Tesla Read Free Page A

this?”
    The brothers resembled each other, but no one noticed that. Auntie Deva, who was snaggletoothed like a boar, preferred Dane. So did Luka Bogić, the red-faced hunter who sometimes pointed his gun at children and threatened to kill them. The gray-bearded Father Alagić, who snorted as he laughed, also liked Dane better.
    In front of visitors, Milutin never failed to boast about Dane’s intelligence.
    “How many priest vestments hang on your mother’s family tree?” he asked impatiently.
    “Thirty-six.”
    “Who was the first one?”
    “Tomo Mandić.”
    “That’s my clever boy!”
    When he started school, Dane never had to read a page more than once. Whatever he said was well said.
    “The prince!” his relatives would say.
    “Will he become a patriarch?” the sly Luka Bogić asked.
    “He can be whatever he wants to be,” Milutin Tesla responded soberly. “But let him become a good man.”
    There were no signs that Dane was bored by these performances for his father’s friends, even after he reached his teens. Whenever the exquisite Danilo Trbojević, the excellent Danilo Popović, or the diligent Damjan ČuČković came to visit, he recited Schiller’s poems in German, including “Unter Den Linden,” “Die Ideale,” or “Das Lied von der Glocke.”
    “It’s obvious he comprehends every single line,” praised Čučković.
    “Both comprehends and feels,” added Popović, who was himself a poet.
    But the real mental exercises were conducted when Milutin was alone with his son. He demanded that the boy learn texts by rote, practice rhetorical skills, and read people’s minds. As a cadet in the military academy, Tesla observed his teacher, a Jesuit, get into a student’s face and command, “Refute Aristotle!”
    He repeated the same drill with Dane. In the voice of the former officer, he ordered, “Refute Descartes!”
    Dane had new growth shadowing his upper lip. He looked out the window and began: “Descartes doubted his own existence, suspecting all visible things to be merely props that a malicious demon placed around him.”
    The boy paused deliberately. Then he raised his voice: “Tormented by his universal doubt, the philosopher searched for certainty. Excited and perhaps defiant, he uttered the famous sentence, ‘I think, therefore I am.’” Here Dane smiled and pointed out: “The problem that tortured Descartes was nothing new. In the fourteenth century, John of Mirecourt postulated, ‘If I deny or even doubt my own existence, I contradict myself. Is it possible to doubt one’s existence without implicitly confirming it?’ Saint Augustine foresaw Descartes’s dilemma when he exclaimed, ‘If I am deceived, I am!”’
    Dane Tesla raised his arm and, like a matador killing a bull, concluded: “After all, Descartes was a thinker, and it does not come as a surprise that for him thinking was the source of certainty. Had he been a gardener, he would be looking for confirmation of his existence in his garden. As a musician, he would say, ‘I play, therefore I am.”’
    “Not bad,” Milutin muttered, while his face was saying, “That’s exquisite, son! That’s top notch!”
    And who was that big-eared boy with a triangular head, peering at his father and his brilliant brother from behind the door?
    Nikola did not like to be called Niko, because in Serbian it meant “nobody”—the one who does not exist. Through the half-open door, the boy watched his brother, who was turning into a young man. Dane was as handsome as Young Joseph. How could one person be blessed with so many gifts? Who endowed them? Dane was mysterious with the mystery of youth. He felt blood rushing through his veins. Surprised by himself, he strained his ears to hear the voices in his own breathing. Nikola had to ask him three times before he got a response. Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned to leave.
    “Where are you going?” Dane called him back.
    “I’m going to eat.”
    “Why?