Twelve years later the boy who had watched his brother go through was seventeen years old and dying.
The room in Gospić where he was dying belonged to the parsonage. It was the same parsonage to which the family had moved in 1862, a year after Dane, because Đuka had not, in the end, been able to stay in Smiljan, and because Milutin, who was not a man who permitted himself much, had permitted his wife this. The parsonage in Gospić was larger than the one in Smiljan. It had an upper floor. The room in which Nikola was dying was on the upper floor, at the back, overlooking the kitchen garden, which in December was a rectangle of black earth with the stubble of cabbages in rows.
He had been in the room for one hundred and eleven days.
He had come down with cholera on the first of September, the day he returned from Rakovac with his diploma from the Higher Real Gymnasium. He had gotten off the stagecoach in the market square at noon, and by six he had been vomiting, and by midnight he had been delirious, and for most of the next nine months — the nine months which would end, in the following May, with his first fever-clear morning — he lived in a country that was not Lika and was not the Austrian Empire and was not, finally, a country he had a word for. It was the country of the door.
In the country of the door, things which had never happened to him, happened. He was in Smiljan again. He was five years old again. Dane was alive again, sitting cross-legged on the rug in the boys' room, drawing Nikola a map of Europe with a piece of charcoal. He was in the field. He was on the mare. He was on the mare and the door was in front of him and he was the one who would go through. He was on the other side of the door looking back through at a field in which a boy of five stood in short trousers with the boy's older brother's shoe in his hands. He was in Gospić again, in the room on the upper floor, and Đuka was wiping his face with a rag, and the rag was cold, and Đuka was singing — she who never sang — a song about a widow and a falcon. He was in all of these places at once. He was nowhere at all. The door was always there. The door sometimes stood in the corner of the room. The door sometimes opened in the rag in his mother's hand. The door was sometimes his own mouth, when he breathed out.
On the night of the fourth of December he woke up.
He woke up in the way the very ill wake up: without warning, without any narrative of sleep. One minute he was in the country and the next he was in Gospić, in the room on the upper floor, in his bed, with the wooden crucifix above the washstand visible in the yellow light of a single candle, and his mother in a chair in the corner with her head back and her mouth open in a sleep so complete that for a moment he thought she was dead.
He was cold. He was cold through, the way stone is cold. But the cold was only cold. It was not the other cold, the cold of the country behind the door. He had not been so merely, ordinarily cold in four months.
He understood that he was going to live.
He understood this before he understood anything else. It was not a deduction. It was a piece of information that had been placed inside him, by the door, during the four months he had spent on the other side of it, and the door had brought him back and set him down and closed behind him, and here he was, seventeen years old and alive, and the question of why the door had released him — of what the door wanted — was a question he was not yet strong enough to ask.
He moved his head.
There was a book on the small table beside the bed. He had not seen it there before. It was a paperback, American, with a small brown kangaroo stamped on the cover — the device of an American publisher. The title on the cover, in Latin letters, was Roughing It, and the author was given as Mark Twain.
Nikola had never heard of either of them.
He reached for the book and his hand was the hand of a skeleton, and his mother — not dead, after all, only very deeply asleep — snored lightly in her chair and did not wake. He opened the book to the first page. His eyes had to work to focus. He read:
"My brother, Orion Clemens, had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory — an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the absence of the Chief Magistrate."
He read the first page. Then the second. Then the third.
He had been taught English by a tutor in Karlovac for three years and he had thought, until this moment, that he knew it. He did not know it. The Englishman in Karlovac had spoken the English of a dictionary. Mark Twain — whoever Mark Twain was — spoke an English that had a smell. It smelled of a river. It smelled of a kitchen. It smelled, and this was the uncanny thing, of Dane. Of the particular way Dane had laughed when he had been caught at a small dishonesty. Of the way Dane had called to Nikola from across a room, when he had wanted something from him, in a voice that had been pretending to be careless and had been, Nikola knew now, deliberately careless in order to disguise how much it wanted what it wanted.
Nikola read.
His mother woke, at some point, and saw that he was reading. She did not say anything. She rose, slowly, from the chair, and she came to the bed, and she put the back of her hand against his forehead, and her eyes — her large, dark, illiterate eyes — filled, for the first time in four months, with tears, and she did not wipe them, and she went downstairs to wake Milutin, and Nikola read.
He read until morning.
By morning he had finished the book.
When his father came into the room — Milutin, now fifty-four years old, with a beard that in the last four months had gone fully grey — Nikola said, in a voice that had been unused for so long that it was almost a new voice:
"Father, who is Mark Twain."
