NIKOLA TESLA: The European Years

                                                            Part Two - The Family, Childhood and Youth

                       

Krajina, October 10, 1997

 

I am traveling to Lika, to the place called Smiljan, the birthplace of Nikola Tesla.

The word lika comes from the Greek likos (wolf), Latin  liquore (liquid), and Serbian and Croat lik  - fiber and personality - and this harsh  kars land has had all of these in abundance, and more besides.

            In my childhood, Lika was the far lair of mountains, which separated us from the warmth of the sea, and out of which came thunder and lightning, snows, howling of wolves, and rumours of shoeless and pillow-less poverty. Although pushing nearly into central Europe, Lika is the quintessential Balkans, the very fault line of  the Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem – Western, Eastern and Oriental – worlds, a lawless and tortured land of survivors  of political turmoils and religious and national  resentments, where warmongers could start a war whenever they wanted one. Historians have identified here 36 wars and 350 battles in the past 350 years. The latest carnage took place from 1991-95, during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.

The two-lane highway was curving and rising into the hills and morning mists of Krajina.

Places pass.

Slunj. Right after World War II, 6,117 Serbs left here for Vojvodina in Serbia. 

Plitvice Lakes. In the Park here, there was once a monument to the Proletarian Brigade, “Nikola Tesla.”

The Ottoman Turks first came to Lika in 1468, shortly after the fall of Constantinople, Serbia and Bosnia; conquered it in 1528; and the very next year, marched north as far as Vienna; and would do so, again, in 1683. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Lika was a no man’s wasteland. The local Croat population had retreated north, to Slovenia and Austria, and the Serbs, after the Turks had overrun their  lands, drifted westward, to the seacoast, and then north. In 1530, the first fifty Serbian families arrived in Lika. They sought permission to settle here, but it is not clear if anyone was sufficiently in charge to grant it. Theirs were large families, perhaps twenty to a hearth, consisting mostly of men of arms-bearing age, because everyone very young or very old, had perished along the way.        

To stop or slow down further Turkish advances into central Europe, in 1628, Austria formed the Military Borderland - Die Militargranze – or Krajina, which, over the next 250 years, expanded and contracted across the northern Balkans, according to the military fortunes of the European powers.   

Korenica, once Tito’s. Here in the year 1700, there were eighty Serbian homes and a priest. In the post WWII years, 6,060 Serbs left for Vojvodina.

Bunic, the rebel stronghold. In 1685, the Serb borderers razed the Turkish fort; the Turks left in 1689. The following year, thirty Serb families settled here. 

After the Austrian-Turkish wars of 1683-99, the Turks were pushed out of Lika, and in 1712, the  entire region became part of the Military Borderland. In 1709, “1700 Turks and their children” who did not leave for Bosnia, and some “Turkish” Serbs, were forcibly converted to Catholicism; in 1714, another “400 Turkish poor” were converted.

Men of Krajina were soldiers for life, under the direct command of Vienna. In return for their service, they were free from feudal servitude, owned their land, and Serbs were allowed to practice their faith. In war time, Vienna was generous with military badges and distinctions for bravery; but in the years of  peace, the Serbs’ services were quickly forgotten. On several occasions, the Serbs rose against their Austrian and Catholic masters, but their rebellion was more a show of insubordination than a coherent political program. Their discontent was skillfully contained. Ability to organize, negotiate and compromise was not theirs.

Krbavica. Vukovo. Ljubovo. Siroka Kula. Military places and military names. Kula (tower) was burnt down in 1584. Forty Serbian families arrived in 1690.

For a few years, in the early 1800s, Lika was part of Napoleon’s France. The Serbs at first fought in the Habsburg army, then were incorporated into the French army, and marched against Russia.

Krajina was demilitarized in the 1870s, and formally abolished in 1881, in the belief that Moslems wouldn’t trouble central Europe any more.

When the wraiths of fog thinned, occasional hamlets appeared, spread out over the mountain sides. Grass was growing in the wheel-rutted and weed-bordered country roads leading to them. For the most part, there was evidence everywhere of sudden departures and subsequent pillage. Serbian homes lay in ruins – dilapidated, doorless, windowless, roofless, gutted by fires – not merely vandalized, but ravaged. Sometimes beside a shell of a recently built home, there was an older ruin.

There was little life on the highway. Few cars were going in either direction. Here and there, sat Croat women, reading pocket books, and offering Lika cheese for sale; but peasant women don’t read books, and this was no local cheese, because there wasn’t a cow or sheep in sight.

A man came out of the gloom of a neglected meadow, a tall man, with a walking stick in hand, spare, black-hatted, inscrutable and razorblade-shaven. I ask him for directions to Smiljan. He tells me, speaking  with, what I take to be, a Serbian Lika intonation. I ask him then, if during the recent troubles, he had had to go away.

“Yes, yes, I had to remove myself.” Then after a reflection, adds, “It could have been worse.” An  observation, borne of centuries of danger and courage and injustice and deracinated lives. Perhaps a common phrase here, because Nikola Tesla used it throughout his life.

“Do you know if there are any Serbs in Smiljan?”

“Eleven souls, I heard. But that was before this war. Now I don’t know.”

In his book My Inventions*, published in 1919, but  written years earlier, Tesla wrote:

Hardly is there a nation which has met with a sadder fate than the Serbians. From the height of its splendour, when the empire embraced almost the entire northern part of the Balkan peninsula, and a large portion of what is now Austria, the Serbian nation was plunged into abject slavery, after the fateful battle of 1389 at the Kosovo Polje, against the overwhelming Asian hordes. Europe can never repay the great debt it owes to the Serbians for checking, by the sacrifice of their liberty, that barbarous influx.

*Footnote:  all quotations from now to the end of Part Two, unless otherwise indicated, will be from this book.

 

II. The sun came out, a weak disk of autumnal sun, as I entered the village of Smiljan, so named after an old fort, but named also because of the sweet basil, which once grew here in abundance. 

In 1686, the Krajina men took Smiljan from the Turks. The Turks returned six years later. Then  the Croats expelled them. In 1696, there were seventeen Serbian homes here, and an old church. In 1755, Empress Marie-Theresa, gave permission to Serbs  to build a new church. In the 1850s, Smiljan was composed of several hamlets, strung out at the foot of a chain of broken hills, each one bearing a different name. The homes were wretched hovels, built of uncut stone, or more rarely of rough hand-hewn beams – and in the case of extreme poverty, made of wattles and cow dung - and roofed with thatch straw; people lived on polenta, corn bread and potatoes. When the Tesla family lived in Smiljan, the Serbian parish of St. Peter and Paul would have had 70-80 homes and close to 1000 souls.

Then I saw the place:  it just appeared, over the tops of trees where the brook should be: a white-walled church with a distaff and not spindle steeple; and not more than fifty paces away, the birth house - both spared from destruction this time - and I turn left off the main road, and take the little-used path to the vacant pastorate…. thinking of that day, 145 years ago, when Pastor Milutin Tesla arrived here, walking ahead of his tired oxen, his wife walking beside the ox cart and looking at her new home and the green meadow. The house then bore the number 227.

In old pictures, there was a linden tree in front of the Church. Of that tree, there was now left only an old stump.

The door of the church was open: the door handles had been removed; the church was empty, cold with disuse, its walls bare; the bells, if they were still in the belfry, hadn’t tolled here for years; the wind blew leaves into the church. Not far from the church door, there was a remnant  of a monument to Tesla: an iron hook stuck out where the head used to be, and the wording on the marble slab was patiently, letter by letter, chiseled away, except for the very last line, which read, Raised by relatives and friends, 1950. A few paces away, lay the little graveyard, gnarled in dew-heavy weeds and besmirched with broken wood, metal, mortar, and military items, dying in the shadow of the encroaching forest.

