the water without a splash? A shadow.

  He did not know how they got home. Each window, each table, each chest of drawers, even each box, was covered by the embroidery she made with her fingers, “nimble as flames.” She kissed his hair, warm from the sun, “to make it better.” The house smelled like her. His sisters clattered trays as they served. The relatives raised their glasses remembering the deceased:

  She believed you can’t change people—you can only love them.

  She believed a man can pray under a linden tree.

  Thirty-six priest vestments hung on her family tree.

  She could tie three knots in an eyelash.

  She knew herbs and could heal animals.

  She cried only because she never went to school.

  Nikola Tesla woke up with the question, “Who am I?” It was like a corset burst open. Milky whiteness flooded his memory. His mind emptied itself. A glance into a mirror’s shard crushed him: Look, a wisp of my hair has turned white.

  Even before, he had complained of forgetfulness.

  His job was a combination of mining ore and playing roulette. In New York, he worked sixteen hours a day with all the deepest energies of his soul. It was too late when he discovered that those Musesdemons cannot be ordered around without retribution.

  He wondered, “What is love?” just as Pontius Pilate wondered, “What is truth?” He could not explain anything to himself, so he let his baffling thoughts and events run around like skittish cows.

  “Has the high voltage erased his memory?” one sister asked the other softly.

  “Or pain?”

  “Has he gone mad?”

  To have such a brother was both a blessing and a curse.

  For a few weeks, Nikola rested in the enormous silence of the Gomirje Monastery garden. He did not pay attention to the cypress trees or the novices who kissed the candles before they lit them. The monastery yard was under the spell of the muffled cooing of the doves.

  With unfocused gaze, he fought against the demonic whiteness of his memory. A long time before, that same Nikola had been able to fend off the sight of Dane’s funeral with the sheer power of his will. Now he used his willpower to remember. It felt like moving the entire world from one place to another. The wretch searched for names in the labyrinth and put the recovered notions back onto the shelf of his mind:

  Socrates was a philosopher. Phidias was a sculptor. Bucephalus was a horse.

  Intoxicating and stifling images kept flying back, like soot, like gold leaves, like musical notes.

  CHAPTER 56

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  In Nikola’s dream, intoxicating, stifling images kept flying back, like soot, like gold leaves, like musical notes:

  Nikola turned into a pigeon.

  Edison turned into a fox, pounced on the pigeon, and started to choke it while the feathers flew around.

  Tesla turned into a terrier and started to throttle the fox.

  The fox turned i
nto a hurricane of claws. The lynx jumped at the dog and made it all bloody.

  The dog turned into a lion and grabbed the lynx by the throat.

  The lynx turned into a dragon and started to tear the lion apart.

  The lion turned into pearly grains of rice that scattered across the floor.

  The dragon turned into a rooster that pecked at the grains and ate all but one, which rolled under the bed.

  From this grain, Tesla turned into a tomcat that glowed.

  The tomcat dashed from under the bed, grabbed the rooster by the throat, and snapped its neck.

  CHAPTER 57

  The Glare

  Nikola was astonished that his acquaintances in Zagreb did not notice the state he was in. He expected someone to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and say, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?”

  That did not happen.

  Naturally, the cadence of speech was different than in Paris. The faces were his countrymen’s faces. And yet, people glided by him politely and superficially.

  “People are blind. They don’t see anything. They don’t understand anything. Most of them, anyway,” his late mother had once taught him.

  Most likely, his hosts expected that their famous guest must be strange by definition.

  “People are blind,” Nikola concluded, resigned to hide the state he was in.

  As scatterbrained as falling snowflakes, in Zagreb he gave a lecture on his London lecture. After the talk, he spent a half hour in the bathroom trying to compose himself. Once an official delegation had to wait for him while he handed out money to beggars in front of the Stone Gate.

  “How do you know they won’t just drink it?” one of the delegates asked him.

  “Let them.”

