The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  “You are Amnon Feuerberg,” he said at last. His voice sounded surprisingly high-pitched, and he had a Romanian accent. “But at home you are called by your father—Nonny.”

  5

  Walt, Is He a Good Guy or a Bad Guy?

  I was speechless. I held out my hand and he shook it. Then he said, “Begging your pardon, I forget to mention: Felix is my name!” And I thought, Gee, I hope I have hands like his someday, long and strong and finely shaped. And I began to bubble inside like boiling milk. I don’t know what got into me, maybe it was the way he looked. I held my hand out again, and again he shook it, probably realizing that I needed to touch him one more time in order to imprint his strong, slender fingers, so that when I grew up, I would be able to duplicate them together with his regal nose and lion’s mane and crinkly blue eyes, and his nobility and everything else about him.

  Had I been less shy, I would have shown him I could climb into the luggage rack and hang by my ankles, or do a handstand in a moving train. But it took all my strength just to put on a civilized front and assume an upright stance.

  “Please to sit, Mr. Feuerberg,” he said gently, as though he sensed my inner turmoil and wished to help me relax. I sat down. I wanted him to give me more things to do so I could show him how obedient I was. Whereupon he pulled a black-and-white photograph out of his suit pocket, studied it carefully, looked back at me, and said, smiling, “Just like in picture, only better.”

  He handed the picture to me. It was one I’d never seen before, showing me on my way home from school in a billowing gray coat. Dad must have taken it from the car when I wasn’t looking.

  “Shot with a telephoto lens, right?” I said to this Felix character, to show him I know what’s what. “He gave it to you so you’d recognize me, right?”

  A manly blue smile flashed from his crinkly eyes. I thought I would faint. He looked like a movie star. I returned the smile and touched the corners of my eyes, but couldn’t make anything crinkle. How many years would it take for me to get those three deep wrinkles there? His looked as if they’d been there all his life. He was still poring over the photograph. I suddenly realized that there might be others on this train carrying pictures of me for identification purposes! I couldn’t believe the lengths Dad had gone to over me!

  I leaned forward to get a better look, and a better whiff of Felix’s aftershave, too. My best friend, Micah Dubovsky, was in the picture, standing two steps behind me, openmouthed.

  “And this is your friend,” said Felix amiably, though he didn’t sound too pleased with Micah. Micah looked kind of goofy there, catching flies.

  “He’s not such a close friend,” I quickly explained. “I mean, we play together and all. Actually, he’s my deputy.” At home we called him “my man Friday,” and Gabi used to make fun of him sometimes, but he was okay, I guess, as a deputy.

  “You wish to tell me more about him?” asked Felix, crossing his arms over his chest as if he had all the time in the world to hear stories about Micah. “What’s there to tell?” I answered. “He’s just this kid I know who’s been with me for years. He thinks I’m his friend, but I only hang around with him out of pity,” I added with a giggle, wondering why we were wasting so much time on Micah, though Micah was an okay guy, I guess.

  “So, your best friend is who?” Felix wanted to know. “From what you tell me, I think it is Micah!”

  Oops, now I was in trouble. Maybe Dad had provided Felix with detailed information about me, and because I was afraid he wouldn’t like Micah, that Micah wasn’t worthy of someone as noble as Felix, I put him down when actually he was okay.

  “Micah is uhm …” But I didn’t want to talk about Micah. What was there to say about him? Just that he was the type of kid who was always around.

  “Actually, he’s my bodyguard,” I started to explain, and then, before I knew it, I heard the buzz in the middle of my forehead, the sound of the motor heating up in there. “But the truth is”—I went on earnestly, listening to my tongue roll in my mouth so I would know what to say next—“my number-one best friend is Chaim Stauber. He’s a real friend. He’s special. I mean, he’s a genius. We’ve been friends for years. Boy, the things we’ve done together!”