In 1936, when the local Serbs celebrated  Nikola Tesla’s 80th birthday, they wanted to build a deep well beside the church, but had no money to do it. Five years later, on the Feast of St. Elijah the Prophet, August 2, 1941, Croats burned down the church and the birth house, and  massacred 590 Serbs of Smiljan, burying them “south of the church.” In the post-WWII years, the federal government planned to raise a memorial to the victims, but never did.

I crossed the patch of grassless lawn, to look at the house. This, of  course, is only an approximate replica of the wooden house, built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, renovated in the late 1870s, again in 1904, and in 1936, and built anew, together with the church, in the 1980s, with the donations of the Krajina immigrants. The house bears no inscription or number. The one door was locked, and the door handle broken off; inside, the rooms were devoid of any furniture or fixtures, smelling of emptiness. One of the basement windows was knocked out, and there was a makeshift wooden ladder pushed through it: technical papers and Physics books were scattered about on the dirt basement floor.

At one time, there had also been a barn here, to house cows, a horse and sheep, but that wooden barn, or whatever had become of it over the years, was burnt down in 1992, together with all its contents, which included  an old cart, a crib, a stove, and twenty-three other objects from the times when the Teslas lived here. The brook below the house, called Vaganac, had dried up years ago. There was not a stalk of basil about. And worse: in the birthplace of the inventor of  Alternating current, there was no electricity. No wires. No utility posts. No light.  Never had been installed at all.

I looked across the desolate country toward Mount Velebit, the fog-pressed lair, where, in my childhood, I imagined mountain fairies slumbered and played, and where Prince Marko, the folk hero, lay asleep.

The silence, the utter nightmarish silence of the place.

Of Nikola Tesla, on his mother’s side is known this: Sofija Budisavljevic, his maternal grandmother, told the story, how in the middle of the 15th century, three brothers, Jurisa, Budisa and Pilip, left their native village of Pecane by Prizren, (now in Macedonia) for Montenegro, and retreating before the Turks, made their way even to Lika, to a place called Licki Novi. Jurisa and Pilip converted  to Catholicism, but Budisa kept his Serbian Orthodox faith. In 1527, when the Bosnian Turks attacked  Lika, Budisa’s son Radomir moved to Gacko…  Radomir’s descendents in the sixth generation, Tomo and Males Budisavljevic, founded the new village of Pecane, and in that village was born Marko Budisavljevic, Nikola Tesla’s great-grandfather.

 For his exploits against the Bosnian Turks, Marko was knighted by Emperor Joseph II, as the “Hero of Prijedor”. One of his four sons, Petar, was killed near Verona, in 1805, in the Austrian army, fighting against the French, and the following ballad was sung to him:

He fought like a hero everywhere,

And in war, in a knightly combat,

Near Verona, in the land of ‘Talians,

A French leaded ball struck him

Near the very heart, in his heroic chest,

May the black earth rest on him lightly,

For he was a hero to the nation.

The oldest son, Toma, (1777-1840), was decorated in 1811, with the French Medal of Honour. Toma was a priest, able and ready to hold a church liturgy in the morning, and as a major, command a company of Serb border guards in the afternoon. He could build a complete ox cart with his own hands. Toma’s daughter, Sofija, married priest Nikola Mandic, who lived in Tomingaj.*

*Footnote: Toma’s woodland. Nikola  was a collector of books and a book binder. The Kiev Psalter, 1646, once housed in the Krupa Monastery, was, “rebound by the sinful hand of Nikola Mandic, in 1829”

Sofija and Nikola had four sons and four daughters. The eldest, Georgina – Djuka, born in 1822, was the future mother of Nikola Tesla. 

Less is known about  Nikola Tesla’s forebears on his father’s side. His paternal grandfather, Nikola (1789-1855), a staff officer in Napoleon’s army, is mentioned  in June 1824, as returning with four heads of cattle from Srem, where he might have gone for a year or two, to escape famine. Another reference dates from 1835: he is a subscriber to a historical book Woolstandige Topographie der Karlstader Militargrenze, by F.J. Frasa, printed in Agram (Zagreb),1835. He married Ana Kalinic, from the family of Colonel Kalinic in Raduc, County Medak, and sometime around 1820, moved to Gospic. Nikola and Ana had five children: Milutin, Josif, and three daughters: Stanka, Janja and one whose name has not been preserved. 

            Milutin, Nikola Tesla’s father, was born in Raduc, on February 19 (OS), 1819.*  *Footnote: According to the  Julian Calendar, which, in the nineteenth century, was  twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar.

            The Serbs had arrived in Raduc from around Knin, in 1716, having made their way there from western Serbia, via Herzegovina. The name Tesla denotes either a trade, as tesla is Serbian for adze, or a physical characteristic, such as protruding teeth, prevalent in the Tesla family. In Roman times, there is said to have been a place near Raduc, called Tesleum. 

Milutin attended the German-language public school in Gospic, then, together with his brother, enrolled into the Military Officers’ Training School; but the military profession, with its discipline and drills, did not suit him and, following a reprimand for not keeping his brass buttons bright enough, he left, and,  after obtaining the necessary release from future military obligations, enrolled into the Orthodox Seminary in Plaski. The school had opened in 1824 and worked, some years better than others, because of the poorly trained teachers and sometimes barely literate students. Milutin completed his studies in 1845, as the best in his class. He could speak and write Serbian, Croat and German and knew some Italian.

            When in 1846, army officer Nikola Tesla asked his friend, Priest Nikola Mandic, to give his daughter, Djuka, in marriage to his son, Milutin, the Teslas may have stooped a little, for the girl was already 24 years old,  and had little or no dowry.  But Nikola Mandic was a man of renown, and the young woman, as the oldest of eight children, had proven her mettle. In 1838, when she was sixteen, a virulent pestilence swept the country - thought to have been either cholera or smallpox - which damaged her mother’s eyes to the point of blindness, and early death, and Djuka took charge of the household.

            Following his marriage, Milutin was duly ordained by Bishop Evgenij Jovanovic, as a priest of the Orthodox Diocese of Upper Karlovac, and appointed, first, to the church in Stikad, and from there, on April 30, 1847, sent to Senj, on the Adriatic coast. The young pastor was expected  to strengthen the congregation of some forty households, and represent Serbs before the “foreign and Catholic persons.” He was paid 200 forints per year - and an additional 40 forints toward lodging – which was barely enough to make ends meet, and avoid ridicule due to poverty. And even that was paid him irregularly; but Milutin was consoled by the honour and dignity of his calling.  

Pastor Milutin was spare and  “a head taller” than his congregation, of serious visage, high cheek bones, sparse beard,   “as contented as he could be,” he wrote, and a talented speaker and preacher. His sermons were said to be as eloquent as those of Abraham a Santa-Clara – a former Court Chaplain in Vienna. He was a fine penman too, and wrote many letters, some of which have been preserved. On July 20, 1848, he writes  to the local military commander, Major Froschmeier von Scheinbenhoff,  requesting that he allow Serb soldiers to attend the Orthodox Church services on Sundays. But the Austrian equivocates, in November calls Milutin for questioning and, “holding our clergy as nothing,” sends his request, with a covering report, to Zagreb.

Serb army officers, stationed in towns, were prone to marry Catholic women, or to convert to Catholicism, in order to advance their military careers.

Sometime in 1847 or ‘48, the first child was born, a son, Dane. Two more children were born in Senj: Angelina in 1850, and Milka in 1852.

Poor material circumstances were compounded by Milutin’s ill health. In July 1850, he was so ill, that first, an uncle, one priest Draganic, and then his brother-in-law, Toma Mandic, travel to Senj, to perform his pastoral duties. Toma would stay for much of the next nineteen months in the “stony church on a steep cliff.”  In late September 1852, after nearly five-and-a-half years in Senj, Milutin and Djuka put their three children, and few possessions, in the ox-cart for the 75-kilometre trek over the mountains, back to Lika, to their new pastorate in Smiljan.