Milutin sat down on the edge of the bed. He was not a man who sat down on beds. He did it now. He said, "He is an American writer. A friend at the market in Senj had the book. I thought — " and here he stopped, because he was a man whose throat closed on certain kinds of sentences. He began again. "I thought you would like a story."
"Father," said Nikola.
Milutin waited.
"Father, I am going to live."
Milutin, who had not slept a full night since September, put his face in his hands. He did not make a sound. His shoulders moved. After a minute or two he lifted his face and he took Nikola's skeletal hand in his own large calloused hand and he said, in a voice like gravel:
"Then, Nikola, you will not become a priest."
Nikola, whose vocation had been an issue of pitched argument in the household for three years and whose illness had suspended the argument, blinked.
"I will not?"
"You will not," said Milutin. "If you wish — if you wish — you will be an engineer. I will send you to Graz. I will sell the horses. I will sell whatever is required to be sold. Niko. My son. If God gives you back to me, I will give you back to God in whatever shape He gives you."
Nikola, who had been prepared for many things, was not prepared for this.
He lay for a long moment with his father's hand around his. Then he said, "Father, I do not think God is giving me back to you."
Milutin looked at him.
"I do not think," Nikola said, choosing his words with the same small careful hand he had used to write three words in a notebook twelve years before, "that it is God who has given me back."
Milutin held his hand very still.
"Niko," he said.
"I saw the door again, Father. In my illness. I saw the door very clearly. It has dimensions. I could now draw them for you. It has a place — it has a place in the air, Father, which I could show you if I had the strength. I saw Dane on the other side of it. Dane is — Dane is well, Father. He is not — "
Milutin placed two fingers on his son's mouth.
It was done gently. It was done without anger. Milutin Tesla had loved his older son in the way a father loves his first, and he had loved his younger son in the way a father loves the son who is left to him, and the two loves were different loves and he had never permitted either to be confused with the other. He placed his fingers on Nikola's mouth. He held them there. He said, in a low voice that was entirely calm:
"Niko. You are my son and I love you. You will not say those words in this house, ever again, while I am alive. Do you understand me."
Nikola looked up at his father.
He was not afraid of his father. He had not, in seventeen years, been afraid of his father. Milutin had never given him cause.
But he saw, in his father's face — in the grey of the beard, in the hollows of the cheeks, in the eyes, which had read forty years of funerals and six years of his firstborn's absence — that his father had seen the door too. Perhaps not clearly. Perhaps not as clearly as Nikola, in the past four months, had seen it. But enough.
Enough, at least, to be afraid.
Enough to know that a door that had opened and swallowed his firstborn son was a thing one did not speak of in one's own house, under one's own roof, across the bed of one's surviving son, on the first morning one's surviving son was again a living thing.
Nikola closed his mouth under his father's fingers.
He nodded.
Milutin kissed him on the forehead, which he had not done in nine years, and rose, and left the room.
Đuka came back in, not long after, with a bowl of broth. She fed it to him with a small wooden spoon, three sips, then a pause; three sips, then a pause. He ate the whole bowl. When he had finished she laid the spoon across the rim and took the bowl away and sat down again in the chair in the corner and picked up her sewing, and did not look at him.
Nikola, propped against the pillow, opened the book again. He began, with what strength he had, to read it a second time. The second time through he read more slowly. He read it the way an engineer reads a thing that works: with attention to the fit of the parts.
Mark Twain — he thought, somewhere in the second chapter — was a man who knew that the door existed.
He did not know how he knew it. But the book was, beneath its surface of small American boys and a small American town and a girl in a straw hat, a book written by a man who understood that a boy could be called from across a yard and could answer and could not answer, and that the not-answering was not always, not in every case, a failure of hearing.
Nikola read on. He did not know, at seventeen, that he would meet Mark Twain in twenty years in a laboratory in New York, and that Mark Twain would hold a glowing vacuum tube for a photographer, and that Nikola would, in a subsequent private experiment, X-ray the writer's skull — and that what Mark Twain's skull would show, on the plate, would be a thing that Nikola would, within the hour, destroy.
He did not know any of this.
He only knew, in the room on the upper floor of the parsonage in Gospić, on the morning of the fifth of December, 1873, that a man in a country he had never seen had written a book that was, in a language he had only partly known, an honest book about the door; and that he, Nikola, was going to live; and that Graz Polytechnic would have him in the autumn if he could walk; and that there was, in the world, a thing called engineering, which was the study of how apparatus worked; and that doors, at the end of the day, were apparatus.
He read until the afternoon light was gone from the window.
He slept.
He did not dream.