  And there was Micah staring out of the picture, looking like such a dope, with his mouth hanging open. He always stared that way, as though he were in a trance or something, whenever I started talking big and telling terrible whoppers. But he never corrected me in front of the other kids, never said a word. Sometimes it drove me crazy; I could do anything I wanted, tell lies about him, things he had to know were lies, and he would just listen to me with his tongue hanging out, like a lazy dog.

  And now this handsome, well-dressed man was listening to me, too, but not at all stupidly. He nodded, deep in thought, till I felt he was looking into my heart and that he knew all there was to know about me and Micah, and about my recent betrayal.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. The buzzing between my eyes felt good. It was like being tickled there with a feather to stimulate the invention center of the brain. “Wow, Chaim Stauber, too bad you’ve never met him! What a kid! He knows the whole Bible by heart! And he plays the piano! And he’s been everywhere, even Japan! And he skipped two grades!” Most of this was true, but I wanted to make sure Felix knew that I, too, had friends who were men of the world, that they weren’t all jerks like Micah. Only, Chaim Stauber wasn’t really my friend anymore. After the episode with Mautner’s cow, we had to sign a note for the principal and Chaim’s mother promising not to exchange another word until after we graduated.

  My mood turned glum. Why did I start off this new friendship with lies and betrayal? He seemed so sweetly innocent, smiling like a big baby. Well, too bad. I felt as if I were getting nowhere fast. As if I were missing something, not to mention the game, because soon we would be pulling into Haifa station. So what should I do, I asked the mysterious Felix. Should I start over and play it again, move by move, until I found him? I didn’t really feel like doing that, to tell the truth, but Dad and Gabi had gone to so much trouble, and there were people waiting for me, people who’d rehearsed their parts.

  Fortunately for me, this person named Felix was no stickler for rules. He smiled a little smile of what seemed like contempt for them, and I smiled, too, though I had no idea what I was smiling about, maybe I just wanted to try his smile on for size, and then he pulled a fine chain out of his trouser pocket, and I could barely refrain from reaching out to touch it: this time it was a silver chain with a big pocket watch. The only one like it I’d ever seen was in a movie called Pimpernel Smith. Felix’s watch had large square numerals on a white face with a golden ring around it. If I had a watch like that, I thought, I would put it in a safe and only take it out at night, when I was alone. He shouldn’t keep something so valuable in his trouser pocket. This Felix character was much too trusting. Hadn’t he heard of pickpockets? Or thieves? I could certainly teach him a thing or two, if he’d let me.

  Felix closed his eyes and moved his lips as though thinking aloud. “Is like this, perhaps,” he said at last in his heavy Romanian accent. “You come earlier than expected, or, another way of saying, your time is coming soon.”

  I didn’t understand a word of this.

  “Time now is ten minutes after three o’clock, young Mr. Feuerberg, and we must to arrive at our car by three and thirty-three o’clock. That’s right.”

  “What car?” I asked.

  “Oh, did I say car?” He threw up his hands. “Beg pardon! Poor Felix, he grows old! Saying aloud what must to be kept secret! Young Mr. Feuerberg will please to forget everything he has heard and wait patiently for big surprise. Surprises are important, but even more important is to wait for them, not so?”

  In those days, the word “secret” was enough to set my right foot trembling, and the. word “surprise” would make my left foot positively twitch. Felix didn’t know what he was doing when he used those two words in a single sentence.

&nb
sp; “Why this hop-hopping, Mr. Feuerberg?” he asked, bending down to pull a brown leather traveling bag from under his seat.

  I didn’t explain the cause of my strange frenzy.

  “My valise is made of leather, made-in-Romania!” He gave the bag a friendly pat. Each time he spoke, his voice surprised me: it sounded old and shrill, and reedy, not the right sort of voice for someone so distinguished. “Ha, my whole life I go everywhere with this valise,” he said as he carefully buckled the strap, and then chuckled. “My only friend is this.”