            Smiljan was a large parish and congregation, the priest’s plot of several acres of land plentiful and fertile, and the Tesla and Mandic extended families were close by. Soon, Milutin and Djuka had several cows, a flock of sheep and poultry. They even employed one or two servants, homeless people, or children from large families. Milutin’s health improved - so that all maladies stayed away from him “like fire kindling from the wall,” he subscribed to Serbian publications, and began to write articles on education and  history. In 1855, in the Novi Sad Diary, he writes, “Lika is, according to its territory and population, large, and is made up of only Serbs, or if you like, of Serbs and Croats, of Orthodox and Catholic faith. In Lika, there are more Serbs of Orthodox than of Roman Catholic faith.” But he also notes, “Except for the clergy and merchants or tradesmen, here and there, hardly anyone knows how to sign his name in Serbian.” Only one man in forty was literate. He calls for amity between “brother Serbs and Roman Catholics,” undertakes action to build wooden fences around cemeteries, and writes instructions  on proper behavior in church during liturgy. In an article, dated February 25, 1855, but published in the Diary on March 10, 1857, he writes, “Serbs in Croatia do not have High schools, Teachers’ Colleges, or any other public places of learning. The sons of this poor people are not able to attend distant schools…..”

There were only four or five Serbian language schools for a population of 200,000 souls. Milutin  sought to build a school in Gospic, but all his efforts were met by a wall of poverty and others’ political agenda. The view of Emperor Francis I, expressed in Maribor in 1821, that Vienna did not want ‘learned, but loyal citizens,’ held sway. 

                                               

III. In 1855, on the eve of St. Peter’s Day, the Feast Day of the church, Milutin is said to have had a vision, or a visitation, of “divine nature”. It had been an uncommonly hot and humid day, and toward evening, it suddenly turned cool, the stars became visible early, lightning kindled the sky in the east, above the Bogdanic (God-given) hill, and thunder followed it in the west, resembling the sound of a gigantic waterfall: the stars disappeared, and there was an utter silence for a space of time a man would moderately take to clap his hands, and a vision, or a visitation, told Milutin that, by St. Peter’s Day, next year, he would have one more son, who would lighten the load of millions of working people around the world. The lightning and thunder ceased, and the stars came out again.

 Nikola Tesla, the fourth child of Djuka and Milutin,  was born during a summer thunder storm, on Saint Vitus Day,  June 28 (OS), 1856, at the stroke of midnight, according to an old clock, left by grandfather Nikola, who had died the previous year.

“Your son will be a child of storm,” the village wet nurse, afraid of storms, said to Djuka.

“No, of light,” the mother responded.

In the morning, the word went through the village: “Our priest’s wife has born a son.”

But in the morning, also, the infant did not look well and, in case he should die, Milutin took steps that he be christened  the same day. Toma Oklobdzia, the priest from Gospic, came to Smiljan; the godfather was Jovan Drenovac, an army captain, also of Gospic; and the baptism took place after the regular service in the St. Peter and Paul’s. The infant was named Nikola, after both his grandfathers. On his birth certificate was written the Church Slavonic Nikolaj. He was also enlisted into the First Lika Regiment, the Ninth Medak Company, with its headquarters in Raduc, his father’s birthplace, to be a Krajina soldier from 15 – 60 years of age.

            Nikola Tesla’s first recorded words, while he was still in his mother’s arms, relate to two gaunt, bright-eyed aunts, with protruding teeth who, when they came in visits, liked to kiss him and ask him questions. When asked who was the prettier of the two, the two-or-three year old Nikola responded, pointing to one of them, Deva, “This here is not as ugly as the other.”

            Of his early childhood, Nikola Tesla, when he was 83, sent the following description to the 12-year old Pola Fotic:

            My mother was indefatigable, and worked regularly from four o’clock in the morning till eleven in the evening. From four to breakfast  time…, I never  closed my eyes, but watched my mother with intense pleasure as she attended … to her many self-imposed duties. … After breakfast, everybody followed my mother’s inspiring  example. All did their work diligently, liked it, and so achieved a measure of contentment. But I was the happiest of them, the fountain of my enjoyment being our magnificent Macak, the finest cat in the world…. Wherever I went, Macak followed, primarily owing to our mutual love and, then again, moved by his desire  to protect me…. I would run from the house along the church and he would rush after me…. He liked best to roll in the grass with me. … It happened that…we had a cold drier than ever observed before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle, gave a flare of light…It was dusk… and I felt impelled to stroke Macak’s back… my hand produced a shower of sparks.

“What is this?” Nikola asked his father.

“This is nothing but electricity.”

“What is electricity?”

He found no answer.

My mother seemed alarmed. “Stop playing with the cat,” she said, “he might start a fire.” I was thinking…Is  nature a gigantic  cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.

Eighty years later, Tesla still claimed that he did not know what electricity is.

My childhood … would have passed blissfully if I did not have a powerful enemy, relentless and irreconcilable… our gander…I aroused his ire by throwing pebbles at him…. I liked to feed our pigeons, chickens, and other fowl, take one or the other under my arm and hug and pet it. But the brute would attack me…grab me by the seat of my trousers… flap his huge wings in glee….

But now and then, I would play in the poultry yard to my heart’s content, for on certain days, our geese, led by the gander, rose high in the air and flew down to the meadow and brook, where they sported like swans in the water and probably found some food. I would then feed and pet the pigeons, the poultry and our grand resplendent cock who liked me. In the evening, the gander brought back his flock, who made a few turns above the house, and then came down with a defeaning noise. The sight of the flying geese was a joy and inspiration to me.  

Nikola liked pigeons especially: they were elegant, almost permanently in flight, easily contented, and had such fanciful irridescence on the top of their necks.

He was five when he made a fishing hook. He took an iron wire, hammered the end to a sharp point between two stones, bent it into shape, tied it to a string on a stick, and went to catch frogs in the brook. Frogs paid no attention at first, but when he removed the bait, they kept snapping at the bright hook.

That same year, he made his first waterwheel - a thin wooden disk: he put a stick through its centre, wedged the stick into the stream banks, and sat and watched the wheel move; he modified the wheel, without adding any spoon-like buckets, and it still moved. And there was no end of water in the brook, and in the sky. The sky was also round. And the sun was perfectly round too.

The old clock told the time, and moved like a living thing. Someone had invented it. Who? One day, the six-year old Nikola took the clock apart; but could not put the pieces back together.

It took thirty years before I tackled another clockwork again, Tesla wrote afterward. 

            In winter, when his mother and the village women span thread from hemp fiber, he made a pop-gun: taking a cubit-long piece of hollowed corn stalk, or a bamboo-like shrub that grew beside the brook, he would plug one end of the pipe with a wad of moist fiber, and, using a stick as a plunger, fire: the air pressure forced the hemp bullet out with a pop strong enough to blister the whitewash on the wall across the room. Bullets could also be made of wood or hard mud.

One spring, the bushes were black with May beetles, and Nikola easily knocked them down, held them by their feet, and watched their wings beat frantically in an effort to get free. He took two splinters of wood, tied them cross-wise, attached a wooden spindle to the cross-section, and with a piece of string, acting as a driving belt, attached it to a wooden disk: next, he attached four live bugs onto each arm of the propeller: the bugs beat their wings, rotated the axle and moved the wheel tirelessly.

He next took to making wooden swords and, in Serbian-epic-hero-like fashion, cutting down his enemies in the form of corn stalks, which earned him several spankings from his mother.