  In addition to Mayor Armuš and other dignitaries, he met the people who worked on the city’s renovation, Herman Bole and Iso Kršnjavi. The latter had a somewhat shorter beard than Bachelor and walked a dappled Great Dane with a tail that looked like a truncheon. The cathedral had had scaffolding around it ever since the earthquake. As elsewhere, journalists would not leave him alone.

  “Yes, I feel extremely comfortable among my countryman,” Nikola smiled.

  His relatives in Lika told him about the deteriorating relationship between Serbs and Croats. He, however, remembered Milutin Tesla and the Catholic priest Kostrenčić holding hands in front of the church. He promised to help his countrymen build the future power plant free of charge. He suggested that they use the alternating current system, which had made such a breakthrough in America that even Edison had to give up. With all sincerity, he added that if they ran into any problems, they could contact him and ask for free advice. His stubborn countrymen did not listen to him, but they still sang his praises in the newspapers.

  On Tuesday morning, the third day of his stay in Zagreb, the laughing, joyful representatives of the Serbian University Youth swarmed into the lobby of the Austrian Emperor Hotel, where he lodged. Their great compatriot confided in them: “It takes the same amount of energy to make a real discovery as to fake that you know what you are doing in life.”

  The students left crestfallen. They suffered from the infinite longings of youth. Above those longings, the inventor’s raised index finger burned like Archangel Gabriel’s fiery sword. Using Tesla’s gloomy voice, the archangel warned them, “Beware of women like hot coals.”

  Yet again, the rails’ glare stretched toward where the eye could not reach. Swift clouds dashed across the sky above the Pannonian Plain.

  What was the difference between French and Hungarian clouds? Was there such a thing as national clouds?

  The flatlands tired his eyes.

  Did Mother’s death widen the gap between him and people a little more? Did he become a balloon that was ascending to the sky?

  Vineyards were drinking the darkness that people would turn into wine. The familiar view of Budapest woke him up. That was where, many years before, two young men had been engaged in a milk-drinking contest that Szigety won by downing thirty-nine bottles. Coaches made of gingerbread moved along new boulevards. This was the great recapitulation of his life. He could not wait to see what color his soul would paint the well-known landscape.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Mrs. Várnai asked upon seeing him.

  “Nothing.”

  Mrs. Várnai was not a blind traveler through life. Her eyes did not fail to notice pain.

  Tesla looked around the familiar apartment. The dusty curtains. The perplexing mirrors. The plants suffering from elephantiasis. In the painting in the sitting room, Matthias Corvinus was being crowned with as much enthusiasm as before. White brushstrokes created the impression of welling tears in the eyes of the moved spectators.

  Fighting forgetfulness, the young man asked for permission to crack the door of “his room.” Instantly, the room turned into his heart’s resonator. “I almost died in this bed.”

  Yes, in that same bed his soul experienced the suffering rivaling the agonies of medieval mystics. He had been so tired that he wanted to lie down eight stories beneath the ground. His landlady once kissed him there in secret. He shivered and the world shivered with him, but their shivers were out of phase and would not harmonize.

  The painful return of memories was a good sign.

  “I read about you in Paris newspapers.” Mrs. Várnai spoke slowly, as if delivering a lesson. She was proud of him and deeply moved in her quiet way. Her son was now a physician in Poszony. “Yes, he comes,” she said. “He comes… whenever he has time.”

  The skin on her neck had already started to droop. But her eyes were alive. Her eyes were young. Her eyes were like the rails’ glare flashing toward infinity.

  “They started construction of the parliament building while I was still here. When are they going to finish it?” Nikola asked, smiling.

  “Never.” Mrs. Várnai sighed, putting the coffee cup down.

  He drove out into the fragrant evening—ah, an evening of lamps hidden in treetops. Tivador Puskás took him to the best fish paprikash in the world.

  Tesla laughed. “I’m living backward.”