  As he was speaking, I tried to guess where Dad knew him from and why he’d never mentioned Felix to me. Maybe he was somebody from Special Operations, or one of those legendary detectives sent overseas under a false identity to work with Interpol and the FBI. Sometimes one of them would whisk through the corridors at District Headquarters while home on leave, spreading a trail of mystery behind him. Everyone whispered, A Shushu is in town—a secret agent—and then all the secretaries would scurry out on one pretext or another to take a peek. Even Dad used to tense up when a Shushu walked past his office. “Remember you saw him,” he would say to me, indicating the agent with his eyes, and quickly add, “Now forget you ever saw him,” in case I was kidnapped by blackmailers who wanted to squeeze secret information out of me. But the one Shushu I happened to catch a glimpse of looked pretty normal in his civilian clothes—he was a short, bald guy with pale arms.

  And this Felix character, who was he? What was he? One minute he seemed perfectly innocent, and the next he was peeking out into the corridor, left and right, with the expertise of an absolute Shushu. And then an astonishing thought occurred to me: Suppose Felix had once been a bad guy who changed sides and joined the good guys. Why not? Dad had all sorts of connections. It was truly amazing how many people greeted him whenever we walked down the street.

  “Come, Mr. Feuerberg,” said Felix. “We must to go now.”

  “Why do you call me Mr. Feuerberg?” I asked. It sounded funny, but kind of annoying, too.

  “So how I must to call you, please?”

  “Nonny.”

  “Non-ny?” He tried my name out. “No, no, I cannot call you Nonny … We are not major friends yet.”

  “Why not?” I know, that was stupid of me. It was true that we weren’t. But I wanted us to be. So we wouldn’t have to waste time on details. That’s the kind of person Felix was, he made you want to trust him right away.

  “But everybody calls me Nonny.”

  “Then I must to call you Mr. Feuerberg, because God forbid Felix should do what everybody else is doing, correct?” He looked at his reflection in the window and adjusted his tie.

  “Perhaps later,” he said, “when two of us are major friends, it is possible I call you Amnon. Only then. Because too close is not good. A person must to have boundaries, yes? For now you will be Mr. Feuerberg to me, and afterward we see, all right?”

  Let it be Mr. Feuerberg, then. Somehow, coming from him it sounded fine. I had a teacher once who used to call me that in class, as though she were holding my name with a pair of tweezers. But there was a big difference between her and Felix.

  The memory of this teacher brought out the chutzpah in me.

  “So why do I call you Felix? Don’t you have a last name?”

  He turned to me with an approving smile. “It is enough for now, till we get out.”

  “Out of where?”

  “Out of here, this train, this locomotive.”

  “How are we supposed to get out of the locomotive?”

  “We cannot get out of locomotive until we get into it, correct?”

  Something cold and white fluttered around my heart, touched it for an instant, then passed, so quickly I didn’t have the chance to figure out what it was. A twitter of alarm, perhaps, or a warning. One painful spasm, and that was all; I forgot.

  6

  What’s Come Over Me?

  We hurried out of our compartment and headed toward the locomotive. Felix walked quickly ahead of me, alert and catlike. More and more I suspected him of being a Shushu. He kept glancing around all the time, like the bodyguard of some VIP. Only I was that VIP, apparently. It was fun to trail behind him with a blank expression on my face, hoping some cold-blooded assassin would come after me and give Felix the chance to pounce on him and knock him out, and then, as I coolly made my way past the cheering crowds, I would whisper to my followers, Such a bore, these assassination attempts.

  But it was not an assassin who approached me, it was the man in the top hat. I saw him get up as we passed compartment 3, his mouth opening in a soundless cry and his hand raised as if to stop me. All at once I understood: he had been waiting for me patiently, thinking I had disappeared because I didn’t have the nerve to play this game, and suddenly here I was again, but instead of turning to ask “Who am I?,” I walked right by and continued the game without him!

  Felix noticed him as well. A single glance, sharp as a whip, was enough for him: he grabbed my hand and yanked me past the door of the compartment. He looked so determined, so stern and tough, that for a moment I thought maybe it was no simple prank Dad and Gabi had planned for me but something far more meaningful and important, practically a matter of life and death.