Then there were the visitors: relatives from Raduc and Tomingaj, and places even farther away; blind guslars who, as if the world owed them a roof over the head, stayed for days, singing epic songs and ballads; visitors before the church service and afterward - men, overdressed summer and winter, wearing their homespun clothes and homemade footwear, and “dressed” also with a musket, or a short gun stuck in the wide leather waist belt. Visitors sat around a large dining table, beneath the kerosene lamp that hung from the ceiling beam, and talked mostly of wars, droughts and hunger, great snow falls, Serbian Kings and Kosovo, and of new times that, eventually, must dawn. Men smoked together, borrowing each other’s tobacco pouches. But not all of them were good men:  some were brigands; some beat their wives without mercy; some were deviants of different kind.

Women, who still cooked over open hearths, came to see what the priest’s wife had in the way of needlework, tapestries, embroidered towels and feathered pillows, came to seek patterns and dies and pieces of fabrics: garbed in perpetual black, from their thirties on, they sat, and sometimes whispered, re-arranging their kerchiefs, then wiping their faces with the hem of their long skirts. Rare was a family which had not lost men in wars, or children to disease. 

Nikola heard the oft-repeated words of consolation: widows – will remarry; orphans – will grow up; wounded men – a dog’s wound heals on a dog.

Meanwhile, ox carts passed down the road, the sound traversing through the ground, shaking the little windows, and resonating through the house.

I walked about Nikola Tesla’s devastated birthplace, but watched also the road. It went in two directions: toward the town, and further into the mountains, neither curving nor straight, but only dropping out of sight. If a rare car appeared, I stepped behind the church or the house, until it had passed the Tesla turn-off. 

Although compulsory education would not become law in Austria-Hungary until 1874, and even then be applied cavalierly to girls, all Tesla children went to school. Milutin  helped with their school work. He read to them poetry from Vuk Karadzic*

*Footnote: Vuk S. Karadzic, the collector of Serbian epic poetry, and the creator of the modern Serbian orthography. 

 (who had stayed in this very house in 1838), and since there was always a scarcity of writing paper, prepared daily memory exercises, as guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences … Nikola learned, by heart, 144 poems, ballads and pieces from the liturgy books.

Dane, the first-born, was gifted to an extraordinary degree.  He still remembered when the family lived in Senj, and sometimes talked about the ocean-sea and big sail ships. He was the pride of the family, the centre of attention; he was destined for priesthood.     

After Dane, and the two older sisters, had gone to school, Nikola was alone with his mother, and sister Marica, born when he was three years old. The forest and the country were full of animals and birds. One or two pairs of swallows nested in the barn, swooping in and out, on their light and noiseless wings. Birds fascinated him.  But to watch birds fly was one thing, to spread one’s own wings would be everything.

Nikola’s attempt at flying ended in a debacle. He took his grandfather’s umbrella, climbed to the peak of the roof of the barn, opened the umbrella, waited for a gust of  a strong wind, richly charged with oxygen,  took in a breath, puffed up his cheeks, and jumped: the umrella turned inside out above him, and he fell to the earth in a heap of bruised flesh. His mother carried him inside the house, where it took six weeks to mend his hurts. 

At six, he made his bows, bowstrings and arrows, improving on the design, until he had in hand an arbalist, which, with a metal-tipped arrow, could pierce a plank of pine one inch thick. A pair of brown eagles had made a nest at the very top of a beech tree on the edge of the forest. One morning, he shot an arrow blindly into the dense fog, and to his amazement, an instant later, the male eagle crashed to the earth. The bird whistled in pain. Nikola’s arrow had broken the eagle’s left wing. Milutin made a splint for the broken wing, and released the eagle into the yard, where all living things kept their distance from the terrible bird. The entire family helped the female eagle feed the two famished eaglets, by taking frogs, fish and mice to the foot of the tree. The wounded eagle stayed in the yard, dragging his wing on the ground for some ten days, then rejoined his family.

The eagles did not return. 

Nature was endlessly fascinating. He once witnessed a snowball roll down the Bogdanic hill, gather volume and speed and land in the ravine behind their house, having taken with it a swath of frozen grass. A flash of lightning was followed by thunder. Why? Or was it  St. Elijah, the Thunderer, driving his four-horse, fiery chariot across the sky?

Nikola attended the one-year Smiljan public school. He was very left-handed, but the teacher ceased frowning, when he saw that Nikola, who had been looking at letters and words, studying their shape and colour, since he was three years old,  could read both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet.  In school, the language of instruction was German.

The Tesla family owned a horse -  presented to them by a dear friend - a raw, Arab stallion, prone to buck and stampede. Milutin rode it when visiting more distant parishioners. The fifteen-year old Dane was in charge of grooming the horse, and in the summer of 1863, it cost him his life. One day, Nikola saw Dane on the horse’s back, descending down the ravine  to the  watering place, when of sudden, the horse cocked his ears, turned aside, as if glancing at something, reared on his hind legs, and with one violent jerk, tossed off the rider, slashed down with his forelegs, and slipped away, while Dane, flying through the air, fell to the ground, head first.Years later, Nikola would note,

This horse was responsible for my brother’s injuries from which he died. I witnessed the tragic scene and although fifty-six years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force….

Dane died in the middle of the night. Nikola remembered:

It was a dismal night, the rain falling in torrents as if the heavens had opened. I felt in every fiber that something terrible would happen and my dread was intensified by the isolation of our home, our nearest neighbours being a church and a graveyard at the foot of a range of hills infested by wolves. The old fashioned clock indicated midnight when my mother stepped in the room, took me in her arms and whispered almost inaudibly: “Come and kiss Daniel*.” My only brother, a youth of eighteen* and an intellectual giant, had died. I pressed my mouth against the ice cold lips knowing only that the worst had come to pass. My mother put me again to bed, tucked me in and lingering a little, said with tears streaming: “God gave me one at midnight, and at midnight He took away the other one.”

*Footnote: Tesla, or his published text, is wrong here: Daniel was Dane, and at the time of his death, was, at most, fifteen years old. 

He was free of his brilliant brother, but had he, Nikola, wished him dead? Had he killed his brother with his thoughts? Had he spooked the horse?

Frightened by his brother’s death, Nikola left home, and following the brook, set out into the hills. There were in the forest mad dogs, hogs and other wild animals, and when the evening came, he entered an old chapel on an inaccessible mountain which was visited only once a year, closed the door behind him, realizing instantly that it could be opened only from outside. He was entombed in the chapel.

The next morning, he was overjoyed to hear his father’s voice, calling, ”Nikolaaa! Nikolaaa!” and he answered back, banging on the heavy door.

Dane stayed with Nikola all his life. He would carry the burden and the unfulfilled promise of his killed brother.

Anything I did that was credible, merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself.

Then there were the ghosts. Spirits wandered about the country, abiding in the midst of the living: they could not speak, but only looked pleadingly, prowled about at night, and after a space of time returned to their yawning graves and unspeakable tortures. All told, there were either 140 or 160 of these apparations wandering around Smiljan. They were thought to be afraid only of the sound of the church bells.

 After Dane’s death, an emptiness came into the house, and no one, especially Milutin, could bear to look at the fresh grave in the little graveyard above the church, and on July 19 (OS), Bishop Zivkovic reassigned  Milutin to the Gospic parish, six kilometers away. The Bishop also promoted Milutin to the  level of the Archpriest.

For Nikola, the move was … a calamity … almost broke my heart… like a prison. The same year, Nikola Mandic, the grandfather, died.

And so, I too leave this place, this birthplace. There is nothing corporeal and visible about Tesla in Smiljan, and hasn’t been for a long time, yet, there is something liberating in being here, proving that, perhaps, the life energy of those who had preceded us, is not entirely destructible, that the software of life may endure in the spirit of even a destroyed place, to help others in their timeline and journey, one does not know wither.