  “It’s good that you’re here,” Puskás toasted him in his hoarse voice. “It’s really good that you’re here.”

  Paganini jammed the violin underneath his double chin, and the highest string trilled like a bird. Melancholy music changed, became unstoppable. A dancer balancing a carafe of wine on his hat slapped his boots.

  Tesla felt like a man who had died, then was risen, and now was walking around the place he used to live.

  The next morning, he took a walk in the park. The fever led him toward the spot where he had experienced the epiphany that united him with Szigety.

  The May rain first became visible on the water, and then it softly kissed the leaves. The park became fragrant. With the speed of a piano player, the circles replaced one another on the surface of the pond. The rain fell on the ducks swimming around. Overwhelmed with emotions, Tesla took shelter in a gazebo. He looked on, and someone else looked on next to him. Memories, tinged with nostalgia, brought Szigety’s voice: “How are you, friend?”

  On Sunday, he sat silently with Szigety’s parents, whom he gave their son’s ring and watch. In between, he took a long time washing his face in the bathroom. Long ago, Farkas Szigety had told them about the heart motif, so common in Hungarian folk art. He had also told them to be careful about doing favors: “Never offer a favor—but it’s a sin to refuse one.”

  Long ago, the old architect used to sit still while he listened and became animated when he talked. Now, he barely opened his mouth. Even though he did not feel like it, Nikola did most of the talking.

  It was he who had invited his friend to come. It was he who had taken him to America.

  “I’m so sorry,” he wanted to tell the old man. “Please, forgive me.”

  No one blamed him for anything.

  He gave them the watch, the ring, and the money. “Thank you,” said Szigety’s parents.
/>   At twilight, someone placed his dirty hand on Tesla’s soul. The paw of dark melancholy felt his diaphragm to see what it was made of.

  Through a tunnel made of sycamores, a coachman brought him to his uncle’s mansion in Pomaz near Budapest.

  The men from Lika bragged how their country gave birth to the two greatest inventors in the world: Nikola Tesla, the engineer, and Pajo Mandić, who invented a way to marry the richest Serbian bride in all of Hungary. It took two hours for a train to pass through the Pomaz estate of Mandić’s father-in-law, Petar Lupa.

  The aging military officer Pavle Mandić complained that his bones ached. The doctor insisted that it was gout, but Pavle did not believe him. The former beauty Milina, who now had dark circles around her eyes, scolded her husband: “You were a typical uncouth officer, and that you will remain until you die. No matter how many times I explain anything to you, you do it your own way.”

  The uncle puffed his cheeks and defended himself: “In addition to the famous Trbojevićes of Medak, the Milojevićes of Mogorić, the Bogdanovićes of Vrebac, and the Došens of Počitelj, the Mandićes of Gračac are one of the most prominent families in Lika.”

  To Nikola, he proudly pointed out the tunnel of treetops lining the mansion’s driveway: “You can’t go wrong with sycamores. They would make the moon more beautiful if you planted them there.”

  Hiccuping after the second bottle, Pavle told Nikola about their relatives. Uncle Petar became a bishop and pledged allegiance to the emperor. How’s old Uncle Branković? He’s still hanging on. See that “vanity” on the wall? He gave me that.

  Are Marica’s and Angelina’s marriages happy? Bah.

  At one point, apparently, a moment of change came, but it did not say: Hey, I’m the moment of change, because change never announces itself.

  “Nikola has changed,” the aunt told the uncle.

  Nikola felt offended when they said that he had changed as well as when they said that he had not changed at all.

  In Pavle Mandić’s house, wine helped Tesla keep dark thoughts away. He stayed till the wee hours of the morning, alone, in the oakpaneled salon. More than once, he slept the night on the sofa. For two months, he never dreamed of Dane. Instead, Szigety visited him in his dreams to tell him about his brothel adventures in heaven. Tesla embraced him. “Antal, imagine—they told me you died.”