  But there was no time to stop and ponder what was going on. It all happened so fast. I was hurled down the corridor, past the the man in the black top hat, though I couldn’t quite figure out why I was supposed to run away from him, why Felix didn’t simply stop and explain that young Mr. Feuerberg here had decided to skip phase one of the game; and what’s wrong with that, Mr. Feuerberg is a free agent!

  I looked around and couldn’t believe my eyes: there was Felix, leaning against the door of compartment 3 with the silver chain in his hand. No mistake about it: it was his silver watch chain. With one vigorous pull, he managed to tear it out of his pocket and wind it around the door handles, with the watch still attached to it! His hands moved so nimbly, it crossed my mind that he would have made an excellent pickpocket, or perhaps he had been one in the past—and here I’d thought to warn him about pickpockets! I stared at him round-eyed: he couldn’t have cared less about the people he was locking into the compartment. As he wound the chain tighter he pursed his lips, and a fine shadow of cruelty played over them, the cruelty of a predator.

  And the same shadow appeared over my own lips. It emanated from me, in a fine white line that rose to the surface, like a scar. My brow, too, was creased with effort, like a pro’s. Even our hands moved in sync, and I could actually feel the sensations in his fingertips, their tingling nerves, because I had touched them.

  The people on the other side of the glass stared at him uncomprehendingly. They were transfixed. The man in the top hat bent his knees as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to stand up or sit down, with one hand hanging limply in midair and his mouth forming a mute, astonished O. The other man, the roly-poly bald fellow, gawked at Felix with a silly smile of disbelief. From behind those two, the woman who looked like Grandma Tsitka peered out, her lips stretched tight with amazement, just like Tsitka, though unlike Tsitka, she didn’t say a word.

  And neither did I. It was the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen in my life: here was an adult, an old man, in fact, doing things that would have gotten a kid like me permanently expelled from school!

  And maybe this is what was so thrilling about it: that someone could be like me and still be an adult.

  Felix had no time to waste on the passengers. He made sure the doors were chained fast, grabbed me by the arm, and pushed me toward the locomotive, flashing a smile like blue lightning. “Everything all right now! We must to go!” he said.

  “But—but,” I protested, “the people in there are … They won’t be able to …”

  “Later, later! In the end will come explanation! Hi-deh!”

  “What about the watch?” I groaned. Please, let him take the watch at least.

  “Watch is not important! Time is important. Not to waste it!
Hideh!”

  “What does hi-deh mean?” I shouted as we ran.

  Felix stopped in surprise. “Young Mr. Feuerberg does not know what hi-deh means?”

  We stood face-to-face, both panting. The train rocked as we rounded the bend. Sounds sort of like Heidi, I thought, but wisely said nothing.

  “Hi-deh is like ho-pah!” Felix laughed, grabbing my hand and bounding ahead with me. “Like ‘Go go go!’ Like ‘Giddyap!’ ”

  “Ah.” I understood at last. “Like ‘Yempa!’ ”

  We ran through car after car, as the scenery went flying by, outpacing us on the wooden legs of the electric poles. A long green line of eucalyptus trees rushed past, and then a field of sunflowers, and mounds of earth, and straight ahead, more corridors and cars and doors. Sometimes the passengers seemed to glance up and raise their hands in a mute cry of surprise. Maybe they were the people Dad and Gabi had sent to meet me, only I couldn’t stop, Felix was pulling me so fast, not that I wanted to stop, and suddenly we were in the very last corridor, where a sign on the heavy door said: ENTRANCE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and Felix, who may or may not have known how to read Hebrew, pushed the handle till the heavy door gave way, and there we were, inside the locomotive.

  The noise there was even louder. A giant in a filthy undershirt was standing with his back to us, leaning over a big steel box.

  He didn’t turn around as we entered but only roared, “Engine’s running down again! Second time today!” Felix closed the door behind us and bolted it shut. It was blazing hot and right away I started sweating. And the noise, I already told you how noise affects me.

  Felix winked at me and tapped the engineer on the shoulder.