 

IV. The Austrian military founded Gospic “from the top”, in 1712, but even today, it is still more a town than a city. In the 1860s, there were here about 200 Serbian homes and 1500 Serbs; but 15,000 Serbs lived  in the entire county. The Tesla family lived in a three-room flat, in a new building, across the street from the recently-built Junior High school.

The first day, in Grade Two of the primary school, Nikola arrived late, and is said to have been seated in the very last available spot, on a two-seat bench, beside a girl. The girl’s name was Milica.

“You are the priest’s son,” she said.

He was too shy to respond.                             

Milica was dove-like, and when she ran, her light tresses were like wings.

Nikola had few companions. He read, or gazed out the window, doing nothing, a subject of  incessant stream of impressions necessary to the preservation of life.   

He was a poor sleeper, but while he was allowed to read, or sleep, by the dim light of a wax candle in Smiljan, he could not do so here. With upward of six or seven people in the flat, he never slept alone, was lucky to have a bed to himself. He spent much of the night lying awake in the pitchblack dark, beset with images, hearing everyone sleep. Against the dark blue, starless field, there would be flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing, until he thought of something else he had seen or heard of, and finally, drift into sleep. But when there were no images, it meant a sleepless night - disconnectedness. One night, he saved a neighbour’s house, when he smelled smoke and heard a crackling sound  of fire.

In those days, he also attained the distinction of being a champion raven-catcher.

Ravens were smart and caring birds. He would hide in the bushes and imitate a call of the bird in distress – yawk - awwh - and when a raven would  flutter down, he would throw a piece of cardboard to distract its attention and catch it, until one day, as he was returning with a pair of captive birds, other ravens attacked him, knocked him down, and he had to release the birds.

Weddings, christenings, burial and other clerical services took place in his father’s onion-shaped, Church of  Great Martyr St. George. He attended the service and was the bell ringer. One Sunday, after ringing the bell at the end of the service, he raced down the steep staircase, several steps at a time and, with the final jump, landed on the train of a prominent  woman’s dress and, as she was in the process of  sweeping out, tore it off her with a ripping noise.  His father gave him a gentle slap on the cheek, the only corporeal punishment he ever administered to me, but which was seared in his memory all his life.

But a redemption was not long in coming.

The town had purchased new fire-fighting equipment, and one public holiday, the authorities wanted to introduce it to the townspeople. The populace came out to see the horse-drawn hand pumper. A fire brigade of  sixteen firemen in new uniforms stood at attention, a military band played, be-medalled men gave speeches. Nikola  watched the German-made pump, painted red and black, and the rubber-and-canvas hose that was stretched to the nearby stream. When the speeches were finished, and the order came to start the pump, the firemen pressed on the handles, but only a gurgling sound came out of the hose, and then nothing at all. The professors and experts tried in vain to locate the problem, and examined the pump, while glancing obsequiously at the civic elders; but to no avail. There was no water. The seven or eight-year old Nikola intuitively realized where the problem lay, and summoning all his courage, shouted to the firemen, “I know what to do. You keep pumping.” And following the hose, he ran to the water where it was immersed, found the mouth of the suction hose, and saw that it was collapsed, held it open, unflattened the hose, and the water burst out over the official party. 

I was carried on the shoulders and was the hero of the day.

The pump incident set afire his imagination. But of all things I liked books the best, wrote Tesla in 1919.

Milutin had a fine library, consisting not only of clerical books, but also of belles-lettres in Serbian, Croat, German, Italian  and French. His most prized book, however, and the only one to survive to this day, was the 236-page Sluzabnik, a book of Serbian Liturgy, printed in Venice in 1519. After Milutin’s death, Djuka kept the book; and after her death, Nikola took it with him to New York, and had it restored; from Nikola, the book passed into the hands of his nephew, Sava Kosanovic who, in 1950, as Yugoslavia’s Ambassador to the United States, gave it to President Truman. This book is now in the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and was most recently restored in 1977.

Nikola  read at random, looking for things no one else, not even his father, knew. He read about Thales of Miletus, who claimed that all things came from water, and concluded that his own  mind seemed older than that of the legendary Greek mathematician-philosopher.

            On June 15, 1915, he wrote in the Scientific American,

When I was a boy seven or eight, I read a novel entitled Abafi – The Son of Aba – a Serbian translation from the Hungarian of Josika, a writer of renown. The lesson it teaches….The possibility of will-power and self control appealed tremendously to my vivid imagination, and I began to discipline myself. Had I a sweet cake or a juicy apple which I was dying to eat, I would give it to another boy, and go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied. Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting, I would attack it, again and again, until it was done. So I practiced day by day from morning till night…

            In a book on the tourist wonders around the world, he saw a steel engraving of Niagara Falls, and marveled at all that water falling idly away, and said to his uncle, Captain Josif,

”Some day, I will go to America and build a huge waterwheel under the fall!”

And from that day onward, the word Niagara created in his mind an unknown source of  power, a dream, a magnetic resonance, a mingling of senses, a cataract in the sun, a sharp edge of water rearing, and pigeons flying through the mist. The roar of water fills my ears.  Thirty years later, after he had designed the huge turbines, and overseen the construction of the world’s first hydro plant in Niagara Falls, Tesla would write, I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the mystery of the mind.

At eleven,  he entered the three-year course in the Lower Real Gymnasium (Junior High school). One of his school fellows, Mojsije Medic, would remain a devoted friend through his entire life, and would write several articles of genuine affection about Milutin, Djuka and Nikola.

            One day, the Aldermen were passing through a street where I was at play with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen – a wealthy citizen – paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me, he suddenly stopped and commanded, “Look in my eyes.” I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when, to my dismay, he said, “No, not much, you can get nothing from me, you are too smart.”

            In school, Freehand Drawing was becoming a problem, as were, increasingly, all round forms and objects. Free Drawing was an obligatory subject, and his entire family excelled in it! He preferred objects with sharp edges and plain surfaces, scientific apparatus, and the glitter of crystals also fascinated him, and was passionately fond of mathematics.

The teachers - pedantic, rancorous and domineering - would, of course, not be memorable. In July 1870, when the math teacher, one Velko,  was about to give Nikola only a passing grade, because he thought that he was cheating, Nikola requested to be re-examined. Time after time, he saw a solution even before the teacher had finished writing the problem on the blackboard.

He had completed the Junior High school.

What was he to do next?

During all those years - after Dane’s death - my parents never wavered in their resolve to make me embrace the clergy…

Watching his only son, in his timorous awkwardness, guilelessness, his unresponsiveness to ordinary emotions, rigidity, sleeping disorders, extraordinary sensitivity and ambitions which looked beyond the known and the familiar, and did not bode well for a rational or happy life, there was no dance in Milutin’s voice. He said to Nikola that there was no need for him to go to High school, since he was going into ministry. The school was expensive; they were landless; and surely, he did not want to be an army officer, for it meant to be prepared to draw sword against one’s own people.

“Get used to the idea, that some day you’ll be a priest.”

For Nikola it was no choice at all, for he was born and grew up around the church walls, and the smell of incense and clerical air and clerical talk, and clerical clothes and clerical books and church keys. He would not be the man his father was. He expected no backing from any quarter, but would not be cowed.

In the summers, Nikola liked to visit Tomingaj, his mother’s birthplace, a gentle hamlet, full of considerate relations,  where he felt free, and could think a little, and cut his initials in the smooth beech bark of the woodland. He visited watermills on the Otuce and Basinice streams. He made a sling and threw stones. One late afternoon, as trout were skipping above the mountain stream, he told his uncle – probably Priest Petar - that he would throw a stone against a specific rock, and as the fish came up, would cut it in half, and …no sooner said than done. He threw a stone and watched a trout rise above the current, and at the instant when it was motionless, against the sunsetting light, the stone hit him and cut in half against the rock.

His uncle exclaimed, Vade retro Satanas!

“Time will come….,” Nikola said.

Heartsick at having to oppose his father, Nikola took a job in the Gospic Public Library, cataloguing its multi-lingual books, and reading whatever he liked. One day he was handed several new German language books  – the earlier works of Mark Twain – the like of which he had not read before - and which made him, for a while, forget his own  hopeless state.

 In the end, he succumbed to his inner turmoil, and took to bed. He stayed indoors, reading Twain’s books.

Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens… I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears.

He read book after book, story after story, poems, technical articles. Toward the end of the summer, 1870, a letter arrived from his aunt Stanka in Karlovac, asking whether Nikola was coming to Gymnasium and, if so, he was welcome to board with her and her husband, retired Colonel Dane Brankovic.

The church question was deferred for three years.

And so, at the age  of 14, with a fellow student, Vladimir Njegovan, who was also traveling by himself, even further away - to Sremski Karlovci - he went to live in yet another inhospitable town.

 

V. In July 1873, Nikola received his Zeugnis, a Certificate of Maturity, and was now at the critical point of his life. The old church question.

Should I disobey my father, ignore the fondest wishes of my mother,

 or should I resign myself to fate?

The thought oppressed me and I looked to the future with dread.

 His father sent him a message in Karlovac to go on a shooting expedition, rather than return to Gospic, where the cholera had gripped the town, a scourge which visited the country in intervals of from fifteen to twenty years…. People knew nothing of the character of the disease, and the means of sanitation were of the poorest kind. They burned huge piles of odorous shrubbery to purify the air, but drank freely of the infected water and died in crowds like sheep. Contrary to peremptory orders from my father, I rushed home and … contracted the awful disease on the very day of my arrival….

There was no treatment for cholera. People often died within hours of contracting it. Nikola lay in bed, permanently dehydrated, malnourished, suffering from muscle cramps, low blood pressure, weak heart.

In the Scientific American, in 1915, he wrote:

Nine months in bed with scarcely the ability to move seemed to exhaust all my vitality, and I was given up by the physicians.  It was an agonizing experience, not so much because of physical suffering, as on account of my intense desire to live. On the occasion of one of the fainting spells, when he was already drifting into coma, his father sat by his bedside, and said,

“Nikola, how can you get better?”

“Perhaps, I may get well, if you will let me study engineering.”

“You will go to the best technical institution in the world.”

A heavy weight was lifted from my mind, Nikola wrote, and from that day on, began to get better.

He recovered, but was a hopeless physical wreck, and soon faced another hurdle: a three-year army service in the recently constituted Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

They could all see that he wouldn’t last long in the bivouacs, even  in his uncles’ regiments; but avoiding conscription was a serious offence. Milutin insisted that Nikola spend a year in healthful physical outdoor exercises, and it was agreed that he should hide in the mountains, while his uncles, senior army officers, on both sides of the family, would help misplace his military file and hush up his disappearance. Nikola reluctantly consented and  went  to live with some out-of-the-way relation, or parishioner - an old lady - in the mountains.

There is no record of what took place. Tesla never explained. He spent most of the time under the canopy of the dense forest. He slept much better, drank clean water, tired himself out in the daytime. He observed living thing – animals, birds of the air, plants – they lived and suffered and knew joy for a span of time: he watched them burrow and nest, eat and go hungry, maintain their health: night owls flew silently in the daytime, wolves that howled at the moon at night, passed by peaceably on their way to savage ambushes; every day, he walked farther and farther, more and more attuned to the balanced and rhythmical life of nature. There were caves in the mountains, where men had lived in the past, and he came upon remnants of crumbling forts that had outlived empires.

At night, he reached out to the stars.

For nine months, from the early fall of 1874, until the next summer, he lived like that, until he was fit for the most  arduous  bodily exertion.  Every now and then, he would leave the woods, to sit in the sun’s warmth, and look down into the valleys and villages, and that fall, and again the next spring, he saw many army camps and groups of young men, and horses marching off to wars – the tsar’s soldiers – and the sun blazed on the soldiers’ tabors and bright bayonets, and ravens and crows followed the army.

The 1870s had begun with the siege of Paris, the Franco-German war, saw two Serbo-Turkish wars, the Serb rebellion in Herzegovina, and would end with the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The world was out of balance. If only love of nature could replace other passions in the hearts of men? One look at the sky, one look at the world, and a man could spend his entire life describing it.

In 1900, Tesla wrote,

I have seen men hung, beaten to death, shot, quartered, stuck on a pointed stick, heads chopped off and children on bayonets like quails….

 He had rebuilt his body, but he had also brought with him a bagful of books, to build up his fortitude, some day to be able to go his way. He began to think in terms of inventions.

One design called for a mail delivery between Europe and America through a cross-Atlantic, under-ocean spherical tube - but his hydraulic principles were wrong; another idea was the construction of a free-floating ring around the equator, to facilitate travel - but he lacked the all-important fulcrum that Archimedes sought millennia ago.

In early summer of  1875, he came home.

One day he met Milica, his  bench-mate from Grade Two. He had not seen her since then. Her mother died and the father moved the family away. She had uncommonly intelligent eyes, and her hair was like the wings of a white-winged bird. But he had grown allergic to other people’s hair. He talked to her a few times, followed her with his eyes. But she would soon want to marry.  For him, love would have to be captured in different ways, by something  stronger than a woman. He would never again harbour any romantic attachments to another human being.

 

            VI. In 1879, after his return from Maribor, Nikola strolled about Gospic, and often found himself in the company of card players and recommenced gambling. 

To sit down to a game of cards was for me the quintessence of pleasure, wrote Tesla.  

He played cards for the sake of immediate gratification and momentary release from anxiety.

Milutin, bed-ridden, could not  excuse the senseless waste of time and money.

“I can stop whenever I please,” Nikola responded, overestimating his willpower. .

 He soon lost all his money, and one day, went to his mother to ask for more.

 Djuka gave him a roll of bills and said, ”Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess, the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.”

He went back to the pub, played cards one more time, and never again.

Following his own return from Maribor, in mid-March, Milutin Tesla fell ill from some unspecified malady, and took to bed. He did not complain, but only grew gray, and more yellow of face, his cheek bones more prominent, his hair and beard more sparse; he lay propped up against the high bedboard, permanently cold. But to be brought back under police escort… He put aside his glasses, said little, and listened  for the bells of the Apostles Peter and Paul resonate against the Bogdanic hill, and to the Great Martyr St. George toll different hours and times. Who will look after my widow? Who will replace him? His brother-in-law, Petar Mandic, would be the best choice. He could live in the flat, and look after Djuka.  The girls, thank God, were all married and living in their own homes. But, Nikola, Nikola, the vexation of his life. No one will punish you as much as your own children.

Milutin Tesla dwindled, and on April 17 (OS),  died, aged sixty years.

            The next day, assembled priests carried Milutin’s body from the flat to the Church, where they gave him a “funeral liturgy fit for a saint.” The bells of the churches in Gospic and Smiljan tolled for him, and the populace of the  town and country streamed behind the ox-driven casket to the Jasikovac cemetery in Divoselo. When the moment of burial came, the sun broke out, as it would burst forth during the funeral service to Nikola,  sixty-four years later.*

            *Footnote: Nikola Tesla died behind locked doors of a two-room suite, Number 3327, in the Hotel New Yorker, on the Serbian Orthodox Christmas Day, January 7, 1943. As the daylight was retreating, he had looked out the window, at the millions of city lights, generated by his Alternating current, when, unexpectedly, there was the rumble of thunder, and a lightning stretched across the sky.  The gaunt old man, reportedly said, “I have made better lightning than that.” He died in bed, at 10:30 that evening. His funeral service was conducted in the cavernous Cathedral of St. John the Divine: at the end of the service, a sheaf of sunlight streamed down through the Dome, edging out and blurring all except the light coffin itself.

            The widow was 57 years old. Of Djuka’s love for Milutin, the following anecdote has remained: some time after Milutin’s death, a certain priest, Pepo Milojevic, who had wooed her, when they were both young, said, on meeting her, “Eh, Djuka, if you’d married me, you wouldn’t now be a widow.”

To which Djuka responded, “I would rather be Milutin Tesla’s widow than Pepo Milojevic’s wife.”

That summer, Nikola turned 23. The summer passed, but he still did not know what he was going to do. He taught a large class of  students in his old Junior high, where his former fellow student, Mojsije Medic, was now also teaching. He taught, but did not want this to be his future. One could have the greatest ideas, but it wouldn’t matter one whit in this military frontier backwater. He knew that important discoveries were being made in the world. He was aware of his gifts, and of the privilege that had been given to him, to grasp  some of the workings of the laws of nature. He was convinced that his preservation was not altogether accidental. 

A cain for his offences would have to be paid, he knew, but not here, O Lord, not in Gospic, not now! 

What was he to do? There was no money.

But there would be money, there always was. His uncles. He would speak to Petar and Pavle Mandic.

And his uncles came to the rescue, and put together enough money to unclog him from Gospic. He would go to Prague. He had failed in Graz; but he would do better in Prague, a Slav city.

The new year 1880, and Christmas came, and he got ready to leave. He had garlanded the flat, and with pine bows and sprigs still stuck about the windows and doors, departed, in mid-January, for Vienna and Prague.  He took his clothes, books, money and some artistic fabrics woven by his mother, and with a sense of relief, boarded the train. The train sped away northward, vanishing through the snow-covered, hoar-frosted woods and wilderness, the hooting and shrieking of its locomotive echoing across the skyline of Krajina.

He would now have elbow-room.

                                                           

            VII. A man living in foreign countries for many years, eventually becomes something of a foreigner even to himself.

In late September of 1889, after five years of ceaseless work in America, the extraordinary discovery of an apparatus for transmission of radio energy, and patents for the conversion and distribution of electrical energy, Nikola Tesla returned home. He had a new, American face to face the old world. On the way to Gospic, he stopped in Paris, to visit the Universal Exposition, which observed the centenary of the French Revolution, featured the newly-built Eiffel Tower  and celebrated the attractions of the hour. His uncle, Petar Mandic, came to meet him in Paris, and they returned together home. The Serbs everywhere were commemorating the 500th anniversary of their catastrophe on Kosovo, and that year, the Kosovo Day, was also his own 33rd birthday.

            His sisters came to see him. They had been long since married:  Angelina, now Trbojevic, wore gold earings; then Milka Glumicic, always something of a black sheep in the family; and Marica Kosanovic, the kid with the best memory, his most frequent correspondent, who liked cities and the sea. All married to priests, his three bearded sash-ed, brothers-in-law.  The sisters were already thin and haggard, complained of different ailments, appealed for help; but what was genuine, was their love for him, their only brother. They followed his career, worried about his health, bought newspapers, in hope to see something about him: and when they did, kissed his picture, cried over it and memorized the text of the article. Marica wanted to learn English. 

Amongst the ten nephews and nieces, there was already a Milutin, a Djuka, and at least one Nikola.

            His name and fame was of help to his relatives. Everyone wanted to see him, but he preferred places to people. He visited Smiljan. The old home had been  renovated, and had a new roof, like a city dwelling. The new priest, Genadon Ilic, was born in the house the year the Teslas left. He visited his brother’s grave. A long time ago, he had met a wolf here on the edge of the woods.  He was looking at me fixedly and approaching slowly. I shouted as usual when a wolf was around and he trotted slowly away.  Then went to Raduc, Tomingaj and Plitivice Lakes.

            He ordered a marble headstone for his father, and composed the following inscription: To Archpriest and Priest of Gospic/Milutin Tesla/1819 – 17.4. 1879/Grateful Son/Nikola/1889. On the other side of the stone, he added: To My Good Father. It had taken him many years and tribulations, to appreciate his father’s upright and full life and his just works.

While a great industrial expansion, made possible by some of his inventions, was sweeping the West, in his own birthplace, kerosene was still a luxury. In Gospic, they were still talking about building a Serbian-language school. There was an anti-Serb campaign in the Croat press – initiated by some higher politics.

Tesla stayed in Gospic until just after the new year’s, 1890, and went back to New York. He took with him his father’s silver cigarette case.

            In 1891, Nikola Tesla became an American citizen.

 

            VIII. Early in 1892, Tesla was in Europe again. He had accepted invitations to give a series of lectures in London and Paris. He had also reviewed his American experiences…. His mother was now in her seventieth year, and the letters from his sisters and uncles told him that her health was failing. … the craving to see my mother… was driving me to desperation. Every night my pillows were drenched with tears and unable to stand it any longer, I resolved to quit work and go home.

Tesla arrived in London on January 26, and on February 3, spoke before the Institute of Electrical Engineers. His lecture was entitled: “Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency”. He gave two lectures in London and, nearly shocked at the tumultuous reception his visit had aroused, left for Paris during the second week in February. He gave his first Paris lecture on the 19th  before the joint conference of the Societe de Physique and the Societe International des  Electriciens, and was, some days later, in his room in the Hotel de la Paix, reading the French language proofs of his second lecture, when a messenger  delivered a telegram  from his uncle Petar: Your mother is dying, hurry if you want to find her alive. He  cancelled the lecture, and without an hour of rest, rushed to Gospic, and after a long journey of  day and night arrived in the old flat, where his mother was in the agonies of death, in the same bed in which his father had died thirteen years earlier.

            “You’ve arrived Nidzho, my dear,” his mother said, and the joy of seeing me worked the miracle of temporary recovery.

During the train journey home, a patch of his raven-black hair on the right side of his head had turned white. Some things of long ago were blotted out of  my brain. Passages of texts …mathematical formulae were there, but old passions and old sorrows were submerged.

All discoveries are born in pain.

The flat was bursting with visitors. His sisters looked at him as at a saint. The Serbian Church calendars carried his photographs. Milka, unhappily married to a heavy drinker, was already a widow. He sat by his mother’s bedside, night after night, until he was in such a need of sleep, that on the Good Friday, he was taken to a house two blocks away, to get some rest. But he couldn’t sleep, anyhow.

When I was alone in my bed, I meditated on what would happen if my mother were to die. Would there be a disturbance in the ether? If so, could I detect it? At that time, my senses were keen to an incredible degree. I would hear the ticking of a watch at a distance of fifty feet. A fly alighting on a table in the center of the room produced in my ear a thud that of a pile driver, and I could plainly hear the clatter of his feet as he scurried over the table. I was a trained scientific observer, well qualified to make an undistorted record of what I perceived. My mother was a woman of genius and rare courage, who was meeting her fate with perfect composure, and I was sure that she would think of me to her last breath. If her death produced a disturbance in the medium, the very best condition for its detection at distance existed. Mindful of the enormous scientific importance of such a discovery, I struggled desperately against sleep and, with my senses sharpened by the darkness and stillness of the night, I watched intently. Five or six hours, seeming like eternity, passed and there was no sign. Then nature prevailed, and I fell in a sleep or swoon. When I regained consciousness, an indescribably sweet song filled my ears and I saw a floating white cloud in the centre of which my mother was reclining,  looking at me with loving eyes, her smiling face illuminated by a strange radiance unlike ordinary light and grouped around her were figures like those of seraphims. Spellbound, I watched the apparition, as it passed slowly across the room and disappeared from sight. In that instant, a feeling of absolute certitude swept over me that my mother had just died and, sure enough, a crying maid came running who brought this mournful message.  

Djuka Tesla died  at one o’clock in the morning, on Holy Saturday, April 4. A choir was singing in a church nearby.

There is no photographic likeness of Djuka. She was a woman of austere morality, unlettered; a priest’s daughter, a priest’s wife, a mother of five children, and a mother-in-law to three priests. She ran the household, gave of her time to others, visited her married daughters. In the correspondence between Nikola and his sisters, the sisters often mention their poor mother, how she sighed for  Nikola, and wept over his absence.  

There was probably more of Djuka than of Milutin in Nikola, and Tesla was constant in praise of his mother: I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess… My mother was especially gifted with a sense of intuition…an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life. The dexterity of her hands was such that she could tie three knots in an eyelash, when she was past sixty.

             Djuka was buried the next day, Easter Sunday, beside Milutin. Six priests officiated at the burial. There was a large funeral procession, and a multitude of wreaths, including one each, from: children, brothers and sisters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and the citizens of Gospic. The Serbian church choir sang Eternal Memory.

            From Gospic, on April 21, Nikola wrote to his uncle, Pavle Mandic, in Varazdin: … I  am immeasurably sad, but console myself the best I can. I had long anticipated this sad event, but the blow, nevertheless, was heavy. I always hoped that mother would live longer, because she was strong, and  mine and my uncles’ successes were a strength to her….

He went back to Smiljan one more time, visited Tomingaj, Raduc, Medak, and Gracac, where he placed the ailing Milka with one of their aunts, and visited the monastery in Gomirje, where uncle Petar, now Monk Nikola, was the Iguman. The patch of white hair on his head was turning black again, and all his buried past was with him again.

            When his mother’s effects were divided, Nikola took only the Sluzabnik. Before leaving Gospic, several weeks later,  he instructed his sisters, that a marble headstone of the same height and likeness, as he raised to their father three years earlier, be purchased for their mother. He would send the money. When the stone was raised, it bore these words: Here Lies/Djuka Tesla/Wife of Priest Tesla/1822-1892.

            Nikola was traveling to Zagreb, on his way to Belgrade, with his uncle, the recently-consecrated Bishop, Nikola, who was going to see the Emperor in Vienna.

            Uncle Nikola was a handsome man, of sound mind and body, with a fine head, and a small beard, a widower since the age of 25, when his wife Marta died, leaving him with two infants. He had served, routinely and peaceably, in the parish in Gospic, since Milutin’s death in ’79; but, suddenly, momentous changes took place. A year earlier, almost to the day, he  left priesthood and took monastic wows in Gomirje, changing his name from Petar to Nikola;  he had hoped, vaingloriously, to be elected the new Bishop of the Diocese, but the election did not fall on him. Instead, the local Serbs asked him to represent them in the Croatian Parliament in Zagreb. Then recently, the Patriarch in Belgrade appointed him the Archimandrite of the Tuzla –Zvornik Diocese in Bosnia, and he was now going to Vienna, to swear fealty to the Emperor, the Head of Bosnia and Herzegovina, since the Austrians took it from the Turks. He wondered now if moving out of the flat last year hadn’t contributed to his sister’s demise, and still thought of it with some distress, as it was Djuka who had brought him up by hand; and also wondered whether he would really meet Emperor Franc Joseph, or be presented, God forbid, to swear fealty before some Catholic Church dignitaries.

Tesla had always liked this uncle best. In addition, he now reminded him of his mother. Reminded him also of his refusal to serve the Church. And yet, maybe he had been a priest all his life, without admitting it. From time to time, his thoughts went back to New York, where the battle of Edison’s direct and his own Alternating current was brewing. He had sufficiently advanced his concepts, and would win, if not this year, then definitely next year, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His AC would illumine the Exposition; he would give demonstrations on the safety of electricity. Electricity would win. It would be ease the burden of people around the world. But he had to be alert, had to file for patents on time. Were not Firmani, Hertz and d’Arsenoval already borrowing some of  his lightning and claiming it as their own? Even in recent weeks, he had finalized in his mind the electrical oscillator, so steady, that it could serve as a clock. And then, there was Niagara Falls, echoing in his ears, that cataract that would some day, turn his gigantic turbines. 

And so the two Nikolas, the Bishop and the inventor, traveled in silence for long stretches of time.

At length, the younger Nikola spoke about the new age of electricity, which was really the transformation and transmission of energy at will, and of his lectures in London. In London, he had sat in Michael Faraday’s chair, and drunk from his very own bottle of whiskey, which had not been touched for twenty-five years.  The English had called him an inventor. With William Crookes, he had discussed religion, the control of the weather and environment, telepathy, even spiritualism. 

“Time will come, when by means of a pocket instrument and a wire stuck in the ground, you can communicate from any distance with friends at home through an instrument similarly attuned. I don’t expect that my ideas will be readily accepted. I don’t aim at immediate results. The scientific man will lay the foundations and point the way…”

“Don’t forfeit your soul even in the pursuit of knowledge.”

“I am invulnerable that way. There is no conflict between the ideal religion and the ideal science. The truth will prevail.”

“My Dr. Faust, what about a Margareta?”

“Do you know what it would mean to marry a rich woman, how much time? An artist, a writer, should have a wife, but a scientist? If I had ever intended to marry, I would, undoubtedly, marry a Serbian girl.”

“No man can excise from his nature his capacity and need to love a woman.”

The uncle and nephew stayed in Zagreb for three days, then continued their journey to Varazdin, where they saw Pavle Mandic, Colonel in the Hussars, and there, toward the end of May, parted. They would never see each other again. Within four years, Archimandrite Nikola became a Metropolitan, and then the Archbishop of Sarajevo where, eleven years later, he would also be buried. And Nikola, the inventor would, within  a few short years, be the most famous scientist in the world, the man who “invented the twentieth century”; but he never again see the place of his birth, which, over the next one hundred years, would be part of some half-a-dozen different countries. Some fifty years later, he would tell a chance visitor, that he always remembered Smiljan, especially in winter, when the snow was six or seven feet deep…  its dry cold and snow of immaculate white…  the house, the church, the pasture, the brook below the church, and that forest above the church – all, as if it were before my eyes now….

 

            IX. I do not go further afield on this day. There were a few people, dour and unwelcoming to a stranger. Aging policemen and soldiers loitered at gasoline pumps and pub doors. In 1800, there were 229 Serbian homes, and 1885 Serbs in Gospic. Today, the Serbian part of town is completely destroyed. In 1992, the Church of St. George was blown up, and so was Tesla’s statue on the town square where, many years ago, Nikola shouted to the firemen, ‘I know what to do!’ There was still a Nikola Tesla Street; but there was no marking of any kind on the school building, where Tesla was both a student and a teacher, or on the apartment building, where the Tesla family once lived. In the Public Library, there was no trace of Tesla’s cataloguing.  

Milutin Tesla’s birth house in Raduc was burnt down in 1942, in a gunfight between Serbs themselves - royalists and communists; Djuka Tesla’s birthplace, although “under  the protection of the state” from 1945 – 91, went to ruin, because the local Croat functionaries wouldn’t allow any repairs; in September 1993, in the Medak pocket, every single Serbian house - 312 homes - were burnt down, and everything living - human and animal – killed.

Here in Gospic, in 1941, the Croat Government Minister announced his program for the solution of the Serb  question in Croatia: one third to be killed, one third to be converted to Catholicism, and one third to be expulsed. Following decades of ethnocide, the program was accomplished in 1995 when, from August 4-7, 212,000 Serbs from western Krajina were ethnically cleansed - with full support of western governments.

 

             There is no escaping hate in this world.  

 

Footnote: On return to Canada, I wrote to all the governments of the countries where Tesla once lived, to Time-Life, which had recently counted Tesla amongst its 100 most significant people of the millennium, and to UNESCO, seeking protection for the Nikola Tesla’s birth place. Only Life and the Czech President responded. Havel promised to instruct his Ambassador in Zagreb to intervene with the Croat government.